Christ the Only King

One hundred years ago the world went mad and descended into the mess that was to become World War One. German, English and French armies all declared loudly that God was on their side. Of course, God was supporting those who showed respect and dignity in the cause of peace, and there was not much of that to be found. In the soul searching after the war, many became disillusioned with faith and put their trust in ideologies such was communism, fascism and Nazism. The atheistic regimes that came to power in Russia and Germany were responsible for more deaths than in any conflict in history. Most of the deaths were planned so that a more pure society could emerge. In the midst of this tumult and burgeoning of militant atheism, the Church, declared the feast we celebrate today, the Feast of Christ the King.

The Kingdom we seek, the kingdom we build, is not of this world. It is not a kingdom that can be bought and sold, not one that can be taken by force, not one that can be built by political machinations. The kingdom we seek to build and be a part of comes directly from our faith and is based on truth and justice, and is of God.

Unfortunately, life has often never been that black and white. Members of the church have not always thought that a little bit of force here and there is a bad thing. The chaplains who chose to walk up and down trenches in the First World War declaring the enemy as the devil to be eradicated were at best misguided. Whatever they were doing, they were not preaching the Gospel of Christ the Universal King. Standing before Pilate, Jesus declared: I came into the world for this, to bear witness to the truth, and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice. Not many people listened to Jesus, and he was led to his death.

Today we find something of a parallel. Some have walked away from the church in the revelations of weakness and of seeming inaction in the face of misconduct. Over the last weeks the media have fed us with a constant diet of anger against the Church. The leadership of the Church has been seen as uncaring at best, and criminally negligent at worst. Whist some are using this as an opportunity to display rabid anti-Catholicism and discrimination, many are angry that we seem to have not borne witness to the truth, that we have not tried to follow our own advice.

Well, at least to some extent they are correct, and the upcoming Royal Commission will be a chance to be humble before God and move forward to concentrate once again on building the Kingdom. I read yesterday that ‘this will be the end of the Catholic Church.” We all know that will not happen, but we will be humbled, and despite the untruths that will undoubtedly be told along with the truthful evidence, God is in this process of purification.

Always know that we are building the kingdom. Let us not take our eyes off Jesus Christ, our universal king, who us leading us to this reign of God.

Homily, OLQP 25^th November 2012 Christus Rex

Living Stones

The feast we celebrate today is ostensibly about a building constructed on the Lateran Hill in Rome in 324, the Cathedral Church of Rome. So is this a tangible sign of what many see is the growing irrelevance of the church to modern Australian society; or maybe something else?

The mandate of the WA Bishops to the CEO mentions nothing about buildings, yet we seem to spend so much time stressing about their maintenance and construction. This year has seen the flurry of openings of completed BER projects, and most of you have spent a good deal of time stressing over the completion of new buildings, or extensions and alterations to existing ones.

We celebrate this feast not because of a beautiful Church in Rome, in fact a building known as ‘the mother of all churches’, but what it point s us toward. Today’s Collect prays:

God, who from living and chosen stones prepare an eternal dwelling for your majesty, increase in your church the spirit  of grace you have bestowed, so that by new growth your faithful people may build the new Jerusalem.

The beautiful places that we dedicate for worship in are intended to raise our minds and hearts to God, to point to something bigger and greater than ourselves. We are called to use all our gifts to be the ‘living and chosen stones’ that build the new Jerusalem.

Our Kimberley schools are magnificent places, made even better through the BER. We have great pride in their appearance and upkeep so that they are worthy places to hold and nurture the ‘living stones’ that are entrusted to us, our students. These living stones are not restricted to those we teach, but extend to include all those involved in the mission of the church.

During my recent convalescence in Sydney I noticed a fundraising appeal from St Mary’s Cathedral. It urged donors to buy a stone, numbered and located, in the towers of the Cathedral. Some of those stones are huge, others tiny; some are structurally crucial whereas others give flesh to the Cathedral bones.

All Christians are important, but due to the responsibility of the roles given to Kimberley priests and principals, we are all crucial to the flourishing of the Kimberley Church. We are the bones, we are the crucial stones. The school at Mulan or Ringer Soak may not seem to be as important to many as St Mary’s Broome, just as many see that our modest cathedral pales beside St John in Lateran, but we are all bones in the edifice of the Church, and she is weaker without each part which composes the whole.

We end the year as we began it and as we have lived it: through prayer. Prayer is the way we have been able to achieve the heights of our school year, it is the way we have been able to make sense of the disasters of the year. Prayer is the way we have been able to see beyond the maintenance and administration to the object of our passion, the passing on of faith and hope through appropriate and challenging education.

May God guide those of you who will soon depart the Kimberley. May he who led you’re here continue to guide you in grace. May he guide and strengthen those of us who will return to continue the mission in the red north.

May we never forget that we are all living stones, chosen to build the kingdom.

Homily 9th November 2012 for the Kimberley Principals. Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St John in Lateran

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