Fullerton T

3RD SUNDAY OF ADVENT

This Sunday is known as Gaudete Sunday. The term Gaudete refers to the first word of the Entrance Antiphon, “Rejoice”. Rose vestments are worn in many churches to emphasise our joy that Christmas is near, and we also light the rose candle on the Advent wreath. In many places the Parishes celebrate Bambinelli Sunday when the Children are asked to bring the baby Jesus Crib Figure to get a special blessing and then they place the baby Jesus in the Crib on Christmas Morning.

As Christmas draws near, the Church emphasises the joy which should be in our hearts over all that the birth of our Savior means for us or all that it should mean for us especially in our world where so many have little or nothing at all. The readings for this week, particularly the Gospel, express this theme of rejoicing at the imminent coming of the Lord. John’s disciples ask Jesus if he is the one who is to come. Look around you’, they are told. ‘The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the Good News is proclaimed to the poor and happy are those who believe.’ We praise and rejoice in God on this Gaudete Sunday. We thank him for all he has done for us. We rejoice that through the coming of his Son Jesus we have been saved.

We do what we can to imitate his life, to follow his Gospel of love and that is all that faith asked of us to do our best in following Jesus. We join together to celebrate the Eucharist, sharing the bread that is his body and the wine that is his blood. ’We do all these things, yet mostly we wait. But this is not like waiting for a bus at the local bus stop or waiting for the postman to deliver a letter. We wait with hope in our hearts for the culmination of all things in Christ and the prayer that is on our lips is ‘thy kingdom come!’ As we continue our Advent journeys let us prepare the way for the Lord in our own lives remembering that in  the words of the psalm the lord keeps faith forever and he won’t let us down.

2nd Sunday of Advent

This weekend we hear about John the Baptist who was the herald of Jesus who said that there is one who is to come after me and I am not worthy to take the sandals of his feet.  John’s task was to announce the coming of Jesus and to point to him when he came. John’s work was extraordinary.  He was called to reawaken a sense of expectation among a people that had grown tired and distant from God as many have done in our present generation.  John was called to bring renewal to institutional expressions of religion which, at the time, had become fossilized into mere formulae or external ritual again for many today that is also the case.   John attracted thousands to come out into the desert to see him. Tradition sees the desert as the place where God speaks to the heart of his people. It is from this solitary place of spiritual combat, the desert bordering the Jordan, that John appears “with the spirit and the power of Elijah” (Luke 7:17).  By his word and his baptism with water, john called the children of the covenant back to the Lord their God as he calls us today to come back to the Lord our God.

The figure of John serves as a warning, to all believers, to the Church and Church organizations that we need to draw our strength from Christ alone, rather than identifying with the cultural patterns or the Fads and fashions of the time, which in any case come and go. The Church is here in the present as it has been in past times to proclaim and live out the message of Jesus in every generation in season and out of season whether people at large like it or not. A great example of this is the teaching of the Church on the issue of Abortion and life issues. The Church that is the people of god, you and I  are called to constant renewal, to tear ourselves away from conventional expectations, attitudes and superficialities and centre ourselves completely on God.  The Church in every age must become like John the Baptist, an uncomfortable reminder of how we must allow the truth of Jesus to break into our lives to enlighten the darkness that can at any moment enter into our lives or the life of the Church as the scandals have painfully shown. As the journey of Advent continues, as we prepare to celebrate the nativity of Christ, John the Baptist’s call to conversion sounds out in our communities.

 It is a pressing invitation to open our hearts and to welcome the Son of God who comes among us to make the kingdom of God manifest to all of us and to others through us. As we continue our Advent Journey let us stop and listen to the call of John the Baptist to prepare the way for the Lord and put it into action in our lives as we make our pats straight  during this Advent time.

1st SUNDAY OF ADVENT

We are now in Advent the official run up to the feast of Christmas as we begin the Spiritual preparation we light the first purple candle on the Advent Wreath and we pray that we will make good the preparations for the season of Christmas. The message of advent is clear for us, we must continually strive to work for a peaceful and just world, so that Christ may have room in our homes and our hearts. We start our journey to be illuminated by His Words of peace and to allow Him to indicate the path to tread. (cf. Is 2:1-5). Moreover, we must change our conduct abandoning the works of darkness and put on the ‘armor of light’ and to seek only to do God’s work and to abandon the deeds of the flesh. (cf. Rm 13:12-14). Jesus, through the story in the parable, outlines the Christian life style that must not be distracted and indifferent but must be vigilant and recognize even the smallest sign of the Lord’s coming because we don’t know the hour in which He will arrive. (cf. Mt 24:39-44) Saint John Henry Newman reminded us in a homily for the Advent Season:   “Advent is a time of waiting, it is a time of joy because the coming of Christ is not only a gift of grace and salvation but it is also a time of commitment because it motivates us to live the present as a time of responsibility and vigilance. This ‘vigilance’ means the urgency of an industrious, living ‘wait’ We need to take Advent seriously, for the coming of the Lord will be not just a beautiful Christmas, but the actual day of judgment. With joy, let us climb the mountain of the Lord! We believe that Advent is the time of preparation for the celebration of the Birth of Jesus.   At the beginning of each church year we are reminded that Jesus the Christ is present as a person to us.  When we think that his presence is something so exalted as to be beyond our own experience, we are reminded that he was born in the lowest of places, a common stable.  The first visitors were stinky, rough shepherds.

