Peter MALONE
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING, 2018
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE FEAST OF CHRIST THE KING, 2018
Feast of Christ, Heart of the Universe
November 25th 2018
Suggested formula for recognition of indigenous people and their land.
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we are now gathered,
(the ……) and recognise that it continues to be sacred to them.
We hail them: as guardians of the earth and of all things that grow and breed in the soil; as trustees of the waters – [the seas, the streams and rivers, the ponds and the lakes] - and the rich variety of life in those waters.
We thank them for passing this heritage to every people since the Dreamtime.
We acknowledge the wrongs done to them by newcomers to this land and we seek to be partners with them in righting these wrongs and in living together in peace and harmony.
As we do this, we must also acknowledge the loss of their hunting grounds,
the destruction of their ceremonial places and sacred sites,
and the great loss of life from all kinds of violence and disease,
and that the land was never given away.
Peace remains possible. And if peace is possible, it is also a duty! Pope Benedict XVI
If there is hunger anywhere in the world,
then our celebration of the Eucharist
is incomplete everywhere in the world.
Pedro Arrupe SJ, former Jesuit superior general
None of us have the right to avert our gaze
William Sloan Coffin, 1924-2006
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
William Sloan Coffin
Liturgy of the Word
First Reading: Daniel 7:13-14
Responsorial Psalm Ps 93:1, 1-2, 5 R. The LORD is king; he is robed in majesty.
Second Reading Revelation 1:5-8
Gospel John 18:33b-37
Penitential Rite
- Jesus, you came to be the servant of all people, who are sick, vulnerable and marginalised: Jesus, have mercy.
- Jesus, in your total commitment to love, you laid down you life for all: Christ, have mercy.
- Jesus, you did not seek power and privilege, but established your Reign on truth and love. Jesus, have mercy.
Opening Prayer
God of hope,
the mystery of Jesus’ sovereignty
over every age and nation illumines our lives.
Open our hearts, and remove from us,
every desire for privilege and power
and direct us in the love of Christ
to care for the least of our brothers and sisters.
or
Opening Prayer
God of hope,
open our eyes to the sign of Jesus' coming
and make us see him
already walking by our side.
Keep us faithful in hope
and vigilant in our love for you
and our concern for one another.
Prayers of the Faithful
Introduction: Let us pray through Jesus Christ, that the reign of God may become real and concrete among us. Response: May you reign in us, O God.
- For political and religious leaders everywhere, that they may call people to compassion, reconciliation and forgiveness rather than lead them to revenge and further violence, we pray, May you reign in us, O God.
- For peace and justice in the Middle East: we pray for the people of Gaza at this difficult time as they again threatened by a stronger power and may the Palestinian and Israeli people grow together in unity and peace, we pray, May you reign in us, O God.
- For peoples everywhere who live under oppressive regimes whether state or non-state, that they may have their cries for justice and peace, we pray, May you reign in us, O God.
- For the people of Paris, and all people who have suffered violence such as in Lebanon, the Philippines, Iraq, Iran, Yemen and West Papua, we pray in solidarity for them and that their cries be heard, we pray, May you reign in us, O God.
- For all who exercise power and authority in this world: may they like Jesus accept power as a means to serve all who are vulnerable and defenceless, effective, we pray, May you reign in us, O God.
- For all people who act in response to the needs of their sisters and brothers, may they be strengthened knowing that they reflect the face of the compassionate God in their midst, we pray, May you reign in us, O God.
- For all who are unable to see the presence of a God of love in the diversity around us and would impose an intolerant God who demands uniformity on others, we pray, May you reign in us, O God.
- For all churches and all faiths that they may come to see the richness in the other through inter-religious dialogue: may all people be strong in their love, service and compassion rather than seek power and privilege we pray, May you reign in us, O God.
- For people who live with HIV and AIDS: may all work to stop fear, shame, ignorance and injustice so that people living with HIV/AIDS throughout the world will experience God’s nearness through the love of others, we pray, May you reign in us, O God.
- For women and men who strive to eliminate violence against others and heal the fractures within community life, we pray, May you reign in us, O God.
- For world leaders, for miracles of collaboration that they may see in the migrant and the refugee not a problem to be solved but brothers and sisters to be welcomed, respected and loved, we pray, May you reign in us, O God.
- For safe travel for those who return home or back to college on this Thanksgiving weekend, with gratitude for the bonds of family and friendship that have brought us together, we pray, May you reign in us, O God.
Final Prayer: God and gracious God, fill us with a greater desire to bring your reign to this Earth. Mold our hearts, sharpen our senses to hear your voice and fill us with your wisdom and grace. Help us create a world where truth and justice find a home. We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.
or
Final Prayer: God and gracious God, we pray for the fullness of the coming of Jesus, the Heart of the Universe, in all places and in the hearts of all people who bear witness to your love and presence in every place in this world.
Prayer over the Gifts
God of hope,
you have put into our hands a piece of bread and a little wine
for the growth of your Reign and the future of the world.
May we be effective instruments searching for new ways
where the hungry find food and the thirsty are satisfied.
Prayer after Communion
God of hope,
we recognise Jesus, the Centre of our lives, in this Eucharist.
May we respond by becoming, like him,
people who live for others,
by being instruments of your healing
where your peace reigns in the hearts of all people.
or
Prayer after Communion
God of hope,
you have entrusted a future in our hands.
May our celebration of this Eucharist,
help us to seek this future
as a challenge to be creative
and to build up a new world
by the power of Jesus Christ,
who at work in us and in our world.
or
God of hope,
in this Eucharist we have given thanks to you
and acclaimed Jesus your Son and his power in our lives.
Nourished by the bread of life
may we follow him so that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
Parish Notices
November 25 is United Nations International Day to promote the Elimination of Violence against Women. In 1999, the UN General Assembly declared 25 November as the International Day for the Eradication of Violence against Women. Gender-based violence knows no colour and nationality. It devastates lives and fractures communities, impeding development in every nation. In every country in the world, the well-being, promise and gifts of millions of women and girls are destroyed by violence. The first International Day was marked in 2000 and an important focus of the day is to encourage the role of men in championing non-violence. The symbol of the day is a white ribbon, to be worn by men for the whole day as a statement that they support the campaign to stop men's violence against women.
Feminism is
the radical notion
that women
are people’
Violence against women is perhaps the most shameful human rights violation. It knows no boundaries of geography, culture or wealth. As long as it continues, we cannot claim to be making real progress towards equality, development, and peace.
Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General
Further Resources
Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself.
William Sloane Coffin, Jr
Too often people are brought up with a wrong concept of God and their reaction to him is one of fear or apprehension. This can take many years to break down. The simple thought that God loves me, and the words used to describe human love such as warmth, intensity, strong, unreserved, all have a meaning in describing God’s love. It is quite literally true that no one can, or will ever, love me more than God does; nor will any experience of mine ever, even in the dimmest way, reflect God’s love for me. There are no limits to God. We are, as we go through life, like lovers in search of the Beloved. That is the only way to try to understand our response to God’s love for us.
We are lovers in search of the Beloved, simply because he is in search of each one of us and sees each one of as his Beloved.
Cardinal Basil Hume osb The Mystery of Love
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children; to learn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a little bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Philosophy should always know that indifference is a militant thing. It batters down the walls of cities and murders the women and children amid the flames and the purloining of altar vessels. When it goes away it leaves smoking ruins, where lie citizens bayonetted through the throat. It is not a children's pastime like mere highway robbery.
Stephen Crane
Educate and inform the whole mass of people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Thomas Jefferson,
By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy - indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self-satisfaction.
William Osler (Canadian Physician, 1849-1919)
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
Albert Camus
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.’
Albert Einstein
All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.
Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
The Giving Tree
Once there was a giving tree who loved a little boy.
And everyday the boy would come to play
Swinging from the branches, sleeping in the shade
Laughing all the summer’s hours away.
And so they love,
Oh, the tree was happy.
Oh, the tree was glad.
But soon the boy grew older and one day he came and said,
‘Can you give me some money, tree, to buy something I’ve found?’
‘I have no money,’ said the tree, ‘Just apples, twigs and leaves.’
‘But you can take my apples, boy, and sell them in the town.’
And so he did and
Oh, the tree was happy.
Oh, the tree was glad.
But soon again the boy came back and he said to the tree,
‘I’m now a man and I must have a house that’s all my home.’
‘I can’t give you a house’ he said, ‘The forest is my house.’
‘But you may cut my branches off and build yourself a home’
And so he did.
Oh, the tree was happy.
Oh, the tree was glad.
And time went by and the boy came back with sadness in his eyes.
‘My life has turned so cold,’ he says, ‘and I need sunny days.’
‘I’ve nothing but my trunk,’ he says, ‘But you can cut it down
And build yourself a boat and sail away.’
And so he did and
Oh, the tree was happy.
Oh, the tree was glad.
And after years the boy came back, both of them were old.
‘I really cannot help you if you ask for another gift.’
‘I’m nothing but an old stump now. I’m sorry but I’ve nothing more to give’
‘I do not need very much now, just a quiet place to rest,’
The boy, he whispered, with a weary smile.
‘Well’, said the tree, ‘An old stump is still good for that.’
‘Come, boy’, he said, ‘Sit down, sit down and rest a while.’
And so he did and
Oh, the trees was happy.
Oh, the tree was glad.
Shel Silverstein from Bobby Bare's ‘Singing in the Kitchen’’,
If you are thinking a year ahead, sow seed.
If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree.
If you are thinking 100 years ahead, make people aware.
By sowing seed once, you will harvest once.
By planting a tree, you will harvest ten-fold.
By opening the minds of people, you will harvest 100-fold.
Chinese proverb
King?
King is your word not mine;
Friend I am, and not very choosey,
pagans and prostitutes,
publicans and sinners,
grace is my kingdom.
King is your word, not mine;
Servant I am, no one beneath me,
feet washer and waiter,
serving the least,
love is my kingdom
King is your word, not mine;
Physician I am, all free of charge,
touching the leper,
expelling the demons,
health is my kingdom.
King is your word, not mine;
A seer I am, seeing God’s word
in mustard seed and yeast,
wildflower and ravens,
truth is my kingdom.
King is your word, not mine;
Tradesman I am, honing my craft,
familiar with wood,
hammer and nails,
hope is my kingdom.
B.D. Prewer 2002
I'd rather be a naive fool than be cynical. I don't mind being called a fool if I'm foolishly believing in a better world. It sounds cheesy, but why else be alive? Honestly. What else is there? It's worth living to be happy, to have a nice house, to have a good marriage, and to raise kids, and I want to do those things. But the bigger question...what's the point of being alive if you're not hopeful that you can do a little something to make the world a little better?
Greg Halpern
The war against Iraq is as disastrous as it is unnecessary; perhaps in terms of its wisdom, purpose and motives, the worst war in American history…. Our military men and women…were not called to defend America but rather to attack Iraq. They were not called to die for, but rather to kill for, their country. What more unpatriotic thing could we have asked of our sons and daughters…?
William Sloane Coffin
If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Howard Zinn There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. Howard Zinn,
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning.
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), escaped slave, Abolitionist, author
No attempt or pretence, that was ever carried into practical operation amongst civilized men -- unless possibly the pretence of a ‘Divine Right,’ on the part of some, to govern and enslave others -- embodied so much of shameless absurdity, falsehood, impudence, robbery, usurpation, tyranny, and villainy of every kind, as the attempt or pretence of establishing a government by consent, and getting the actual consent of only so many as may be necessary to keep the rest in subjection by force. Such a government is a mere conspiracy of the strong against the weak. It no more rests on consent than does the worst government on earth.
Lysander Spooner (1808-1887)
In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
The earth is not dying. It is being killed, and the people killing it have names and addresses.
Utah Phillips
War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves’
Leo Tolstoy
Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) German philosopher
There are some whose only reason for inciting war is to use it as a means to exercise their tyranny over their subjects more easily. For in times of peace the authority of the assembly, the dignity of the magistrates, the force of the laws stand in the way to some extent of the ruler doing what he likes. But once war is declared then the whole business of state is subject to the will of a few ... They demand as much money as they like. Why say more?’
Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536)
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -how passionately I hate them!
Albert Einstein
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.
Emma Goldman
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
Barbara Ehrenreich
A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
Bill Vaughan
The strong do what they can, and the weak do what they must.
Thucydides (c. 460 B.C. - c. 395 B.C.)
…..if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties.. if that is what they mean by a ‘liberal’ then I am proud to be a liberal.John F. Kennedy The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. Stendhal [Marie-Henri Beyle] (1783-1842) They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. ... Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder... And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. Eugene Victor Debs The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that The State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.Arthur Miller, The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity. George Bernard Shaw
Inside us there is something that has no name,
that something is what we are.
Jose Saramago
The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.Michael Parenti
Jose Saramago
Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters.
Jose Saramago
Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties…. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.
Jose Saramago
I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?
Jose Saramago
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
Jose Saramago
We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.
Jose Saramago
Most of you, even with all that you have to suffer, are much better off than you realize.
Yet the heart of man can be full of so much pain, even when things are exteriorly ‘all right’. It becomes all the more difficult because today we are used to thinking that there are explanations for everything.
But there is no explanation for most of what goes on in our own hearts, and we cannot account for it all. No use resorting to mental tranquilizers that even religious explanations sometimes offer.
Faith must be deeper than that, rooted in the unknown and in the abyss of darkness that is the ground of our being. No use teasing the darkness to try to make answers grow out of it.
But if we learn how to have a deep inner patience, things solve themselves, or God solves them if you prefer, but do not expect to see how.
Just learn to wait, and do what you can and help other people.
Thomas Merton. The Road to Joy,
Often in helping someone else we find the best way to bear with our own trouble.
Thomas Merton, The Road to Joy, p. 94.
Everybody prays whether [you think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else’s joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to God.
Frederick Buechner
Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.
Frederick Buechner
What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Reflections on the readings for Feast of Christ, Heart of the Universe
Today’s feast is based on a subversive claim. Though Jesus did not claim to be a king, it is subversive by overturning understandings of power and looks to an inclusive and empowering leadership. It was a subversive act to acknowledge Jesus in apartheid South Africa, the Philippines today, Palestine, and many other countries including Australia above the power of government. It is subversive as a carpenter's son is executed as a political troublemaker by an oppressive regime. It is subversive when he teaches that first will be last and the last first. When Pontius Pilate asks Jesus if he were king of the Jews, Jesus replied, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18, 36) meaning that the new reality Jesus speaks of is not the old system of domination. Those who dominate fail to understand the controversial kind of power Jesus refers to. And anyone who wishes to live out the meaning of this subversive power must be prepared for controversy in their lives.
We might recall a few weeks ago, Jesus warned his disciples, ‘You know that those who are recognised as rulers over the gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones make their authority felt. But it shall not happen among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all. For the Son of Man came to serve and not to be served…’ (Mark 10). Subservience, idolising, building up and putting people down are contrary to the one we ‘celebrate’ today who is truly at the heart of justice, mercy and love. Today’s feast is really about the relationships we develop and through them rediscover how we can live God’s dream for humanity: right relations with all – God, each other, creation (the basis of ‘shalom’); a love that transforms and brings new life as opposed to a hierarchy of privilege and power.
Before Pilate, Jesus’ manifests a leadership that turns the ‘king thing’ upside down. As Pilate’s reign represented arbitrary rule, privilege and domination, Christ’s reign reflects the ‘the earth community’ consisting of love, justice and service. Leadership is meant to be about service, not dominating power. Ignacio Ellacuría, a Jesuit Salvadorian martyr said, ‘We are people of the Gospel, a gospel that proclaims the reign of God, and that calls us to try to transform this earth into as close a likeness of that reign as possible’, the reign of Christ Jesus, not that of “Pilate”. Charles Colson, founder of the Christian Prison Fellowship, says, ‘All the kings and queens I have known in history sent their people out to die for them. I only know one king who decided to die for his people’. Jesus is best known for his scars – scars that revealed his compelling love for the world and his complete self-emptying. And Jesus is still known by his scars. The truth is a person, the Word made flesh, who came to live with us - literally, to ‘pitch his tent’ among people of earth. Today’s feast gathers together all that the reign of God is to express in the gospels.’
Jesus came to change the world, to close any system that enslaves people. What is subversive about this reign is that it is based on a love and justice that leads to peace – not privilege, domination and power that is divisive and exclusive; where the excluded are included and become integral to God’s reign; where the true treasures of the reign of God are always those considered ‘the least’.
As disciples we are empowered and called to act and intervene wherever the power of death pervades in our society, community and life. The disciple is now empowered to ‘get in the way’ where life is reduced to a commodity and people are seen as means rather than ends. This subversive reign of God allows new life to emerge in situations of hopelessness and violence. It comes about by love of others; where mercy is seen as foolishness, where love and compassion is seen as weak and vulnerable, where forgiveness and generosity is seen as softness. These threaten any society based on power, domination and violence.
We can wonder how many people surrendered their consciences in the name of patriotism and national loyalty with the invasion of Iraq, or detention of people in Guantanamo, the treatment of asylum seekers, justifying Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians or blaming people in our country for their social isolation and poverty. Laws and policies governing public life are not critically examined for their humanity and justice. Though God's reign is among us, something is seriously wrong when children are taught to torture and kill as soldiers; when women, girls, boys and men are trafficked around the world with relative impunity; when minorities are persecuted; when 100’s of people can be detained in secret locations and abandoned by their governments; when more and more families are caught in a vicious cycle of poverty and homelessness and our leaders tell us we are pretty well off, when we close our hearts and minds and our doors to asylum seekers; when some elderly people feel abandoned or have to decide whether to buy food [or pet food] or medicine; when natural resources are used without regard for future generations; when war is seen as a way to settle to differences. What do these have in common with God’s reign?
Jesus proclaimed and revealed a different way of being in the world. Jesus says, ‘My kingdom [reign] does not belong to this world.’ It is about being different and doing things differently. Jesus is referring to a rupture between domination and service. ‘For this I came into the world’ - to inaugurate a world of peace and fellowship, of justice and respect for other people's rights, of love for God and for one another.
Jesus’ words can just as much be directed to ecclesiastical powers as to the political and financial institutions. The Church still seeks exemptions from anti-discrimination laws? The church seeks to have religious freedom guaranteed without regard for those whose freedoms have been and continue to be ignored when it has sought to protect itself and its image rather than protect vulnerable children; when it seeks exemptions from anti-discrimination laws in employment of gay and lesbian people. One can imagine how much moral and psychological coercion and domination is exercised by authoritarianism, centralism, and dogmatism? How is God’s reign manifested the reign of God manifested; when moral and psychological coercion is exercised in its centralism, authoritarianism and dogmatism; when our leaders are more and more remote from the people who seem to be treated as children in need protection and discipline? Not only our leaders. How many of us have been totally convinced about the kind of power that Jesus exercised. We all stumble when we, and the churches, rely on the power that dominates, bullies, is cruel and violent. Are we convinced in the power that Jesus manifests when we stand in awe or assent or justify expenditures on weapons of war? Are we convinced in the power that Jesus manifests when bay for harsher punishments for people rather than seek their rehabilitation.
We look around we are witnessing a revival of populist rhetoric, fascism, and the undermining of democracies from the USA, Australia, Hungary, Turkey, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries that rely on propaganda, indoctrination, and so-called fake news or ‘alternative facts.’ Today’s feast is a reminder to Christians – political leaders and citizens alike – of what constitutes God’s reign and true Christian leadership.
Jesus’ presence/actions, at the centre of power [Jerusalem] undermine existing social organisations. The excluded are brought in again. In God’s world, broken people are integral. For us, the poor [meant inclusively] are the starting point for understanding the gospel as the good news of liberation. Jesus still stands before the rulers and powerful of this world and holds in his pierced hands, the poor, the starving, the unwanted, the abused and tortured, those shunned by important people. We are his but where do we stand or sit, and who do we sit with? It comes down to how we live day to day and whether our gaze is directed towards and behalf of the least of these.
Media Release, November 13 2018 Slaughter Occurring Right Now in Afghanistan. Hazaras Targetted by Taliban
Media Release, November 13 2018
Slaughter Occurring Right Now in Afghanistan. Hazaras Targetted by Taliban.
Claude Mostowik (MSC Justice and Peace Centre) has circulated this release.
The Edmund Rice Centre today strongly condemned the targeted violence and killings of the Hazara people currently occurring now, and the lack of coverage of these atrocities.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the killings of Hazaras in Jaghori, Malistan and Khas Uruzgan. In recent days we have seen Afghan Special forces slaughtered by the Taliban and a massive increase in murders of innocent Hazara civilians”, ERC Director Phil Glendenning said
“This violence is taking place in areas previously held to be safer than other parts of the country for the minority group, particularly Jaghori in Ghazni Province.
“These districts, bordered by the Taliban controlled areas in southern Afghanistan, are areas where the Australian Government has returned rejected asylum seekers to. This must stop”.
