1. Re-run. This homily was preached previously in 2017.

    Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 6 / Sunday (Anniversary of the Dedication of the Church of St Ignatius)
    Readings: Sirach 15.16-21 / Psalm 118.1-2, 4-5, 17-18, 33-34 (R/v 1b) / 1 Corinthians 2.6-10 / Matthew 5.17-37


    A perfect day.

    Don’t we all hope for that kind of a day? One when everything works out just right. One when all we wish for comes through. One when all that we experience is good and happy. In the words of Lou Reed, have you ever had a perfect day?

    We all dream of that perfect day. More than this, so many of us want to be perfect at what we do. All of us struggle with perfectionism, even the most laid back of us who smile and deny it.

    Maybe this is why we burden ourselves with many expectations. Maybe this is why some parents weigh down our school children with unrealistic demands: “No, your A is not good; get that A+, or else”. Maybe this is why we as a society have so many rules and regulations on how we should interact. It is true in the church too, isn’t it? We want to have so many ministries, organise so many programmes, do so many things so that we have the perfect parish.

    We want all these to achieve perfection because we so often think that it is the mark of distinction. Perfection is what makes one worthy. Perfection is the anti-thesis to sin. Yes, perfect is what we must become.

    But it’s hard to be perfect, isn’t it? You and I know our struggles with perfectionism in everyday life. For some of us the price of perfection is too costly: stress, despair, suicide. 

    We’re not spared this struggle in matters of faith. When we recognise that we are imperfect Christians because we don’t live up to God’s commandments or we fail to observe the Church’s instructions on Christian living, many of us struggle with feelings of unworthiness about coming to Church and the Sacraments, of meaninglessness in religion, and of hopelessness in the faith. These experiences why some choose to leave Catholicism and search for God elsewhere, if not to give up on God altogether.

    That is why we must not be so quick to interpret today’s gospel passage as Jesus cranking up the demand that we be perfect. You shall not kill. You shall not be angry with others. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not swear. You shall not. Yes, we hear Jesus teach these.

    A cursory glance at these teachings — based on God’s Ten Commandments — might make us think that Jesus is demanding nothing less than perfection from us, if not, even more perfection from those of us who think we are indeed perfect.

    But what if Jesus is simply calling us to be realistic and to try to live better? To live better one step at a time? To live better than before in each moment we have, and every day that we live? To live better, and not to be fixated with being perfect all at once?

    I believe Jesus is calling us to live better because he knows that no matter how much you and I want to live the perfect Christian life by following God’s commandments, we are human and we will repeatedly sin. We will argue. We will lust. We will gossip. We will get angry. We will lie. We will do all these because we are human.

    But didn’t Jesus call us to be perfect like our heavenly father (Matthew 5.48)?  Yes, he did. And he did, I believe, knowing that our human tendency is to fail, to sin and to be imperfect. So can we ever be perfect?

    I’d like to suggest that we can become perfect by letting Jesus and his teachings shape how we ought to live better, from moment to moment. His teachings are God's compassionate, patient and understanding ways to perfect us by helping us to grow in spiritual maturity.

    This kind of growth involves discernment. Discernment is the daily process of faithful conversations with God about how God is labouring in our lives to make us more perfect like Jesus, his son. We discern with Jesus in mind because he is the model of spiritual maturity for the Christian life. He is the only one who has scored 10 out of 10 for living God’s commandments. You and I score much less: some of us score 8 out of 10, many others score 5 out of 10 and still some others score around 2 or 3 out of 10. Whatever our score is, Jesus never gives up on us. He comes, again and again, in God’s love, like he does through today’s gospel, to invite us to improve ourselves. St Paul echoes this call in our second reading: Christians must strive to grow in wisdom to know and live in God’s ways.

    As much as discernment is the way for us to grow in spiritual maturity, we must remember that God never intended his commandments to be a checklist for us to tick off like we do a checklist of do’s and don’ts, a checklist that scores how perfect our actions make us out to be.

    In our first reading, Sirach reminds us that God's commandments are for us to have life. Discernment helps us to recognise and understand this truth. In fact, Jesus teaches us throughout the Gospels that God's commandments are to empower us to live as spiritually mature Christians. Such a person understands that Jesus’ teachings are much more than the rules, the prescriptions, the regulations we so often think they are. They are more properly statements about the values we need to have to live with God and in God's ways, especially those that ask us to respect, care for and uplift others, and so, save ourselves as we do so.

    Today Jesus is teaching us that is it not enough to live by avoiding the technical prohibitions of not committing murder, adultery, swearing and all the “thou shall nots” of the Ten Commandments.* He is challenging us instead to live more pro-actively in God’s ways: to settle our grievances with others, to avoid anger, to be pure of heart, to be trustworthy, and to have integrity. One needs values to live like this. Jesus clearly summarises this other, Christ-like way of living with values when he commands us to turn our cheek and to love the enemy who hurts us (Matthew 5.39), as well as to forgive our enemies not seven times but seventy-seven times (Matthew 18.22).

