The Narrow Door
21th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Lk13:22-30)
When you were in school, did you prefer easy-going teachers to demanding ones? I have been in formal education for 24 years and I generally preferred the demanding teachers, because most often I found the easy-going ones not only shallow but very “stingy” with marks to maintain the class average because they wanted to please all students!
In the gospel reading of today, Luke presents Jesus as a demanding teacher. This portrayal of Jesus is very unlike Luke. For instance, Matthew uses the phrase “grinding of teeth” (NJB), or in other translations, “gnash their teeth” (RSV), five times in his Gospel, whereas Luke uses it only once. And that happens to be in the gospel text of today. Being consistent within the Gospel of Luke, what is the central orientation of the Word of […]
Sunday Sermons
Sunday Sermons and Homilies
Sermon for 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle C Homily
Disturb us, Lord
20th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Lk 12:49-53)
Jesus said to his disciples: ‘I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already! When I read the gospel reading of today, a phrase kept coming back to me very spontaneously. It was the first line of a prayer that I had heard before. I googled and came across this poem-prayer, written by a famous British sailor of the 16th Century, Sir Francis Drake:
Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new […]
Sermon for 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle C Homily
Spiritual Capital: Treasures in Heaven
19th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Lk 12:32-48)
I am intrigued by what one of my former students does for a living. He predicts stock-markets. He appears on TV at breakfast shows forecasting trends in the market and advising investors. He trains people on how to make money sitting at their homes buying and selling shares. I watched a few of his TV-shows. It was all about how to get rich quickly and effortlessly! And his ideas sell.
In this climate of quick money, I asked myself how would people look at religion and spirituality. We are forced to speak a language of economics even in the context of faith: hence my reflection today is on “spiritual capital”. I am aware that this term is already in use in different circles. But the way I […]
Sermon for 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle C Homily
Follow the Kingdom with a Single-Minded Devotion
There are several films on Jesus. Each movie has its own take on the life and message of Jesus as narrated by the Gospels and, sometimes also, using extra-biblical sources. One of my own favourite films on Jesus is Jesus of Nazareth, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and produced by Rai-Uno, the Italian TV Channel. In fact, it was originally produced as a TV serial in1977, and later distributed in film form in different languages.
There is one particular scene in that film, that is worth recalling here in the context of the gospel text of today. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” they say. Even with the limitation of words in comparison to image, let me attempt to describe the scene: one evening, Jesus and his […]
Sermon for Pentecost – Cycle C Homily
Are we ready to be surprised by God, the Spirit?
Feast of Pentecost
Positive Psychology (PP), an approach in psychology, focuses on ingredients of human wellbeing and happiness. For instance, PP has a list of 24 character strengths and 6 core virtues that are said to play an important role in human wellbeing. This ‘catalogue of sanities’ – as they call it – is nothing but a list of the cardinal virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit (similar to Gal 5:21-22; Eph 4:2-3). PP has a questionnaire to measure individual’s level of these character strengths. An interesting finding is that, in the present global population, ‘humility’ is one of the less developed character strengths. Some time last year I took the test and I must ‘humbly’ confess that humility featured as the least developed character strength even for […]