The tragedy of this season is that we have been programmed to believe it’s all about buying things, about gift giving, about phrenetic activity that leaves us exhausted and very happy it’s all over by Christmas night.  So then we forget the 12 days of Christmas and dump the tree and the lights and wait for Valentine’s Day. So what are we really waiting for this Advent?  is it all the presents and the comings and goings that families and friend’s bring over Christmas or is it the birthday of Jesus the Son of god our saviour who gives the true meaning to our Advent preparations and our Christmas celebrations.

FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING 34th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

This Sunday we celebrate the feast of Christ the King the last Sunday of the Churches year. The Feast of Christ the King was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925 as an antidote to secularism, this is a way of life which leaves God out of a person’s thinking and has us living life as if God did not exist as we all know God does exist and we see this through so many people throughout history right down to ourselves. The readings this Sunday come as a sort of final warning. Malachi pulls no punches. Those who have chosen to live their life harming others will disappear without a trace. Those whose lives are centered on themselves in self-pride that considers no one their equal will face the truth of their lives that is the way they lived them. Our Gospel reading for this Sunday has Jesus on the cross between the two thieves. The cross reveals both the folly of our sin and the toll sin takes on our world where the innocent suffer cruelly at the hands of the powerful.

The cross also reveals God’s profound and undying love for us. Even Jesus’ crucifixion did not turn God away from us. God loves us, even when we do our worst. We have a God who is not indifferent to our suffering, indeed, he has entered into our pain and the horror of death for us. Christ the King does not condemn those who murder him; while he passes a merciful judgment on those who turn to him in sorrow and need. Remember the thief who asked Jesus to remember him in his kingdom Jesus told him that he would be with him in paradise. The gospel shows us that all through his life and right up to his death Christ has taken a place with the suffering, poor, sick, the defeated and the outcast who cry out to God. In our midst he stays faithful to us, no matter how far we have attempted to go down the road on our own; or how far life has driven us. At the end of this church year , we are asked to embrace the cross and walk in the victory of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. What began as a humble event with the birth of Jesus in the stable has changed the world.

As we prepare for Christmas during Advent that begins next weekend  are we with Jesus and his call to us to be merciful to the people around us in our locality? Do our lives demonstrate  the love of God ? We can be sure that nobody there on Good Friday  thought they were witnessing the death of a great King.  The kind of kingship Jesus spoke about cannot be learned in palaces nor in schools of diplomacy but among the poor and needy and those whom the world has forgotten. For our king is the servant of the poor and we only belong to his court when we become servants of the poor. Let’s not forget the beautiful truths of faith that we have learned, let’s continue to learn more about them, celebrate them, live them, and pass them on. So that when people look at us, they will see that in our daily lives and dealings with those around us  “Christ is King to the glory of God our father.”

33RD SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

In November as a Church we pray for the dead in many Churches over the past few days we have held our annual masses for the parishioners who have died in the last year  may all of them rest in peace and may their families be consoled by the love of the communities where they are.

As we come to the end of the Liturgical Year we listen to Jesus’s words concerning the end times. The vision of the future in the Gospel Reading for this Sunday doesn’t look very appealing. The bad news is delivered first of all. Jesus imagines a time of terror and trouble and persecution ‘Nation will fight against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes and plagues and famines and there; there will be fearful sights and great signs from heaven. Jesus says, “These things must happen.” Then there will be cosmic upheavals: “the sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will come falling from heaven”.

After this catalogue of disaster there is the good news. Jesus looks beyond the time of distress to the final time, when the Son of Man will gather the scattered people of God to himself.  Jesus sees beyond suffering and persecution to a future of peace with God . God does not call us to be anxious, but he calls us to confidence in the message we hear in the gospel and asks us to proclaim it in our lives so  that we will remain in his light. Christ remains our high priest who has offered himself for the forgiveness of our sins. God knows what it is to be human. The Lord calls us to stay awake amidst the distractions of life, so that we will recognize him when he comes again. St. John of the Cross wrote, “When evening comes, you will be examined in love” (Sayings, 60). We prepare for the day of Christ’s coming by first recognizing him in our brothers and sisters and by knowing him in his word and his sacraments. False securities and shallow guarantees will not sustain us in times of strife and testing. God alone must be our hope.

