Always in Need of Reform

Last night at dinner I was asked why the Protestant Reformation occurred. It wasn’t exactly the pleasant dinner conversation I had expected, but nonetheless it was important to the person who asked and even more pertinent to today’s liturgy.

The church was once described as the necessary institution to disseminate the non-institutional message of Christ.  We exist to facilitate the saving message of Christ being transmitted to all people of all times. Even in these technologically sophisticated times, God can’t just have a Facebook page that people could ‘like’. Christianity is a religion of flesh and blood, of relationships: it does not live in a virtual world. If the Church did not exist, there would be no way for people to meet Christ as a person.  The Church is made up of people like you and me. Generally we are people who strive to live our lives along the lines of Gospel values. To the best of our ability we allow the Gospel to penetrate our thoughts and reflections so that we continue to grow closer to God and so that the Kingdom of God continues to come into being in our world.

However, this has not always been the case through history, and it is not always the case in our Church today. Like all other humans, we become bogged down in our own ways of doing things and stuck in our ways. We also try to cut corners and sometimes have a public and a private face that are very different. The current crisis of sexual abuse bears that out only too well. The Reformation the 16^th century was brought on, at least in part, by the desire of some to constantly reform and the inability of others to listen to that call. One of the big issues was that some believed that if you just did things or built great edifices, you could get into heaven. We all know that you can’t buy God’s love or forgiveness, but it is amazing how many of us try, even now, to buy off God with actions or prayers without actually changing our hearts.

In the Gospel Jesus teaches us that God is not impressed with outward appearance without inward change. He makes it clear that the numerous dietary laws of the Jewish people are not going to get any them close to God unless they are accompanied by true interior change of heart. Outward signs are necessary, but are only real when they indicate what is going on inside a person’s heart. The Reformers in the sixteenth century saw rotten people in the church who thought that they could buy God. This was a time where rich people believed, as some people of Jesus time did and some in our time do, that power, position and money spent on extraordinary edifices to the glory of God could smooth the way to heaven . Challenged by the reformers, the Church would not listen and the reformers rebelled and formed breakaway churches. In time many of these breakaway churches suffered the same fate whereas, thank God, the Catholic Church seems to have realised that we are in need of constant purification so as the keep on the path towards the Kingdom.

The short story is that outward appearance is important, but only as an indicator of what is going on inside. We build beautiful buildings because of the love we have for God.  We show respect in the way we dress, treat one another, and reach out to one another because it comes from within.  Goodness, as well as all the negative aspects that Jesus lists, come from within: if we are people of integrity, they should all show in what people see in our public lives.

We all need constant reformation to keep ourselves on the right track. In this Year of Grace may we recognise both our need of grace and the grace of God working in others to keep us building the Kingdom of God together.

Homily 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time,1st September 2012, OLQP Broome

Communion of Love

Last night I was in a conversation with a person who had ridden a bike into a town in France called Lourdes.  He was fascinated by the place and so I shared the story.  Our Lady appeared to Bernadette there in 1858. It did not matter to Bernadette that no one believed her, that people ridiculed her and her family. The truth was important, and that is what Bernadette told people, even though it brought her, in the short term, much suffering.  In telling that story I could not help thinking of today’s Gospel.    

Jesus said some uncomfortable things and held some unpopular views. His teaching on the bread of life, to which we have been listening over the last weeks, is a central example.  As with all difficult teaching and firmly held views, there is collateral damage. When challenged we are faced with the choice to continue to follow or to leave. This, of course comes down to the issue of trust. Who has the greater authority, me or the Church? Recently, after a difficult conversation involving a central tenet of our faith, a person said to me: “Well that is what I believe and it is right for me.” I had to reply that in most matters of faith and morals, something is either right or wrong, so in stating that he was right I needed to point out that he was saying that the Church for the last 2000 years was wrong, a very unlikely scenario. In these times our decisions have implications, because if we disagree our communion with the church is broken.

The Gospel tells us that after this teaching, many walked away from Jesus. The Jewish dietary laws forbade the eating of blood, and here was Jesus telling his disciples that if they did not eat of his blood that they could not have life within them.  This was decision time, a turning point. It is the high point of the bread of life discourse, because this Jesus who has spent much time witnessing and explaining now calls those who were curiously following him to make a decision. The consequences are stark: follow Jesus and you will be persecuted by your fellow Jewish people. As with all things, you cannot believe everything and be everybody’s friend: there are tomes that a line has to be drawn in the sand.