Despite demonstrations from Hazaras in Kabul, the Afghan Government has shown itself to be unable or unwilling to protect their Hazara citizens in these regions.
“This violence and these crimes against humanity are largely going unreported.
“Whilst there has been widespread coverage of the tragic losses of life and property to the wildfires in California – as there should be – there has been virtually no coverage of the slaughter currently occurring in Afghanistan which is on a scale far, far greater than the tragic events in the US.
“Clearly, Australia must not deport Hazara people back to Afghanistan where they would face certain persecution, violence and in too many cases death, Mr Glendenning said.
“These killings must not be met with international silence. Yet as we reflect in the wake of Remembrance Day 2018, that seems to be the case”.
For interview/comment contact Phil Glendenning on 0419 013 758
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE THIRTY THIRD SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, 2018
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE THIRTY THIRD SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, 2018
November 18, 2018
Suggested formula for recognition of indigenous people and their land.
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we are now gathered,
(the ……) and recognise that it continues to be sacred to them.
We hail them: as guardians of the earth and of all things that grow and breed in the soil; as trustees of the waters – [the seas, the streams and rivers, the ponds and the lakes] - and the rich variety of life in those waters.
We thank them for passing this heritage to every people since the Dreamtime.
We acknowledge the wrongs done to them by newcomers to this land and we seek to be partners with them in righting these wrongs and in living together in peace and harmony.
As we do this, we must also acknowledge the loss of their hunting grounds,
the destruction of their ceremonial places and sacred sites,
and the great loss of life from all kinds of violence and disease,
and that the land was never given away.
Liturgy of the Word
First Reading: Daniel 12:1-3
Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 16:5, 8, 9-10, 11 R. You are my inheritance, O Lord!
Second Reading: Hebrews 10:11-14, 18
Gospel: Mark 13:24-32
Penitential Rite
- You promise that those who lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever. Jesus, have mercy.
- You call us to hope and vigilance, peace and not disaster. Christ, have mercy.
- Your desire is to gather your people from the ends of the earth. Jesus, have mercy.
Opening Prayer
God of Hope,
we do not know the day or the hour
when the old world will be gone.
Open our eyes to the continuing signs of Jesus’ presence
and may we see him walking by our side.
Keep us faithful in hope, firm in love for you
and consistent in our concern for one another.
Prayer over the Gifts
God of Hope
in this bread and wine
we offer ourselves to you.
Expand our hearts and lives
with the courage to commit ourselves
to your vision for the world
in order to bring you Reign to completion.
Prayer after Communion
God of Hope
as we have taken delight
in the sharing of the body and blood of Jesus,
may we also delight in serving others in faith and love.
Challenge us to creatively build a new world
by the power of Jesus,
in whose name we pray.
For the prayer of the faithful
Introduction: Let us pray with hope and trust to the God of the Cosmos who waits for us at the end of life’s journey. The response to each prayer is: We place our trust in you, O God.
- For the peoples of the world: may they appreciate more and more that they have within their power to make effective changes in their lives and their world by their engagement with each other for the benefit of all. We pray: We place our trust in you, O God.
- For the world: may be protected and not be degraded due to careless environmental inattention as we come to appreciate the mystery at the heart of life, and accept that we are servants of the planet for future generations. We pray: We place our trust in you, O God.
- For men and women who live with anxiety and fear of the future: may they open their eyes and hearts to a deeper understanding of tender and loving God’s presence in their lives. We pray: We place our trust in you, O God.
- For those who work energetically, lovingly and tirelessly for peace and justice: may they see the little things they do contribute to building a new world that is more human, just and peaceful. We pray: We place our trust in you, O God.
- For those considered to be social outcasts in our society – the street kids, prostitutes, drug users, alcoholics and people in prison or just out of prison: may they find hope and receive effective help through the wisdom, courage and concerns of social workers, police officers, prison officers and drug counsellors. We pray: We place our trust in you, O God.
- For those who have been maimed by land mines, terrorist bombs and other forms of violence: may they not lose hope in their own abilities and the find meaning through dedicated assistance of others. We pray: We place our trust in you, O God.
* For indigenous people around the world, especially in Australia: may all Australians continue to believe in the enduring value of their cultures and come to see that their survival also affects us. We pray: We place our trust in you, O God.
- For the churches: may they be models of justice, compassion, charity and hope in our world and show how we may care for each other as brothers and sisters. We pray: We place our trust in you, O God.
- For those in the midst of personal crisis - the unemployed, those caring for loved ones who are aged or seriously ill; those facing the end of a relationship; those who are depressed or lonely: may they find in their lives people who come with kind and listening hearts to reflect the presence of a loving God. We pray: We place our trust in you, O God.
- We remember those who have died ... (names). We pray for people everywhere who will die today: for the poor who die for lack of food, clean water and medicine; for those who are ready for death and those who die unprepared; for those who will be missed; those who die alone, and particularly we pray for all who have died in war and conflict. We pray: We place our trust in you, O God.
Concluding Prayer: Loving God, hear the prayers of your people this day. Be the light of our lives, our hope when life is difficult, and give and make our hearts sensitive, so that we can continued to be inspired to involve ourselves in the service of the life to which you call us.
Dates
November 18 Second World Day of the Poor
Message of Pope Francis for Second World Day of the Poor
Resources from Presentation Sisters Australia: Encountering the Poor as a Way of Life
November 20 Universal Children’s Day
1959: Declaration of the Rights of the Child
1989: Convention on the Rights of the Child
November 25 Solemnity of Christ the King
November 25 International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
Further Resources
Why don't church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?
William Blum
If you had only known the man you were trying to kill, you would have risked your life, to save his.
Harry Pope
If we listen attentively we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, a gentle stirring of life and hope.
Albert Camus
Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it.
Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held.
Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books.
Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin.
Believe nothing just because someone else believes it.
Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true.
Buddha - Gautama Siddhartha
Do not say, that if the people do good to us, we will do good to them; and if the people oppress us, we will oppress them; but determine that if people do you good, you will do good to them; and if they oppress you, you will not oppress them.
Muhammad
We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots, and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering, and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing. With just a little witty skepticism we can kill a good deal of the future in a young person. Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet.
Hermann Hesse
I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have: three meals a day for their bodies,
education and culture for their minds - and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.
Aldous Huxley, (1894-1963
We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice.
Woody Allen
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
Herbert Marcuse
In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
Matt Taibbi
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Gore Vidal
…..most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are to cast out demons, be healers, artists, musicians,
the builders of caring institutions.
Creativity is not the work of a few. …
We each have the task of making the earth into a fairer, kinder place.
The first step is imaging a better world,
and that is most apt to happen
when we suffer or look upon suffering.
Elizabeth O’Connor
The End is Not Yet
Mark 13 and Romans 8:18-25
When you hear war, and rumours of war,
the end is not yet, just wind and tide.
These are birth pangs of mother earth,
in travail with children of God.
Don’t be mislead, don’t grow anxious,
do not follow men of great pride.
Keep your hearts true, all will be well,
slow turn the years, patient is God.
When you’re abused, if you are beaten,
do not lose heart, I’m at your side.
Don’t practice speeches, nor try slick words,
just tell the truth, honest to God.
I’ll show the way, the Spirit your Friend,
just keep the faith, however you’re tried.
Though friend forsake, or child betray,
hold your heads high, faithful is God.
Temples shall fall, stone upon stone,
rubble and dust, all human pride.
Watch through dust storms, be there at dawn,
when the end comes, you’ll know your God.
© Bruce Prewer 2002
The Peace Prayer
Lead me from death to life, from falsehood to truth.
Lead me from despair to hope, from fear to trust.
Lead me from hate to love, from war to peace.
Let peace fill our heart, our world, our universe.
Peace. Peace. Peace.
Adapted from the Upanishads by Satish Kumar
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The church that preaches the gospel in all of its fullness, except as it applies to the great social ills of the day, is failing to preach the gospel.
Martin Luther
The prophet courageously challenges oppressive social structures of which the church may be an integral part. The prophet is the end result of the best in the tradition and spirituality of the church, which soon, sadly, drives him or her out.
- Milton Yinger, 1946
We're not made by God to mass kill one another, and that's backed up by the Gospels. Lying and war are always associated. Pay attention to war-makers when they try to defend their current war: if they’re moving their lips they're lying.
Philip Berrigan
If any preacher tells you that personal salvation can be achieved without first paying attention to social justice, you may know by this sign alone that you are listening to a false prophet.
Sydney Harris
You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.
Gandhi
It may well be that the greatest tragedy of this period of social change is not the glaring noisiness of the so-called bad people, but the silence of the so-called good people.
Dr Martin Luther King. Jr.
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
John F. Kennedy
If you see injustice and say nothing, you have taken the side of the oppressor.
Desmond Tutu
Praying for peace is like praying for a weedless garden. Nothing will happen until you get your hands dirty.
John K. Stoner, co-founder of Every Church A Peace Church
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
Aristotle
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we do about peace - more about killing than we do about living.
Omar Bradley, WWII General
Military power is as corrupting to the man who possesses it as it is pitiless to its victims. Violence is just as devastating to the soul of the perpetrator as it is to the body and souls of those who are victims of it.
American Friends (Quakers) Service Committee
The most profoundly creative way to overcome enemies is to make them our friends. But this involves a series of painful acts, a constant decision never to achieve our goals by destroying or humiliating others.
Dom Paulo Cardinal Arns, former archbishop of Rio de Janeiro
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop (c. 550 B.C.)
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941)
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) Historian and author
The psychology of 'bigger and better', of the record smasher, the money maker, the imperialist, the speed maniac, the time saver, and the religious fanatic is the psychology of the drug addict. He has not the faintest idea of when or where to stop. He knows only that he wants more and more and more of the same--more speed, more cash, more power, more territory, more converts, more thrills. He wants to possess infinity, whereas the man of sensibility asks only to be possessed by infinity. Thus in the certainty of his given and eternal identity with the ultimate Reality, man is at last free to love things and people for themselves rather than for what he can get out of them. Free from anxiety and impatience he can concentrate on the creation of quality rather than quantity. Free from the compulsion to deserve eternal life by piling up merits, he can love people with their benefit in mind rather than his own salvation. Free from the craving to possess spirit and life, he can devote himself to the perfection of form and matter.
Order, beauty and discipline, harmony and co-operation, exist already in nature below the human level. But the infinite Reality expresses itself as man to introduce a yet more complex and exquisite order. When man considers himself separate from the infinite, he manifests a chaos parallel to the necessary element of chaos in nature. Yearning for the infinite, he wrecks the finite limitations that seem to bar its attainment, first spiritually and then physically. But when he realizes that he is after all one with the infinite from the beginning, he is in a position to be a creative instrument and to fulfill the positive aspect of his destiny.’
Alan Watts, The Supreme Identity: An Essay on Oriental Metaphysic and the Christian Religion, New York: Random House: Pantheon Books © Alan Watts 1972
We declare how we value God as much by our actions, by the way we treat other people, by the manner in which we do our work, as by anything we say. If my actions are wrong or wrongly motivated prayer cannot make them right. If however, despite my failures and inconsistencies, I do on the whole want to put God above all things then prayer will help to purify my motives and clarify my judgment.
Christopher Bryant, from The River Within
Everywhere I go -- from villages outside Kandy, Sri Lanka, to community centers in Amman, Jordan, to offices at the State Department in Washington, D.C. -- I find people with a similar story. When thousands of people discover that their story is also someone else's story, they have the chance to write a new story together.
Eboo Patel
The depth and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their reserves.
Leonardo da Vinci
Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair but manifestations of strength and resolution.
Kahlil Gibran,
Hard as it may be to believe in these days of infectious greed and sabers unsheathed, scientists have discovered that the small, brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.
Natalie Angier
I do not pray for success, I ask for faithfulness.
Mother Teresa
If all my friends were to jump off a bridge, I wouldn't follow. I'd be at the bottom to catch them when they fall.
Unknown
Spread love everywhere you go: First of all in your own house...let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness.
Mother Teresa
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!
Stephen Decatur
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
It is discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
Noel Coward
We have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. Our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and maintain social stability for our investments. This tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and Peru. Increasingly the role our nation has taken is the role of those who refuse to give up the privileges and pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
What is dissent?
I don’t remember exactly when I first began to notice the shift of circumstances, the change in attitudes, but I do know that every day the truth of the difference between past and present religious evolutions got more and more clear for me.
What has for long years been considered ‘dissent’ in the churches by those who want more answers than questions, more clerical authority than spiritual investment may not be real dissent at all. People are not challenging Christianity and leaving the Church. They are not arguing against the need for a spiritual life. They are not denying God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit. They are not ridiculing religion and going away. On the contrary. People currently considered ‘excommunicated’ or ‘suspect’ or ‘heretical’ or ‘smorgasbord’ believers are, in many ways, among the most intense Christians of our time. They do more than sing in the choir or raise money for the parish center or fix flowers for the church. They care about it and call it to be its truest self. They question it, not to undermine it, but to strengthen it. They call for new ways of being church together. They do not dismiss the need for the spiritual life. They crave it. What’s more, they look for it in their churches. But they crave more than ritual. They crave meaning. They look for more than salvation. They look for authenticity and the integrity of the faith.
Women, in particular, find themselves with theological questions that will not go away and immerse themselves in the struggle to bring the churches to be what the churches say they are. Men grapple to reconcile what the institution teaches with what the institution does. These men and women do not abandon the spiritual life, however distant their association with the churches that feel so distant from them. If anything, they try harder to provide for themselves the kind of fullness of the spiritual life their churches fail to provide or even deny, for whatever reason. They reach out everywhere to everything that will provide new insights, new awareness of the presence of God.
Sr Joan Chittister osb
We begin, sometimes without realizing it, to worship things, to relate to them as persons. And in the process, we inevitably relate to other persons as if they were things.
Edward J. Farrell
For a better world
Generous God, we thank you:
For the gifts you have given us,
the abundance of your Creation,
and the beauty that surrounds us.
For the people whose lives have touched ours,
for the love they show,
the burdens they lift,
the hopes we share.
Compassionate God, we ask you:
to fill us with your love,
to place in our hearts a spirit of courage,
to move us to reach out to others in need.
And lead us to play our part,
So that
now and in generations to come
all your children may share in
our hope for a better world.
We ask this through Christ our Lord, Amen.
Written by Catherine Gorman/CAFOD for the Your Catholic Legacy consortium
Reflections on the readings
Today’s readings seem to be filled with gloom and doom. They are not meant to be threats or make us fearful. We are invited to reflect about how we live our lives today. The references to war, famines earthquake, families torn apart, persecution, conflict and other fearful phenomena seem very contemporary. But, the intent of the scriptures is hopeful. The ‘Son of Man’ (‘the truly Human One’) will be the source of hope. His coming is to offer hope and the possibility that we possess the creative energy to making all things new. Consider the beautiful words in Daniel: ‘But the wise shall shine brightly like the splendour of the firmament, and those who lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever.’ I am aware of so many people at all levels of education prepare young people for ‘participation in the creation of a more just and humane world’? Anne Frank says, ‘How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.’
We are challenged to look at life with new eyes ...not with self-centred concern but with compassion and care. To serve each other does not just involve thinking differently but also taking the necessary steps to move outside ourselves: to lend a hand to those in need, a listening ear to those who are lonely and a compassionate, and offer and understanding heart to those who find themselves living on the fringes of society. It is only in giving ourselves to each other that we gain a proper perspective on life and let Jesus Christ lead us so that we might, in the words of the prophet Daniel, ‘be wise and shine brightly...like the stars forever.’ We know of these stars through their words and actions for justice; Fr Ted Kennedy in his solidarity with Aboriginal people in inner west of Sydney; Mum Shirl who took in troubled Aboriginal youth; Nelson Mandela and his struggle for freedom in South Africa; St Oscar Romero and his call for Christians to transform history; Malala Yousafzai and her brave insistence on education for women and girls in Pakistan; the late Wangari Maathai with her creative healing of the Earth by planting 1000’s of trees. We might think of other examples of wise teachers who shine bright in our live and hopefully led us on the path to justice.
We are called to pay attention to those among us who show us a different way of responding to distress, pain, and violence. The prophet Daniel speaks to a people facing great distress with violence and fear lurking everywhere, religious freedom was really threatened and sacred sites damaged and desecrated. For many people such experiences are very contemporary. We still need to stand up for people (men, women and children) held in foreign detention centres; a caravan of immigrants threatened with violence in the USA; people seeking protection are turned away from the ‘fences’ of Europe; people in cities facing violence and poverty; investigative journalists threatened, silenced and even murdered for saying that injustice is not okay; disasters such as wild fires and hurricanes; various forms of sexual violence in our work places and families. Then there are more private distresses people carry such as sick children who in some cases need long-time or life-long care, or concern for aging parents, or living people who have mental illness, or experiencing relationship breakdowns. These can be lonely and fearful times. We might ask where is God? We should also ask where are our sisters and brothers in the faith? Where are we for those who are remembered today on this World Day of the Poor. We are reminded that God hears their cry. Do we?
In an earlier passage, when the disciples stood in awe of the temple, Jesus dismissed it by saying ‘all will be thrown down’ (Mark 13:2). God’s favourite dwelling place is in people, in all creation, not in buildings or institutions built on the exploitation of the weak and poor. True religion puts God’s treasure—the least of these—first. St Lawrence, the 3rd century Roman deacon, when commanded by Roman authorities to hand over the church’s riches was martyred for bringing the church’s ‘treasures’ - the city’s lame, sick, poor and excluded. These are the very image of God. The readings offer hope and encouragement for people who struggle for justice and oppose oppression. They question the tendency to put particular classes of people beyond the bounds of God’s love and our love and concern. They also question the tendency to put particular people beyond our humanitarian concern. We can act differently to transform our political, economic and ecological reality.
We are currently living in an age of great distress where the very existence of life on this planet is at risk through human destruction of the natural world. Fr. Thomas Berry spent much of his life warning that commercial values were a threat to life on our planet. Today, Mark might be challenging us to consider the future of our planet – especially as we approach the another UN Conference on Climate Change (COP 24) in Katowice, Poland in December. Pope Francis and many scientists warn us of what can happen if the earth is treated like a rubbish dump or as an endless source of resources. Environmental destruction is often seen as an unfortunate consequence of war. Rather than be alarmed, passive, apathetic or sceptical about the future, Mark is calling us to be engaged. He affirms that we can trust in God’s ongoing presence with us today.
Hope comes by facing the darkness, the fear, the loss and tragedy however they are manifested. The late Vaclav Havel, and former Czech President, poet and dissident, who knew persecution, said: ‘Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good’. The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton said: ‘Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.’
The constant question ringing through the scriptures is the one asked of Cain: ‘Where is your brother’? Cain, after murdering his brother Abel, was the first to build a city, to put up fences and enclosures to protect him from influences he could not comprehend and control. Control was what he and subsequent walled empires wanted: control over people (and God) and any of life’s variables that might threaten security. Walled civilisations and closed gates are symptomatic of closed minds and hearts, of an insecurity that can become aggressive and lethal if we do not watch out. Our partiality to walls remains. Today, we call it ‘border protection or border security’. When a nation’s (or Church’s) trust, curiosity, creative imagination, and courage begin to fail, there is talk of walls, closure, isolation, exclusion, and making ourselves look different to others (e.g., the new liturgy) – which lead to suffocation and a deadly ‘normality’.
Jesus preached a coming reign is characterized by gentleness, mercy, forgiving love not avenging justice. Jesus coming has not brought catastrophe upon the world except for himself: ‘……the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again’ (8:31).
So let us not be too concerned with looking at the skies for signs of the ‘end of the world’ but concern ourselves with the present moment: about engaging with the God of mercy rather than condemning others; building God’s reign by embracing the stranger rather than rejecting the different or the difficult. Let us share the vision of Jesus: that whatever is happening does not have to be that way; that it is not okay; that war will not have the last word; poverty will not raise a final triumphant fist; racism and sexism will not do victory jigs together; oppression will not have a foothold over the vulnerable. Let us look to the teachers of the past and in our midst and engage with one another where just and peaceful living is possible. But, let us not miss the world that lies at our doorstep, in our neighbourhood, community or family.
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE THIRTY FIRST SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, 2018
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE THIRTY FIRST SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, 2018
31st Sunday of the Year 2012
November 4, 2018
Suggested formula for recognition of indigenous people and their land.
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we are now gathered,
(the ……) and recognise that it continues to be sacred to them.
We hail them: as guardians of the earth and of all things that grow and breed in the soil; as trustees of the waters – [the seas, the streams and rivers, the ponds and the lakes] - and the rich variety of life in those waters.
We thank them for passing this heritage to every people since the Dreamtime.
We acknowledge the wrongs done to them by newcomers to this land and we seek to be partners with them in righting these wrongs and in living together in peace and harmony.
As we do this, we must also acknowledge the loss of their hunting grounds,
the destruction of their ceremonial places and sacred sites,
and the great loss of life from all kinds of violence and disease,
and that the land was never given away.
************
The beauty that will save the world is the love that shares the pain.
Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini former Archbishop of Milan, recently deceased.
The only thing worth globalising is dissent.
Arundhati Roy
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Kahlil Gibran, from The Garden of the Prophet
Readings
First Reading Deuteronomy 6:2-6
Responsorial Psalm Psalm 18:2-3, 3-4, 47, 51
Second Reading Hebrews 7:23-28
Gospel Mark 12:28-34
Opening Prayer
God of loving kindness,
you have committed yourself to us
in a covenant of lasting love
in the person of Jesus.
May we respond to you
with the whole of our being
and to live your commandments
as opportunities to love you in our sisters and brothers.
or
Opening Prayer [alternative]
God of loving kindness,
direct our steps
in our everyday efforts
to be your presence in our world.
May the changing moods
of the human heart
and the limits which
our failings impose on hope
never blind us to your presence
in our sisters and brothers.
General Intercessions
Introduction: We pray to the God of love and kindness who draws near to all people as neighbours. We pray in response: Make us instruments of your peace and love.
- We remember our neighbours in West Papua, Afghanistan, the Philippines and other places of conflict: may we seek to respect and help one another and build peace and progress on the basis of justice and equitable sharing, let us pray: Make us instruments of your peace and love.
- We remember our neighbours in West Papua: that we listen to and recognise the desire of the Papuan people to establish a ‘land of peace’ and that we not be silenced by those who turn a blind eye to the ongoing violence in the region, let us pray: Make us instruments of your peace and love.
- We remember our neighbours who are vilified and attacked because of their faith and ethnic backgrounds: that the Rohingya people find dignity and status from their brothers and sisters in Myanmar and the Jewish people targeted in the recent massacre in the USA synagogue find healing in their pain and loss, let us pray: Make us instruments of your peace and love.
- We remember our neighbours in places affected by the climate change - the Pacific Island States and Indian Ocean Island States, the people in the USA and Vietnam currently suffering from hurricanes: may all these people receive the support, encouragement and assistance they require as we also strive to act mindfully to respect and thus protect our environment, let us pray: Make us instruments of your peace and love.
- We remember our neighbour in the young: that we together as a nation seek to make specific and concrete commitments to the young and vulnerable ones where they feel included in society and communities and find respect by those in authority, let us pray: Make us instruments of your peace and love.
- We remember our neighbours around the globe who suffer illness, illiteracy and other forms of poverty: may we continue to demand from our leaders a human response to the needs of others and speak out to defend the rights of the poor and the needy, let us pray: Make us instruments of your peace and love.
- We remember our neighbours who are sick, especially those living with terminal illness: that we are mindful of the psychological and sometimes physical isolation they feel and seek to be a loving and compassionate presence to them, let us pray: Make us instruments of your peace and love.
- We remember our neighbours who at great risk have the courage to speak truth to power: may those in the media, medical profession, arts world and ordinary citizens find consolation in the realisation that their humanity is bound up with people whose rights are being ignored and violated, let us pray: Make us instruments of your peace and love.
Concluding Prayer: God of love and kindness, listen our prayers and help us through your loving Spirit give to your love a human shape by our engagement with one another.
Prayer over the Gifts
God of loving kindness,
in these offerings of bread and wine
we join Jesus, your Son
in his self-offering of love for the world.
May we respond to you love
and seek to bring life to our brothers and sisters.
Prayer after Communion
God of loving kindness,
in our sharing in the mystery of the breaking of the bread
and the blood of Jesus,
may we be joined more closely to his heart
and be in the world
people that reflect his heart and love for all people.
Notices
November 4 Day of Prayer for Anglican-Roman Catholic Reconciliation
November 5 World Tsunami Awareness Day
November 6 International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed
Conflict
November 9 Opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989
Further Resources
‘Jesus summarised all the teachings as 'Love God and love your neighbor.' Our neighbour, we know, isn't just found in our family, workplace, or apartment. It's the kid flashing gang signs, the smelly homeless man who lives in the park, the transgender prostitute who works the downtown corner, the crazy old woman who lives alone outside of town, and the immigrant family that doesn't speak English. Jesus gives us the strength of God's love so that we can learn to be allies with those whom society has pushed to the margins.’
Rose Marie Berger, excerpt from The Revolution: A Field Manual for Changing Your World
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Aldous Huxley, English novelist and critic, 1894-1963
The natural state of man(sic) is not war, as Dick Cheney thinks ~ the natural state of (man) is social cooperation and altruism but only if we make a stand for those values of the soul.
Allen L Roland
"Don't turn your face away.
Once you've seen, you can no longer act like you don't know.
Open your eyes to the truth. It's all around you.
Don't deny what the eyes to your soul have revealed to you.
Now that you know, you cannot feign ignorance.
Now that you're aware of the problem, you cannot pretend you don't care.
To be concerned is to be human.
To act is to care."
Vashti Quiroz-Vega
The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out 'stop!' When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.
Bertolt Brecht
Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighbouring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?
Kahlil Gibran
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
Mohandas Gandhi
In the democracy of the dead all [people]at last are equal. There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave.
John James Inga
How many does it take to transmute wickedness into righteousness? One man must not kill. If he does, it is murder.... But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder. It is just, necessary, commendable, and right. Only get enough people to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent. But how many does it take?
Adin Ballou, The Non-Resistant, February 5, 1845
The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity
André Gide
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Frederick Douglass
To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.
Alexander Hamilton
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
George Bernard Shaw
There is an evil which most of condone (support) and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral (impartial), and not easily moved by the wrongs done to other people
Abraham Joshua Heschel
The question about Auschwitz (the Holocaust) to be asked I not, ‘Where was god?’ But rather, ‘Where was man?’
Abraham Joshua Heschel
St. John Chrysostom on the Poor from St John Chrysostom’s meditations on the Gospel of Matthew
Would you honour the body of Christ? Do not despise his nakedness; do not honour him here in church clothed in silk vestments and then pass him by unclothed and frozen outside. Remember that he who said, ‘This is my Body’, and made good his words, also said, ‘You saw me hungry and gave me no food’, and, ‘in so far as you did it not to one of these, you did it not to me’. In the first sense the body of Christ does not need clothing but worship from a pure heart. In the second sense it does need clothing and all the care we can give it.
We must learn to be discerning Christians and to honor Christ in the way in which he wants to be honored. It is only right that honor given to anyone should take the form most acceptable to the recipient not to the giver. Peter thought he was honoring the Lord when he tried to stop him washing his feet, but this was far from being genuine homage. So give God the honor he asks for, that is give your money generously to the poor. God has no need of golden vessels but of golden hearts.
I am not saying you should not give golden altar vessels and so on, but I am insisting that nothing can take the place of almsgiving. The Lord will not refuse to accept the first kind of gift but he prefers the second, and quite naturally, because in the first case only the donor benefits, in the second case the poor gets the benefit. The gift of a chalice may be ostentatious; almsgiving is pure benevolence.
What is the use of loading Christ’s table with gold cups while he himself is starving? Feed the hungry and then if you have any money left over, spend it on the altar table. Will you make a cup of gold and without a cup of water? What use is it to adorn the altar with cloth of gold hangings and deny Christ a coat for his back! What would that profit you? Tell me: if you saw someone starving and refused to give him any food but instead spent your money on adorning the altar with gold, would he thank you? Would he not rather be outraged? Or if you saw someone in rags and stiff with cold and then did not give him clothing but set up golden columns in his honour, would he not say that he was being made a fool of and insulted?
Consider that Christ is that tramp who comes in need of a night’s lodging. You turn him away and then start laying rugs on the floor, draping the walls, hanging lamps on silver chains on the columns. Meanwhile the tramp is locked up in prison and you never give him a glance. Well again I am not condemning munificence in these matters. Make your house beautiful by all means but also look after the poor, or rather look after the poor first. No one was ever condemned for not adorning his house, but those who neglect the poor were threatened with hellfire for all eternity and a life of torment with devils. Adorn your house if you will, but do not forget your brother in distress. He is a temple of infinitely greater value.
I sought God and God I did not see.
I sought my soul but it eluded me.
I sought my neighbour and found all three.I
Old Adage [altered for gender sensitivity]
One of the nicest things that can happen to a person is to do good by stealth and be found out by accident.Mark Twain
The trouble is that when American dollars earn only six percent over here, they get restless and go overseas to get 100 percent. The flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to defend some lousy investment of the bankers. We should fight only for the defense of our home and the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It had its 'finger men' to point out enemies, its 'muscle men' to destroy enemies, its 'brain men' to plan war preparations and a 'Big Boss' - supernationalistic capitalism.
I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.
I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central
American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.
War is a racket.
General Smedley D. Butler
Always question your fear, Anh. there's almost never a good reason to be scared.
Anh Do The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir
And don't kid yourself; when you don't decide, that's a decision.
Anh Do The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir
There's only two times in life, there's now and there's too late
Anh Do
Give it a crack and see what happens. And if you fail... celebrate, because at least you know you're sailing near the edge of your capacity! ‘
Anh Do
And we were saved on the fifth day by a big German merchant ship which took us to a refugee camp in Malaysia, and we were there for around three months before Australia says - come to Australia. And we're very glad that happened. So often, we heard Mum and Dad say - what a great country. How good is this place? And the other thing - kids, as you grow up, do as much as you can to give back to this great country and to give back to others less fortunate. And so, that's how Mum and Dad taught us to fit in.
Anh Do, The Happiest Refugee
Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History
…whoever closes his eyes to the past becomes blind to the present. Whoever does not wish to remember inhumanity becomes susceptible to the dangers of new infection.’ Richard Von Weizaecher, former President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Speech 5/8/85
Reflections on the readings
Today’s readings are all about love for God and neighbour. We can explore by way of Jesus’ conversation with the lawyer as well as the other readings.
The two themes that come together in this week’s readings are the Great Commandment to love God and neighbour. In the non-Catholic readings we see how Ruth’s love for Naomi expressed in her commitment which cemented their relationship and ensures that both are protected as they continue their journey to Naomi’s home. In Deuteronomy, Moses instructs the people to wholeheartedly love God. The consequences of this love is not a “reward for good behaviour” but points us to a life that is for all. If we seek life, we must go by way of love expressed in our lives. It must include see the other person as a human, like oneself.
We know the pain of inadequate love in people’s lives and communities. We see that when the rich ignore the poor who live beside them. Marriages and relationship fall apart through carelessness and neglect. People are marginalised because party political agendas are more important than Jesus’ call to love. Many of us can be so busy trying to have our needs gratified prior to meeting the needs of others. The readings today are suggesting the paradox that when are truly generous and put the needs of others before our own leads to an abundant life. On a more global level we economic crises result from greed and stinginess. War and conflict result from hatred and put the groups agenda ahead of the common good. Climate change comes from a a failure to respect, love, appreciate what had has made. Love and compassion are not soft and idealistic but Christ-like love is practical, sacrificial, and very powerful. It has little to do with legalistic observance of exclusionary laws.
The double-edged gospel commandment today demands a face, race, gender, age. It demands the acknowledgment of the other as a neighbour, a sister or brother. The question God asked of Cain in the Book of Genesis is implicit in each passage of scripture: ‘where is you brother (sister)’. It was missing in the March 1968 massacre of innocent civilians in a small settlement called My Lai in Vietnam when Lt William Calley was court-martialled for leading this so-called My Lai massacre:
‘An enemy I could not see. I could not feel and I could not touch: nobody in the military system ever described the enemy as anything but communism. They did not give it a race, the did not give it a sex, they did not give it an age.’
We can often fail to give the faces we meet with a name, a story, a history whether it is the Big Issue seller on the street or the person begging for change on the street. I know that the times I have stopped I have found out that the woman had been a ‘victim’ or living with cancer or kicked out of the family; or the young man kicked out of home for being gay, or a man whose marriage has broken up and living with depression. Faces. Names. Stories. Histories. The lawyer in the gospel wanted to reduce all 613 tenets of the law into one little summary statement. Jesus tells him and he got the message. It is a teaching that needs to be enshrined and made flesh in our lives. It needs to have the flesh and blood of everydayness to get into our hearts, into our behaviour. Every week in this country 100’s of 1000’s of people from all faiths spend an hour or so to worship. Around the world, it is millions – all aiming to make the world a better place. I can imagine what might happen if they also, or alternatively, spent 10-15 minutes making phone calls to their local political member and those in the opposition to affirm the good they have done but also, and very importantly, to challenge them when they forget the poor, neglect the stranger, support war…. all commandments against love. We can be confident, if we reflect on today’s psalm which tells us not to put our trust in princes, those at the top are not really in charge.
Last week we saw how the blind beggar at the side of the road would not remain silent when told to be quiet and remain invisible. Jesus response to him enabled him to find within himself his dignity and his voice. The crowd did what we often do. Render such people invisible or silence them. Those who had benefitted from Jesus’ presence and teaching remained blind to what he was on about: instead of the assisting hungry people, they wanted to send them home; instead of letting little children who had no standing in society to come Jesus, told the parents to keep them away; instead of seeing that Jesus came to serve and not be served, they asked a question that no true disciple would ask, ‘can we have a place in glory seats in your reign’. The American poet and critic, Wendell Berry said, ‘The certified Christians seems just as likely as anyone else to join the military-industrial conspiracy to murder Creation’. We are called to love all creation, yet so often we need to ask what is the church doing to save a perishing planet, instead of just our ‘imperishable’ souls. This God of Jesus is the God who does not collaborate with the military coup leader, the banker or financiers who enriches himself as the price of ordinary people. The God of Jesus is with those who are on the underbelly of society – those traditionally referred to as the weak, widowed and orphaned. Only this God liberates the poor and needy. And love of God is achieved only through love of neighbour. It's not loving God and loving neighbour. It is loving GOD who is NEIGHBOUR. It is one action. God is only loved in our neighbour…. the ‘one to whom we draw near’. That is what neighbour means. God is a neighbour God…. One who draws near to us.
Jesus’ reply would not impress some fundamentalists because he balanced vertical religion with the horizontal where love of neighbour is right up there with the love of God. I strongly believe that Pope Francis is not impressing many in power because he is reminding them, and us, of our sisters and brothers who have face, stories, histories – which require love and support. Unfortunately, many people we are rendered passive by fear, blindness, prejudices or passivity – and sometime bloody-minded. We must not leave our brains at the church door where social structures need to be critiqued and ways of being together formed.
Abundant life, our liberation and salvation, depend more on our relationships than on religious rites: ‘I was hungry and they fed me………’ We can rationalise these passages to suit ourselves as much as we like, but we cannot get away from the pull they have on us as human being and as followers of Jesus. God’s reign is expressed in the practise of love concretely expressed among people today. When Jesus tells the scribe that he is not far from the reign of God, he implies that knowing the commandments is not enough. We must live them each day. Speaking to people who might find comfort in their love of God, the gospels clearly indicate that we cannot love God without our neighbour. It is not just a matter of being nice people. It is about seeing our lives as bound up with the other and that God is there at the heart. The neighbour is not just the one who has the same values that we hold, or speaks the same language as us, who dresses as we do. Our neighbors are also those whom we may never meet: the trafficked person, the asylum seeker on Manus Island or Nauru or any other camp around the world or the people of the Pacific Island nations threatened by climate change as well as the first peoples of this land. Which is the greatest commandment of the law? What's the big credo in our public life today? More and more we hear about national security and border security; the so-called ‘war on terror’; the ‘flag’ and a false ‘patriotism’ enlisted when people genuinely criticise the harm one’s country does; ‘values’ that have little bearing in our lives except to serve those in privileged positions of power.
The government can play the media like a piano to promote its agenda and is often the Churches are silent. Those in politics, the media and the church want ordinary people to leave their brains at home. Jesus is implicitly telling us today: ‘Don't park your brains at home or the church do and walk away.’ The political system, corporations and some parts of the church want to determine what we think. No discussion! No listening! No understanding! They dangerously claim to know the mind of God and there is no higher form of oppression that doing something in the name of God.
We find that as we and others grow more sensitive and attentive to the other, we discover our connectedness and our shared humanity. We become more mindful of the consequences of our choices and actions. We are motivated to live justly and work for justice for the sake of all. It is common sense that when we become more concerned for one another and more aware of, and sensitive to, one another’s needs, the world becomes safer, more peaceful, more just and more prosperous for all.
Love versus Scripture. David Hayward The Naked Pastor October 25, 2018
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE THIRTIETH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, 2018
LITURGY NOTES: 30th Sunday of the Year
October 28th 2018
Suggested formula for recognition of indigenous people and their land.
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we are now gathered,
(the ……) and recognise that it continues to be sacred to them.
We hail them: as guardians of the earth and of all things that grow and breed in the soil; as trustees of the waters – [the seas, the streams and rivers, the ponds and the lakes] - and the rich variety of life in those waters.
We thank them for passing this heritage to every people since the Dreamtime.
We acknowledge the wrongs done to them by newcomers to this land and we seek to be partners with them in righting these wrongs and in living together in peace and harmony.
As we do this, we must also acknowledge the loss of their hunting grounds,
the destruction of their ceremonial places and sacred sites,
and the great loss of life from all kinds of violence and disease,
and that the land was never given away.
************
If we are to love our neighbours, before doing anything else we must see our neighbours.
With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists,
we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces.
Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark
Readings
First Reading: Jeremiah 31:7-9
Responsorial Psalm: Ps 126:1-2, 2-3,4-5,6
- (3) The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.
Second Reading: Hebrews 5:1-6
Gospel Reading: Mark 10:46-52
Penitential Prayer
- You open the eyes of those who are blind. Jesus, have mercy.
- You give courage to those who afraid to see. Christ, have mercy.
- You strengthen the faith of those who dare to stand up. Jesus, have mercy.
Or
- Jesus, you see the needs of the human family and hear their cries. Jesus, have mercy.
- Jesus, you notice the hunger for warmth, the craving for justice and human dignity of friends and neighbors. Christ, have mercy.
- Jesus, you feel the desire in people for hope and meaning in their lives. Jesus, have mercy.
Or
- Christ Jesus, you are the light of the world: Jesus, have mercy.
- Christ Jesus, you open the eyes of the blind: Christ, have mercy.
- Christ Jesus, you shine in our hearts today: Jesus, have mercy.
Opening Prayer
God of light,
open our eyes
to see the needs of those who cry out
or suffer in silence,
and give us the courage to bring them
your healing compassion.
or
God of light,
you are very near to us in our joys and pains.
Give us the eyes of faith and love to see
the mission you have given us in life
and the courage and grace to carry it out.
Make us also clear-sighted enough to see
the needs of people who cry out their misery
or suffer in silence,
that we may bring them your healing compassion
and lead them to you.
Prayers of the Faithful
Let us pray to Jesus, who restores the sight of the blind, so that we too may see the needs of our sisters and brothers everywhere. Let us say in response: God of light, we look to you in hope.
We pray that we be open to the life stories that people have to tell, especially those of Indigenous Australians, refugees and victims of torture, we pray: God of light, we look to you in hope.
We pray for all people who speak out for women and girls deprived of their human rights, we pray: God of light, we look to you in hope.
For asylum seekers who seek protection from civil war, massacre, prejudice and threats of hunger and disaster, may we not be blind to their plight and to their humanity, we pray: God of light, we look to you in hope.
For all refugees who have died in their search for freedom from persecution and torture: may we together challenge inflexible and inhumane policies towards people who seek asylum in this country. We pray: God of light, we look to you in hope.
Fear can cause blindness and dull our vision: may we see that our fears are overcome through our solidarity and cooperation with those who challenge violence, injustice and abuse of power, we pray: God of light, we look to you in hope.
Courage begins with the capacity to see through the eyes of God’s love: may we be open to the concerns of others knowing that when the least of us is threatened, we are all at risk, we pray: God of light, we look to you in hope.
People who are visually impaired perceive what others do not see: may we as a society accept them and their gifts, and appreciate the generosity of their carers, we pray: God of light, we look to you in hope.
Blindness prevents us from recognizing the image of God in other people: may we realise that the indignity and injustice perpetrated against people indiscriminately and unlawfully detained in Guantanamo Bay, we pray: God of light, we look to you in hope.
Concluding Prayer: God of light, you hear our prayers. Give us the eyes to see people and the world with your vision. We make this prayer in Jesus’ name. Amen.
or
Concluding Prayer: Christ Jesus, make us open our eyes, our hands, our heart and so we can look on this world and on people with the same gentle eyes as you, who are our Lord for ever and ever. R/ Amen.
Prayer over the Gifts
God of light,
your presence is reflected throughout the world.
Give us eyes to see in these signs of bread and wine
the love of Jesus
and give us the faith and courage
to make that love effective our world.
or
God of light,
the whole world is a sign of you:
Your beauty is reflected in every living thing.
Give us new eyes to discover
in these signs of bread and wine
the love and the life of Jesus your Son.
Give us faith to see your presence in your people.
Prayer after Communion
God of light,
we recognise Jesus in the breaking of the bread
and as the one who opens our eyes
to the needs of our world.
