In 2018, I attended the episcopal ordination of Bishop Ewald Sedu, in Maumere. Maumere is a very Catholic town, on the very Catholic island of Flores, in very Christian eastern Indonesia.

How many of us, especially the younger generation, have thousands of Facebook friends but have never met them in person? I am sure one of them.

The first reading from the Prophet Jeremiah speaks of how Jeremiah was ill treated for doing God’s work. He is thrown in the well since he is accused of dampening the spirit of the soldiers and the people by speaking the truth.

The Gospel reading for this Sunday invites us to be ready and dressed for action. We remember the Gospel from last Sunday, where the rich man, seeing the bumper harvest he had, thinks of building bigger barns and store all the wealth to himself and doesn’t even give a second thought of sharing it with the other.

To borrow a story from a good friend of mine, Fr Bel San Luis, SVD, there was a man who wanted to have a lot of money so badly that he promised the devil to do his work in exchange for a copy of the newspaper a day ahead before it was published so that he could get the winning Lotto number in advance.

This Sunday’s Gospel is surely at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. It begins with Jesus instructing his followers how to pray. He says those words that Christians cherish, the Our Father, and then he talks about asking for things and receiving what we need.

A contractor needed one more man to chop down trees for export. One day, two men appeared willing to do the job but only one could be employed so what the contractor did was to put the two men to a test, they were to chop down as many trees as they could in an eight-hour shift and the man who chopped down more trees got the job.

When I was still a seminarian, I was in Surigao City, a city northeast of Mindanao Island in the Philippines and one day as I was walking around a corner a car nearly sideswiped me.

An atheist friend once said, “The Bible message is nice to read, but it is too beautiful to be true”. Of course, it is beautiful, who would say otherwise?

This Sunday’s Gospel reading is one of those passages of Scripture that is very hard to understand. Jesus seems to be contradicting himself. 

Today we celebrate a feast that is central to our faith. We celebrate the real presence of Christ in the bread and the wine that we consume during Mass. We believe that after the priest says the words of consecration during Mass, the bread ceases to become bread and it becomes the body of Christ.

This Sunday, we celebrate the feast of The Most Holy Trinity, one of the most foundational doctrines of Christianity. This is a celebration not as a theological discourse to be understood completely, but rather good news to be celebrated and enriched by.

With the arrival of Pentecost Sunday, our Easter journey is almost over. The concept of Pentecost as a culmination of the spiritual journey from Resurrection to the gathering in the upper room, and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the reluctant disciples, rather than simply an awe-inspiring theophany, is intimated in John’s Gospel as the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to the disciples, that The Advocate will come and remain with the fledgling Church for all time.

One summer I spent a few days in Darwin as part of my summer break. While I was walking on the streets of Darwin, I happen to pass by the Cathedral of the Diocese of Darwin. Outside the Cathedral, there was a statue of the crucifix mounted on the wall.

Since the celebration of Easter, the Church has invited us to reflect on the origins of the Christian community.