That “Eureka!” moment of life – and death

The Lord Is My Chef Recipe for the Soul

Homily at the Funeral of Archimedes Lazaro (ICS ’97), 18 February 2020

Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9 ><)))> 0 <(((>< Luke 7:11-17

Soon afterward Jesus journeyed to a city called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd accompanied him. As he drew near to the gate of the city, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. A large crowd from the city was with her. When the Lord saw her, he was moved with pity for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” He stepped forward and touched the coffin; at this the bearers halted, and he said, “Young man, I tell you, arise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, exclaiming, “A great prophet has arisen in our midst,” and “God has visited his people.”
Luke 7:11-16

Today, we are like at the city of Nain. Traffic is so heavy outside as many of us – family and friends, former classmates, colleagues at work from all over and neighbors – gather to pray and pay our last respects for Archie.

Celebrating a funeral Mass for a young person is always difficult for me. Like Jesus, I feel so sad for their parents. Normally, it is the children who bury their parents. It must be so painful for parents burying a son or a daughter. That is why in our gospel, Jesus was “moved with pity” with the widow of Nain.

But today, amid the pains and sorrows with the sudden death of Archie last week at a very young age, we actually celebrate life in Jesus Christ.

Photo by author of the hills of Galilee from the Walls of Jerusalem, May 2017.

Jesus comes to visit us always

Like in that scene at Nain, we remember and celebrate the life of Archie who had come to visit us even for a short time.

I love that part of the gospel where the people at Nain exclaimed at how “God has visited his people” when Jesus raised the dead young man.

Jesus continues to visit us everyday through one another like Archie.

Despite his many sins and imperfections, Archie made us experience Jesus Christ’s love and friendship, warmth and kindness, especially to his two sons, family, and friends.

Surely, Jesus must have visited Archie, too, during those dark moments of his life.

And the good news is, Archie visited Jesus so often especially these last two years when he started to pick up the pieces of his life.

Last time I saw Archie was last November when he came to celebrate Mass in our Parish. And I have heard how he had sought spiritual guidance from Fr. Carl, driving that far to Paco every month as he renewed his relationship with Christ, trying to follow anew the Lord he had served since elementary as a sacristan and later as a seminarian in our high school seminary.

It is Jesus who first finds us always

Photo by author at Mt. St. Paul Spirituality Center, Baguio, 04 February 2020.

We all know Archie’s tocayo is one of ancient Greece’s great scientist and inventor, Archimedes.

It is said that he discovered the principle of buoyancy – the “Archimedes’ principle” – while taking a bath.

When Archimedes sat onto his bathtub, he observed that “when a body is submerged in a fluid, it experiences an apparent loss in weight that is equal to the weight of fluid displaced by the immersed body.”

Archimedes was so ecstatic with his accidental discovery that he jumped naked from his bathtub out to the streets, shouting “eureka!” or “I have found” the solution to a problem he was trying to solve at that time.

Archimedes had not only enriched the field of mathematics and sciences with his discoveries but also the English language with the word “eureka” or “eureka moment”: when somebody discovers something very significant in business and economics, the sciences especially medicine, and practically in every field and subject.

Most especially in life.

Photo by author, Mt. St. Paul Spirituality Center, Baguio, 04 February 2020.

Archie had the same eureka moment in life: he had found Jesus Christ again that he went back to Mass and Confessions.

He had found meaning in life again after losing hope and directions.

Most of all, Archie had found love again.

Like his namesake of ancient Greece, Archie is now exclaiming “eureka” ecstatically into heaven – naked – with nothing but the love and mercy of Jesus Christ who first found him and brought him back to life a few years ago.

Today as we bring the remains of Archie into his final resting place, we thank God who never stops looking for us, finding us so that we can find him again and finally rest in him.

Today it is Jesus who is most ecstatic of all because he is the first to have found Archie and that is why, he had called him back to him, never to get lost again.

But the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction. But they are in peace. In the time of their visitation they shall shine.
Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-3, 7

Amen.

“Pick Up the Pieces” Live From Daryl’s House (2010)

The Lord Is My Chef Sunday Music, 10 November 2019

Photo by Mr. Chester Ocampo, October 2019.

Today’s Sunday gospel is admittedly very difficult: the resurrection of body and life everlasting.

In our gospel, the Sadducees tried to trick Jesus with their “levirite law” from Moses that decreed “If someone’s brother dies leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for his brother” (Lk.20:28).

Right away, Jesus quashed their wrong argument because there is no point in having analogies and comparisons when it comes with the resurrection of the dead. Marriage is something of this world while resurrection is something beyond this world and life.

What Jesus is asking us this Sunday is to focus our sights on our loving and merciful Father because faith in resurrection is faith in a living God.

Moreover, faith in resurrection of the dead is borne out of an encounter and experience of God, moving us to forge on with life amidst all its difficulties and trials because we believe this life would be changed and perfected by God in the end.

And that change, that resurrection begins right here in this life – every time we try to pick up the pieces of our lives, when we try to start anew, whenever we rise again from every little death, that is when we experience our little resurrection.

From that experience we slowly gain passion for life because we are convinced deep inside there is something more bigger awaiting us because we have God on our side who would never forsake us and perfect us in eternity.

In reflecting these things of the above like heaven and resurrection of the dead, I always choose next to prayer the way of music, and believe me, not just meditative or classical music.