May this celebration be effective in our lives
by our deeper understanding and response to those needs.
Or
God of light,
we have heard and recognized Jesus
in the breaking of bread.
In his light may we understand
the deeper meaning of suffering and pain.
Final Blessing
- May God give us a full life by being open to compassion. AMEN.
- May Christ Jesus open our eyes to the wonder of life and all creation. AMEM.
- May the Spirit fill us with courage and the faith that makes us whole. AMEN.
Further Resources
In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
Mahatma Gandhi
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Into his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
Emily Dickinson
Everywhere I go - from villages outside Kandy, Sri Lanka, to community centers in Amman, Jordan, to offices at the State Department in Washington, D.C. -- I find people with a similar story. When thousands of people discover that their story is also someone else's story, they have the chance to write a new story together.
Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith and founder of the Interfaith Youth Core
It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don't. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.
Philip Adams, broadcaster
It is the minorities who have made the history of this world. It is the few who have had the courage to take their places at the front; who have been true enough to themselves to speak the truth that was in them; who have dared oppose the established order of things; who have espoused the cause of the suffering, struggling poor; who have upheld without regard to personal consequences the cause of freedom and righteousness. It is they, the heroic, self-sacrificing few who have made the history of the race and who have paved the way from barbarism to civilization. The many prefer to remain upon the popular side.
Eugene Debs
When you invite people to think, you are inviting revolution
Ivana Gabara
When the people liberate their own minds and take a hard clear look at what the 1% is doing and what the 99% should be doing, then serious stuff begins to happen.
Michael Parenti
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Lunch Hour Christ
I see him busking in the mall,
where people hustle by,
his oboe plays a haunting tune
that keeps my woes at bay.
I watch his eyes upon the crowd
that mass of many moods,
he seems to play for one and all
as if they each were gods.
His tune keens down to secret depths,
then joys above the stars,
but few are hearing any sound
their minds fixed on their cares.
I watch him busking in the mall,
his oboe tunes my soul.
There are a few coins at his feet
but grace is not for sale.
I leave him busking in the mall
although its starts to rain,
the shoppers run for dry arcades
while he plays on alone.
He’s waiting there at home for me
when I come in the door,
He asks me how my day turned out
and I kneel on the floor.
© B.D. Prewer 2002
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
John Muir
God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.
John Muir
Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf
Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful
and the powerless
means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Paulo Freire
Not one of God's children can be evil.
At worst, he or she is hurt.
At worst, he or she attacks others,
and blames them for their pain.
But, they are not evil.
Yes, your compassion must go this deep.
There is no human being
who does not deserve your forgiveness.
There is no human being
who does not deserve your love.
Paul Ferrini, American Author and Inspirational Speaker
Of the Good in you I can speak, but not of the Evil.
For what is Evil but Good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
When Good is hungry, it seeks food, even in dark caves,
and when it thirsts, it drinks even of dead waters.
Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese Poet and Philosopher
Sometimes a man imagines that he will lose himself if he gives himself, and keep himself if he hides himself. But the contrary takes place with terrible exactitude.
Ernest Hello, 1828-1885, French Author and Philosopher
That's when I want you - you knower of my emptiness, you unspeaking partner to my sorrow. That's when I need you, God, like food.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted,
then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.
Shoshana Zuboff
Whatever joy there is in the world, all comes from wanting others to be happy; and whatever suffering there is in this world, all comes from wanting oneself to be happy.
Shantideva
Sure, people need Jesus, but most of the time, what they really need is for someone to be Jesus to them.
Reuben Welch
The market for private police and private jails is booming, while all of us - some more, some less - are turning into guards and prisoners: guards keeping an eye on whoever's nearby and prisoners of fear.
Eduardo Galeano
... No ‘terrorist’ gene is known to exist or is likely to be found... Surely the(y), and their supporters were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened, fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What was that? Simple logic says that we must go to the roots of terror. Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidal terrorist can be purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere.
Ouch Borith, Permanent Representative of the Kingdom Of Cambodia To The UN: 10/03/2001
Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.
John Adams
If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
Frank Herbert
When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.
William Blake
The first time it was reported that our friends
were being butchered there was a cry of horror.
Then a hundred were butchered.
But when a thousand were butchered
and there was no end to the butchery,
a blanket of silence spread.
When evil doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out 'stop!'
When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible.
When sufferings become unendurable,
the cries are no longer heard.
The cries, too, fall like rain in summer. -
Bertolt Brecht
There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used.... Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed.
Gil Bailie
Reconciliation is the ultimate aim of non-violence because non-violence holds not only for the absolute inviolability of the human person, both friend and enemy, but maintains that human beings are ultimately one family, brothers and sisters to each other.
Niall O'Brien, Columban priest in the Philippines
God the world-maker is God the care-taker. Humans properly stand over other creatures only as they stand with other creatures, showing them love, giving them space, and granting them 'rights'.
Kim Fabricius
Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered Expression.
Gerard K. O'Neill
We need a type of patriotism that recognizes the virtues of those who are opposed to us. We must get away from the idea that America is to be the leader of the world in everything. She can lead in some things. The old ‘manifest destiny’ idea ought to be modified so that each nation has the manifest destiny to do the best it can - and that without cant, without the assumption of self-righteousness and with a desire to learn to the uttermost from other nations.
Francis John McConnell
Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.
Helen Keller from My Religion
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.
Frank Zappa
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down
Frederick Douglass
Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favour of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate...Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and.. the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
- L. Menchen
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
James Baldwin
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
Thomas Paine
As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.
Clarence Darrow
. . . in America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them.
Gerry Spence, From Freedom to Slavery.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country . . . we're dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . . it is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
Edward Bernays,
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)
This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths.
Simon Heffer
The press is the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man, and improving him as a rational, moral and social being.
Thomas Jefferson
The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses.
Albert Einstein, (1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921
We are not worth more, they are not worth less.
- Brian Willson
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke
What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
John Ruskin
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
Bishop Desmond Tutu
Holy One,
in the midst of suffering,
help us to resist the depression and marginalization
that suffering can bring.
In difficult times help us to remember
who and whose we are in You
and to live with hope
because of your unfailing love.
Amen.
Reflections on the readings
The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland seems to have a connection with today’s gospel. Alice follows a rabbit down a hole and finds herself in a place where different values apply. She encounters animals with a superior air and treat her as inferior. The usual roles are reversed. Alice is trapped in her narrow, human way of viewing life and reality, which for her is the only way to see them. It is a terrifying experience. Her fear is actually unfounded as she gradually experiences a movement from a narrow frame of reference within which she viewed reality and to see the limitations of her assumptions, judgments and stereotypes about life and people.
The disciples also seem trapped within their inherited, rigid expectations of Jesus and his mission. But, Jesus shows them that reality is much deeper, and filled with many more possibilities than their assumptions will allow. The Christian’s life revolves around seeing – and seeing what others do not. Two weeks ago, Jesus’ encountered a rich young man who was caught up in a world of keeping commandments and saving himself. Jesus tried to open him up to change of focus from that of his wealth to the people, people who are poor; from things to people he had not noticed before.
Last week the focus of the disciples was on where they would sit with Jesus when their dreams of triumph and success was realised. They had still not heard and seen what Jesus was about. In their own way they were blind. The blind man Bartimaeus stands in stark contrast to Jesus’ inner circle who sought power and honour for themselves. Bartimaeus also stands in contrast to the ‘in-crowd’ – marginalised, as was the haemorrhaging woman. These lowly people, unacceptable in polite society, demonstrated a trust and faith that neither the Synagogue ruler (5:21ff) nor the rich man (10:17ff) could muster.
Though considered a ‘nobody’, sitting by the roadside, on the margins of life, he realises his dignity as a human being. He also defies those who try to silence him. Bartimaeus sees what others cannot see - Jesus true identity. He is not afraid to proclaim that Jesus has come to liberate humanity from a narrow view of reality; a narrow view of others and the world. ‘When Jesus asks ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ Bartimaeus’ answer is a simple: ‘Master, I want to see.’ When Jesus asked the same question, the disciples wanted to be in seats of power. Here Jesus interrupts his final journey to Jerusalem and to the cross, to perform the last miracle of healing recorded in Mark’s Gospel. The faith that is Jesus acknowledges is not that of a clearly espoused doctrinal confession but the persistent belief that Jesus can make and will make a difference. It is the faith that keeps squeaking when other voices seek to drown them out. The voices come not only from around us but also from within. Who are you to think you deserve something from Christ? With Bartimaeus we see that Jesus is displacing the powers, not to occupy their place, but to make room for a different kind of kingdom where blind beggars are asked, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’
Despite Jesus saying the last shall be first in his way of doing things; his followers are still willing to push this blind man to the edge of the scene or the end of the line of people waiting to receive mercy from Jesus. We see it on the borders of Europe, Australia and the USA as people cry out for mercy- from us. Our churches, neighbourhoods, communities and families are filled with people living with endless challenges and suffering: grief, addictions, life-threatening illness, anxiety about loved ones, extreme poverty, unemployment and violence. Bartimaeus represents those people who are unwilling to remain on the margins, unwilling to listen to others who suggest that things cannot be different; that change is only daydreaming. We have seen that as women and men cry out to be heard, to be understand and seek justice when they have been abused in institutions in this country.
Bartimaeus refuses to listen to those who try to stop them. We are challenged today about what we see. Whom do we shun, rebuke or quieten? What games do we employ to avoid the perennial question: ‘where is your brother or sister’? Who is crying out for understanding and compassion? Whose cries are we not hearing? Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, West Papua, Palestine, trafficked children, women and men, youth and homeless people on our streets, people in the Philippines who lose their land to Australian mining companies, people who seek full recognition of who they are: Indigenous people, women, gay people. Was there not a deep disconnect in the Prime Minister’s apology to people abused as children in our institutions and the ongoing abuse of children in offshore detention centres? Our leaders refuse to see and so do not need to respond.
Jesus comes to heal the blindness that immobilises and lead us to fuller vision and move us from being passive bystanders. Despite sharing truths about himself and his mission, the disciples are often blind and clueless. Today’s gospel asks ‘who is really blind’. Bartimaeus saw Jesus’ compassion and loving kindness; the disciples did not when they tried to send hungry people away, when they intimidated children and wanted their parents to prevent them from coming to Jesus, when they sought power and privilege.
Bartimaeus’ cry is the subversive cry of children, women, sinners, and people in need of healing. It is an incredible act of hope – a hope that things can be different. It is the refusal to remain powerless and passive. These are the cries reach the heart of God.
Bartimaeus’ desire to see raises questions about moral insensitivity and blindness to injustice. Courage begins when we see through the eyes of God's love, touch that breaking heart as our hearts break to feel for another with God’s compassion, and know God's grief and tears over injustice. We might give notional assent to the sacredness of every human being and every living thing, but action on the behalf of others can be brief and intermittent. Our vision can be dulled by the details of daily, life, the tasks before us, counting the cost and our fears. Arundhati Roy in Listening to the Grasshoppers writes on what it means to struggle against injustice: ‘It means keeping an eagle eye on public institutions and demanding accountability. It means putting your ear to the ground and listening to the whispering of the truly powerless. It means giving a forum to myriad voices from the hundreds of resistance movements across the country which are speaking about real things – about bonded labour, marital rape, sexual preferences, women’s wages, uranium dumping, unsustainable mining, weavers’ woes, farmers’ suicides. It means fighting displacement and dispossession and the relentless, everyday violence of abject poverty. Fighting it also means not allowing your newspaper columns and prime-time TV spots to be hijacked by their spurious passions and their staged theatrics, which are designed to divert attention from everything else’. [p.17]
From the ‘roadside’, today’s ‘Bartimaeus’ would see ordinary people passing by; people caught up in their world and blind to others’ needs. Ear-phones shut others out whether on public transport or on the street with their music. Today’s Bartimaeus would see people close their eyes to misfortune or blind themselves with judgments about the idleness or laziness.
So we might check our own vision and our attention. We might consider whom we might not be seeing or whom we might prefer not to focus or whose voices we may be silencing, at home or overseas. Let’s cry out: I want to see… how prejudice blinds us to the goodness of people who are different to us; how living our safe and comfortable lives can distract us from the demands of justice for the poor and marginalised; how apathy and complacency allows evil to flourish because we do not want to get involved in opposing it. The hardest challenge is to learn to look differently, to look comprehensively, to see the world as God does: with empathy and compassion for all creation. Asking to see can be risky. To see can call into question many things we have believed and devastate us. To follow Jesus is to see things as they really are and it might mean dismantling our beliefs, our theology and worldview. How do we survive seeing? We need to be careful what we ask for!! When we see things with Jesus’ eyes we will see suffering, betray, death, many broken places in our world. But, a mature faith will look at those places and see them. But when we look at what is ugliest, hardest, and fragile in our world we also see (eventually) resurrection.
Pope Francis keeps emphasizing that mercy, tenderness and compassion made concrete are what make a difference to our world. What difference it would make to our communities if we took the time to encourage people in pain to talk about it, if we made the space for them to be heard?
A final challenging quote from Arundhati Roy: ‘The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence; either way you are accountable.’
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE TWENTY NINTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, 2018
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE TWENTY NINTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, 2018
29th Sunday of the Year
October 21st, 2018
Suggested formula for recognition of indigenous people and their land.
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we are now gathered,
(the ……) and recognise that it continues to be sacred to them.
We hail them: as guardians of the earth and of all things that grow and breed in the soil; as trustees of the waters – [the seas, the streams and rivers, the ponds and the lakes] - and the rich variety of life in those waters.
We thank them for passing this heritage to every people since the Dreamtime.
We acknowledge the wrongs done to them by newcomers to this land and we seek to be partners with them in righting these wrongs and in living together in peace and harmony.
As we do this, we must also acknowledge the loss of their hunting grounds,
the destruction of their ceremonial places and sacred sites,
and the great loss of life from all kinds of violence and disease,
and that the land was never given away.
or
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we stand
We pay our respects to them for their care of the land
May we walk gently and respectfully upon the land
that was never given away.
or
We acknowledge the …………………….people the first inhabitants of this land.
We honour them for their care of the land
on which we gather today, and with them,
and as we pray for justice and their constitutional recognition
may we also be mindful that the land has never been given away.
People try nonviolence for a week, and when it 'doesn't work' they go back to violence, which hasn't worked for centuries.
Theodore Roszak
If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, i think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
Wendell Berry
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke
Readings
First Reading: Isaiah 53:10-11
Responsorial Psalm: Ps 33:4-5, 18-19, 20, 22
- (22) Lord, let your mercy be on us, as we place our trust in you.
Second Reading: Hebrews 4:14-16
Gospel Reading: Mark 10:35-45 (or 10:42-45)
Penitential Prayer
- You have come amongst us as one who sympathises with our weakness. Jesus, have mercy.
- You have come amongst not to be served but to serve. Christ, have mercy.
- You assure us that the great in your reign serve one another. Jesus, have mercy.
or
Penitential Prayer
- Christ Jesus, you came to give your life for us: Jesus, have mercy.
- Christ Jesus, you are the servant leader: Christ, have mercy.
- Christ Jesus, you call us to be like you: Jesus, have mercy.
Opening Prayer
Servant God, [or: Good and gracious God]
you search the depths of our heart
and direct us in ways to give you undivided service.
Grant us your people
the boldness to desire a place in your realm by our service,
the courage to drink the cup of suffering,
and the grace to find in service the joy you promise.
Prayer of the Faithful
Introduction: As we pray for the world, the church and for ourselves, we ask God who serves us that we may be inspired to serve others. The response to each prayer is: Servant God, hear our prayer.
- For the church: may the inspiration and witness of St Oscar Romero and St Paul VI cause it to look out to the world; look at it with love and tenderness and respond to the needs of our sisters and brothers with courage: We pray: Servant God, hear our prayer.
- For all people enslaved in mines and factories; bonded labour; for your people forced to become soldiers, children and adults exploited in the sex industry and used as commodities; and those forced to work for low wages, may they find liberation from their situations and have their dignity acknowledged and restored. We pray: Servant God, hear our prayer
- For us who are consumers, that we may be aware of what we support through our daily words, actions and purchases; and respect the dignity of our sisters and brother. We pray: Servant God, hear our prayer.
- For all church leaders, that in their service to the church and the world they hear the words of Jesus ‘do not be afraid’ and strive with courage and integrity to work for interfaith relations and consistently call for peace among peoples and between them. We pray: Servant God, hear our prayer.
- For our brothers and sisters throughout Asia and the Pacific, especially in the Indonesia, that continue to suffer the effects of earthquakes, typhoons and flooding and made worse by extractive industries: may all who have lost loved ones, homes and livelihoods find relief and healing through the love and kindness of others. We pray: Servant God, hear our prayer.
- For our country: may we look with confidence in a spirit of cooperation as we confront the difficult issues of our time – for peace with justice, for economic recovery, environmental responsibility, access for all to health care, adequate shelter and education. We pray: Servant God, hear our prayer.
- For our political and religious leaders: that they may deal with each other and with all people in their care with respect and seek to work together collaboratively rather than by domination. We pray: Servant God, hear our prayer
- For the United Nations in its work for international peace, development and education: may leaders of nations respect international law and vigorously renew their moral and financial support for the UN. We pray: Servant God, hear our prayer.
- For all refugees who have died in their search for freedom from persecution and torture: we pray that Australia will adopt more flexible and humane policies towards people who seek asylum in this country. We pray: Servant God, hear our prayer.
- For the many people who serve us in our daily lives and who we take for granted: we pray especially for those in the medical profession, nurses, teachers and the hospitality industry. We pray: Servant God, hear our prayer.
- For ourselves: that we may have the capacity to take risks to speak the truth and act justly without being paralysed by fear when confronted by the unjust demands of those in authority. We pray: Servant God, hear our prayer.
Concluding Prayer: God of freedom, we pray that we may be continually converted to the Gospel and freed from the urge to seek power and position and profit at the expense of others.
Prayer over the Gifts
Servant God, [or: Good and gracious God]
Jesus serves us at table
in the signs of bread and wine.
May the love of Jesus help us
to understand that the great are those who serve
and commit themselves to give life to others.
Deliver Us
Deliver us, O God who serves, from every evil,
keep us from the urge
to seek positions of honour or power
at the expense of others.
Help us to pay with our service
the cost of peace and love,
as we wait in joyful hope
for the coming among us
of our Savior, Jesus the Christ. R/ For the kingdom...
Prayer after Communion
Servant God, [or: Good and gracious God]
in this sacrament
you have made yourself known to us.
Help us to know that
whenever we walk in strange places,
we see your footprint;
whenever we meet with unknown faces,
we see your image;
and whenever we stumble into the unexpected joy of service,
we feel your heartbeat.
Final Blessing
- May the blessing of God who creates and upholds, be with you. AMEN.
- May the blessing of God who redeems and endures, be with you. AMEN.
- May the blessing of God who inspires and leads us, be with you. AMEN.
Parish Notice
October 21 World Mission Sunday
October 24 United Nations Day and beginning of Disarmament Week. This observance begins on the anniversary of the founding of the United Nations in 1945. All countries are invited to highlight the danger of the arms race, the effects of the sale of all arms, the need to cease the propagation of weapons and increase public awareness of the urgent task of disarmament.
October 26 Return of Uluru to the traditional owners, the Anangu people in 1985
More Resources
‘It is not possible to remain indifferent before the knowledge that human beings are bought and sold like goods! I think of the adoption of children for the extraction of their organs, of women deceived and obliged to prostitute themselves, of workers exploited and denied rights or a voice, and so on. And this is human trafficking. It is precisely on this level that we need to make a good examination of conscience: how many times have we permitted a human being to be seen as an object, to be put on show in order to sell a product or to satisfy an immoral desire? The human person ought never to be sold or bought as if he or she were a commodity. Whoever uses human persons in this way and exploits them, even if indirectly, becomes an accomplice of injustice.’
Pope Francis, March 5, 2014
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers,
half-truths, superficial relationships,
so that you will live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice,
oppression, and exploitation of people,
so that you will work for justice, equity, and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain,
rejection, starvation, and war,
so that you will reach out your hands to comfort them
and change their pain to joy.
And God bless you with the foolishness to think
that you can make a difference in the world,
so that you will do the things which others tell you cannot be done.
Source Unknown
Only bad things happen quickly…….virtually all the happiness-producing processes in our lives take time, usually a long time: learning new things, changing old behaviors, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among life’s primary virtues.
Gordon Livingston
The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter.
Paulo Coelho
Without patience, we will learn less in life. We will see less. We will feel less. We will hear less. Ironically, rush and more usually mean less.
