Welcome to the Church of the Nativity family. Since its dedication on October 21, 1989, our community has faithfully committed to our mission: We are a praying, learning and caring community fulfilling the mission God gives us in baptism by our worship in faith, by our witness in hope, and by our service in love. We invite you to journey with our community in Christ, thus will be said, “Day by Day the Lord added to their number” (Acts 2:47). Our Nativity School is led by faith-filled, loving professional staff who provide not only excellence in academics for our children so that they may excel in life, but help cultivate and form our children to come to know, love and serve God through the gifts God has blessed each of them. We are a Dynamic Parish and look forward to walking with you and your family to pray, worship, and give thanks to God for the many blessings He has bestowed upon us. In joy and in sorrow, we will live out together the witness of faith, hope and charity. At the Church of the Nativity, there will always be room “in the inn” (Luke 2,7).
In the past two Sundays I shared my reflections on the following general themes: 1) the need for witnessing to our faith in Jesus as the most effective way for evangelization; 2) the concrete role of the poor in the world today that has appeared to have different faces as not only the object but also an active agent of evangelization; and 3) the virtue of poverty as one of the characteristic that the Church and its members should embrace, as evangelizers, in order to efficiently bring the Word of God to many unbelieving men and women in the world today.
Today is the thirty third Sunday in Ordinary time. Next Sunday we will be celebrating the Feast of the Universal Kingship of Jesus Christ. Our first reading and gospel readings focus on the end times which remind us of two important and hard realities: first that there an end to life on earth and second that death is a certain reality. If there is a reality that many people, you and I, often would earnestly want to dismiss for many valid as well as flimsy reasons, it is these two realities: the end of the world and the reality of death. Among so many reasons for our obsession to prolong life on earth is because we really love to live longer and do not wish anything that we love to last shorter. Another reason is the fact that many of us are really afraid of the end and also afraid to die. Precisely due to both our obsession to prolong life and our fear of death that the celebration of this Eucharist today as the need for us to listen to the meaning of the readings today are truly so relevant and significant. These remind us that indeed the end is certain and death for each one of each will be coming. Hence, we should be thankful that this celebration has been made part of our liturgical year.
Why should we be thankful? Indeed we should be grateful that we have been alive and lived in a world so beautiful and rich in manifesting the grandeur of our Creator Himself. Furthermore, thankful because by knowing that all these will end, we are given the chance to prepare for its eventual coming and prepare it with joy and hope, virtues that our Christian faith graciously endowed us with during our lifetime. Believing that life on earth is but a passing and transitory phase into eternal life allows us to be thankful as well as truly prepared for the end times.
How are we, therefore, prepare ourselves for this reality whose uncertainty of the mode and time of its occurrence is most certain in the world today? At this present moment what comes to my mind is what we should do during this year of the preparing us for the Jubilee year: be a witness to Jesus in the world today and this begins by knowing our faith more seriously and living it joyfully as well as sharing our faith with others lovingly and more generously.
All these suggestions are made in general terms, but today I would like to begin with a program of knowing our faith more seriously. There are many ways to know our faith. The first is having the important documents that we should own: the bible, the catechism of the Catholic Church and other important church teachings both universal and local. Second, reading our bible and the catechism. Third, studying them individually and in our families, or in study groups already existing in our community. After knowing our faith deeply, we can share our knowledge by practicing joyfully what we know in our relationships with others. Indeed, with the knowledge of our faith that we would share with others, we can be living witnesses to Jesus in the world today, we can be true and living agents of evangelization while preparing ourselves for the end times and even our death with joy, hope and love.