    This is why the Christian life cannot be about living God’s ways in terms of compliance and reward. It must be about living with God’s values of mercy and compassion, of love and tenderness — values that God uses to perfect us for Christian life. The goal of Jesus’ teaching is to help us imbibe these values to become a spiritually mature person who lives with God by living for others. For St Paul, such a person is blessed with true wisdom that comes from God to live in this way

    Our Baptism calls us to become such persons too. We would be wise then to make today’s psalm our daily prayer to ask God to enable us to become spiritually mature Christians:
    Instruct me, O LORD, in the way of your statutes,that I may exactly observe them.Give me discernment, that I may observe your law and keep it with all my heart.Blessed are we then who follow your law, Lord. (Psalm 118.33-34)
    I believe praying this psalm often opens us up to God. This is how we let God into our lives to perfect us. Perfected in God's ways is how we can live each moment, each day better. 

    Today we celebrate the dedication of our parish church. St Ignatius is our patronal saint. He lived in God’s ways by discerning God’s will constantly. He practiced the Examen to do this. We know the Examen. Quite a number of us practice it. The Examen helps us to become aware of God in our lives and to be thankful for God.

    The Examen is therefore a way to cultivate constant mindfulness of God and God’s good labour of perfecting us to live meaningful Christian lives and to be happy. “Cultivating such mindfulness requires attentiveness and availability. Indeed our whole day, all that we do, all that we think and speak must make our hearts, our minds totally available for God. God longs to give Himself to us; our work is availability”.**  Attentiveness and availability are also what we need as the parish community of St Ignatius to let God perfect us as a church.

    Maybe when we can become more attentive and available — individually and as a church — to God like Ignatius did, then God can truly perfect us better.  When we recognise this, do not be surprised that God is always blessings us with so much more than than the perfect day we hope for each morning.



    * Tom Purcell, Creighton Daily Reflections
    ** Trappist Monks at Spencer Abbey, MA.


    Preached at St Ignatius Parish, Singapore
    photo: a summer day by adrian danker, sj ( in new york city, november, 2012)

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  2.  Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 5 / Sunday 

    Readings: Isaiah 58.1-10 / Psalm 111.4-5, 6-7, 8a and 9 (R/v 4a) / 1 Corinthians 2.1-5 / Matthew 5.13-16


    Sisters and brothers, would you sit family and friends on a stained sofa? Or use a chipped coffee mug at work? Or, wear to Church today something old, something outdated, something torn? Probably not.

    We all want what’s good and best, and new if we can, to use, to share and yes, to give away.

    Not my friend Joshua. If you should visit him in Boston, you’d find a Tiffany lamp on the sideboard after entering the front door. It’s a “hand-me-down” that Joshua received from his father who received it from his father who received from his father. This stained leaded glass lamp has a botanical design featuring flowers and dragonflies, spiders with webs, green shoots and butterflies.

    But it has a crack. Out of it streams plain yellow light from the bulb onto the wall. No more the scintillating play of coloured light we often associate with Tiffany lamps. “It’s still broken”, I often remarked to Josh whenever I visited. “It’s good enough”, he’ll always reply.

    Good enough. This is the Good News today’s gospel reading proclaims. 

    Jesus isn’t asking us to become light. He is honestly saying, “You are the light of the earth”. 

    If this is how Jesus sees us, then we must be for him good enough to be light. Light to brighten someone else’ darkness. Light to guide another out of danger into safety. Light to offer hope for all suffering in doom and gloom.

    For Jesus, we are good enough to be light in spite of how cracked we may be with our faults, broken because of our addictions, and damaged by our sinfulness. 

    I’d like to think that Jesus recognizes us as “light of the world” because he looks beyond our soiled, stained and sinful actions. 

    He sees beyond by looking deep down inside us to value the truth about us. That you and I are really God’s own. Not just God’s creation but really the very best of creation. By going deep, Jesus sees what we so often struggle to admit about ourselves and one another: our potential for goodness. This is the glimmer of our possibility to be saintly. That flicker of our kindness to love. That incipience of our compassion to care. 

    This is the light Jesus acknowledges and treasures about us when says “you are the light of the world.” Often we struggle to see this light. We are more fixated on the faults and messiness in our lives. But God sees this light of goodness in us, however faint it is. For God, we are good enough to be set ablaze and to shine for all to see, never hidden away. God is not ashamed of us.

    Today Jesus says he treasures the light of our goodness for the world. 

    How do you feel hearing this? Joyful? Hopeful? But I suspect, also uncomfortable because we all in some way judge ourselves unworthy. Unworthy to be God’s light for someone else. Are we really?

