The Body of Christ for the World

During the last week the priests from the Kimberley were here in Broome to learn more about the changes to the way we celebrate Mass. Those of you visiting from the eastern states may have already experienced some of the changes that will be implemented here in November. The changes to the Mass have been made to ensure that what we pray is what we really believe. The time with the priests reminded me that the structure of our prayer and the church’s year is very important. It is not by accident that we celebrate the Ascension forty days after Easter, or Pentecost fifty days after Easter. It is planned and crucial to the way we believe and pray that we have celebrated the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, then the perfect communication of God within himself and then to us through the Holy Spirit on the feast of the Blessed Trinity. These feasts prepare us for the feast of the Body and blood of Christ, known for a thousand years as Corpus Christi. God has given us all that is possible to allow us to respond to his grace and love.

On Thursday Pope Benedict reminded his listeners that Corpus Christi is inseparable from Holy Thursday. On Holy Thursday Jesus gave himself to his disciples at the Last Supper before giving himself for us all on the wood of the cross. He offered bread and wine, changing them to be his body and blood, that same body that would die and the same blood that would flow from his side on the cross. This leads us to the wonderful centre of this feast. We celebrate who we are and what we can become. We acknowledge that we are the people called by God, we are the Body of Christ, a sure and visible sign of the presence of God in our world. We are bearers of hope peace and joy to a world that is looking for these things in all the wrong places.

We gather around this altar conscious of who we are, with our strengths and weaknesses. We bring the best we have to offer. We bring our needs and desires, our joys and hopes, our fears and anxieties.  We bring money for the needs of the church and the poor, knowing that we pray with our bodies, talents and resources as well as our minds. We bring the bread and wine, the staples of life and we offer them to God to be sanctified and transformed into what we are called to become, the body of Christ. This offering, like the offering of Christ, like the offering of ourselves at this altar, is taken, blessed, broken and shared. In this way be become the visible Christ to our world.

In many places of the world today there will be processions of the Blessed Sacrament through the streets of cities, and villages. The aim of this is to recall he who calls and leads us to bear witness. It recalls the power and strength of our God who came to live among us, in our towns and villages. The Corpus Christi Procession is led by Christ the head of the Body of Christ, and we follow.

In the gift of the gift of the Eucharist God gives us the best so that we can give of our best. We hold in our church this treasure, far greater than anything humanity can produce. This treasure gives life to all who are able to experience it. Let us celebrate and live our faith.

Homily , 26th June 2011 Feast of Corpus Christi A

God in our World

People often come to me and say: ”it doesn’t matter what you believe in as long as you are a good person”, or “I don’t care about all that dogmatic stuff, it is what is in your heart that is important”. Honestly, I usually don’t know what to say back to them, as they are not usually looking from an answer and often assume that I agree with them. Well, have to say now that, regardless of whether you are I am good people or not, what we believe is crucial to the way we think,  look at the world, live our lives and prepare for what comes after this life.

So today we celebrate Trinity Sunday, which for most people is a pretty dry topic. As the young say: boooring!!! Maybe it is if you are approaching it from a dry theoretical perspective. The trick for us is to remember who we are, we are a people called by God .  Just last Sunday we remembered that we are held together by the Holy Spirit, the same spirit who animated the apostles and sent them out to all nations. This Spirit was sent by Jesus, who himself was sent by the Father. All that we know of the Trinity revolves around relationship… about how they fit together, work together and reach out of themselves to others.  It took the first four hundred years of the Church’s life to nut this one out. Finally it was decided that the three persons were coequal, consubstantial and coeternal.  This leaves the question of how they relate to each other and us. Once we understand how the Trinity relates to each other, then we can become to know the way to relate to them and to each other.

One explanation that makes sense to me is called the mutual love theory. St Augustine developed it in the fourth century. It goes like this: the Father and Son relate to each other through a love, they bestow this love on each other. This bestowal, this breathing forth, is the Holy Spirit. They then reach out to the world as one God, but through different persons. The Son became incarnate and lived among us as Jesus the Christ, and Holy Spirit was breathed forth into our world by the Father and the Son, and continues to live in the Church as the Holy Spirit. The love of God returns to God. 

We are inheritors of a circle of love. If we want to be true disciples, we continue to relate to each other and with God through love. We are invited into this circle through Jesus who offers us a share in his life. He wants to draw us into the life and love of the Trinity. John 3.16 makes this plain: ‘so that everyone who believes on him may not be lost but have eternal life’.  The love that we are called to is succinctly put in the letter to the Corinthians: “try to grow perfect, help one another, be united love in peace”.

Relationship is at the heart of the Trinity, holding it together and sending it forth. This love comes from God to us, drawing us out of ourselves into relationship with God and with each other. Life on earth can only make sense if we are able to from and sustain relationship with God and each other. We are reminded by this every time we say: in the Name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Homily 19th June 2011, Feast of the Blessed Trinity

The Holy Spirit of Peace

One Pentecost morning in Lightning Ridge, in the far north west of New South Wales, the reader began the first reading, the same as we have just heard. After stumbling over some of the place names he looked up and said: “Well there were a lot of people from a helluva lot of places and they could all understand each other.”