Mother Teresa
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… live everything. Live the question now. Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
We are vulnerable on all sides, in and out, up and down, past, present, and future. We fear vulnerability. It takes a great deal of living to discover that, actually, vulnerability comes to us more as friend than as enemy. Vulnerability may be the greatest strength we have. Vulnerability bonds us to one another and makes us a community in league with life. Because we need one another, we live looking for good in others, without which we ourselves can not survive, will not grow, can not become what we ourselves have the potential to be. [Change in our lives and in our communities cannot happen without this]. Vulnerability is the gift given to us to enable us to embed ourselves in the universe. We are born dependent and spend the rest of our lives coming to wholeness. It is a delicate and dangerous process, requiring and untold amount of support and an amazing degree of forgiveness as we stumble and grope our way from one new part of life to another. Vulnerability, in fact, is the one hallmark of life which, try as we might, we can not cure. Vulnerability, therefore is clearly part of the spiritual process, clearly part of the human endeavor.
Joan D. Chittister from Heart of Flesh
The healing of our present woundedness may lie in recognizing and reclaiming the capacity we have to heal each other, the enormous power in the simplest of human relationships: the strength of a touch, the blessing of forgiveness, the grace of someone else taking you just as you are and finding in you an unsuspected goodness. Everyone alive has suffered. It is the wisdom gained from our wounds and from our own experiences of suffering that makes us able to heal. Becoming expert has turned out to be less important than remembering and trusting the wholeness in myself and everyone else. Expertise cures, but wounded people can best be healed by other wounded people. Only other wounded people can understand what is needed, for the healing of suffering is compassion, not expertise.
Rachel Naomi Remen
Even here, in the silence of this room, I am not alone. This silence is alive with the unfolding of other lives and with the turning and movement of the Earth. I began to sense my connection to the world’s pain and my part in healing it. I realized that my transformation of pain into love was an act of service for humankind. By embracing my existence, I could bring courage to others to face their own pain and to acknowledge what it had to teach them.
Yael Betheim from The Unhealed Life
What do we want the church to do? We ask for its presence with us, beside us, as Christ among us. We ask the church to sacrifice with the people for social change, for justice and for love of brother and sister. We don't ask for words. We ask for deeds. We don't ask for paternalism. We ask for servanthood.
César Chávez
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of [people] we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage is to sacrifice ourselves for others in totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be [human] is to suffer for others. God help us!’
Cesar Chavez
The more clearly we can focus our attention on
the wonders and realities of the universe about us,
the less taste we shall have for destruction.
Rachel Carson
A Jewish Blessing
O God, you have called us to peace,
For You are Peace itself.
May we have the vision to see that each of us,
in some measure, can help to realize these aims:
Where there are ignorance and suspicion,
Let there be enlightenment and knowledge.
Where there are prejudice and hatred,
Let there be acceptance and love.
Where there are fear and suspicion,
Let there be confidence and trust.
Where there are tyranny and oppression,
Let there be freedom and justice.
Where there are poverty and disease,
Let there be prosperity and health.
Where there are strife and discord,
Let there be harmony and peace.
Indian Proverb on Courage
Do not be afraid of standing up for what you believe;
what you do, no matter how small, will make a difference.
A candle is a protest at midnight.
It is a non-conformist.
It says to the darkness,
‘I beg to differ’.
Human rights in the sense of human solidarity has created a new universal and equal language going beyond racial, gender, ethnic or religious boundaries. That is why we consider it a doorway to dialogue for people of all socioeconomic groups and all ideologies.
Munir Said Thalib, Indonesian human rights activists murdered September 6, 2004, on board a Garuda flight bound from Jakarta to Amsterdam.
The Indians, Columbus reported, ‘are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone....’
From his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were ‘naked as the day they were born,’ they showed ‘no more embarrassment than animals.’ Columbus later wrote: ‘Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.’
Howard Zinn, excerpt from A People's History of the United States
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/Columbus_PeoplesHx.html
Christopher Columbus is a symbol, not of a man, but of imperialism. ... Imperialism and colonialism are not something that happened decades ago or generations ago, but they are still happening now with the exploitation of people. ... The kind of thing that took place long ago in which people were dispossessed from their land and forced out of subsistence economies and into market economies -- those processes are still happening today.
John Mohawk, Seneca, 1992
When shall it be said in any country of the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance or distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes not oppressive; the rational world is my friend because I am friend of its happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and government.
Thomas Paine
The vested interests - if we explain the situation by their influence - can only get the public to act as they wish by manipulating public opinion, by playing either upon the public's indifference, confusions, prejudices, pugnacities or fears. And the only way in which the power of the interests can be undermined and their maneuvers defeated is by bringing home to the public the danger of its indifference, the absurdity of its prejudices, or the hollowness of its fears; by showing that it is indifferent to danger where real danger exists; frightened by dangers which are nonexistent.
Sir Norman Angell 1872 – 1967
Iniquity, committed in this world, produces not fruit immediately, but, like the earth, in due season, and advancing by little and little, it eradicates the man who committed it. ...justice, being destroyed, will destroy; being preserved, will preserve; it must never therefore be violated.
Manu 1200 bc.
Beat me with the truth, don't torture me with lies.
Author - Unknown
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I will be harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject i do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.
William Lloyd Garrison (1805 - 1879)
Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
Bertrand Russell
Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion;
it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers;
it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favour of systematic hatred.
Bertrand Russell, Unpopular essays
I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not so desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
The Foolishness of God
Christian preaching and testimony is rooted in the apparent absurdity, the foolishness of God, the foolishness of the cross. This preaching is not a controlled rational account of moral norms or theological propositions so much as a dangerous attempt to convey something of an experience of power and liberating grace flowing out of the heart of desolation and darkness. It is a proclamation, a lifting up, of the crucified Jesus as Saviour and conqueror. Its power is inseparable from its paradoxical character. It is a mistake to try to eliminate, reduce, or explain away the scandal and offensive character of the cross. In the same way there is a paradoxical character about committed Christians, a strange and attractive combination of calm and unpredictability, of stability and surprise. Christian life is never a routine of foregone conclusions but is always open to the strange and the unexpected. As the fool disrupts the monotony of life, so the grace of God is subversive and destabilising in its strange work. Martin Luther King once described Christian people as ‘creatively maladjusted’, transformed non-conformists. Our task as holy fools for Christ's sake, creatively maladjusted to the wisdom of the world, is to hold fast to the folly of the crucified one, knowing that it is in his foolishness that our wholeness lies.
Kenneth Leech in We Preach Christ Crucified, [Cambridge & Boston: Cowley, 1994.]
Reflections on the readings…
In recent weeks, Jesus has taken us on a journey towards Jerusalem whilst instructing his disciples about what it means to follow him. Today, we face the difficult changes necessary to be an authentic follower of Jesus. Jesus turns human assumptions about what really matters on its head; ‘greatness’ is measured in God’s reign by ‘service.’ This is the message he embodied. In the upside-down (or right-side up) Reign of God, greatness is defined very differently from the power, fame and fortune criteria that most human systems use. In God’s reign, ‘greatness’ is found in the role of a ‘servant.’ This was exemplified and embodied in Jesus: ‘For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve….’ Which, finally will cause him to ‘give his life as a ransom for many.’
Despite the obsession with adversarial political discourse and the allure of fame and wealth, it is encouraging that we can still honour people, who give themselves in service of others, rather than leaders who use their power for self-aggrandisement, or corporate executives that amass huge fortunes, or celebrities who become addicted to their own fame and influence. It is the heroic men and women who bring the greatest healing to the world. The temptation to seek the bigger and better ministry, organisation, impact or influence can lead us to be arrogant, and to seek to manipulate or dominate others according to our own agendas. But, what we need desperately is a culture of ‘greatness’ that celebrates self-giving, humility, service and small acts of contribution to the greater good. The creation of this culture begins with us when we choose not to get caught up in the hype over the latest celebrity or movement, but to embrace and celebrate the humble, serving people around us.
In a world where power is important and is often abused, we are asked to do things differently, to have the heart of a servant, to be countercultural. Today, Jesus asks to give up unilateral power that takes no account of consequences for others, to refuse to dominate, to refuse to coerce any person, community or group of people. Pope Francis is being attacked on all sides for ‘proclaiming the good news of Jesus. These attacks are from the within the church, modern scribes and Pharisees who of many who are closest to him. A former English bishop (cf. The Tablet, October 13, 2018) said that many people have been encouraged Francis’ leadership. His constant emphasis on love and mercy and his encouragement to understand the importance of celebrating the grace in life before condemning failures and irregularities; to defer judgment in favour of encouragement or invitation. Last Sunday, Oscar Romero was canonised after being assassinated by people within the church for condemning their violence, abuse of power and accumulation of wealth. Church leaders did not always support his leadership exemplified by being a strong voice on behalf of the crucified peoples of his country. Pope Francis is also faces opposition mainly from within the church, because like Jesus he seems to be undermining their precious vision of the law and subverting the power over ordinary people. Jesus’ words to the disciples, ‘You know that those who are recognised as rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones make their authority over them felt’ still apply. Jesus has up-turned the value of power in favour of service, ‘But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all. For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.’ If the disciples had really listened to Jesus, they would have known that being close to him in his ‘glory’ meant to be close to him in his humiliation, suffering and death. Genuine leadership does not use coercion or power to make things happen, but serves and stands alongside people where they can grow and also become ‘servants’ of others.
It is by having the heart of a servant that enables us to be like the One (cf. Hebrews) who is touched by our infirmities, able to sympathise with our weaknesses and be not aloof from pain and suffering. This is not always possible from positions of power and privilege. William Sloane Coffin (d. 2006), a pastor of Riverside Church in New York in the late 1970s, encouraged his congregation to share his sympathies about the injustice of war and segregation. Having been active in the civil rights movement and in antiwar demonstrations, he was arrested a number of times because of his convictions. When his son was killed in a car accident, someone tried to comfort him with the cliché, ‘It is God’s will’. Coffin responded, ‘The hell it is! When my boy was killed, God was the first who cried’ (Peter Gomes, The Good Book, HarperCollins, San Francisco: 1996). One who exercises power cannot respond this way. When Mark was written, long after Jesus’ Resurrection, the community of disciples was changing and taking the shape of the Roman Empire: leaders had special designations, special titles, special garments, and power over people.
John and James failed to understand Jesus’ meaning. Mark explains again that Jesus’ passion and death come with the experience of being faithful to God’s word. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus declares, ‘Whoever is near me is near the fire, and whoever is far from me is far from the Reign of God.’ In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a well-known journalist and Kremlin critic and, was murdered in Moscow for exposing corruption, violence and oppression in Russia. This has been the fate of journalists in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Turkey when they expose corruption, injustice and violation of human rights. Oscar Romero continues to speak a prophetic word as his demands for justice continue to be echoed. He was the enemy of cover-up and ‘spin’ challenging the many ‘Nicodemus Christians’ today who are afraid to speak out publicly about the issues that affect human beings. In his context for many survival meant silence. Today, power and wealth also force people to be silent.
‘Whoever is near me is near the fire, and whoever is far from me is far from the Reign of God’. Jesus’ way requires us to be in solidarity with the afflicted, the wounded, the bruised and brutalised, the ones led astray, the oppressed - the prisoner, the asylum seeker, the homeless person, the struggling young person, the person living with mental illness. Last week I referred to a minister who said that the church should go to hell. He meant that the church should go to the hell holes of the world to be with people who are dying, suffering, perishing, oppressed. It cannot be done from positions of power and privilege. Solidarity requires that we rage against organisations or people that devalue people; that forget and neglect the humanity of others.
Jesus continually reverses the prevailing order. He has come and become one of us not to be served by to serve. He is affected, touched by our experiences and the experiences of others – especially the marginalised, the vulnerable, the suffering. For Romero, being a bishop meant picking up dead bodies. Poverty, hardship, disaster, pain and suffering are never God’s will, but that God is the first to weep when these occur – and hierarchy, domination and control are not part of his plan. Politicians (and kings and popes and bishops) may believe that their power is God-given – but the exercise of political and economic power is not his way, nor of those who follow him.
God’s sacred image in our sisters and brothers cries out for response. To choose to ignore the truth by closing our eyes or ears is to fail to appreciate the consequence of the ‘baptism’ Jesus asks of us. We have been given a power in the gospel: a power for life, life for others…. We must use it. We need to flesh out the tenets of our faith in acts for justice and human rights. We need to stand in solidarity at the places where violence is taking place around us. We can’t do everything, but we can do something.
The gospel today gives us hope. When beset with attitudes of competition; misuse of power, had an inordinate focus on possessions rather than people, or been deaf to Jesus’ teachings as were the disciples, we find forgiveness on offer. God’s Spirit continues to be given despite our failures, and surprisingly today, each day, we are again sent to the world, we are challenged to learn what real prominence in Jesus Reign is: service and self-giving. God has a dream for us ….it is a dream that we will all fall in love - in love with Jesus present in others and in creation - a love that will cause us to help create a world of hospitality and compassion. Let’s not forget how powerful the influence of an attentive parent or grandparent or teacher can be. Let’s not forget what a difference small act of kindness and service can make to our neighbourhoods and communities.
In the words of the prophet Micah: ‘And what does the Lord require of you? Only this: to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.’
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE TWENTY EIGHTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, 2018
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE 28th SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, 2018
28th Sunday of the Year
October 14th 2018
Suggested formula for recognition of indigenous people and their land.
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we are now gathered,
(the ……) and recognise that it continues to be sacred to them.
We hail them: as guardians of the earth and of all things that grow and breed in the soil; as trustees of the waters – [the seas, the streams and rivers, the ponds and the lakes] - and the rich variety of life in those waters.
We thank them for passing this heritage to every people since the Dreamtime.
We acknowledge the wrongs done to them by newcomers to this land and we seek to be partners with them in righting these wrongs and in living together in peace and harmony.
As we do this, we must also acknowledge the loss of their hunting grounds,
the destruction of their ceremonial places and sacred sites,
the great loss of life from all kinds of violence and disease,
and that the land was never given away.
‘I want to tell you right away how much
the Church esteems and loves you,
and how much she wishes to assist you
in your spiritual and material needs.’
Pope John Paul II, Alice Springs 1986 to the Aboriginal people..
God of peace and life,
speak to the hearts of those responsible
for the fate of peoples,
stop the `logic' of revenge and retaliation,
with your Spirit suggest new solutions,
generous and honorable gestures,
room for dialogue and patient waiting
which are more fruitful than
the hurried deadlines of war.
John Paul II [adapted for gender sensitivity]
If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
Wendell Berry
‘Our revolution comes about through tenderness,
through the joy which always becomes
closeness and compassion,
and leads us to get involved in
and to serve the life of others.’
Pope Francis
Readings
First Reading Wisdom 7:7-11
Responsorial Psalm Ps 90:12-13, 14-15,16-17
Second Reading Hebrews 4:12-13
Gospel Mark 10:17-30 (or 10:17-27)
Penitential Rite
• You look kindly upon your people and heal their brokenness. Jesus, have mercy.
• You teach us wisdom and enable us to discern your presence in the world. Christ, have mercy.
• You challenge us to appreciate your gifts and share them. Jesus, have mercy.
Penitential Rite [Alternative]
• Your Word is living and effective in our lives. Jesus, have mercy.
• Your Word penetrates our heart and soul and enables us to discern your will. Christ, have mercy.
• Your Word exposes all things. Jesus, have mercy.
Penitential Rite [Alternative]
• Christ Jesus, you are the Word of God dwelling in our midst: Jesus, have mercy.
• Christ Jesus, you are the Word who speaks to us today: Christ, have mercy.
• Christ Jesus, you are the Word who can change our lives: Jesus, have mercy.
Opening Prayer
God of Wisdom,
your loving kindness is the foundation of our lives
and guides all the moments of our day.
Your word probes the motives of our hearts
and your love accompanies us on our journey.
May we courageously pursue the practice of good works
and be open to your call to respond to the Gospel in new ways.
Prayer over the Gifts
God of Wisdom,
May the prayers and gifts
we offer in faith and love
serve to open our minds to your presence
amongst all people.
Prayer after Communion
God of Wisdom,
May the body and blood of Jesus which we have shared
strengthen us and give us courage
to share our lives to promote the good of all your people.
Prayers of the Faithful
Introduction: Let us pray for the wisdom to appreciate God’s gifts with gratitude and use them for the good of all: The response is: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That the people who have suffered horrific hurricanes and tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan will quickly, despite the traumas and losses suffered, find ways their communities restored to acceptable standards through the love and support of each other, rescuers, doctors, nurses and other kind people. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That the people of West Papua, struggling under oppression and persecution will find hope from the support they are receiving from a few neighbouring countries in the Pacific, freedom from oppression, and continue to persevere in their struggle for liberation. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That the lives of Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Oscar Romero may fill us with gratitude and hope, on this weekend of their canonisation, and that our hearts will burn for responding to God’s word coming to us through the lives of people who are poor and vulnerable. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That the leaders of all Churches may not sacrifice their values for power, success and ambition but commit themselves to promote human dignity and gospel values of peace, justice and compassion. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That the leaders of all faiths may speak with voices that promote good relations within their communities and between other communities. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That world leaders will see that the rules of international trade change where they benefit the rich, undermine and destroy the livelihood of the poor, and wreak havoc on the planet’s ecosystems. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That, during this Anti-Poverty Week, all in the church will have the courage to embrace Jesus’ command: “Go sell what you have and give to the poor,” and use our wealth for the sake of the Gospel. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That the developed countries of the world will have the wisdom to recognise that they inflict injustice on other countries by unfair trade practices, refusal to cancel debts and failure to abide by international law. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That the lonely figures of dissent within society and the churches may continue to courageously expose injustice, lies and deceit. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That people who suffer from any kind of trauma especially of accidents and war find through the patient presence of others healing for themselves and reconciliation with those who have offended. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That people engaged in the mass media will promote the values of life by seeking the truth and exposing injustice in politics and business. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That parents and teachers will challenge the young to live for things that matter and inspire them to give themselves generously to others. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That we may all, through the teaching of the Gospel, come to a new understanding of justice where giving to the poor is a redistribution of wealth that goes beyond alms-giving and charity. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
That Australians will not take for granted but be grateful for the riches of culture that have been inherited from the First Peoples of this land and from those who have come here from other lands. We pray: God of Wisdom, fill us with your love.
Concluding Prayer: Good and gracious God, Creator of all life and all that is good, hear our prayers this day. Make us mindful of our blessings and fill us with gratitude for your care and love for us.
Parish Notices
October 14 Canonisation of Oscar Romero and Paul VI.
October 14-20 Anti-Poverty Week
Resources https://www.antipovertyweek.org.au/resources/promotional-materials
October 17 International Day for the Eradication of Poverty
October 19 17th Anniversary of the Sinking of SIEV X with the loss of 353 children, women and men and the shame of Australia’s abandonment of responsibility and subsequent lies around the tragedy.
Resources
Sacred land, Sacred Lives: Prayer for Indigenous Peoples’ Day October 12, 2009
God, the Holy Spirit, we come to you:
strengthen us as we journey through this life.
We of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes have, through time,
acknowledged the sacredness of the earth.
We acknowledge the earth in prayer in all the directions of the earth:
To the north. To the south. To the east. To the west.
The sacredness of all the plants and those we harvest
are treated as living beings.
Our grandfather river is sacred to us
and we benefit from and respect our river.
Our ancestors taught us to respect the earth
and use its gifts with care.
We are saddened by those who exploit
the resources of the earth only for profit.
Our river was destroyed, our land was stolen
and we know the promise that our government
would leave us on the land we loved
‘as long as the grass shall grow’
was a lie,
as were the government’s promises to all native people.
Although we seem helpless as this exploitation continues
we continue to use our influence
to protect the small portion of the earth
which has been our home for centuries.
We ask that the Spirit give us the strength and grace
to continue to protect our land and our life.
Reba Walker Worship Ways vol. 8 no. 3 October 12, 2009
I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can experience.
Mother Teresa.
To be human is to be responsible. That is the inner meaning of the ‘dominion’ of Genesis 1:26, which is a dominion not of domination but of stewardship, taking care of the world's back yard. God the world-maker is God the care-taker. Humans properly stand over other creatures only as they stand with other creatures, showing them love, giving them space, and granting them ‘rights.’
Kim Fabricius Propositions on Christian Theology
A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson In Defense of Poetry
When the mask falls and the core of our being is revealed, it soon becomes obvious that we are religious by nature, that religion is the secret dowry of our being.
Johannes Metz Poverty of Spirit
Today we are worshipping the gods of metal, the bomb. We are putting our trust in physical power, militarism, and nationalism. The bomb, not God, is our security and strength...We must all become prophets... We must all do something for peace. We must stop this insanity of worshipping the gods of metal. We must take a stand against evil and idolatry. This is our destiny at the most critical time of human history. But it's also the greatest opportunity ever offered to any group of people in the history of our world—to save our world from complete annihilation.
Father George Zabelka former Catholic Air Force Chaplin, speaking at a Pax Christi conference in August, 1985
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.
Arundhati Roy
According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, 'Grow, grow.'
Barbara Brown Taylor from An Altar in the World
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil.
Gerard Manley Hopkins God's Grandeur
If you're going to care about the fall of the sparrow you can't pick and choose who's going to be the sparrow. It's everybody.
