Homily: March 31, 2022, Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent

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 The Lord said to Moses, “…my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them.”

In this first reading, we see God’s anger and furious reaction to the infidelity of the Israelites. Then Moses pleaded with God. And it seems his words made sense and God changed His mind.

This reading really confused me. I thought about it a lot. Are these really God’s own words – His threat to destroy the Israelites? And is God negotiable? Does He change his mind so easily?

We know that every word in the bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit, so there must be truth in what we are reading. I don’t have the perfect answer to these questions, but I have some realisations.

First, our God is a living God, He is not a block of wood. He has emotions, and He expresses them freely with His people. He is not indifferent to our behaviour, He feels, because He loves.

Second, our God is a loving God. He has compassion, and mercy for His people. He understands them very well. He understands us very well. He feels sadness when we refuse His love. He cries out in anger but He acts out of love. 

Our God feels. Our God relents. Our God loves.

Imagine if your child, whom you love deeply, were to reject your love, forgets all that you have sacrificed for him, then acknowledges someone else as his family, would you not feel hurt, upset and angry?

But would you not yearn in pain also, that he would realise his mistake, come back home and be reunited with you, the one who truly loves him?

Well, that’s probably how God feels when the Israelites replaced Him, the real living God, with a fake molten calf. God provides and protects them, but this calf can do nothing for them. God pains at their foolishness and blindness.

The Jews in Jesus’ time also did not believe that God sent Him, they continued in their foolishness, they continued to reject God.

God calls them back. God calls us back from our foolishness, worshipping this material, temporal world which can never satisfy us nor do anything for us.

Lent is a time to respond to God’s yearning for us. Let us stop our foolish pursuits and distractions, and return to God wholeheartedly, the one who truly loves us and feels for us.


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Homily: December 25, 2025, The Nativity of the Lord (Christmas)

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 “So they went in haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the Infant lying in the manger.” Today we hear the beautiful story of the shepherds visiting the newborn Christ. They found not only a Child, but a family. God sent His Son into the world not as a warrior or a king, but into the care of a mother and a father. Into a home. Into love. And what kind of family did God choose? Not a wealthy family. Not a powerful family. Not a comfortable family. Mary and Joseph had no room in the inn. Mary gave birth in poverty. Joseph struggled to provide safety and shelter. Their situation was not easy there was fear, uncertainty, and hardship. Yet God entrusted His Son to them. Even if they lacked material comfort, Jesus never lacked what mattered most: a loving mother and a caring father. As God wanted His Son to have a holy family, so too God wants every child to experience a holy, loving, safe family. Today we look around and see many broken families, many homes burdened with pain, absence, d...
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Homily: December 28, 2024 Feast of the Holy Innocents (Suffering).

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"Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you." Just three days ago, we celebrated Christmas - a joyful commemoration of the day God came to live among us in our world, it is a when divine light entered human darkness, it is a day for rejoicing. The Christmas season continues for the Church up until the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. However, if we read and reflect on the details of Christ’s birth and events surrounding this season of joy, we see poverty, simplicity and suffering. Just before our Lord was born into this world, His earthly parents went through hardship just to find a place to rest, He was then welcomed into physical and material poverty, the day after His birth, we celebrated the death of the first martyr, St. Stephen, followed by the feast of St. John the Evangelist who suffered persecution and isolation till a ripe old age. And now today, we observe the feast of the Holy Innocents — a sorrowful event when hundreds of...
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 “The angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you.’” As a young man, Joseph must have had beautiful dreams about his future family. He could have imagined a helpful and capable wife, children playing around the house and growing up to be well respected people in the community, a vision of a stable and peaceful life. When he got engaged to Mary, it seemed like his dreams would become reality soon. Many of us, married or not, can identify with the dreams that Joseph could have had. Yet like Joseph, the realities of our lives would have unfolded quite differently from how we have dreamt it. Joseph’s family life turned out totally unlike his own dreams, yet he continued to dream, now with God’s will revealed and God’s plan unfolding in the reality of his life. The hardship he went through in Bethlehem, with the birth of Jesus, did not end there. Today’s Gospel shows another unexpected cha...
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Homily: October 18, 2022. Tuesday of the twenty-ninth week in Ordinary time (Feast of St. Luke)

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“Stay in the same house and eat and drink what is offered to you.” This sounds fine to me because I am not fussy with food and am happy to eat anything offered. I can’t think of any food that I will not eat. And it helps a lot in my ministry, especially in this parish since I get invited to homes of various cultures and different cuisine. So far, I do enjoy Eritrean, Burmese, Laotian, Sudanese, Mexican and of course, American food. Yes, it is easy to feed me but very difficult to slim me down. But why did Jesus give such a specific instruction to His disciples regarding eating and drinking? It may look simple for us, but it was challenging to His disciples. They were Jews and the Jewish law laid out very strict food practices and prohibitions. And now they were being sent out to Gentile villages to preach to them. They were to live in Gentile homes and eat as they eat, drink as they drink. The disciples probably had never done anything like that before. Can you imagine the cultural sho...
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Homily: June 15, 2025 Soemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

