Feed Them Yourselves!

When I was the assistant to Fr McKelson, he kept telling me that soon he would become a pensioner, so I told him that when he did we will throw a party to spend his first cheque! Well his 65^th birthday and party came, and to celebrate, the Bidyadanga mob went out and caught 65 salmon, which were carefully filleted and refrigerated the day before. The time of the party arrived and the fires were burning when I was told that the fridges had failed and all the fish had gone rotten. Meanwhile there were two hundred people gathering for a meal. A team of people went into overdrive and, using everything in the kitchen and convent, cooked for the waiting people. I can assure you that there was a miracle there that day, but I do not know it was a miraculous multiplication of food. However, we are part of a greater miracle, described by the readings we have reflected on today, and we are all called to be part of the response.

God calls us to come together.  Come to he water you who are thirsty. We are invited and encouraged to acknowledge our need for God, and to work together to create a better world. It does not matter whether we consider ourselves to be talented, capable or worthy. God accepts our efforts as part of the whole and invites us equally to share in the benefits of being in relationship with him.

This invitation is freely given by God and not earned by us in any way.  In that way we can never be separated from our God, who created sustains and loves us. We are, of course, able to ignore or hide from God, and to commit sin, which prevents us from seeing the work of God in our lives and world.  This can happen, but St Paul is reminds the Romans and us, two thousand years later, that neither death nor life nor angel nor demon nor any other power nor life nor death nor anything else in all creation can separate from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. The point is quite laboured isn’t it? However the point is made that God is there and is not going anywhere else! We have nothing to worry about, we are never alone.

Jesus comment to his disciples is the key to the story of feeding the five thousand. Miracles do happen, and they are from God, but those who recognise miracles cannot be passive recipients or spectators. I often have people ask me: Where is God? Why doesn’t he send a miracle to help people in need?   Our answer of the Christian is that of Our Lord: Feed them yourselves, pray and prepare, use every gift and talent you have, and when that is exhausted, God will provide. The Lord works through his people as well as through his world.

At Lourdes in France I have seen people praying and hoping for a miracle, not passive sitting, but fervently hoping praying and preparing for whatever gift their relationship with God allows them to receive. I have witnessed miracles at Lourdes and in other places, and they are all, without exception, the fruit of people co-operating with the love of God, people coming to the water, people offering the little faith, hope, love and money they have and allowing God to multiply it over and over.

God works best when things seem hopeless and people seem lost. This is not because God wants to big note himself, but these are the times that God’s people recall that God is in the middle with his suffering people, and that he is not going anywhere. We know that  God is with us we can change the world.

Homily OLQP Broome 30th July 2011

The Riches of Relationship

During the past week I have been in Sydney at a meeting called by the Australian Catholic Bishops. The Bishops asked for a representative from each diocese to come together talk about a radical concept. The concept is JESUS.  They are proposing a Year of Grace, which is defined as starting afresh from Christ. It is an opportunity to encounter Jesus I everything we do as Church, in every part of our lives. ‘What is so radical about that’ I hear you say, isn’t that what we try to do every day? Well, if my life is any indicator, yes and no.  Today’s liturgy gives us a wonderful chance to really ask ourselves that question and seek the answer.

What do I want out of life? Big question, and one that only be answered after a significant amount of reflection, and dare I say it, prayer.  We all have our priorities, and often what we would like to see as our priorities are, in fact not what is acted out in our lives.  We all have the experience of saying something that we did not intend to, and when it comes we are sure that it was from God and not from us. I think that is what happened to Solomon in his dream dialogue with God that we read about in the first book of Kings.  He did not ask for riches, wealth, and power, to win wars, to be handsome or get a stack of really good wives. Instead he asked for ‘a heart to understand how to discern between good and evil’. I don’t think that Solomon saw that one coming, but when it did, he took it and ran. It is right and true, and he was given that gift that made him the wisest and best king of Israel.  He encountered God, and having done that, everything else fell into place.

Solomon not only found the answer to life, but was able to sustain the pace. The psalm tells us about that: ‘Lord I love your commands”. That does not mean that they are all easy, or sometimes we do not find them difficult. It means that if we are in relationship with God, we accept him into our lives and allow him to mould and guide us, not just to follow the teachings of God when they happen to agree with our mood or situation.

The one we need to be relationship with, of course, is the one the Bishops have pointed us to: Christ. He is the one that all of our actions need to be measured against. In all our actions and the activities of our day we need to be able to ask: where is Jesus in all of this?

Each of us will have a different way of finding this treasure, and just like the search for the pearl can sometimes be treacherous, so the search for the pearl of great price can be dangerous, and the mighty can indeed fall prey to sin and temptation. We need to stay close to the church, be guided by ample prayer and teaching, and always move forward.

The journeys of each of us here are different, but they are carried on within the same matrix of faith. There is no new way, the path is forever the same, but with the gift of our humanity and uniqueness, always new. We hold a treasure, held in things new and old, a relationship with the Son of God, and through him, with each other. May God protect us and keep us moving together as one people.

Homily OLQP  Broome 24th July 2011