Madeleine L'Engle
It is a blessed thing to know that no power on earth, no temptation, no human frailty can dissolve what God holds together.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Beautiful is the moment in which we understand that we are no more than an instrument of God; we live only as long as God wants us to live; we can do only as much as God makes us able to; we are only as intelligent as God would have us be.
Archbishop Oscar Romero From Romero's last homily, March 23, 1980
God has no other hands than ours.
Dorothee Sölle
As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.
Bertrand Russell
If you think of humanity as one large body, then war is like suicide, or at best, self-mutilation.
Jerome P. Crabb.
If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
What is the unmistakable mark of a wise (man)? It is Love, Love for all humanity.
Sri Sathya Sai Baba
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi
A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.
H.G. Wells
If we work in marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity:.
Daniel Webster
Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently and all for the same reason.
José Maria de Eça de Queiroz
The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.
Federico Garcia Lorca, Spanish Poet and Playwright, 1898-1936
I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
Booker T. Washington
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.
John Adams - Second US President, 1797 - 1801
Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.
William Godwin, (1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist.
I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
Booker T. Washington
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) French economist, statesman and author
It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government.
Thomas Paine
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
Wendell Berry
Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.
Anaïs Nin
Let's be realists, let's dream the impossible.
Che Guevara
Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller
Because a fellow has failed once or twice, or a dozen times, you don't want to set him down as a failure till he's dead or loses his courage--and that's the same thing.
George Lorimer
The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.
Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.
Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi (1828-1910) Russian writer Source: On Life and Essays on Religion
Come to the edge, He said. They said, We are afraid. Come to the edge, He said. They came. He pushed them...and they flew.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Truth is treason in an empire of lies
Ron Paul
Then what is freedom? It is the will to be responsible to ourselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Twilight of the Idols, 1888
The powerful have invoked God at their side in this war, so that we will accept their power and our weakness as something that has been established by divine plan. But there is no god behind this war other than the god of money, nor any right other than the desire for death and destruction. Today there is a ‘NO’ which shall weaken the powerful and strengthen the weak: the ‘NO’ to war.
Subcomandante Marcos, No to war, February 16, 2003
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, ‘War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.
Immanuel Kant
When faced with a choice between confronting an unpleasant reality and defending a set of comforting and socially accepted beliefs, most people choose the later course.
W. Lance Bennett.
Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are victims just as much as the Iraqis of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs.
Arundhati Roy, Tide? Or Ivory Snow? Public Power in the Age of Empire, August 24, 2004
The best way to honour the fallen is to stop making more of them.
War veteran
The way society responds to the needs of the poor through its public policies is the litmus test of its justice or injustice.
Economic Justice for All, #123
When Did We See You
I was hungry and starving
and you were full;
Thirsty
and you were watering your garden;
With no road to follow, and without hope,
and you called the police and were happy that they took me prisoner;
Barefoot and with ragged clothing,
and you were saying: ‘I have nothing to wear,
tomorrow I will buy something new.’
Sick
and you asked, ‘Is it infectious?’
Prisoner,
and you said: ‘That is where all those of your class should be.’
Lord, have mercy!
Author unknown
To My Mother
I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.
So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,
prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,
and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it
already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,
where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.
Wendell Berry, ‘To My Mother’ from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Poet, novelist, and environmentalist, Wendell Berry (1934—) lives on a farm in Port Royal, Kentucky near his birthplace.
War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
Karl Kraus (1874–1936)
Throughout history,
it has been the inaction of those who could have acted;
the indifference of those who should have known better;
the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most;
that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
Haile Selassie
The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
Albert Einstein
Real care is not ambiguous. Real care excludes indifference and is the opposite of apathy. The word ‘care’ finds its roots in the Gothic ‘Kara’ which means lament. The basic meaning of care is: to grieve, to experience sorrow, to cry out with. I am very much struck by this background of the word care because we tend to look at caring as an attitude of the strong toward the weak, of the powerful toward the powerless, of the ‘haves’ toward the ‘have-nots. And, in fact, we feel quite uncomfortable with an invitation to enter into someone’s pain before doing something about it.
Still, when we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares.
You might remember moments in which you were called to be with a friend who had lost a wife or husband, child or parent. What can you say, do, or propose at such a moment? There is a strong inclination to say: ‘Don’t cry; the one you loved is in the hands of God.’ ‘Don’t be sad because there are so many good things left worth living for.’ But are we ready to really experience our powerlessness in the face of death and say: ‘I do not understand. I do not know what to do but I am here with you.’ Are we willing to not run away from the pain, to not get busy when there is nothing to do and instead stand rather in the face of death together with those who grieve?
Henri Nouwen (1932-1996)
Our men . . . have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up.... Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to ‘make them talk,’ and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later. . . stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.’
Philadelphia Ledger in 1901, from its Manila [Philippines] correspondent during the US war with Spain for the control of the Philippines
We reject [homosexuals], treat them as pariahs, and push them outside our church communities, and thereby we negate the consequences of their baptism and ours. We make them doubt that they are the children of God, and this must be nearly the ultimate blasphemy. We blame them for something that is becoming increasingly clear they can do little about.
Desmond Tutu, former Anglican Archbishop of South Africa
... the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret.
Robert Parry, investigative reporter and author
They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war.
Eugene Debs
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous.
Carl Sagan
Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.
Dwight David Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States, 1890-1969
Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.
Plato, Ancient Greek philosopher (428/427-348/347 B.C.)
A rationality that has brought us into the age of nuclear weaponry and global economic meltdown invites some sharp questions, to put it mildly.
Rowan Williams (http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/10285)
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
Aristotle
You may have an army of bleeding hearts tending the sorrowful and the hungry and yet not see an end to the causes of hunger and thirst. Working for real change is vital.
Melba Maggay, Filipina evangelical theologian
Many Idols Mark 10:17-22
One idolised wealth,
another hungered for fame,
so they went sadly away.
One loved career,
one the latest fashion,
and they went proudly away.
One lived through her children,
one lived for his farm,
so they went busily away.
One fed on the adulation of fans,
sport was another’s passion,
so they went impatiently away.
One had the gambling lust,
another’s was sex,
so they went madly away.
One wanted to be waited on,
one wanted to lay about,
so they went sluggishly away.
One was hooked on sport,
one on the next drug fix,
so they went hurriedly away.
One lived for churchly honours,
one for churchly clout,
so they went blindly away.
© B.D. Prewer 2002
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) German Dramatist
Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.
Henry Miller (1891-1980) American writer
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a ‘pet’ notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.
John Dewey
Reflections on the readings……..
Our world is full of ‘shadow people’ – unseen sufferers who struggle daily with poverty, dread and infectious diseases, lack of clean water and sanitation, few resources and fewer opportunities. For many, these people remain unseen even when they live next door, are ‘out of mind.’ It is easy to see these ‘shadow people’ as ‘issues’ to be resolved where helping them without their involvement involves an uneven power dynamic where we can be seen as ‘saviours’ coming to ‘rescue’ the ‘poor.’ It seems that a powerful healing work of justice is to really notice the ‘shadow people,’ to see them as people and acknowledge and honour their humanity and respond to them in friendship and solidarity. We can only experience traces of God in our lives but those traces disrupt, challenge and make demands on. But, this God shows up explicitly and concretely in one specific place – the ‘other,’ the friend, the neighbour, the stranger, whom we encounter daily, and whose needs impinge upon us.
Anti-Poverty Week begins today. We are reminded of increasing inequality in this country and around the world. One billion children worldwide live in poverty. The UNICEF reports that 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. These are not statistics but human beings, each with a face, relationships - and dreams that are continually being dashed as countries close their borders, communities erect walls, nations spend more and more on weapons of war, neglect people affected by climate change. All these add to people living in poverty.
Jesus told the man who wanted to inherit eternal life: ‘Go sell what you have and give to the poor.’ Today’s Gospel contains an ‘inconvenient truth’ if we listen. I recalls the public interchanges between Fr Bob Maguire in Melbourne with ‘head office’ when faced with accusations relating to his mission amongst the poor. He was accused of using too many resources on behalf of the poor and needy rather than handing it over to ‘head office’. Like Mark, Maguire thought it better if the Church was poor and thus more open to the real treasures within the community and that its possessions be at the service of people-especially the poor. Another minister once said that the church should go to hell, that is, it should go to the hell-holes of the world (the streets in our inner cities or outlying suburbs, Nauru, Manus Island, Christmas Island, Gaza) in solidarity with the dying and perishing people. The challenge for the rich man, the churches and ourselves is: ‘in what do we ultimately trust? Is it money, possessions, status, power, need for recognition or being vulnerable and trusting in God?
Where Jesus has addressed power and service, family and social relationships in recent weeks, today he touches on another inconvenient truth - security and possessions are also a source of power and have the tendency to hide the faces of people from us; to lead to exclusiveness and neglect. The young man in the gospel was blessed with wealth and had done everything right. He would have been seen as blessed by God because of his ‘goodness’. Having wealth and power were seen as signs of God’s favour whereas poverty was a sign of God’s rejection or punishment.
Jesus way is radically different from what society deems good. Jesus’ yardstick is God’s goodness. Jesus’ look reveals who we are, and what we can be. ‘Goodness’ is about the quality of social relationships - doing justice and loving – both signs of God’s Reign among us
Possessions can isolate us from others. They can buffer us from the suffering of others, and make us complacent about our personal security. Rampant individualism can cause people to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the cries of the poor and the cry of the earth. Unfortunately, many people justify themselves by saying ‘we earned our wealth,’ ‘we worked hard,’ and ‘the poor are just lazy.’ This buffering and negativity applies to people seeking asylum, people who are homeless, people in prison and the First Peoples of this land. Our ability to hear the pain of others correlates to the ability to experience God’s goodness. Power and wealth can turn us away from responding with compassion to asylum seekers, the First Peoples, the aged, many youth and migrant workers. Possessions (which may not always be material) can steer us inwards rather than outwards. The young man’s focus was on himself, his eternal life, without concern for that of others. ‘What must I do.’ He does not see that experiencing eternal life lies outside his own doing. It is not about piety points. Jesus only recalls the commandments that refer to our neighbour: the social justice laws, dealing with right relationships, justice in property matters, the right use of the court system, making provision for the elderly.
During this Anti-Poverty Week we might also reflect how we have benefited from Aboriginal dispossession; from injustice; from pushing free trade rather than fair trade; support cutbacks in health and other social benefits; downsizing at the cost of unemployment and cuts to wages from people in very vulnerable sectors of the community; selling air and water which are natural resources and gifts to us already. Erasmus, (C15th priest) mused, ‘Nowadays the rage for possession has got to such a pitch that there is nothing in the realm of nature, whether sacred or profane, out of which profit cannot be squeezed.’
When hurting, poor people come to church, do they find God present in the congregation? How many young people, how many homeless and hungry people, how many people living with a disability or mental illness, how many gay and lesbian people, how many unemployed and unemployable people find God there? How many single parents, unwed mothers and fathers can find God in our houses of worship? We are expected to notice others to be in solidarity with people in a future where there is enough for all. It means working together to overturn the tables of control and divisive systems. Today’s gospel story must also be interpreted today as an invitation to transform systems and structures that create wealth and poverty, that maintain privilege within our own society or in our world.
Whilst wealth was always seen as a blessing from God, the prophets considered it an insult to God when derives from unjust practices or the failure to share. Jesus saw how people can be consumed by constant competition for status, recognition and control which permeate social and personal relations. None of these can really fill the void that resides within the human heart. When Jesus tells the young man to sell his possessions he may also be telling him and us to be humble and acknowledge that nothing that we possess can make us right with God. It is by opening our hearts and recognising our need for God – personal conversion.
Pope Paul VI: ‘We don’t have a right to keep for our use what is beyond our need when others lack the barest necessities.’ In the face of poverty, local or global, we have to face up to the question as to whether we have something to share with the poor. We are invited to a new understanding of justice. Need to go beyond generous alms-giving to tackling the causes of injustice. Let us do a check on what we worship most. What is the central focus in our lives? What draws our primary attention or distracts us from Christ in order to be open to the ‘one thing’ Jesus offers us – God’s unconditional love? What can obscure the view and drown out Jesus invitation to us today.
Jesus loved this man, not shame or browbeat him. The sadness in Jesus’ heart may be that we let things/stuff (wealth, ambition, work) isolate us from other people. Every community has suffering people, but often these people find themselves feeling isolated and marginalised even within our churches. Too often we try to avoid facing or acknowledging the reality of suffering, and in the process we leave sufferers feeling hurt, humiliated and lonely. No matter what our financial situation, our wealth, we all respond to the poor in our communities – the wealth of friendship or compassion or support to struggling, sick and lonely people. Standing with them and acknowledgment is often a far more powerful gift than any material help we can offer which in many circumstances can be disempowering. For us too, it is important to have the humility to receive the help and compassion of others, and not embrace a proud, stoic aloofness. It is only as we walk through suffering together that we can really experience and reflect the mercy and compassion of God.
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE TWENTY SEVENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, 2018
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE 27th Sunday of the Year
October 7th 2018
Suggested formula for recognition of indigenous people and their land.
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we are now gathered,
(the ……) and recognise that it continues to be sacred to them.
We hail them: as guardians of the earth and of all things that grow and breed in the soil; as trustees of the waters – [the seas, the streams and rivers, the ponds and the lakes] - and the rich variety of life in those waters.
We thank them for passing this heritage to every people since the Dreamtime.
We acknowledge the wrongs done to them by newcomers to this land and we seek to be partners with them in righting these wrongs and in living together in peace and harmony.
As we do this, we must also acknowledge the loss of their hunting grounds,
the destruction of their ceremonial places and sacred sites,
the great loss of life from all kinds of violence and disease,
and that the land was never given away.
Hospitality is politically subversive.
- Richard Beck, Unclean
The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.
Thomas Berry
Readings
Reading 1 Gen 2:18-24
Responsorial Psalm Ps 128:1-2, 3, 4-5, 6
- R. (cf. 5) May the Lord bless us all the days of our lives.
Reading II Heb 2:9-11
Gospel Mk 10:2-16 or 10: 2-12
Penitential Rite
- For hands across the table, for hands across the sea and for hands around the world. Jesus, have mercy.
- For eyes meeting across a room, for eyes opened to different lifestyles and for eyes shining in new friendships. Christ, have mercy.
- For ears that can hear the beating of a heart, for ears that pick up the cries of the voiceless and for ears that respond to the pulses of the world. Jesus, have mercy.
or
- Holy One, you have made us so that we may not be alone. Jesus, have mercy.
- Holy One, you have made us to see you in and through our relationships. Christ, have mercy.
- Holy One, you have joined us together so that we may expand our circles of relationships. Jesus, have mercy.
or
- Christ Jesus, you taught us to love one another: Jesus, have mercy.
- Christ Jesus, you blessed the little children: Christ, have mercy.
- Christi Jesus, you showed us how to live in the kingdom: Jesus, have mercy.
Opening Prayer
God, source of all love,
in Christ you have created us all in your image.
Your love and goodness
is beyond what our spirit can touch. .
Lead us to courageously seek
beyond our reach in relationships
because it is you whom we also touch.
Keep us in your peace
as we conform our lives to your gracious design.
Prayer over the Gifts
God, source of all love,
may our offering of the gifts of bread and wine
serve to remind us of our call
to give ourselves wholeheartedly
in service of one another especially the most vulnerable.
Deliver Us
Deliver us God, source of all love, from every evil
and grant us the capacity to love
without conditions or compromise.
Give us a love that stays faithful
and grows deeper in days of trial.
Keep us free from all fear
of committing ourselves to one another,
as we wait in joyful hope
for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.
Prayer after Communion
God, source of all love,
may the Eucharist we have shared
make us mindful that we are filled with your Spirit
and that we carry this Spirit in our connections with others.
Prayers of the Faithful
Introduction: Let us pray to God that the work of love and faithfulness in relationships may be realised more fully in our lives. Our response is: Keep us in your love, O God
or
Introduction: God created us to live in harmony with one another, to care for each other and to pray for each other. Confident that God hears our prayers, let us pray today for our families and all those whom we love. Our response is: Keep us in your love, O God
- For Pope Francis, that he may continue to proclaim a revolution of tenderness and mercy in all our dealings with one another especially those who cry out for acknowledgement, dignity, acceptance, we pray: Keep us in your love, O God.
- For the people of Sulawesi, and people elsewhere who are caught up in natural disasters: may our hearts reach across the seas to our sisters and brothers that they may find in us and in those who are equipped to help them strength, support and hope: we pray: Keep us in your love, O God.
- For our country and our leaders; for journalists who tell the stories and for public servants who seek the common good; for resolve in the face of all odds to do what is right, we pray: Keep us in your love, O God.
- For people liv9ing the single life that they may see that they witness to the God who has made a covenant with us through our friendship, service and care for others, we pray: Keep us in your love, O God.
- For all people torn away from their families, loved ones and home by government policies, genocide, war and conflict, we pray: Keep us in your love, O God.
- For those who experience the pain of divorce, and who grieve the loss of hopes and dreams, for courage and for consolation, we pray: Keep us in your love, O God.
- For people whose sexuality is a cause of suffering and embarrassment that they may find that they are beautifully created by God and that they are made for friendship, companionship and love, we pray: Keep us in your love, O God.
- For peace and understanding between nations, ethnic and racial groups, and people of different cultures that they may recognise in each us the sacred image of God and that all bear God’s graciousness to the world, we pray: Keep us in your love, O God.
- For our homes and communities, that they may be built on love and respect so that their members may understand more deeply the love of God, we pray: Keep us in your love, O God.
- For homes and families where there are broken relationships and dreams that understanding, forgiveness and reconciliation might be shown as signs of God’s loving kindness, we pray: Keep us in your love, O God.
- For homes that are broken and for partners who have failed each other, that people may show them understanding and that God may give them mercy, we pray: Keep us in your love, O God.
- For all our beloved sick, for those who face addiction or depression each day, for those who live with dementia or mental illness, and for families and caregivers who love them, we pray: Keep us in your love, O God.
Concluding Prayer: Good and gracious God, watch over and protect us and our homes. Strengthen the love that unites families in peace and joy and grant that our parish family may know the peace and unity that is a sign of your presence among us. We ask this through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
Notices
October 10 World Mental Health Day
October 10 World Day Against the Death Penalty
October 11 International Day of the Girl Child
October 11 Feast of Pope St John XIII
October 11 Opening of the Second Vatican Council 1962
Resources
Reconciliation is the ultimate aim of nonviolence because nonviolence holds not only for the absolute inviolability of the human person, both friend and enemy, but maintains that human beings are ultimately one family, brothers and sisters to each other.
Niall O'Brien, Columban priest in the Philippines
So let us regard this as settled: what is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men:
Voltaire. François Marie Arouet (1694-1778)
The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
Georges Bernanos
How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that impute the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calm the conscience. It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even there from that the war is just and thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better.
Mark Twain
War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood. It degrades and stupefies with the sense that you are not responsible, that 'tis not yours to think and reason why, but to do and die,' like the hundred thousand others doomed like yourself. War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.
Alexander Berkman
‘I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.’
Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird
‘First of all,’ he said, ‘if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view--until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’
Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird
It seems that 'we have never gone to war for conquest, for exploitation, nor for territory'; we have the word of a president [McKinley] for that. Observe, now, how Providence overrules the intentions of the truly good for their advantage. We went to war with Mexico for peace, humanity and honor, yet emerged from the contest with an extension of territory beyond the dreams of political avarice. We went to war with Spain for relief of an oppressed people [the Cubans], and at the close found ourselves in possession of vast and rich insular dependencies [primarily the Philippines] and with a pretty tight grasp upon the country for relief of whose oppressed people we took up arms. We could hardly have profited more had 'territorial aggrandizement' been the spirit of our purpose and heart of our hope. The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.
Ambrose Bierce, Warlike America
We should take care, in inculcating patriotism into our boys and girls, that is a patriotism above the narrow sentiment which usually stops at one's country, and thus inspires jealousy and enmity in dealing with others... Our patriotism should be of the wider, nobler kind which recognises justice and reasonableness in the claims of others and which lead our country into comradeship with...the other nations of the world.
Lord Baden-Powell
My kind of loyalty was to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.
Mark Twain
In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.
Thomas Paine
What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is [the human being]! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on ….fellow [humans] a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.
Thomas Jefferson
One needs to be slow to form convictions,
but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.
Mahatma Gandhi
We must be prepared to make heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war.
Albert Einstein
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
Theodore Roosevelt, April 19, 1906
The slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark;
the real tragedy of life is when people are afraid of the light.
Plato, (adapted for gender sensitivity)
The state has, in order to control us, introduced division into our thinking, so that we come to distrust others and look to the state for protection! But the roots of our individualism remind us that what we are is inseparable from the source from which all others derive; that coercive practices that threaten our neighbor also threaten us.
Butler Shaffer
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.
William James
A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.