Maybe that is the right place to start discovering what this feast means. Jesus the Christ rose from the dead, after appearing to many people, ascends into heaven, vowing not to leave us alone. The apostles looked to the sky because he was leaving them, yet saying that he was not going anywhere.

Just after this, the apostles, scared and outnumbered, gathered in the Upper Room, the only place they felt safe. Tradition says that Mary was there with them. This was the place where Jesus had held them together on the night of the Last Supper. It was there that the Holy Holy Spirit came among them and strengthened them. It was there that the Church began, because the Holy Spirit formed the Church. If the Holy Spirit is not our initiator and sustainer, we are a rag tag group of like-minded people, maybe like a sporting or interest club. We know that we are far more than that, and it is the Holy Spirit that allows this to occur and sustains the church. The Holy Spirit guides us individually, and far mote powerfully, as a Church united with the Holy Father and the Bishops. Jesus did not promise the Holy Spirit primarily to individuals, but to the gathered assembly of the church. It is through the Church that Christ leads onwards and hold us together. That is why today is rightly known as the birthday of the church.

This Holy Spirit works in and through us in many ways, as St Pauls enumerates for us. We all have a particular part to play but it is part of the whole, not our own show.  We are interdependent.

The gifts of the Holy Spirit are wide and varied, but the greatest of them are the quietest, and the strongest is that of peace. In the gospel we experience Jesus, who appeared among the disciples to share with them the gifts a peace and forgiveness, the most precious gifts. These are gifts we can live share, and they can only come through the work of the Holy Spirit.

In my ministry as a priest, I am privileged to be with people in many facets of their lives. Recently I have been with people as they have allowed the peace and healing of Christ into their lives, and it is an extraordinary experience. Being accepting, hopeful and happy when ones prognosis is dire, when alongside the sick person there are family and friends are despairing, blaming God or just angry, is a great and wonderful gift. It is a quiet gift, but contains the strength to transform society. This gift of peace and forgiveness shines out from within a person who has it and is visible those around.

This Pentecost, remember our dignity as a people chosen and called by Christ to be people who live and grow together, gradually spreading  joy, peace, forgiveness and hope to a broken world. These can only be sustained through the Holy Spirit, and we are taught that the Holy Spirit never ceases working through the Church. It begins with us here today, and truly has the power to transform the earth.

Homily, Pentecost  Sunday, 12^th June 2011 OLQP Broome

Allowing Christ to Soar

When you train for a pilot’s licence, the first big challenge is to fly a circuit around the airstrip yourself. It is called the first solo.  Many years ago when I was training for a pilot’s licence, the instructor suggested to me that it was time for me to fly by myself. I suggested to him reasons why I was not quite ready. We landed and taxied, as we normally did, the instructor working the radio and me flying the plane. As I looked at the instruments I heard him say on the radio: “Jandakot Tower, India Bravo Papa, request first solo”, after which he leapt from the plane and ran across the taxiway and grass. It was time, even though I thought was not ready, but I picked up the radio to confirm the towers assignment of runway to me, lined up and took off, and landed again.  After that, the sky was the limit and the whole world of flying opened itself up to me.  If I did not accept the challenge, I could not have moved on and would not have grown. All the theory would have been wasted.

The Ascension had to happen. None of the disciples wanted it to happen, for they liked having Jesus close. Jesus needed to go so that all the faith hope and love he had given them could bloom and spread far beyond the confines of those whom Jesus could personally touch. The Ascension made the message of Jesus soar!

The Ascension marks a fundamental change in the way that the followers of Jesus relate to him. When Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection, she wanted to hug him. Instead he tells her: No not hold me, for I have not ascended to my father. Just as Jesus had opened to us a new way of relating to god, he shows us a new way of relating to him. It does not have to be physical. In this age where we have to see everything to believe, he asks us to feel and know him in our hearts. Of course, we know that this is a far stronger presence of the risen Christ than if he was among us physically, for he stays with us always.  Pope Benedict teaches us: Ascension does not mean departure into a remote region of the cosmos but, rather, the continuing closeness that the disciples experience that it becomes a source of lasting joy. [i]

To live our Christian life, we need to know that the presence of Christ is always with us. He has promised to always be with his Church, and indeed he is. In this liturgy he remains with us in various ways: in the word proclaimed, in the priest who acts in persona Christi, in the Eucharistic species, in the congregation as the body of Christ. He is here among us, Christ resurrected and ascended. The apostles looked in the sky and the angel asked: why stare into the sky, he is ascended. We are called to live as people of the resurrection; bearing witness to the Christ we know in our hearts by going out to all nations, baptising them in the name of the father, the son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them all that Christ commands and reminding them that is with us always, yes, until the end of time.

Homily, OLQP, Ascension Sunday 5th June 2011. 

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[i] Jesus of Nazareth II 281