Father Labib's Installation Homily

Father Labib's Installation Homily

March 29, 2003

Your Excellency,
My brothers the priests,
The Excellencies Consul of Egypt and Consul of Jordan,
The Ecumenical and interfaith community,
All you my friends and family,

I welcome you all to St. Thomas More on behalf of this one family that represent members of diverse traditions, ethnic, heritage and languages. I tried to put beside the Holy Mother statue about 50 different languages that could represent part of our Cosmopolitan city, San Francisco.
I feel so honored today to be introduced as your pastor by His Excellency Bishop Wester. And I accept this ministry with great love to all of you. With my dear brother Francis Tiso, the Parochial Vicar and Campus minister we want to dedicate our lives at your service.
This church of us celebrates, today, what the previous priests before us have accomplished in you, with you and through you for years. You wanted your church to continue in mission and the Lord blessed your efforts of love, dedication and faithfulness and the Archdiocese today represented by His Excellency Bishop Wester with many priests is the proof that the Lord is blessing you and will continue to bless us all.

Fr. Francis and I will continue the work of the different priests who did much to make this house of God a beautiful church and rectory.

We want specially to continue the vision of Brotherhood Way. In fact our Church have been the first church built on Brotherhood Way, many different interfaith and Ecumenical communities came to make from Brotherhood Way a special place in San Francisco.
We want to continue this mission of Brotherhood, a vision of love, sharing, cooperating and supporting each other for the best of our City, San Francisco and our nation.

Fr. Francis returned just last week from a visit to India so as to build bridges with the Hindus, Buddhists and others.
Our vision is then based on our love to see the whole San Francisco a family, a village where people stand with each other for better and for worse. And we believe that if we can realize this between Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and all people of faith or even secular people, we can be a Role Model for the nation and the world.

We know this may seem to be too much of vision specially when we are living a time of war where political interests are linked to economical interests and when the appeals of real religious leaders like our Holy Father Pope John Paul II who is against war are not heard or listen to.
But we know also that the only way to stop violence is to come together and stand before of God together as his children, all together before God who does not make differences between his children and who loves us all the same.

So we believe that
1) The whole world despite of the differences of language, ethnic groups, races, sex, continents, countries and religions form ONE FAMILY IN LOVE as we are all sons and daughters of the one God who is Love, Creator of all of us.

2) That peoples are equal and in the mind and eyes of God there is no difference between any of us, no wealth, no culture, no education, no honors, no titles, no economical interests can make one better than another as we will all be judged in the way we have lived LOVE, and because only LOVE is the law of God.

3) That sharing, cooperating, dialogue, sacrifice, forgiving and forgetting when lived sincerely are the expressions of REAL LOVE. Only if we work together can we find hearts and hands creating the vision of God and that wars and violence are not the way that God wants us to resolve our differences.

4) That in these dark days of war that our American people is living, when fears, anxiety, troubles, conflicts, misunderstanding threaten to destroy our peace of mind and heart, or hurt our social, familial, spiritual life, (We believe that) only unselfish LOVE can make us family and not weapons and appeals to war and vengeance.

5) That we are created to LOVE and that our world would be much better today than more than 2000 years ago if LOVE and only LOVE were the Law communicating with each other, the way to educate each other, the way to talk, to work with each other.

This is why we believe that with St. Thomas More on Brotherhood Way, we can form a family of LOVE with everybody and that we can build a kind of paradise where everybody from everywhere can find peace, serenity, joy, truth, friendship, caring, ministry and especially LOVE.

With the help of some of our friends we have created a sanctuary on the corner looking to Brotherhood Way, a sanctuary that we called Our Lady of Brotherhood as a sign of our commitment as St. Thomas More to work hand in hand for love.

I pray with you and ask you to pray with me and with Dear Fr. Francis to serve you for the best and build this family of Love.

Fr. Labib Kobti