Fullerton T

33rd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Well here we are at the 33^rd Sunday of ordinary time we are near the end of the liturgical year as well as that we are at the end of the year of Mercy.  These days we live in very uncertain times, things in the world at large are very different with the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA. As the saying goes what a difference a week makes. So what does our Gospel for this Sunday tell us, This gospel reading from Luke is there to help us to be honest with ourselves as we go forward to the feast of Christ the King and then on to Advent as it talks about the end times. This weekend Luke’s gospel places Jesus in the temple. Those around him were marvelling at the temple, the stone carvings, the offerings of the people to God were a source of amazement. Jesus threw cold water on their thoughts about the great temple. When people commented on its  glory Jesus prophesied that doom and gloom would come from their spiritual slumber. Jesus also stated that there will come a time when the temple with all its glory will lie in ruins, its magnificence gone and the place a place of desolation. To the crowd around him who heard what he said this was inconceivable.

The temple was the hinge of Jewish life, something solid to hang onto in hard times. Naturally they wanted to know when it would happen. Jesus didn’t give them or us a date or time when this would happen. Jesus also assured his followers of divine help of God when the time of trial came. Those people who have the courage to live the Way of Jesus are often questioned, interrogated, and abused because they are following Jesus. They give witness by how they live their daily lives and many persecuted people have given their lives in so many places in recent times. In these first 16 Years of the twenty first century we are faced with terrible inequity of living standards in many countries. For many people there is the awful crushing experience of being left out, being left behind. Many people don’t want to understand the pain and isolation that comes from being excluded from so many things for instance exclusion from education and healthcare these are just two examples of people being denied opportunities for a better life there are many more and there are many people around and about us who are afflicted and Jesus came to comfort them in what he did and what he said.

How are we responding to the issues of our time as we look towards the future this weekend wondering what that future holds for us as we think about this we also remember that the words of Jesus in the Gospels are there to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted! None of us have the answers if we had the answers, I don’t know that we would be any better than we are. This weekend when we think about the end times in the scripture we pray for one another, for faith that endures, a faith that perseveres, and a faith that lasts till the very end of the doom and gloom of the dark night that we sometimes have to go through until we come to the light of Christ!

NOVEMBER

During the month of November we remember those who have died. In the parish where I live we as a community celebrate a Mass for the bereaved remembering all those who have died during the year and their families are invited to attend. During the Mass the names of those who have passed on will be read out and a family member will come forward to light a candle in their memory. Also for the whole month of November the remembrance book in which the names of those who have died over the past year will be inscribed will be on a table in the Church and the candle will be lit near this book during every Mass. We also keep up the venerable tradition of the November Dead List in which we list the names of our dead friends and relations and the lists are placed in the church for the month of November and we remember all those people as well. Goodness is not limited to any age of history: neither the past nor the present has a monopoly on saints because all of us are called to be saints and we find that most if not all the saints were also sinners!!

We are related to those who went before us, those who linked their belief to those who went before them. We are part of that chain of holiness we are a small part of the marvellous company of heaven that is the believers who have gone before us. We are not abandoned to our own devices; we have our ancestors in faith the saints who are blessed in heaven. In John’s vision he sees “a huge number, impossible to count, of people from every nation, race, tribe and language”. Among them are counted people who know us and love us Who we are is what we have been given. Our faith also educates the hope we share that we will return to the source of life, the God of all beginnings. Death is not a door into the dark, it is a dark door which opens into the light. Those we have loved and all the faithful departed have passed through that door, and during the month of November we pray for their eternal peace and joy. During November we hold holy the memory of all the faithful who have been called to return to God. We bless God for the many ways they have enriched our families, our communities, our life of faith. We pray that as we remember their names before God, they will remember us. The faith and love that bound us together with them in life still binds us in their new life. We pray that their prayers will support our own hope as we continue our journey in faith. Our journey is the road that will take us to eternal joy of the heavenly kingdom.                                      

Mission Sunday 2016

This Sunday we celebrate Mission Sunday. Since 1926, the Church has remembered its universal mission during the month of October. On Mission Sunday, we celebrate the work of all missionaries throughout the world. We thank God for them, for all who support them in our own countries and we unite ourselves in prayer with them and with the communities with whom they work. So many men and women  have gone to foreign lands to bring the faith of our fathers to those who might not have got the faith otherwise. We think of all the members of the religious orders such as the Columbans, Mill Hill Fathers, St. Patrick’s Fathers the Medical Missionaries of Mary and all the other religious orders who along with the Lay Missionary movements like Viatores Christi who have brought Christ and his message to the far flung corners of the world. This Sunday celebrates the great missionary spirit that has brought the faith to all corners of the world since the Apostles first missionary Journeys .

Mission Sunday gives us the opportunity to acknowledge all those missionary men and women who left everything in order to bring the faith to the ends of the earth with love of god and his people in their hearts. In his message for Mission Sunday Pope Francis says “As they travel through the streets of the world, the disciples of Jesus have a love without limits, the same measure of love that our Lord has for all people. We proclaim the most beautiful and greatest gifts that he has given us: his life and his love”. This year the mission Sunday theme is ‘Every Christian is a missionary’ all of us are called to pray that the Lord of the harvest will continue to inspire many people to join the missionary orders and bring the joy of the Gospel to those who haven’t heard the Good News of the Gospel.

29th SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

In our Gospel for this Sunday Jesus tells us about our need to pray and not to lose heart when we don’t get what we pray for straight away. Over a long period of time many people have prayed for various things for example family concerns for healing of body mind or spirit or whatever. Some people ask me why god is not answering their prayers straight away in the here and now of the present moment and I tell them that their prayers will be answered when God in heaven sees that they really need whatever they have been praying for. My own experience is that we often pray for things and don’t get them straight away but we get the things we prayed for when we really need them. Remember that Rome was not built in a day: No great work can ever be achieved without long and patient effort and this is the same for us in our prayer lives work of patient persistent prayer will yield results as God helps us to get through all our problems large and small and gives us some surprises along the way.

Remember the saying that nothing is impossible for those who have faith and if our faith is the size of mustard seed it can move mountains.  The prayer in today’s gospel is the prayer of petition. If our prayers are always prayers of petition, we run the risk of being selfish and self-centered; except, of course, when the prayers of petition are for others. Like one of the ten lepers in last weeks gospel, we ask, and then when our prayers are answered, we return to give thanks to God. When we meet the judge and the widow in this Gospel passage we meet them at a crisis point. We have no case history for the widow but we do for the judge. He is a hard man who isn’t influenced by religious principle or by public opinion. Both justice and compassion are absent from his dealings with the widow. She has no influential friends to bring pressure on the judge and she has no money to bribe him: all she has is the justice of her cause and her own persistence.

Jesus encourages us to be persistent in our prayer and never lose heart. We live In an age where we have become accustomed to instant results we are impatient with what appear to be endless delays in god’s response to us. The danger is that we give up too quickly, that we rest our case too easily and move on. We have to be persistent; we have to invest time in our beliefs and persistent prayer will help us to do this. Through this parable, Jesus teaches us the need for perseverance in prayer. This perseverance develops our trust and confidence in God. It helps us to  to realize how weak we are when left to ourselves. It keeps us close to God, as we learn how dependent we are on His generous love. If we would realize that God is perhaps closer to us than we realise when we think He is forgetting us for he never forgets us!