Seated at the right hand of the Father
20 May 2012
The Feast of the Ascension can strike us a quite bizarre affair – especially to one who grew up on a diet of science-fiction and imagined that Jesus somehow managed to add flying and living outside of the atmosphere to his walking-on-water and multiplying food – as well as raising the dead and getting through…
Love beyond walls
13 May 2012
Discipleship, Easter, Season of Growth, Seasons, Teaching, Year B
In the first century, the standard expression of the Jewish faiths was strongly influenced by the Pharisees, the most populous of the many forms of Jewish sects that were active at the time. Unlike other groups which were often on the fringes of Jewish society or groups such as the Sadducees which were deeply embedded…
Prepared for heaven
2 May 2012
Bastien Joseph Isaiah Madrill, 18 April 1996 – 26 April 2012 It is always with a certain hesitation that I attend to a call like I received last Thursday evening, to visit a family’s home after the death of a loved one. Although you have been invited, you are never quite sure what will await…
Children of the Shepherd God
29 April 2012
Easter, Season of Growth, Seasons, Year B
I am sure that if many parishioners ever bother to listen to the first line of the second reading today, they either choose to ignore it or doubt that it can actually be true. It is a rather extraordinary claim: ‘think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, by letting us be…
Resurrected body
22 April 2012
Easter, New Creation, Seasons, Teaching
One of the lovely things about the Gospel today (Luke 24:35-48) is that it deals with the nature of the resurrected body of Jesus and demonstrates that the disciples did not share the same drug-induced hypnotic experience, or simply remember the warm and fuzzy experiences of Jesus invoked by a vision of his ghost,…
A questioning journey from doubt to faith
14 April 2012
Easter, Season of Growth, Seasons, Year B
Although in the debate on Monday night on the ABC1 TV program QandA between Richard Dawkins and Cardinal Pell, it seemed that doubt and questioning of faith was a very recent and modern phenomena, if you study the scriptures and Christian tradition carefully such doubts and questions are immediately apparent.The passage from John’s Gospel…
Resurrection Sunday
8 April 2012
Although we profess and declare that Jesus Christ is risen, and that through the resurrection, death has been defeated – sometimes it can feel like nothing much has in fact changed. Just this morning the news announced the discovery of a the dead bodies of around 100 young men killed in Syria – many showing…
Passover and redemption
6 April 2012
Although John spends more time describing the events of the last supper – including the conversations across five chapters of his Gospel – he doesn’t give us the details of the institution of the eucharist. He does give us plenty of details around the event, including ensuring that we know that it all unfolded…
Stations of the Cross Reflection
6 April 2012
A brief reflection offered at the end of the Stations of the Cross, celebrated at St Paul’s, Camden on Good Friday morning. Play MP3 Length: 2’15” A full recording of the service (slightly edited to reduce some of the silences and not including the final multimedia) Play Full Service mp3 Length: 40’05”
The Hunger Games and Sacrifice
1 April 2012
Last weekend I joined the throngs – not in welcoming the Messiah to Jerusalem – but in watching the new hit movie, The Hunger Games – based on the first part of the popular trilogy written by Suzanne Collins. The action takes place in a future post-apocalyptic north America, where all that is left…
eMissal now includes Music
31 March 2012
The industry-standard e-book edition of the English eMissal now includes all the music for Holy Week and the Easter Triduum, as well as the Ordinary of the Mass (including the fifty main Prefaces) and some of the music for the seasons of the year (Ash Wednesday – Pentecost). The ePub version of the Missal…
Annunciation – dreaming big and saying yes
25 March 2012
The readings in the liturgy today provides a contrast between two figures – the great and mighty King Ahaz, and the young maiden Jew Mary. When the Lord, through the prophet Isaiah, appears before the king, and directs him to ask for a sign, he is given permission to dream big. “Ask the Lord your…
A new covenant
24 March 2012
Taking a friend out for a driving lesson a few weeks ago brought to mind my own experience of learning to drive a car. Growing up on a farm, our first driving experience was with tractors and motorbikes and eventually cars as we made our way around the paddocks. But once I actually received my…
Let them go up to worship in love
18 March 2012
Lent, Season of Growth, Seasons, Year B
A Jew would recognise our first reading today as the very last passage in the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh. English bibles have tended to reorganise the order of the books in the Old Testament, so that we no longer follow the three-part division of the Tanakh into Torah (the Law), Nevi’im (the Prophets) and Ketuvim…
Ten words of freedom
10 March 2012
To soften the hard edge of these sacred commandments that are presented in Exodus 20, the Rabbis’ would often tell a joke – such as ‘when Moses came down the mountain, he began by telling the people: well, there is good news and bad news; the good news is that I managed to talk the…