Jesus still draws a line in the sand and asks us on which side of the line we stand. He asks us to identify completely with him through the Eucharist, this most scared of rites where we consume his body and blood.

He Eucharist is not only food and drink for us, but it is our opportunity to identify completely with Jesus and his mission. This leads us to the concept of communion. This Holy Communion that we share is the paramount expression of our inclusion in the mission of Jesus and the faith of the Church. By approaching the altar we are saying in front of the congregation that this is our faith our hope and our life. In other words, before we arrive at the altar we have said that we believe what the Church teaches and that we have communion with Christ and the Church: in other words, there are not obstacles, not serious sin, between us and Christ.  Phew!

Jesus leads us to the realisation that communion with him is essential for the Christian. This communion is celebrated and strengthened through the Eucharist and ultimately through Holy Communion where we take the body, blood, soul and divinity of our Lord and saviour into our bodies. What a gift! What a responsibility! 

May we never approach the altar casually or thoughtlessly! 

May we be worthy of this Holy Communion of love.

Homily OLQP 26th August 2012,21st Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

To You we Send up Our Sighs

After someone dies in Broome, we make a Rosary Novena. Most of you know that the Rosary is a series of prayers during which we meditate on the major events in the life of Jesus, using the Our Father and Hail Mary as the main prayers.  A novena is prayer that is said for nine days straight, so when a person dies in Broome we say the rosary for nine days straight.

One time we made the novena, and night after night many people would gather and pray the rosary.  I kept thinking of the woman we were praying for and wondered how she did it. She had a really hard life, with nothing really going right for her. She always seemed to have problems that she could never solve and I wondered why she had, like so many other Broome people, such a strong faith and a great devotion to Mary. Why, I wondered, could she have such faith and devotion when over her whole life she did not seem to get a break: How did she keep going?  I was sitting praying the novena with everyone else when I heard myself praying the Hail Holy Queen, the prayer at the end of the Rosary. Part of it prays:  to thee do we send 

up our sighs poor banished children of Eve,

to thee do we send up our sighs  mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.  

That is when it hit me.

These women and men saw in Mary someone who they could identify with in their happiness but also in their pain.   The Mother of God we celebrate today is the Mary for whom nothing seemed to go well. Asked by and Angel to do the impossible when she was fourteen years old she almost certainly was the butt of ridicule and jokes of those around her; she always tried to protect her Son who was so very special; and in the end saw her son being tortured and die an horrific death; finally she had her dead Son laid in her arms. When Jesus was young the old woman Anna told here that a sword would pierce her heart, and it did.  

It is enough to make you lose faith in life and the world, and certainly in God.

Mary, however, does not do that, but the opposite. Mary trusts, she believes, she holds all her pain in her heart. In doing so she bore witness to her Son Jesus. She was his first and strongest follower, and if we want to know how to follow Jesus, we need to look at Mary.  Those people I have known in this town know it far better than me, but they have shared their secret. To know Mary is to know Jesus. To walk close to Mary is to be beside Jesus. To trust with Mary, especially when everything is going wrong, is to follow Jesus.  At the end of her life she was lifted up by Jesus to be with him in heaven, body and soul. Because of her faith and trust, because she was so close to God form the beginning of her life, her transition from earth to heaven was seamless, immediate. Mary was and is so ‘full of grace’ that she was immediately with God as she left this life.

Our journey can never be so immediate, so instantaneous as Mary’s, but we can be helped by her journey.  The fourth Glorious Mystery of the Rosary is the Assumption. When I pray that mystery I remember that Mary followed God and he kept the promise he made when the Angel asked her to be the mother of Jesus. God is faithful to us: Mary asks us to be, like her faithful to God.

Next time you pray the Rosary, ask to be faithful like Mary.

Homily, St Mary;s College Broome, Assumption 15th August 2012

Food for the Journey

When my Dad was dying in Sacred Heart Hospice in Sydney, I was fortunate to be there with my family. As we gathered around him to give him the last rites, one of us read from the Books of Kings about Elijah under the furze bush, the reading we have just heard. What made it important for a dying man and his family is that it summarised his approach to life and death.  My Dad, like most of us, did his best to follow God throughout his life. Like most of us, he was aware faults and of the inadequacies of his efforts to lead an authentic Christian life. He knew that he could not make it on his own, but was tempted to think that he could, so he spent many hours, most hours in fact, of the latter part of his illness praying for perseverance. He knew the journey that lay ahead, and he knew that he needed God to accompany him.