H.G. Wells
The soul of our country needs to be awakened . . .When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders.
Veterans Fast for Life
If we work in marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity.
Daniel Webster
The evils of government are directly proportional to the tolerance of the people.
Frank Kent
What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.
Robert E. Lee, in a letter to his wife, 1864
The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.
Robert Lynd (1879-1949), Anglo-Irish essayist, journalist
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny.
William Ellery Channing
Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge ‘our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor’ not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us.
Butler D. Shaffer
Listen to the dreams of the world's children in John Denver's song, ‘I Want to Live.’
There are children raised in sorrow,
on the scorched and barren plain
there are children raised beneath the
golden sun. There are children of the
water, children of the sand/
and they cry out through the universe,
their voices raised as one.
I want to live, I want to grow,
I want to see, I want to know.
I want to share what I can give,
I want to be, I want to live.
We are standing all together, face to face and arm in arm/
we are standing on the threshold of a dream.
No more hunger, no more killing,
no more wasting life away/
It is simply an idea, and I know its time has come.
I want to live, I want to grow,
I want to see, I want to know.
I want to share what I can give,
I want to be, I want to live.
God of our relating
thank you
for hands across the table
for hands across the sea
for hands around the world
thank you
for eyes meeting across a room
for eyes opened to different lifestyles
for eyes shining in new friendships
thank you
for ears that can hear the beating of a heart
for ears that pick up the crises of the voiceless
for ears that respond to the pulses of the world
thank you
Kate Compston, England, from 600 Blessings and Prayers from around the world compiled by Geoffrey Duncan, Twenty-Third Publications, Mystic CT 2000
A Marriage Blessing
The all-forgiving Saviour walk behind you
to pick up the broken pieces
and fashion them into new beginnings;
the ever present friend stay by you
to bring you delight and joy in your relationship
with him and with each other;
the [Lord] of space and times go before you
to keep you in the paths of peace and hope;
Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and forever,
Bless you and make your marriage fruitful to his glory.
David l. Helyar, 600 Blessings and Prayers from around the world compiled by Geoffrey Duncan, Twenty-Third Publications, Mystic CT 2000
Most people are, at heart, well-meaning but, in action, hypocrites. They will weep tears of blood over a child killed in the street. They will accept, without a pang, the deaths of hundreds of thousands from malnutrition. The loss of a lifeboat is an epic tragedy; tribal genocide is a paragraph hastily read, lightly dismissed. Sixty dead in a train crash is a disaster; six million dead in the camps and gas ovens is an historical statistic. The charitable will airlift a thousand tons of food to the victims of an earthquake; they will not raise voice or hand in defense of twenty thousand swept into the oblivions of the disappeared dissidents.Morris West in Images and Inscriptions, HarperCollins, Sydney, 1997
Giver of all life,
move among us and through us,
in our loving and our living.
Draw us toward your community of welcome.
Amen.
Blessing the Animals
You who created them
and called them good:
bless again these creatures
who come to us
as a blessing
fashioned of fur
or feather
or fin,
formed of flesh
that breathes with
your own breath,
that you have made
from sheer delight,
that you have given
in dazzling variety.
Bless them
who curl themselves
around our hearts
who twine themselves
through our days
who companion us
in our labor
who call us
to come and play.
Bless them
who will never be
entirely tamed
and so remind us
that you love
what is wild,
that you rejoice
in what lives close
to the earth,
that your heart beats
in the heart of these creatures
you have entrusted
to our care.
Jan Richardson http://paintedprayerbook.com/2013/09/23/blessing-the-animals/#.UkG7oxZD1UM
© Jan L. Richardson. janrichardson.com.
Reflections on the readings…There is much food for thought and dispute in today’s readings. They can raise many antennae in us. Most couples walk down the aisle on their wedding day filled with the promise of love and dream of a mutually life-giving relationship. The Gospel today begins with a painful description of what happens when love is wounded beyond healing; when bonds are fragmented beyond repair; and when trust is shattered beyond hope. The divorce of someone close to us can leave us feeling disillusioned and helpless. However, the way Jesus welcomed the little children immediately after being tested by the Pharisees points to how he wants us to support those going through the heartache of divorce, or for that matter, any other difficult and complicated experience. We see that human creation in all its forms is about companionship, not compulsory heterosexuality or divinely-ordained patriarchy; that sexual unity is about mutuality, joy and freedom from fear; that relationships are not about possessiveness, and that not all suffering should be endured. But, Jesus’ words about divorce and remarriage seem to resist interpretation in how they have been interpreted so literally in the Catholic tradition. But life is messy. The image of Jesus was probably not that idyllic: children dirty or dirtying their pants toddlers screaming and hanging on to mother in stranger-danger fear; two siblings beginning arguing and pushing each other around? The parents were not reprimanded for failing to contain the children’s youthful energy but Jesus welcomed the mess with an open heart. In fact, the disciples were reprimanded for trying to avoid it by their attitude. Jesus calls us to faithfully and courageously wade into the mess with those who are struggling, so they do not have to face it alone. In the first century, children’s lives were precarious and servile. They had no rights and often regarded as possessions or property. This might explain the disciples’ attitude. Jesus would surely have had better things to do than waste time with children or risk his honour by this undignified behaviour. Jesus turned common perceptions upside down by embracing those that society did not value. Jesus tells us that by serving children, we serve God. If we are following Jesus’ lead, we will encircle those who are feeling vulnerable and marginalised with the same tender care. The reference to the acceptance of children, least of the least, expresses a way of being in solidarity with the ‘little ones’ in our world. It is not about being sentimental or just welcoming cute children. It was not their cuteness that made them attractive to Jesus but their helplessness. Remember Pope Francis ditching a meal with Congress in 2013 in favour of sharing with Washington’s poor and homeless people. The Pharisees tried to trip Jesus up with their legalism, but Jesus modelled a different way of relating. He welcomed the bedlam and commotion of children, embraced their humble, seemingly insignificant lives, and lifted them up in blessing. Left with the image of Jesus willingly being tackled by a throng of kids, we can ask ourselves, ‘How good are we at welcoming, embracing and blessing the messiness of life?’ With marital relationships, we need to recognise that people live longer; that marriages, even when entered into with love, hope and resolve, might die; and that there might be the possibility of new life and in a second marriage. Would Jesus’ intent be to cause pain for couples and families dealing with divorce and remarriage? Jesus’ response seemed to be to challenge a mindset that only found fault. Is there a way to reconcile the emphasis on unity, companionship, love, and self-sacrifice with the apparent stark prohibition? It is complicated. Let’s remember that Jesus’ context was definitely patriarchal. The prohibition of divorce and remarriage was to protect women and deal with an imbalance where women did not have the option of divorcing a man. Though repudiation was very commonplace by men, women could be rejected for very insignificant things. Jesus was not going to get trapped about marriage and divorce, but addresses the system of power and privilege where a woman who has been dismissed by her husband became a social outcast without being able to support herself. He questioned the pretenses of a male-biased system that rejected women, just as it rejected children, the poor, the sick, and the outsider. In defending women, Jesus is speaking on behalf of all who are rejected and excluded, those without rights. Jesus often made seemingly strong and outrageous statements about how we ought to live: ‘If your right eye offends you, pluck it out!’ ‘You must hate your mother and father!’ As far as I know, they are not usually taken literally. When Jesus was asked whether one can send his wife away, the question was less about divorce, but about domination and manipulation in relationships. In Jesus’ time women rarely, if ever, owned property. They had no way of making a living. Marriage was for them a lifesaver by guaranteeing support for the most vulnerable members of society, women and children. Laws forbidding divorce indicated that women and children should not be left on their own. In criticising those who advocated divorce, especially for frivolous reasons, Jesus was taking up the cause of the poor and the weak. Jesus was not condemning divorced persons but was coming down squarely on the side of the defenseless. ‘Don’t do that to women!’ is his stern message.’ With this background, we can understand Jesus’ words not as condemnation, but as an expression of compassion. The male-biased/patriarchal approach to marriage is out of the question. These go further and deeper than a marriage commitment but the commitment that we make for right and just relationships within our families, our communities and even more the relationships we have as a universal church. Each of us as female, male, adult or child is call to honour that. With this call comes the respect for the individual and is reinforced in marriage, the single life, religious life and another other committed relationship. We are all called to live in right relationship with each other. Our task is to redistribute power that is unequally concentrated in every social relationship. The alienation in marriage coming from abuse of power also applies to racism, sexism, ageism, classism, homophobia and other forms of oppression. We see that Jesus' quarrel with his disciples was that they did not get it. They had missed the point of his teaching. His response to them goes back to their attitude toward the marginalised. Jesus wanted to ensure that his followers formed a community of equals. So, what a distortion when the church continues to be a community where a few have power and position, contrary to everything Jesus said, can lord it over others. This so-called ‘lording over others’ is seen when we deny the truth that people are made for relatedness and engagement and that we cannot be whole persons in isolation or insulation from the world and each other; it is seen when some members of the community are denied leadership or to proclaim the gospel because of their gender. If only the church would emulate the compassion, the kindness and respectful sensitivity of Jesus when dealing with its children who are struggling with divorce, remarriage, and sexuality. Although the social context of Jesus’ day no longer exists, his message of compassion and his desire to protect the weak and defenseless continues to apply. We need to proclaim the message of liberation that Jesus gives to all, as he did to the women of his day, and we need to address oppressive attitudes and structures women that women face today – whether it is domestic violence, female genital mutilation, and any other oppression or inequality the face. Whether single, married or divorced, whether gay or straight, all people are cherished creations of God. Like Jesus, we are to be compassionate and caring, trusting in the good consciences of others and respectful of the difficult decisions they have to make. To exclude those who are most in need of the ministrations of the faith community would not only be unkind; it would be contrary to the example set by Jesus and the Gospel he came to proclaim. The Gospel insists that no one, not a displeasing spouse, not a helpless child, not an immigrant, not even a criminal, is dispensable.
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE TWENTY SIXTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, 2018
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE TWENTY SIXTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME
September 30th 2018
Social Justice Sunday
Theme: A Place to Call Home: Making a home for everyone in our land
Suggested formula for recognition of indigenous people and their land.
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we are now gathered,
(the ……) and recognise that it continues to be sacred to them.
We hail them: as guardians of the earth and of all things that grow and breed in the soil; as trustees of the waters – [the seas, the streams and rivers, the ponds and the lakes] - and the rich variety of life in those waters.
We thank them for passing this heritage to every people since the Dreamtime.
We acknowledge the wrongs done to them by newcomers to this land and we seek to be partners with them in righting these wrongs and in living together in peace and harmony.
As we do this, we must also acknowledge the loss of their hunting grounds,
the destruction of their ceremonial places and sacred sites,
the great loss of life from all kinds of violence and disease,
and that the land was never given away.
*************
Taken from www.nonviolenceinternational.net
The convenience of silence is as evil as the greatest crime.
‘Who is not against us if for us’
Readings
Numbers 11:25-29 Moses’ response to those who are jealous of other prophets
Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 19:8, 10, 12-13, 14 The precepts of the Lord give joy to the heart.
James 5:1-6 Hard teaching for the rich
Mark 9:38-43, 45, 47-48 Jesus’ response to the jealous disciples
Penitential Rite
- Christ Jesus, you are the Word of God who speaks in our hearts: Jesus, have mercy.
- Christ Jesus, we are often too busy or distracted to hear you: Christ, have mercy.
- Christ Jesus, you have the power to quiet our minds and open our hearts, Jesus, have mercy.
or
- The Spirit of Jesus blows where it wants; it inspires and moves many. Jesus, have mercy.
- The Spirit of Jesus generously pours out its gifts on whoever is open to the breath of life. Christ, have mercy.
- The Spirit of Jesus gives wisdom and insight when and where it is least expected. Jesus, have mercy.
or
- Christ Jesus, you open the boundaries of our minds and hearts. Jesus, have mercy.
- Christ Jesus, you open our eyes to people we can often miss. Christ, have mercy.
- Christ Jesus, you open our minds to the beauty in other people Jesus, have mercy.
Opening Prayer
God of love and peace,
pour out on us and on all people
the life-giving Spirit of your Son.
May our minds be opened so that
we may see your beauty and truth
in an ever-new light.
May our hearts be opened
o that we may receive daily the spirit of courage
and to love others with reverence and respect.
Prayers of the Faithful
Celebrant: We pray to the God of all people, that our hearts will be open to Jesus’ message of justice and compassion and that we will be inspired to welcome and support our sisters and brothers who endure poverty and homelessness in our society today.
- We pray for the First Peoples of our land who have lost not only their homes but also their land and culture that all Australians will acknowledge the harm done to them through the generations and work together with him by listening to them and being in solidarity with them in their future, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for the peoples of the Asia Pacific region who have suffered the loss of homes, livelihood and loved ones in the recent typhoon Mangkhut and are paying the price of our obsession with fossil fuels, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for all people who struggle to meet the costs of housing and live in the shadow of homelessness, and that the abundance of our nation’s wealth will be shared to ensure that all can find a place to call home, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray that political leaders who should govern for the common good of our nation, that a spirit of justice and compassion will urge them on to address homelessness and other injustices in our society as well as ensuring that all people and nations have a just share in the riches of this earth we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray that our faith community will embrace people who live with poverty and exclusion so that they will find welcome, belonging and assistance in their time of need, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for our beautiful earth: may we look upon it as our home and look upon it with love and respect as we would our neighbour, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for all here present: may we all persevere in witnessing to the magnificence of God's love for us by acting justly and being agents of hope and peace, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for the youth in our church and in our communities: may we all recognize the gifts in each other so that the good news of justice and peace will be proclaimed in word and concrete action, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for young people everywhere who experience deprivation and prejudice in Australia and overseas: may those who live with mental illness, those young people who are exploited for sex or labour; those who live in remote areas, or live with mental illness or struggle with their sexuality, find freedom, guidance and peace, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for our brothers and sisters in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq: may we who follow the nonviolent Jesus strive to bring an end to the wars that have ravaged these countries for so long, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for our church: for the humility to seek the truth; for the courage to speak the truth; and for the grace to live that truth each day, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We prayer for the Church we love: that it may bring forgiveness and love to all, welcome all, care for all, inspire all with the gentle power of the Spirit, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for people who are persecuted for their faith: we remember especially Christians in the Middle East and Pakistan, may they be strengthened in their mutual support of each other and of our prayers and thoughts, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for people who are made to be outcast, victims of discrimination, people exploited and trafficked, may they find in others security, the safety of home and justice for their plight we pray, .
- We pray for cooperation among Christians in the work of ministry to the poor, to young people, to those who have little voice in the affairs of the world, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for peaceful solutions to conflicts among nations, within communities and families, between friends, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for solutions to the economic struggle throughout the world: for a just distribution of the world’s goods; for fair treatment of workers; for basic human rights for all people everywhere, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for our own community: for an end to all that divides us; for the courage to reject all unjust discrimination; for a spirit of cooperation as we face the problems of our community, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
- We pray for those who are sick: for those who are elderly or infirm; for those who live with chronic pain or fatigue; for those who feel less valued because they cannot keep up with others, we pray: May your Word makes find a home in our lives.
Concluding Prayer: Loving and faithful God, hear the prayers of your people today. Join our prayers with people everywhere who struggle and pray for the well-being of the poor, the protection of the innocent, the comfort of the suffering.
Prayer over the Gifts
God of love and peace,
you invite us to eat the meal of communion and peace.
Pour out upon us the Spirit of Christ Jesus,
that we may all be one and cooperate with all people of good will
to stand up with courage for freedom and justice everywhere.
Prayer after Communion
God of love and peace,
you send us out into the world
by the strength of the Holy Spirit
given us in this Eucharist.
May that Spirit come upon all
and lead us towards a reign among us of integrity, truth and love.
Parish Information
September 30 Social Justice Sunday
Theme: A Place to Call Home: Making a home for everyone in our land
Download
- Social Justice Statement 2018-19 (PDF and Word)
- Summary PDF Word
- Letter from Archbishop Coleridge PDF
- Liturgy Notes Word
- Community Education Resource (PDF and Word)
- Media Statement (Word)
- Prayer card
- Ten Steps (PDF and Word)
- PowerPoint (right click the link on the mouse and click 'save link as')
- Video
- Launch Addresses
- Jack de Groot (Word)
- Bishop Vincent Long (Word)
People try nonviolence for a week, and when it 'doesn't work' they go back to violence, which hasn't worked for centuries.
Theodore Roszak
‘Immigrants dying at sea, in boats which were vehicles of hope and became vehicles of death. That is how the headlines put it. When I first heard of this tragedy a few weeks ago, and realised that it happens all too frequently, it has constantly come back to me like a painful thorn in my heart …
‘These brothers and sisters of ours were trying to escape difficult situations to find some serenity and peace; they were looking for a better place for themselves and their families, but instead they found death. How often do such people fail to find understanding, fail to find acceptance, fail to find solidarity. And their cry rises up to God! …
‘Has any one of us wept for these persons who were on the boat? For the young mothers carrying their babies? For these men who were looking for a means of supporting their families? We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion – ‘suffering with’ others: the globalisation of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep!’‘
Pope Francis at Lampedusa
Resources
Prayer for trafficked persons
God of justice, pour your mercy on the tens of millions of victims and survivors of human trafficking and modern-day slavery, many trapped in the cycle of poverty. We ask that you would restore them to wholeness and to freedom, that you would restore to them a fullness of life and of identity as children of God. We ask also that those who perpetrate such crimes would be brought to justice. Give us the boldness to speak out on behalf of those who have no voice, and the courage to act where the need arises.
Praise Women Leaders
Praise to you, women leaders of the seven continents, for your many works of justice.
Praise to you, women leaders of Asia, for confronting trafficking of women.
Praise to you, women leaders of Africa, for raising your voices to stop AIDS.
Praise to you, women leaders of Europe, for your peacekeeping.
Praise to you, women leaders of North America, for confronting economic inequities and racism.
Praise to you, women leaders of South America, for struggling against U.S. domination of your land.
Praise to you, women leaders in Antarctica, for your scientific research.
Praise to you, women leaders of Australia, for supporting indigenous cultures.
Diann L. Neu
The hunger for God can only be satisfied by a love that is face to face, person to person. It is only in the eyes of another that we can find the Icon of Christ. We must make the other person aware we love him. If we do, he will know that God loves him. He will never hunger again.
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Catholic social activist and founder of Madonna House (1896-1985)
The only way to live in any true security is to live so close to the bottom that when you fall you do not have far to drop, you do not have much to lose.
Dorothy Day
Walking into nature and ourselves
Walking is an endless school of mysteries and magic; its instructors, the forces of nature, the energy of animals and trees. It is the truest form of movement that we have been given, an expression of our lives and a way to experience the sacred places on Earth and the spiritual wonders of the wild. Through walking we can look at our lives and our place in the grand scheme with new eyes while in communion with everything surrounding us.
James Endredy Earthwalks for Body and Spirit.
We are not asked to love the neighbour as neighbour, but as ourselves.
Geevarghese Mar Osthathios, Metropolitan of the Orthodox Syrian Church in Kerala, India
Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about his religion. Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and of service to your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place. Show respect to all people, but grovel to none. When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
Tecumseh, (1768-1813) Shawnee Chief
What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.
Mahatma Gandhi 1869-1948
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
George Bernard Shaw
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Nobel Prize 1921
……. in America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them.
Gerry Spence From Freedom to Slavery.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Aldous Huxley, English novelist and critic, 1894-1963
Eternal Wisdom,
grant us the courage to reach across borders
so we form alliances
with all your people of goodwill.
Together, God
strengthen us to work
for the restoration of the whole of creation. Amen.
Reflections on the readings
It seems that a clear message in today’s readings is Jesus’ anger towards people who take up positions of leadership and abuse that power. We see clearly where Jesus stands and whom he stands with. “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.” (Mk 9:42) So many people have seen the failings of church leaders and leaders in other institutions, and been turned off. Of concern are those who have not been turned off! James refers to the judgement that awaits anyone who acts unjustly and abuses their power. The unjust treatment of people by those in power and with wealth was a problem in the ancient world as it is today. James paints an unpleasant picture of the wealthy hoarding countless riches and an environment where self-indulgence and pleasure have been the dominant driving forces. Self-gratification with little thought given to others - especially the exploited poor - is their primary objective in life. Though forgiveness is possible, it must also mean justice for victims. It calls for a deep conversion in each of us and a demand for institutional reform. It begins by uprooting all forms of clericalism which gives rise to injustice.
In the face of toxic religion, toxic politics and toxic economics, there has to be hope of redemption. God is still among us. The reign of God is among us. We are reminded that the Spirit blows wherever it likes. No official stamp of approval is required- even from those in the hierarchy.
In the reading Numbers, the Elders were scandalised that Eldad and Medad received the Spirit of prophesy(Nm 11:26). They were filled with the Spirit even though they did not go to the up the mountain and participate in the rituals. They stayed with the people, in the messy camp, and shared the Spirit there.