Sacrifice, obedience and the lamb
3 March 2012
Lent, Season of Growth, Seasons, Year B
Our first reading from Genesis 22 contains what is often regarded as one of the finest examples of a short story in all or Western literature. In 19 short verses, the reader is taken on a terrible and shocking journey along with Abraham and Isaac – your only son, the son that you love -…
Wilderness and floods
26 February 2012
As we journey through lent each year, the Church provides us with similar foundations. Each year, on the first Sunday in Lent, we journey with Jesus out into the wilderness as he is tempted; on the second Sunday, we travel with Peter, James and John up a high mountain where Jesus is transfigured. These two…
Strange ashes
22 February 2012
A lot of the things that we do as a Christian church are kind of strange. If you had never been into a Christian church before, and you happened to wander into this church today – particularly at the end of Mass – and saw several hundred, otherwise ordinary people, who have freely submitted themselves…
Levitical cleaning
12 February 2012
Bible, Season of Growth, Teaching, Year B
Reading the bible is a wonderful gift. But for many people, who with great zeal and commitment begin to read the bible in the book of Genesis, everything goes well for a while. The book of Genesis is interesting, and it is full of familiar stories beginning with creation and then the ‘myths’ of pre-history,…
Immediately driven
5 February 2012
Every book in the biblical library has unique characteristics that set it apart from all other books in the bible. The passage that is our first reading today from the book of Job – dealing with suffering and pain – is fairly typical of this book. So also each of the gospels have particular ways…
fecit mihi magna
5 February 2012
Many years ago, I read the biography of the then holy father, Pope John Paul II – ‘Witness of Hope’ by George Weigel (1999). One of the things that really struck me as I read his story, was the detail about his ordination as a deacon. It was essentially a private event, taking place during…
Teaching with authority
28 January 2012
Any male who had completed his bar mitzvah was eligible to read from the Torah in a Synagogue service and to offer commentary upon the reading. What the commentary contained would always be a reflection upon what the student had learned from his rabbi – who in turn would offer the insights that he had…
Called to follow
15 January 2012
Recorded on my mobile phone at Zero Gravity 2012, a summer camp for 200+ teenagers held at Mount Tamborine on the Gold Coaast hinterland. The Sunday Eucharist was the culmination of the four-day camp. The readings of the second Sunday provided a great reflection on discipleship and evangelisation.Play MP312’09”
All the nations
8 January 2012
We are so used to thinking about the Christmas story as told in the gospel of Luke, that Matthew’s equally compelling story can get sidelined. When we do turn to Matthew’s story, we can get so distracted by the crib scenes and carols that the true details also get lost. It is worth pondering the…
Blessed by the face of God
1 January 2012
Christmas, Season of Growth, Seasons, Year B
In the perception of the so-called general public, when people think about God – if indeed they ever think about God, the idea that will probably be conjured would be more like the idea of the force from Star Wars, then the biblical reality of God. Likewise, the idea of heaven as somewhere up there…
Grace, peace and purpose of Christmas
28 December 2011
Time magazine this year declared the Protester to be the ‘Person of the Year’ – and certainly 2011 was an extraordinary year of protests and revolutions. But it was not the first year to be noted as such – and one event that began a revolution that continues to this day was the birth of…
Christmas Proclamation
26 December 2011
At the midnight Mass on Christmas Day (or Christmas Eve if you prefer) there is a tradition of reading the ‘Christmas Proclamation’ – which powerfully situates the events of the Nativity in the historical context of salvation and secular history. This is a recording of the beginning of Mass and the proclamation…Play MP3 (2’26”)Recorded at…
David, Mary and the Ark
18 December 2011
Advent, New Creation, Season of Growth, Seasons, Teaching, Year B
After journeying through this season of Advent with the prophet Isaiah, and then for the last two weeks with the witness of John the Baptiser, it is only on this fourth Sunday of Advent that we finally are presented with the figure of Mary to accompany our Advent reflection. When we encounter her in the…
Rejoice always
11 December 2011
On this third Sunday in Advent, the church issues a command – Rejoice! The teaching comes to us from the second reading today, taken from the very end of St Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, and therefore the very earliest Christian writing that we have. In the few short sentences, Paul manages to pack…
Beginnings
4 December 2011
Advent, New Creation, Season of Growth, Seasons, Teaching, Year B
Literature in the classical world was often concerned to set the scene and provide an overview of the whole text from the very first line of the text. When we come to a text like the Gospel of Mark, we may be tempted to pass over the opening line of the Gospel – which we…