I do it with rock and funk and soul!

See how Daryl Hall and his musicians play with so much passion and gusto this classic by the Average White Band (AWB) called “Pick Up the Pieces”: it’s a natural high, feeding our soul deep within, transporting us to somewhere higher in realm and reality.

Released in 1974 by Scottish musicians AWB, Pick Up the Pieces is essentially instrumental with its title being shouted occasionally.

I prefer the version of Daryl Hall when he invited to his internet show Live From Daryl’s House AWB original Alan Gorrie jamming with them in his home-studio in New York state in January 2010.

Just enjoy and feel the music, feed your soul, be assured Jesus is always on your side who journeys with you through this life into eternity. Amen.

Faith in the Living God, Faith in the Resurrection

The Lord Is My Chef Sunday Recipe for the Soul, Week XXXII-C, 10 November 2019

2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14 ><}}}> 2 Thessalonians 2:16-3:5* ><}}}> Luke 20:27-38*

Jesuit Mirador House, Baguio City, January 2019.

Our gospel today helps us to further reflect the meaning of last week’s All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day when we honored our departed loved ones with prayers, believing and hoping that some day we shall be with them in heaven at “the resurrection of body and life everlasting”.

Every Sunday this is what we profess and so today, our readings invite us to reflect anew this last but crucial article of our faith, the resurrection of body and life everlasting.

Some Sadducees, those who deny that there is a resurrection, came forward and put this question to Jesus, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us, If someone’s brother dies leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman but died childless. Then the second and the third married her, and likewise all the seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. Now at the resurrection whose wife will that woman be? For all seven had been married to her.”
Luke 20:27-33

The Jewish Cemetery at the Mount of Olives facing Jerusalem, May 2019.

Jesus had finally entered Jerusalem. What an extraordinary manner for him to discuss death and resurrection right in the city he knew where he would eventually die and rise again in a few days later!

And the first to confront him there were the Sadducees, Israel’s elite from whose ranks came the high priests who later conspired with Rome to put Jesus to death.

Very conservative and rigorous in their practice of religion, the Sadducees were basically fundamentalists who refused to accept oral traditions on equal footing with the Pentateuch. They only accepted whatever was explicitly written on the Pentateuch, discarding anything that the Torah does not mention at all like the resurrection, existence of spiritual beings like angels and immortality of the soul.

Don’t we find ourselves into the same situation too when despite our professed religiosity, we subscribe to other beliefs like reincarnation and fortune-telling because of “proofs” we find about their veracity unlike the resurrection that seems to be so difficult to think of in the first place?

We have those vestiges of fundamentalism within, always searching and asking for proofs on so many things about our religious beliefs, especially about God and Jesus Christ.

Jesus said to them, “The children of this age marry and remarry; but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels… That the dead will rise even Moses made known in the passage about the bush, when he called ‘Lord’ the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; and he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”
Luke 20:34-38

Photo by Mr. Raffy Tima of GMA-7 News, 2018.

Notice how Jesus right away told them analogies and comparisons are not applicable because marriage and resurrection are of two different realms. The Sadducees were thinking on ground level when resurrection is definitely of a higher plane.

Jesus finds no need to prove anything at all to them – even to us! What he is more concerned is for us to “level-up” our thoughts, to set our sights to him, the Son of the Living God.

Now in Jerusalem to fulfill his mission, Jesus in the next two weeks will summarize for us all his teachings that lead to our coming home to the Father in heaven upon our death. Like Jesus Christ who died and rose again, we shall experience the same in the end.

How? Nobody really knows but our faith teaches us that resurrection is more than being restored to life; resurrection is life perfected in Christ. Life is surely changed and that is why it is on a different and higher level of existence.

And it starts right here in this life.

Every time we experience our little deaths on our daily cross with Christ, we also experience our little resurrection when our lives are changed for the better. Amidst our many struggles in this life, we experience God’s loving presence, his very revelation of himself that moves us to deeper faith in him for indeed, he “is not God of the dead” – nor a dead God – because “for him all is alive” .

This faith in the resurrection is faith in the living God “who has loved us and given us everlasting encouragement and good hope through his grace” (2 Thes. 2:16) in Jesus Christ.

It is a faith borne out of our encounter with him as our loving and merciful Father that we are filled with passion to do everything for him because he is so true, so real, like in the experiences of the seven Maccabean brothers who heroically accepted death than sin against God in the first reading.

In 2013, I lost my best friend from high school to cancer.

One week before he died, I visited him three more times and that was when I noticed something so different: during the early months of his sickness, he would always cry to me, expressing his fears and anger but, during that final week of his life, I was the one crying to him while he was the one who would console and explain things to me!

Later, I experienced the same thing with some friends and parishioners I have accompanied in their final journey as a priest.

I have learned that the dying stop crying, stop fearing death because they could already see their final destination. They could feel God so close already that they no longer resist dying, so certain of their own resurrection. We who are left behind cry not only in losing our loved ones but unconsciously because we are afraid, unsure of where our lives are leading to.

In one of the beautiful scenes of the Netflix series The Kominski Method, Sandy (Michael Douglas) told his friend Norman (Alan Larkin) how everyone else is also afraid because nothing is so certain in this life. But, Sandy added, we continue to live because we have others with us journeying together in this life.

Let that Other be Jesus Christ who has come to accompany us in this life and back to the Father in heaven. Amen.