SMC celebrates its feastday

More than 1,000 parishioners of St Michael’s Church (SMC) celebrated their parish feastday with a bilingual Mass and lunch, welcoming and sharing their joy with their greater “extended” family, including the poor and the marginalised from their monthly soup kitchen.

IPOH (Herald Malaysia): More than 1,000 parishioners of St Michael’s Church (SMC) celebrated their parish feastday with a bilingual Mass and lunch, welcoming and sharing their joy with their greater “extended” family, including the poor and the marginalised from their monthly soup kitchen.

Over 220 of them were invited to participate.

The feastday Mass of Archangels St Michael, Gabriel and Raphael was celebrated by Fr Fabian Dicom, with SMC parish priest Fr Stephen Liew concelebrating. The theme was St Michael, defender of our faith.

Based on the day’s readings, Fr Fabian said there is a tendency to focus on practising religosity rather than embracing spirituality. “When our faith is all about following laws, then our faith is equated with religosity. We are only governed by fear, following rituals and rites.

“These rituals should be a means to our worship but, often, we just follow, until we become “exclusive” Christians. Working in the vineyard means that God loves us unconditionally, and going (into the vineyard) means translating all our worship in Mass into action.

“There must be openness and love of the outcast. It takes courage to step out and to be at the service of humanity. It is also to care about the vineyard, and to stand up in the quest for social justice.

“We have to do our part instead of just criticising others on social media, he said. “That is the image given by the washing of the feet of the disciples by Jesus.

“As for the parable, we all have a bit of both sons in us, so we have to pray to God, St Michael, and the archangels, to help us.”

Article reproduced from Herald Malaysia online