God’s ways must be our ways, so that when our securities and misplaced confidences fail us we can turn our eyes to God’s saving light. Let us keep vigilant and not be anxious for that day when God who is love calls us and looks at us with love and says Your endurance has won you your life.’

32nd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

In the course of his public ministry Jesus faces a variety of groups and individuals critical of his beliefs and values. In this Sundays Gospel story the Sadducees pit their fundamentalist interpretation of the Law against what they regard as an unorthodox innovation, belief in the resurrection. They attempt to ridicule the resurrection of the dead by recalling the Mosaic Law on marriage. The Sadducees develop an example to the point of absurdity in instancing seven brothers each of whom marries the same woman, but each of whom dies childless. None of the brothers has proved husband in terms of producing an heir: in that case, the Sadducees ask whose wife would the woman be in the resurrection? In his reply Jesus makes it clear that there is no comparison between human life, shared by all, and the resurrection, shared by those who are children of God. Jesus makes the distinction between the people of this age who live a life peculiar to this time, and the just who are resurrected from the dead into a new life in the kingdom of god. Moses called God the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob. If the Lord is God of the living, then he will continue to be so to those who have died. Relationship with God does not end in death: to God all people are alive.

Perhaps the Sadducees’ method of argument sound familiar. There are many who belittle people rather than consider if there is any truth to their beliefs. Most of us have experienced this when we profess our faith. Someone says to us “So, you believe in the Trinity, prove it. So you believe in the spiritual, prove it. Your Catholicism, your Christianity, is just child’s stories. Jesus did not back down he knew that he had come to do the will of the Father in doing that He would suffer being scorned by others for his faith. He would be crucified for his faith. Because so many around us do not respect our faith, or respect us as Christians or as Catholics, we are often called to put up with their scorn for the sake of the kingdom of God. Pope St. John Paul told us from the very beginning of his papacy, “Do not be afraid.” We cannot be afraid of what others are thinking about us. We cannot be afraid of what others might say about us. We cannot be afraid of what others might do to us. Our only fear should be the fear that we cave into the world, reject Christ, or push Him aside in any way. With St. Paul, we pray, “May the Lord Jesus Christ Himself and God the Father who loves us and gives us everlasting encouragement and hope, fortify our hearts and strengthen us.

Let us pray that Jesus’ compassion and mercy will touch the people of this world that God loves. Let us pray that when that touch is to come from the community of faith, from the Church, from us, that we may respond as Jesus did. Let us pray that all people would see one another as valued human beings, so that people of all races and backgrounds would be respected, so that the peace of the Kingdom of God would transcend all barriers of nations and cultures and unite a fractured, broken world.

31ST SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

We have just celebrated the feast of All Saints on November 1^st and  then All Souls on November 2^nd. Also during the Month of November we offer our prayers and masses for the holy souls remembering our family members our friends and all those we have known in this life who have passed on may all of them rest in the peace of god’s kingdom. This weekend our gospel story tells us about Zachaeus the Tax Collector. The tax collectors in Jesus time were despised because they were seen as enforcing the tax system of a foreign country. It seems that Zacchaeus was a small man who was anxious to see the person that all the fuss was about; personally I think he was looking for something more in the spiritual sense as he climbed up into the branches of the sycamore tree to get a look at Jesus as he passed by.  Zacchaeus put his dignity and the prestige of his position on the line when he scrambled up the tree Jesus saw him and he saw his willingness to accept the message of salvation.

The story of Zacchaeus encourages us to seek and find Jesus in our daily lives.  Sometimes we need to go and climb up the sycamore tree of faith to a different level to see the Lord as he passes by.All of us have a role to play in the ongoing work of building up the kingdom of God in our own place.  Our task is to bring love and care to all the people we encounter whoever they may be.  If we ignore people and bring them down to our own sometimes self-centered level we end up being the thorns and weeds that are removed from the harvest and cast into the fire as rubbish. We come to worship in our churches each week to get a better glimpse of Jesus as our Faith is the “tree” we climb. Our hope is that Jesus will  give us a clearer view of where he is in the midst of the issues and struggles we face day and daily. We’ll stay in this “tree” where we meet the Lord each Sunday but just for a short while, then we will climb down to return to our daily lives. The final verse in today’s Gospel can help us interpret many other stories about Jesus. His key mission was “to seek out and save what was lost.” Jesus wants to come to the lost and confused parts of our lives.