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Today’s second reading ends with this powerful phrase: “Because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Today we celebrate two beautiful events: the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity and Father’s Day. So, happy Father’s Day to all our fathers, grandfathers, fathers-to-be and godfathers! My siblings and I are incredibly blessed to have had a good Christian father who fulfilled his duties both as a father and as a Catholic. My papa was a very quiet, resilient, yet very gentle person. He loved and protected all his seven children, physically, emotionally, mentally and especially spiritually. He taught us the faith and was a great model of the traditions. He made sure we never missed Sunday Mass and took us regularly to Confession. I was very much a “dad’s boy”, working with him daily on the farm, taking care of the animals together with him. He didn’t worry much about school grades, but he was very firm and strict with us re...
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Homily: December 24, 2024, Christmas Mass (Swaddling clothes )

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"She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger..." This Gospel scene brings me back to one special day when I was in grade eight. My eldest sister was back at home from college for summer vacation. The rest of my family were out of the house for a parish event, and so it was just the two of us at home. Before leaving the house, my mother had pre-empted us that one of our she-goats on the farm was ready to give birth, although she did think it might happen in a few more days. However, shortly after my parents and other siblings left the house, the she-goat or doe went into labor and gave birth to three babies: two males, one female. The baby doeling was very weak and looked unhealthy, my sister and I did not know what to do. So we called our grandmother on the phone, and she explained to us how to take care of the newborn kids. Following her instructions, we used iodine to treat the navel cords to prevent infection, cleaned up the birth site, made a nice bed of...
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Homily: October 28-2025, Feast of Saints Simon and Jude, Apostles (Heaven our Home)

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 Brothers and sisters: You are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones.” Our true and permanent home is heaven. We are destined to be citizens of heaven. For now, we are just sojourners on earth, pilgrims making our way towards home. I enjoy reading and hearing stories of people who have had near-death experiences. One common thing they report is that heaven is beautiful, and it is familiar. They usually describe it as the feeling of returning home, surrounded by people they know, being totally at ease and at peace. This image of heaven is pure joy. Those who live a virtuous life on earth, who keep their hearts united with God, are already preparing to live in that home. Heaven is not a foreign place for the faithful; it’s the fulfillment of what we yearn for deep inside of us. If we follow Jesus closely, we are already learning to live the heavenly life, experiencing and sharing the love and mercy of God and being in communion with God al...
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Holy Family School Mass Homily.   “At sunset, all who had people sick with various diseases brought them to him. He laid his hands on each of them and cured them.” In today’s Gospel, we hear about Jesus healing many people with different diseases. The passage begins with the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, who was very sick in bed with a very high fever. She was not merely resting, in fact her fever was so bad that she was unable to get out of bed. I am guessing it could be 103 or 104 degrees! Normally, if we get such a high fever, it would take us days to recover with strong medication. But when Jesus visited Peter’s mother-in-law, He simply stood over her, rebuked the fever, that means He scolded the fever, and it left her!  Instantly, she was well again and was able to get up and serve Jesus and His disciples. Wow! Jesus is the King of the Universe, He has power over everything in the world, if you would only believe in Him and trust Him. Even today, Jesus continues ...
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Homily: February 25, 2025, Tuesday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time (Undisappointed Hope)

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 “Study the generations long past and understand; has anyone hoped in the Lord and been disappointed?”  I have read this passage many times before, but it struck me differently this time. The message of hope resonates so deeply with me since this year is the Jubilee Year of Hope.  Romans 5:5: “Hope does not disappoint us.” We are pilgrims of hope, our pilgrimage is a journey of hope, and we are assured that when we place our hope in the Lord, we will not be disappointed. Have you ever been disappointed? Probably yes. And that could be because we were hoping the Lord will meet our expectations. We placed our desires in your own ambitions, and hoped the Lord would satisfy us and please us, He probably did or didn’t. Well, that is not the hope of faith we are talking about here. The answer becomes clear when we study the generations that came before us. If I think about my own parents and grandparents, they lived devout and pious lives. Their only hope was in the Lord and Hi...
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Homily: October 5, 2025, Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (Wait-God's Time)

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 “For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint; if it delays, wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late.” These powerful words from the prophet Habakkuk point towards hope. Hope in the fulfillment of God’s promises, despite the people’s failures. Habakkuk is one of the twelve minor prophets in the Old Testament, a small book of just three chapters, but every line is theologically deep. Habakkuk lived in the 7th century before the Babylonian exile. He saw the kingdom of Judah sinking in moral decay, corruption, and spiritual emptiness. The kings were weak, the people disobedient, and the once glorious nation of Israel was on the brink of collapse. Meanwhile, nearby nation Babylon was rising in power and strength, and ruthlessness. Habakkuk could see what was coming, and it terrified him. He wrestled with God in prayer. “Lord, how long?” he cried. Why do the wicked prosper while the righteous suffer? And God’s answer was simple yet...
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