Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 28 / Friday (SJI Thanksgiving Assembly – Morning Mass)
Readings: Ephesians 4.7-16 / Psalm 121.1-2, 3-4a, 4b-5 (R/v see 6) / Luke 13.109
“I…implore you to lead a life worthy of your vocation.” Here is St Paul in the First Reading calling, exhorting, pleading that you and I live a life worthy of our vocation.
How do you feel hearing this today at our final Mass for this school year? What is the vocation we are to live?
Josephians, you are students. In school, your vocation is to learn how to learn and how to live. It is also about how to make friends and grow up.
Teachers, your vocation in school is to educate. This means more than teaching. It is what you do so well: to care, to nurture, and to love our students and one another.
All of us as Christians have a vocation too. It is to live like Jesus to love God and to love our neighbour – and to do this with all the giftedness we have. Don’t we strive to do this well in our families and with our friends?
Paul reminds us that the best way to live this vocation is to practise charity toward each other, and this involves selflessness, gentleness, and patience. We ought to do this, he teaches, because this is how all vocations are meant to be lived – fully and happily with God and for others in community.
Hear again how he describes community: one Body; one Spirit; all called to the one hope of being with the Lord in the one faith and one baptism we share. Why one? Because God is the one community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Today we hear the call to be one. Isn’t this how we live in SJI too? Whether we are secondary or JC students, boy or girl, teacher, or student or administrator, we are all Josephians. We are because we are one community.
This year more than any other year, we have had to work so much harder to stay together as community. The pandemic has disrupted school as we know it. So much of our school life has changed. We spent a whole term of teaching and learning at home. Back in school, we wear masks, we have reduced CCAs and CAS-es, and we interact with strict safety measures to stay healthy.
Though change has come, we’ve continued to stay as the SJI community, and flourish. We’ve had to find new, innovative ways to teach, learn, and carry on school life. We’ve done much, and sometimes in surprising ways, to keep our spirits buoyant and hope-filled. We’ve worked hard to strengthen our community by nurturing our bonds of togetherness.
I believe we have done all this because we know how important community is to us in SJI. We read about its importance it in this quote from St John Baptist de la Salle that is outside the Staff Room:
Union in a community is a precious gem… If we lose this, we lose everything. Preserve it with care, therefore, if you want your community to survive. (Meditations 91.2)
Today we assemble to give thanks for the year that has been. Let us begin by thanking God for helping us to preserve our community. Everyone is safe and together. Every student and teacher has lived and can continue to live our vocations fully and happily when all around us in this pandemic there is so much death and suffering, anxiety and uncertainty.
How were we able to preserve community? Because God helped us to do the right thing that Jesus challenges the crowds in the Gospel Reading to do: to interpret and respond to these times in God’s ways.
“Let us remember we are in the holy presence of God.” We recite and hear this prayer school every morning when we begin school and every time we pray in school. What is this holy presence? We can think of it as God’s presence surrounding us. God’s presence is also God’s Spirit dwelling in our hearts. ‘He and I are one,’ as we sing in a hymn.
It is God’s Spirit within us each of us that helped us to interpret these difficult times to respond as God wants us to as Josephians and as a school. This Spirit guides and directs us, helps and comforts us. This Spirit has enlightened us throughout this challenging year to teach and learn, to speak and act, to choose and decide, to care and share, to be and stay as community in the ways God wants us to be SJI. Indeed, God, working through each of us, has preserved our community. Thanks be to God.
Jesus teaches that the failure to interpret as God’s Spirit invites us to is harsh. This year, we have humbled ourselves and listened, and we have let God lead us through this pandemic.
And so, it is good and right that we come to Eucharist. This is the right place to thank God for this year. Our readings today are the Church’s readings for today’s Mass. We did not choose special ones. Yet, they help us to appreciate even more our thanksgiving as we end this school year. They rightly help us to remember, celebrate and believe in God’s faithfulness and goodness to all of us in SJI and our school. This is God’s assuring providence that He is with now and as we begin our holidays. It is God’s providence that will also gather us again in January 2021 to begin the new school year.
There is however one more gift we must thank God for. As we lived out our respective vocations and interpreted how to live in God's ways as a community, I believe God has in fact blessed us even more. This year, through all the pain and anguish, loss and disappointment, and, more so, with everything familiar, comforting, and cherished stripped away, God has shown us more really his steadfast love.
His mercy, in the care of a friend who asked, “Are you ok?” His faithfulness, in your teachers' concern that you turned up for HBL class and now in their ever-present availability for you. His compassion, in your parents who continue to give you the best even as they juggle the many challenges at home and at work this pandemic has wrought.
Yes, more than in any other year, I believe God has shown himself to you and me in the faces of every one of us in school in 2020. If you agree with me that this is how God has indeed come to us, now and always, then join me to respond to God in the most proper of human ways we can by simply saying, “thank you.”
Preached at SJI Chapel
photo: ‘all in a row’ by adrian danker, sj, sji, august 2020
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