    All of St Paul’s life and work as a Christian was to bring God’s light into the world. In scripture and theology, in literature and art, he is depicted doing this heroically. He is God’s chosen apostle to carry on Jesus’ work, the missionary who proclaimed Jesus’ message far and wide, and the Christian who was martyred for his faith.

    Yet today Paul describes himself differently. He tells the Corinthians that he comes to proclaim Jesus in “weakness and fear and with much trembling.” These are the words of a Christian who knows his limitations as an apostle even as he proclaims Jesus in faith. What allowed Paul to do this?

    What allows Christians like you and me to also proclaim Jesus to the world? Proclaim him as God’s salvation even as we struggle with our weaknesses and fears because we feel unworthy, inadequate, and sinful?

    I’d like to suggest that what empowers us to proclaim Jesus in word and deed, in life and prayer, as Paul did, is our confession of God’s vulnerability to be like us. 

    This vulnerability most evidently displayed in Jesus. In his body inflicted with wounds that crack it open. Through these wounds God’s light comes into our lives and the life of the world. We know this Jesus, God-with-us: on the Cross, in the Resurrection, as Divine Mercy.

    For Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, God’s light shines out most clearly through Jesus’ wounds: “Where have your love, your mercy, your compassion shone out more luminously than in your wounds, sweet, gentle Lord of mercy” (On the Song of Songs, 6i). 

    If Jesus’ wounds are channels of God’s grace, then, wouldn’t God’s light also shine most luminously on us, in us and through us, than in our own weakness and woundedness? Here in our weakeness and woundedness God’s light meets us in the darkness of our sin, and especially at the hour of our death.

    God’s light falling upon us should enlighten and enliven us with this truth: that we are God’s own. For God, we will always be much more than sinners. This is why Paul can claim that he is strong when he is weak because Jesus is with him (2 Corinthians 2.9-10).

    Paul speaks as a Christian. We are Christians. His words must be our words. For when we are weak, we are strong: strong because God’s grace works in us and for us. Isn’t this why Paul writes this God saying: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12.19).

    The challenge before us is this: not how much but how much more of God’s light do I want to let into my weaknesses, my woundedness, my sinfulness?     

    We would be wise to consider this challenge. Wise because the degree to which we are vulnerable to receive God’s light will become the depth of goodness in us. Out of this, God’s light shines through us for all.

    When we do this, we can accomplish what Isaiah calls us to do in our first reading: feed the hungry; shelter the oppressed and homeless; clothe the naked; never turn our backs on another in need. 

    When these acts of goodness and charity become our Christian way of life, we will know how God’s salvation labors not just for ourselves but, through us, for many. 

    To live the Christian way then is to let our light, however faint, reflect and refract the light of Jesus. His light is mercy and compassion shining forth from his open heart and wounds. 

    This explains why the cracks of our weaknesses, the fissures of our frailties, the wounds of our sins are indeed graced openings. They allow us to receive God’s light, as they also enable us to share this light with many to see and glorify God.

    “It’s still broken”, I remarked about the Tiffany lamp on my last visit to Josh. “Ah, but its good enough to let the light shine above”, he chuckled. It shone onto a copy of Rembrandt’s The Prodigal Son. Maybe this is why Josh cherishes the crack, as much as God treasures our cracks and us.

    Here we are at Mass to praise, reverence and serve God. And also to thank God. What offering will we make? Let me suggest ourselves. We may be broken and cracked yet we are still God’s own. 

    Yes, God’s own because as Leonard Cohen sings in his song, Anthem, “forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in.” God’s saving light.

    What more should we offer? What more need we ask for?




    Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
    photo: journeyintodreams.org

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  3. Year A / Ordinary Time / 4th Sunday – Feast of the Presentation of the Lord
    Readings: Malachi 3.1-4 / Psalm 24 (R/v 8) / Hebrew 2.14-18 / Luke 2.22-40


    Sisters and brothers, isn’t it true that when we are in the dark or allow ourselves to stay in the dark, it is hard to see clearly what is already before us?

    It is hard because we are focused on the darkness we are in. It so overwhelms us that we cannot see what is before us. I think this is why many of us are frightened about being in the dark. We feel lost, uncomfortable and uncertain when we are in the dark. 

    Maybe this is why we can’t wait for the morning to come. Dawn brings light that slowly pierces the dark of night. We are eager for light.  

    Waiting for light and being eager to see it. These describe Simeon in our gospel passage today. He is waiting eagerly for the Messiah, God’s light. This is Jesus who he has waited all his life in hope to see before he dies.

    Simeon’s story is part of today’s gospel narrative about the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple. This story mentions Anna; she too is waiting for the Lord’s coming.  Mary and Joseph are also part of the story. They are presenting Jesus to God. They do this as faithful Jews, obedient to the law that commands parents to present their first-born to God and to offer the prescribed sacrifice. In contrast, Simeon and Anna show us that something more is equally necessary to recognize the presence of Jesus as Messiah. This is eager expectation. 

