psalm 99: to be holy - 10th week wednesday

Psalm 99 praise God because God is holy.  What is qadosh, the Hebrew word for holy?  Holy means set apart, separated, different, la-in sia sang sa iban.  God is called holy because God different from anything that exist in this world, God is different from anything that we could imagine.  God is the totally other.

This is also our call to be holy – to be holy means to be totally other, to separate oneself from the mob, to be different, not in the sense of becoming an elitist or to feel superior to the rest but to walk the less travelled path, to seek a different direction, to choose a different value, to love what the world despises, to run after what the world loathes.

To be holy means to be different, to be separate like God. 

I said this morning that during the time of Cory Aquino many Filipinos started working abroad by the thousands.  Little by little our values changed.  Parents would send their sons and daughters to courses that were needed abroad so that it would be easy to land a job.  Parents would sacrifice their presence in the family in order to earn more, in order to increase their income and thus improve their lives greatly.  It was also around this time that vocations to the priesthood dropped.  Values changed.  It was more honorable, beside being practical, to have a son or a daughter working abroad earning dollars for their family back home, more honorable than having a son who becomes a priest – more practical and honorable. Most of us come from this environment, from this kind of value system and, as I have said before, because of the prevailing values, it is more difficult for you to become priests than it was for us in the past.  This is your upbringing now and it would take a lot of guts, a lot of courage, a lot of denials in order for you to become a priest.  You have to go against the prevailing values, values held in high esteem by families today.  A priest's greatness in not in this world.  IT is in the kingdom of heaven.  And so to be holy is to really go against a value system that has been ingrained in us by the world and even by our own families perhaps.    And so let us call to God, the all holy, the qadosh, the totally other, to help us choose what the world despises and that is to choose the path of the priesthood, the path less and less traveled today.  Indi kita magkahadlok nga mag-lain kita sang sa iban.