The parts we cover up and want to forget and there are so many dark places in people’s lives these days for so many reasons.  Jesus wants to make a home with us in the very places we have closed up and locked away. He knocks on the door of our hearts and invites us to let him in to change what we have given up on and so many people have given up on Faith and all it entails in recent times. He knocks on the door to bring out into the light the broken and discarded parts of our lives that need healing and Love. In the days ahead may we be like Zacchaeus not afraid to go out into the world climbing the tree to look for Jesus and not be afraid to bring his message to the people of our time and place.

THE FEAST OF ALL SAINTS & ALL SOULS

At the end of this week we have two feasts the feast of All Saints on Friday and the feast of All Souls on the Saturday. On November 1st the Church celebrates all the saints: and the great multitude of those who are in heaven enjoying the beatific vision that are only known to God. During the early centuries the Saints venerated by the Church were all martyrs. Later the  1^st  November was set  as the day for commemorating all the Saints. We all have this “universal call to holiness.” What must we to do in order to join the company of the saints in heaven? We “must follow Jesus footsteps and try to conform ourselves to His image as we seek  to do  the will of the Father in all things. In this way, the holiness of the People of God will grow into an abundant harvest of good, as is admirably shown by the life of so many saints in Church history” (Lumen Gentium) The feast of All Saints should inspire us with tremendous hope.

Among the saints in heaven are some  people whom we have known such as Pope Saint John Paul or Padre Pio who both lived in the last 100 years.  Padre Pio died in 1968 and of course John Paul died in 2005. But there are so many ordinary people who show us how to be saints by the way they lead their lives and we try to follow their example as well.  After rejoicing  with the saints in heaven on November 2^nd we  pray for all those souls who in the purifying suffering of purgatory await the day when they will join the company of saints. in a special Part of  the eucharistic prayer the priest remembers all those who have fallen asleep in the Lord, the priest implores God to grant them a place of happiness, light and peace. In a special way we remember our families and friends who have passed on and we also remember all those who have died whoever they are throughout the whole month of November which is known as the month of the Holy Souls. So at the end of this week we pray with the saints in heaven as we remember all who have died may they rest in the peace of the kingdom of God.

30th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

It is hard to believe that we are almost at the end of October with the schools in our locality having the midterm break for Halloween next week. It is also hard to believe that next Friday we celebrate the feast of All Saints closely followed by all souls the next day. The readings in our Liturgy for this weekend are all about the HUMBLE person of faith that God calls all of us to be in our own time and place. That means that we shouldn’t lose the run of ourselves when dealing with people and the situations that we might find ourselves.

What does the Gospel Reading about the tax collector and the Pharisee say to us today ? Also and I think more importantly what about the words of the Tax Collector who said in a simple humble way  God be merciful to me a sinner what do these humble words  say to us? I think that the Tax Collector despised by the people because of the job he does (nobody likes the tax man even now) is saying to us that we need to have the humility to be humble before God who knows that we are sinners even before we say it and we also have to be humble with other people dealing with them with real humility.

Real humility is about facing  the truth  about the person we are and often times we don’t like to hear the truth about ourselves or any situations we might be in.  The person who is truly humble will always see pride in him or herself as a bad thing.  The person who is humble believes him/herself to have nothing, when in fact he has God, who is for him and in him!  The person who knows  how to be dependent on God humbles himself so much,  putting himself in his proper place before his Creator, that God cannot  leave him in this state:  the Lord lifts him up to his own Glory in order to make him his adopted child.  In a word, he who humbles himself, God justifies! The more someone makes himself small in the eyes of god, the more the Lord is pleased to come and live in him and to make him shine with his divine light before other people.  In our modern world, Pride which was very strong in the words the Pharisee spoke dominates the world, and it is this pride which often leads many people the world over down a long lonely path. The old saying rings true that pride comes before a fall and we see this  in so many places and situations we might find ourselves or perhaps we have seen other people in. Today, the same as  every  other Sunday, we shall receive within us Jesus in the sacrament of the Eucharist.  We shall approach the altar of the Lord with humble hearts and minds. This approach testifies at once to our humility and to our grandeur.

It testifies to our humility, for we humble in believing that what we see as bread is not bread but rather the Body of Christ.  It testifies to our grandeur, for, in communion, we truly become the Body of Christ, adoptive sons and daughters in the only Son of God!  May this approach be our justification, for the salvation of the world! I finish with these words from Micah which really sum up the gospel reading for this Sunday and what does the Lord require of us? He requires us To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God? The Lord requires us in the same way to be just, kind in our dealings with other people and to walk humbly with our god so let us go forth into the world with true humility in our hearts and minds so we are able to serve those who need us most where we are.