This is the process of Christian maturity. We can’t do it on our own, we are not masters of our own destiny, we cannot do, as some new age thinking suggests, whatever we dream to by our own strength.

Elijah was depressed. Thinking he could conquer the world by himself, he suddenly realised that he was not omnipotent, he was no better than the generations before him. Elijah has been let down by the new age of his time. He was unable to admit his need for God, but God intervened anyway. God gave him food for the journey, and together, they were able to reach the destination, the Holy Mountain of Horeb.

Just like my Dad, Elijah was drawn towards God and was then able to move forward in partnership. Similarly strengthened by the sustenance offered through the Holy Spirit we are called to eternal life. Eternal life does not begin when we die, but it begins when we acknowledge the power of God in our lives. Jesus calls us to celebrate this through the Eucharist, the living bread that is him who has come down from heaven. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, he says, so that a man may eat it and may not die.

Today we celebrate the faith that we have but cannot see, but which we know through faith. In this Year of Grace we ask for our hands, eyes, ears, hearts and minds to be opened to see, taste, feel, smell, touch and experience God who is incarnate in our world. It is our window to eternal life. We try, as St Paul urges us, to imitate God as children that he loves. We do this together, just as many of us will together come to the altar to share communion and be able to repeat the psalmist: Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Homily 19^th Vigil of the 19^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, OLQP, Broome, 11^th August 2012.

On Food Safari with Jesus

A few months ago I took a call from one of the planners of ‘Food Safari’ on SBS, who wanted to do a program in Broome. She told me that she had heard that in Broome we celebrate big occasions by coming together and sharing our favourite dish: Everyone contributes and a feast is created. I acknowledged this and wondered why it was so radical, and why they wanted to come and film a feast.  The gospels over the next few weeks give us an insight.

In the East Kimberley, for several years Sr Nellie used to give a course on the meals of Jesus. It was like a culinary tour of the Holy Land, just like so many cooking shows take us around the world.  Jesus valued meals not for their nutritional value (although that is important) but for their fellowship, for the company and conversation that are engendered.

The major teachings and actions of Jesus occur in the context of a meal. Important things happen either before, after or during a meal. Last Sunday we heard about the feeding of the five thousand, and now we hear Jesus talking about what that meal meant.  It was not fast food where people get in, fill up and get out; instead it is an encounter with Jesus. As many meals are, it was ritualised, symbolic, and its significance was not understood immediately. For Jesus, meals were an occasion to have quality time with people in a relaxed and intimate way. He constantly reminded people of the spiritual symbolism of eating, as he does today. We need to eat, and being fed implies a relationship that Jesus intends.  We need to be fed by Jesus, and we need to be able to have the context to be fed. To be fed we need to stop, concentrate and then eat. For it to be appreciated, we need to eat slowly, savouring the tastes and allowing the food time to digest. In the process we form relationship with those around us, we listen and are ourselves heard. There are spiritual resonances to all of these actions.

When I look at ‘Food Safari’ and all those other cooking shows, I conclude that they are not primarily about the taste of food, but the community that gathers to cook, share and relax together.  The eating of food is just the vehicle to experience that community. That is why we celebrate big occasions in our parish with shared meals. But we have something more, and that is what Jesus is trying to tell his friends. Christ is always at the table, he is our bread of life, the answer to our inner hunger, to our inner questions, doubts and confusions.

The Eucharist, the prayer meal, is the central act of our communion with each other and with God. We are called together and nourished together. Like the disciples we ask “give us this bread which will last forever”, and Christ offers himself to us, on the altar, in the sacrifice of the Mass. We receive, and share, and live.

Homily of Fr Matt Digges 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time 5th August 2012 OLQP Broome

Giving God a Chance

H120729Ord17b  Giving God an Opportunity

We threw a party at Lagrange to celebrate Fr McKelson’s 65^th birthday in 1996, and caught 65 big salmon to share with the community. The night came, the BBQs were stoked up and a group went to get the fish. They came back with no fish, as the power to the fridges had been cut and all the fish had gone off: what a disaster. So what do you do to feed two hundred people in such a situation? Sr Veronica, Sr Johanna and the church leaders set about cooking anything we had, but there was no way it was going to feed that many people. I know we did not have enough food to feed that many people, but we did, and we had a bit leftover.

