New Year – Mary, Mother of God
“May the Lord Bless you” (Num 6:24)
Today is a day of blessing. In this New Year, God has blessed us with another opportunity to grow in love, to come closer to Him, and to experience Him in the person of Jesus.
Today is a day of blessing. We honour Mary – she who was blessed among women – as the mother of God. “When the appointed time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman…” (Gal 4:4).
Today is a day of blessing. On this eighth day after Christmas we remember the naming ceremony of Jesus. We bless and honour the holy name of Jesus. We acknowledge that there is power and blessing in the name of Jesus. As St Paul tells us in Phil 2:9, 10: “And for this God raised him high, and […]
Year B
Year B Sunday Sermons
Sermon for 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B Homily
The Power of Suffering and Service
29th Sunday – Year B
Pleasure, Possessions and Power
We are created to be happy. Our pursuit of happiness revolves around, and often misled by, the three P-wants: Pleasure, Possession, and Power. Pleasure is the ability to enjoy positive mental and physical states. Possession is the endowment to have access to the fundamental needs of human beings. And power is the possibility to have agency over the environment and people around us. The 3 P’s may contribute to happiness, and at the same time, an exaggerated focus on them could leave us unhappy. This is our struggle: to balance our need and want for pleasure, possession and power.
The core content of the temptations of Jesus, in the Synoptic Gospels (Mt 4:1-11; Mk 1:12-13; Lk 4:1-11) and even in […]
Sermon for 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B Homily
Do not be possessed by possessions
28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Here is a story from Tony de Mello:
When the sage reached the outskirts of the village and settled under a tree for the night, a villager came running up to him and said, “The stone! The stone! Give me the precious stone!” “What stone?” asked the sage. “Last night in a dream I was told that if I went to the outskirts of the village at dusk a sage would give me a stone that would make me rich forever.” The sage rummaged in his sack and, pulling out a stone, he said, “It is probably this one. I found it in the forest yesterday. Here, it’s yours if you want it.” The man gazed at the stone […]
Sermon for 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B Homily
27th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle B
Let the Children Come to me, in Families! (Mk 10: 2-16)
It is estimated that in Belgium over 70% of marriages end up in divorce – one of the highest rates in the world. Countries such as Spain and Portugal follow very closely with their percentage of divorce being well over 60%. It seems to me that, these days, as people prepare themselves for marriage they also might need to prepare themselves for divorce. I understand that it would be insensitive for us to stand at the pulpit and speak in a condemning way about divorce, given that it is a traumatic experience for people (including children) who have to deal with it. Sometimes it is not even their own fault that […]
Sermon for 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B Homily
Believing and Belonging:
We saw someone who is not one of us…” (Mk 9:38, also Num 11:27)
There are two words that have featured very strongly in the study of religion since the 1990’s: ‘Believing’ and ‘Belonging’. In 1994, a British sociologist of religion (Grace Davie) published a book on the rise of secularism in Britain since 1945. She called her book, Believing without Belonging. In the book, she suggests that most people who do not belong to institutional religions have some form of belief about God. It is only that they don’t want to be part of a specific religion – either because they are tired of the atrocities committed in the name of religion or that they simply don’t have the time for it. There have been other books and […]