    Filled with expectation, Simeon and Anna are actively waiting and eagerly looking out for “the Christ of the Lord” and the “redemption of Jerusalem.” Their waiting for God and the expectation they have that God will come are the work of the Holy Spirit within them.

    Do we wait for God in daily life like Simeon and Anna? Are we as eager as they are, always looking out for God’s coming? 

    Today we are being invited to practise the kind of eagerness Simeon had as he waited for Jesus. Such eagerness must characterize how we live as Christians –- ever hope-filled in prayer and active in service.

    Consider how true this is in prayer. Whether we pray faithfully or sporadically, or pray wholeheartedly believing or half-heartedly, we are praying. By its very nature prayer involves waiting on God -- on God’s coming and how God comes. We cannot pray unless we eagerly await God’s advent. And the fruits of prayer have no meaning until we enthusiastically put them into serving all. 

    Christian faith proclaims God is with us. He is Jesus come to be with us, one amongst us. We hear this truth in the second reading:  Jesus “share[d] in blood and flesh,” he “was tested,” and “he suffered.” In all things but sin, Jesus came as one like us. 

    For Simeon, Jesus also comes as “the light to enlighten the nations.” This image of Jesus as the Light has led to the observance in today’s celebration of light countering darkness. 

    In past times, today’s feast was called Candlemass.  On this day, the faithful would bring candles to Church to be blessed. They would use these candles in prayer to remind them that Jesus is God’s light.

    A candle is not a candle until it is lit. Candles must burn; then, there is light. Light to help us see. Light to console us. Light to lead us onward.

    For Simeon, Jesus is God’s light because he shines. So bright that he overcomes darkness. So strong that he defeats the sinful and evil. So life-giving that he destroys death. 

    Today's feast gives us a more joyful reason to celebrate and give thanks.  This is the impact Jesus has in our lives as God’s light. He enlightens us about God’s ways and guides us to live in these ways. “Your word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path,” writes the psalmist (Psalm 119.105). How true this is.

    The story of the monastery on the hill illustrates this. 

    Once there was a monastery filled with many monks. The people on the plain looked up and saw the light of Jesus alive in how these holy monks lived, cared for each other and served all. 

    Over time, pride invaded the hearts of many monks. They ignore their community. They forgot about Jesus. Their egos became the center of their lives. Soon, as division, disillusionment, and despair took over many monks left.

    The abbot got worried. He sought the advice of a hermit who lived 110 steps below. The hermit’s advice: “Go back; the Messiah dwells amongst you.” Perturbed the Abbot returned. 

    He began asking one monk after another if he was the Messiah. The remaining monks imitated the abbot; they asked each other,  “Are you the Messiah?”  They began to treat each other more lovingly because they believed one of them was the Messiah. 

    Over time, people saw how the remaining monks loved unreservedly, served each other selflessly and cared for the community charitably.  They saw again the light of Jesus, now alive, now real, and now present amongst the monks. Many new men joined them. 

    As the people looked up, they no longer saw darkness; they saw a light shining in the monastery. The holy monks lived in anticipation that the Messiah was one of them. In word and deed, these monks revealed to all that Jesus was amongst them.

    This story should remind us that Jesus wants us to be light for one another. 

    Light that helps each other to find our way out of darkness into life again.

    Light that comforts one another in our pain and suffering. 

    Light that gives us strength and hope to walk in our everydayness. 

    Light that guides the lost among us home to God. 

    Light that stays and accompanies us on each of our journeys of life and faith. 

    Are any of these ways how we are light for one another? Do we often act as light for others?

    A radical way to be light for others is to give the very best of ourselves to them. What else is the best we already have but God. We profess this truth whenever we sing or recall this lyric: “He is dwelling in our hearts; He and I are one.” We cannot give what we don’t have. We have God and God’s love. Being the prodigal father he is, God sacrificed his very best, Jesus his Son, for us. 

    Do we give others our very best so as to return to God the best he has ever given us, Jesus?

    We will do this, I believe, when we begin to understand God’s plans better and so know what must be our good and just response. For someone God makes to wait for us to be God’s light. For another whose eagerness God uses to hasten our steps towards her as God’s light. 

    We cannot do these by remaining in the dark or focusing only on darkness. Certainly, not by hiding in dark. If we want to accomplish the Christian mission to go forth, enlighten others about God’s love and baptised them into God’s life, we need the light of God. This light to empower us daily to first recognise who, not what, is already and always before us -- Jesus. 





    Preached at St Ignatius Church and Church of the Transfiguration, Singapore
    photo: Internet



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"Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute way final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything."

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