We could have easily said: “No way, we can’t do this” and pointed out that we don’t normally keep food for an extra 200 people in case they come past. That would have been logical, but not in the ways of faith. That would have been the way of we had wanted to control, everything and leave no room for God to intervene. We chose to take the punt, to strike out in faith. We were not disappointed. Often we consider the reasons that something will not work, or why we can’t achieve a goal, but this is not what God is asking us to consider.

Jesus asks his disciples what they have, and they present the total food of the crowd. Jesus takes that and uses it to lift everyone up and create something wonderful. He would not have been able to do it if the people did not have faith, and if they had not allowed him to use their gifts, as imperfect as they were. However, they did allow God space to move, to create and to form them, and how wonderful was the result!

So what is this saying to us on this day in Broome? All too often we admit our weaknesses only in terms of defeat. We can’t do something because of x y or z reason. As Christians we are called  to something higher. Sure, we can’t do everything, but we can do our part. We are part of a magnificent whole that God is creating, and we are all able to contribute. On Thursday Lizzie Sockarni, who was dying, was praying fervently for her family and friends. Everyone has an outreach and can contributed to the apostolate.

We are here to celebrate and strengthen our faith. Soon we will bring bread and wine, the staples of life, and allow the Holy Spirit to transform them into the Body and Blood of Christ. The feeding of the five thousand clearly alludes to the Eucharist. Our poor contributions are multiplied by God so that we are fed.  There is twelve baskets left over, representing the twelve tribes of Israel: in other words there is enough left over to feed the whole world!

This year is the Year of Grace. Grace is the gift of the Holy Spirit that allows us to see and respond to God in who is present in our world. If we live a life in grace, we can not only see but respond to God; we can recognise the presence of God in events that many people find meaningless or even cruel. However, grace also enables us to declare our littleness, our need for each other, for community and for each other, our need to be church gathered around this altar.

God is a great provider, but can only feed us if we are prepared to contribute the gifts we have been given.

Homily OLQP Cathedral Broome, 29^th July 2012

Shepherds and Wolves

Last week I was in Warrnambool for the National Council of Priests Conference. 170 priests gathered to learn, share, & deepen our commitment to our ministry & to the Church. The camaraderie of the gathering was marred by the scandals that have been broadcast about the failure of priests who are called to be shepherds. The number of priests who have been wolves instead of shepherds is very small, and what we see on 4Corners or read in scurrilous documents often contains only a part of the truth, but the fact that it exists at all is a scandal. The gathering at Warrnambool demonstrated the damage that sexual abuse has done to the victims and to the mission of the Church.

The Church is composed of fallible humans like you and me: We believe our faith; we believe that God is with us; and we believe that in our weakest and most sinful moments God's healing presence can transform us into something greater. To some extent we are all shepherds and bear the burden of leadership. How do we carry this burden? How do we witness to the Gospel? How do we demonstrate that 'Christ Jesus came to proclaim peace to those far off and peace to those near.' God wants to raise up good shepherds, good witnesses, good role models, for his people. How do we live this ideal?

Many in our world are lost. They look for fulfilment and happiness in places and activities that can never provide anything but a passing high, and often at the expense of the dignity and freedom of others. They are drawn to us, maybe not consciously but naturally, since as Catholics we are people who declare our sinfulness and need for God's healing. Further, we acknowledge that we do not have all the answers, but are content to live with mystery, confident God’s love and support. In short, we are people of hope for a sceptical world. Hope is our secret weapon that allows us opt move forward when pessimism engulf many around us.

Each of us is called to be shepherds to varying extents. How do we answer? How do we cope with our own shortcomings and those of others in our Church?

Our conference in Victoria assured me of the need to be clear and honest. It reminded me of how much good there is in our shepherds, and yet how much damage the few wolves wreak. Ultimately it showed me that we, the Church built on the apostles, is the greatest force for good in our world and that we should claim that humbly and honestly.

Homily 22^nd July 2012, 16^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, OLQP Broome.