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