A similar theme occurs in the reading from Mark. The disciples were scandalised that some outsiders were casting out casting out demons in Jesus’ name and doing good works. Jesus’ response was, “For whoever is not against us is for us.” (Mk 9:40). He implies that what matters is the works – the good works – not the badge one is wearing. One could on a roll here with the treatment of, and neglect of, women in the church!
The Spirit is present in many people and places – in the churches and in the wider world. Despite abuses and scandals, pain and suffering, we can also, if we care to look and listen, see green shoots emerge. They can emerge from the grassroots in surprising places. People are still doing the ‘gospel things’ as they always have with people on the periphery of the Church and non-church groups. That Spirit still calls us into every deeper truth, a thirst for justice and beauty and goodness.
We should not be surprised whom God uses in our world. God can call those we may disregard to carry out God’s reign of compassion and justice. To reject these might mean rejecting ourselves. We are all called to embrace the role of prophet – to listen to the crises of the poor and together response to change systems that oppress. These are the challenges in readings before us. No one person or group enjoys a monopoly on the Spirit.
Jesus did not divide people into believers and atheists. He tried to broaden the horizons and open the hearts of his disciples by encouraging them to look beyond the boundaries they had set for themselves and for him. They needed to understand that they were part of a community called together by God. And, if God called them to follow Jesus – why not others? Those who show hospitality to the needy understand the Reign of God. Such actions subvert systems based on exploitation of the weak by the powerful. Jesus is always present! We are asked to look around at our world and see that who we are and what we do matters. We need to look to ourselves and pray for the ability to respond in new ways to God’s call to follow and that following is recognising others on the journey who are not like us. Many people settle for being ‘reasonable’ Christians who might go through life marked neither by great holiness or profound sinfulness. Jesus came to disturb us and show us there can be no compromise with injustice. If we are truly to follow him, we say ‘I’ll stand injustice no longer’ [E.M. Forster, Howard’s End].
The Australian Catholic Bishops’ Social Justice Statement for 2018 challenges us to bring God’s vision to the fore. At every level people are at work to bring peace and healing with justice. War continues. The environment is tormented. Whilst refugees and asylum seekers in staggering numbers keep knocking at the doors of our nations in Europe, Canada, the USA and Australia and the response often is ‘no no no’ we have people in this country who have no place to call home as outlined in the Social Justice Statement for 2018. Census figures show that over 116,000 people are homeless in this rich and well-resourced nation. This is unacceptable and as one of the speakers at the launch of the Statement said: ‘We are a country in denial!’ It is about profits before people! The costs of rents and mortgages are astronomical and housing services are unable to meet the demand. Finding secure housing for some groups is a great challenge which can take a great toll on social wellbeing and mental health.
The Statement provides example of individual people who go out of their way to assist sisters and brothers in great need as well as agencies and charities that try to offer shelter, safety and care. One among many is the Cana community which has never accepted government funding but provides shelter, friendship, safety, rehabilitation and advocacy for people with the least options. Pope Francis has reminded us forcefully of the rights of people experiencing homelessness around the world. The Statement by the Bishops focuses especially on those in our society who are most vulnerable to housing insecurity and homelessness. It reminds us that Catholic social teaching and the Declaration of Human Rights insist that safe and secure housing is a human right. It is the inherent dignity of each brother and sister in need of a place to call home that urges us on to confront the growing challenge of homelessness and housing insecurity in Australia.
We cannot look dispassionately and with indifference as Pope Francis has said at injustice around us, nor can we ignore the witness that people outside our institutions, our churches, or clans are also offering. We can all witness to justice work to end exploitation and abuse for the transformation of the world – especially the little corner of the world we live in. We must remember that the same Spirit that works in us also works in all who do good by acting justly and loving tenderly. In the gospel, Jesus, whose heart beats for all people, tells us to be open-minded and to recognise the good there is in people and what they do, whoever they are. We have been given the statistics about people living rough, room surfing or plainly homeless. We do not see their faces and are not told their names. But each of these statistics has a face, had dreams and hopes. Basically, they have a story which cannot be rejected or neglected. And even if we cannot do much, we can get to know some of them – not just by throwing a coin at them but greeting them as a human person.
Moses and Jesus direct our attention beyond petty turf wars to what needs to be done and the necessity for a Spirit of cooperation with others who do it differently. Wise discipleship includes knowing what to welcome and what to renounce. Last week we saw how the disciples argued about who among them was the greatest. Jesus commanded them to be servants and to welcome the powerless (a child) as they would welcome Jesus himself. We, and our leaders, must be prepared to hear something different, to hear the voice of the Spirit that comes from the edges of the church and society – from young people, Indigenous people, women, gay people, the poor, the refugee person, Moslems and Jews. God's word comes not just from within the institutional church, not just within our own community of disciples, but even beyond that, from outsiders if you will. Even their very presence powerfully proclaim God’s word about justice. And to do justice is to show respect by listening to people who know injustice in their lives and to insist on seeing things from point of view. Doing justice depends, not on telling people what to do, but upon listening to them and then asking them what they believe needs to be done, to find out what they are already doing. It is amazing the number of groups that are dedicated to bringing change and wellbeing to people in our community and not only from Christian circles but also Jewish and Islamic and of no professed faith. Jesus challenges his disciples for their behaviour because it impedes their ability to listen to peoples’ cries for mercy, for justice, for peace. Many of these people do not need to be taught or told what to do so much as to be heard, trusted and respected. They all, because of their experiences, have a truth to tell us.
Pope Francis and also the Social Justice Statement is reminding us again that we are all in this together and that we can all be a means to give life, compassion and bring peace through justice to our world. It does not happen with boundaries or fences. Are we prepared to work together to live into God’s vision of the New Creation by sharing life in the midst of our relationships? Or are we content to do it all by ourselves?
LITURGY NOTES FOR THE TWENTY FIRST SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME, 2018
21st Sunday of the Year
August 26th 2018
Suggested formula for recognition of indigenous people and their land.
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we are now gathered,
(the ……) and recognise that it continues to be sacred to them.
We hail them: as guardians of the earth and of all things that grow and breed in the soil; as trustees of the waters – [the seas, the streams and rivers, the ponds and the lakes] - and the rich variety of life in those waters.
We thank them for passing this heritage to every people since the Dreamtime.
We acknowledge the wrongs done to them by newcomers to this land and we seek to be partners with them in righting these wrongs and in living together in peace and harmony.
As we do this, we must also acknowledge the loss of their hunting grounds,
the destruction of their ceremonial places and sacred sites,
the great loss of life from all kinds of violence and disease,
and that the land was never given away.
or
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we stand
We pay our respects to them for their care of the land
May we walk gently and respectfully upon the land
that was never given away.
or
We acknowledge the …………………….people the first inhabitants of this land.
We honour them for their care of the land
on which we gather today, and with them,
and as we pray for justice and their constitutional recognition
may we also be mindful that the land has never been given away.
Photo: Angela Wylie
Christ of Maryknoll
by Robert Lentz
Readings:
First Reading: Joshua 24:1-2, 15-18;
Responsorial: Ps 34:2-3, 16-17, 18-19,20-21
Second Reading: Ephesians 5:21-32
Gospel: John 6: 60-69
Penitential Rite
- You look for hearts that are just and hear their cry. Jesus, have mercy.
- You are close to those who are brokenhearted and those crushed in spirit. Christ, have mercy.
- You free us, your people, from the slavery of the fear of taking risks and the excessive need for security. Jesus, have mercy.
Penitential Rite [Alternative]
- Jesus, you have the message of fullness of life, Jesus have mercy.
- Jesus, you accompany us on our way through life, Christ, have mercy
- Jesus, you are among us with your love and patient forgiveness, Jesus have mercy.
Opening Prayer
Faithful God,
in our daily choices in ministry and service
you give us freedom and courage.
Strengthen us in our decisions
that we may always choose hope
over our experiences of pain, difficulty and failure.
Opening Prayer
Living God,
you sent Jesus to reveal your wisdom
and make known yours ways.
You give your people freedom.
Help us to seek the values
that will transform your world.
Prayers of the Faithful
Introduction: Let us pray to God who is the source of our freedom. The response to each prayer is: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People of Australia: may they may always find respect for their culture and traditions and an effective response by government and business to their real needs, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for the people of Kerala and Lombok who face different natural disasters: may they find deep and effective support in the face of the tragedy they face as well as in their grief for their lost loved ones, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for all the people who are affected by the current drought : may they find encouragement in the support being offered be people far and wide and reassurance when they face anxiety for the future, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for all people who are affected by the slave trade around the world: may we remember that slavery and bondage of persons continues in our world various guises and we pray for all who work for the liberation of women, men and children are trafficked in any way, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for the people of this country: may they welcome the stranger, support those who have recently arrived and give comfort to those who feel keenly the lost of family and country, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for all people who are exiled from their homeland, families and friends: may they find a ready welcome from people in those they meet and be empowered by the hospitality offered them, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for our country: may we strive more and more to bear each other’s without shirking our responsibilities; and also call our leaders, and those who represent us, to justice, compassion and generosity, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for the Australian Government: that it may develop a more welcoming approach to people who come seeking protection from torture and political oppression, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: : Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for all people in rich countries: may they be prepared to reach out to people in developing countries by just treaties and sharing our resources in ways that enable people in developing countries to live full and fruitful lives, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for the leaders of churches and other faiths: may they faithfully preserve the central message of love and peace in their faith so that peace may be effectively realised in our world, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for married people: may husbands and wives deepen their love for one another through equality in their relationship and through their commitment to their mutual obligations to the children they raise, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for our Pacific and Asian neighbours: may the diverse communities within them – especially Indonesia, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea -continue to courageously seek peaceful ways to resolve their conflicts, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you protect the vulnerable in our society).
- We pray for all people who experience any kind of oppression – especially people who are impacted around the world by large scale mining that disrupts their communities, jeopardises their food security and undermine their tradition lifestyles, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you protect the vulnerable in our society).
- We pray for people who are ‘trapped’ in difficult or abusive relationships – we pray especially for women and children who are victims of all forms of domestic violence, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you protect the vulnerable in our society).
- We pray for people who are oppressed by racism and other forms of discrimination – we remember especially people who suffer because of their skin colour, ethnic background or sexual identity, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you protect the vulnerable in our society).
- We pray for those whose lives are endangered: for those who live in the path of war; those who live where there is no food or clean water; those with no access to medical care; those who lack the most vital necessities, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for the church especially those who minister to the poor and care for the sick: may the compassion of Jesus be in their heart, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
- We pray for those who are sick especially those who struggle with learning disabilities, emotional illnesses and addictions: may they find strength and patience in those around them, we pray: God of life, hear us (or: Welcoming God, you are close to the broken hearted).
Concluding Prayer: Living God, in Jesus you have given us the Word that brings us a life of peace, love and justice. Grant us hearts and minds open to receiving your Word. Listen to our prayers and set us free
Calendar
August 26 Women’s Equality Day (USA)
August 29 International Against Nuclear Tests
August 30 International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances
Prayer over the Gifts
Faithful God,
in the death of Jesus, your Son,
we find our freedom.
In these signs of bread and wine
Jesus gives himself again to us
as our food and drink
to strengthen us to become
flesh and blood in our service of others.
Prayer over the Gifts
Living God,
the offering of Jesus
made us your people.
In your love,
grant us the grace to remain
faithful to your Holy One
whose words are spirit and life.
Parish Notices
August 26 433 asylum seekers rescued from a sinking vessel by the MV Tampa. The Australian government sent troops to prevent any of the asylum seekers from entering Australia {2001].
August 26 Women's Equality Day (The 95th anniversary of women getting the right to vote in the USA and the signing of the 19th Amendment in 1920)
August 27 Death of Dom Helder Camara, former Brazilian archbishop who promoted the cause of poor people [1999]
August 28: Dream Day Martin Luther King Jr. gave the 'I Have a Dream' speech in 1963
August 29 International Day Against Nuclear Testing
August 29 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall in Louisiana & Mississippi
August 30 People of East Timor vote in favour of independence in 1999.
Further Resources
Will You Also Go Away
The sun shone bright, the crowds were there,
the kingdom seemed quite near,
but Jesus did not preach to please
so some began to sneer.
He spoke of life that comes through death,
his blood and flesh abused.
He asked them to eat to their fill
but they were not amused.
‘We cannot stomach this,’ they said,
‘He’s mad or just a liar.’
In clots of discontent they left
to find some new messiah.
A cold wind blew across the sea
to the remnant on the shore.
‘Will you too go far away?’ he said?
‘The tide has turned for sure.’
Quick, as usual, Peter spoke
the first thing in his head:
‘Where else can we go, dear Lord,
Without you we are dead.’
From that day on the way was hard
and Judas became sour,
till Christ would all forsaken be
in his finest hour.
I find myself on that same shore
where crowds saw him in flesh.
Their footprints are long swept away
but I find his still fresh.
© B.D. Prewer 2000
When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.
Dom Helder Camara
Men and women of our postmodern world run the risk of rampant individualism, and many problems of society are connected with today’s self-centred culture of instant gratification.
Pope Francis, Laudato Si, 162
The Catholic Church teaches that violence against another person in any form fails to treat that person as someone worthy of love. Instead, it treats the person as an object to be used. […] Beginning with Genesis, Scripture teaches that women and men are created in God's image. Jesus himself always respected the human dignity of women. Pope John Paul II reminds us that ‘Christ's way of acting, the Gospel of his words and deeds, is a consistent protest against whatever offends the dignity of women.’
U.S. Catholic Bishops
Violence puts the brakes on authentic development and impedes the evolution of peoples towards greater socio-economic and spiritual well-being.
Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 29
Feminist liberation theology hopes so to change unjust structures and distorted symbol systems that a new community in church and society becomes possible, a liberating community of all women and men characterized by mutuality with each other and harmony with the earth.
Elizabeth Johnson CSJ, She Who Is, 31
[…] the Christ is not exclusively the glorified Jesus, but the glorified Jesus animating his body which is the Church. Christ said to Paul ‘Why do you persecute me?’ (Acts 9:4) because the literal fact is that the Christ is composed of all the baptized. This means that Christ, in contrast to Jesus, is not male, or more exactly exclusively male. Christ is quite accurately portrayed as black, old, Gentle, female, Asian, Polish. Christ is inclusively all the baptized.
Sandra Schneiders Women and the Word
The Synod Fathers stated: ‘As an expression of her mission the Church must stand firmly against all forms of discrimination and abuse of women’(178). And again: ‘The dignity of women, gravely wounded in public esteem, must be restored through effective respect for the rights of the human person and by putting the teaching of the Church into practice.’
John Paul II, Christifideles Laici 49
Prayer for People Who Are Homeless
O God, as Naomi and Ruth journeyed from one land to another seeking a home, we ask your blessing upon all who are homeless in this world. You promised to your chosen people a land flowing with milk and honey; so inspire us to desire the accomplishment of your will that we may work for the settlement of those who are homeless in a place of peace, protection, and nurture, flowing with opportunity, blessing, and hope. Amen.
Vienna Cobb Anderson Adapted from Prayers of Our Hearts © 1991
When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.
Dom Helder Camara
This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she ‘groans in travail’ (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.
Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ #2
In a Time of Violence
This prayer remembers those who are affected by violence and conflict, and asks for the courage to commit ourselves to the difficult work of building peace.
Education for Justice
In a time of violence,
We turn to you.
Lord of Sorrows,
Who is burdened
With the cries still echoing in Hiroshima,
With the broken bodies of women and girls in the Congo,
With the blood flowing in Syria.
In a time of violence
We gather to mourn and pray
For our communities,
Past and present,
Local and global.
In a time of violence
We commit ourselves
To the difficult work
Of peacemaking
So we may honor
The suffering and pain
Of our sisters and brothers.
O Lord of Sorrows,
Give us the courage
To speak the words
Of peace again and again
So they might flourish
In an arid land.
Divine power, then, is the silent cry of life in the midst of suffering.
Elizabeth Johnson, Quest for the Living God
Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it.
Cornel West
What is the unmistakable mark of a wise man? It is Love, Love for all humanity.
Sri Sathya Sai Baba
We bless you Father
for the thirst
you put in us,
for the boldness
you inspire,
for the fire
alight in us
that is you in us,
you the just.
Never mind
that our thirst
is mostly unquenched
(pity the satisfied).
Never mind
our bold plots
are mostly unclinched,
wanted not realized.
Who better than you
Knows that success
comes not from us.
You ask us to do
our utmost only,
but willingly.
Dom Helder Camara, from The Desert is Fertile.
Aspire not to have more, but to be more.
Archbishop Oscar Romero, assassinated Archbishop of San Salvador
Where is the truth, where is the light,
where is the way through this dark night?
Where is the word, where is the call,
where is the joy waiting for all?
Where is the goal, where is the gain,
where is the hope never in vain?
Where is the pearl, where is the yeast,
where is the one worthy high priest?
Where is the meek, where is the just,
where the wealth without moth or rust?
Where is the sower, where is the seed,
where is the creed incarnate in deed?
Where is the robe, where is the ring,
where is the feast fit for a king?
Where is the dance, where is the song,
where is the music where we belong?
Where is the peace, where is the grace,
where is the door into God’s space?
Look no further, seek no other,
Mary’s son is your first-born Brother.
Source Unknown
Friends are quiet angels who lift us to our feet
when our wings have trouble remembering how to fly.
Source Unknown
The God of life summons us to life; more, to be lifegivers, especially toward those who lie under the heel of the powers.
Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit priest, poet, and peace activist
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
Mark Twain
It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.
Albert Einstein
Every time anyone says that Israel is our only friend in the Middle East, I can't help but think that before Israel, we had no enemies in the Middle East.
John Sheehan, S.J., Jesuit priest
Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they're part of the crime.
Olavo de Cavarlho
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation,
nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
Mohandas Gandhi
In the democracy of the dead all [people] at last are equal. There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave.
John James Ingalls
Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for ‘the universal brotherhood of man’ - with his mouth.
Mark Twain
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Oscar Wilde
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley
Let the TRUTH be told, though the heavens fall.
Jim Garrison
Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?
Kahlil Gibran, (1883-1931)
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience
Albert Camus (1913-1960), French novelist, essayist, and playwright who received the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature.
The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
James Madison: US fourth president, 1751-1836
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
Robert M. Hutchins
The Gospels give us a radical Jesus, but we have, down the centuries, made him a plastic one; and Jesus has given us as Gospel a tiger, but we have, down the centuries, made it a pussy cat.
A.T. Robinson, theologian
In today’s world, it is the poor who are bearing the brunt of climate change. Tomorrow, it will be humanity as a whole that faces the risks that come with global warming. The rapid build-up of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is fundamentally changing the climate forecast for future generations. We are edging toward ‘tipping points.’ These are unpredictable and non-linear events that could open the door to ecological catastrophes – accelerated collapse of the Earth’s great ice sheets being a case in point – that will transform patterns of human settlement and undermine the viability of national economies. Our generation may not live to see the consequences. But our children and their grandchildren will have no alternative but to live with them….catastrophic risk in the future provides a strong rational for urgent action.
UN Human Development Report, 2007/2008
We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.
Preamble to The Earth Charter
…. good religion would celebrate life, not death….. humans weren't put here to die; we were put here to live. Religion is precious for offering consolations to the inbuilt sufferings of the human condition, the two main facts of which are mortality and the knowledge of mortality. Religion invented a language of ‘afterlife’ in which to define its hope that mortality, the end of the story, is not the whole story….The devaluing of the here and now in the name of the by-and-by is a mortal offense against the temporality that defines consciousness, but it also can lead to terrible impassivity in the face of injustice, an invitation to accept the given unacceptability instead of working to change it. The present is elusive, but humans were created as creatures of time for the sake of the present alone. What religion refers to as ‘beyond’ is often conceived as outside of time and space (the supernature beyond nature), but the beyond that matters is in the depth of present life. Time, therefore, is an invention. The past and the future are present realities because they are imagined constructs, aspects of consciousness but not its brackets. As memory is indulged for the sake of the present, not the past, thereby avoiding the dead end of nostalgia, so hope intends to strengthen the present, not flee to the fantasy of tomorrowland. Belief in God means to deepen present experience, without any particular regard for its consequences hereafter. Good religion, in other words, is not magic. It tells of the end of the story, yet also of the story's unboundedness. Good religion reckons with a natural order that may go on without an End Time, without humanity as its necessary pinnacle, with its only sure purpose as what humans bring to it. There is no other life, and religion is how one penetrates to the deepest level of that mystery, a level to which religion gives a name. The only life that lasts forever, that is, is the life of God. Humans, by virtue of God's creation as creatures with awareness, have been brought into that life, the eternal life that is only the present moment. To be fully alive is to be aware of being held now in what does not die, and in what does not drop what it holds. Religion calls that God. Second, good religion recognizes in God's Oneness a principle of unity among all God's creatures, a unity that is also known as love. Religion, in its essence, is about love, and every great religion
But skepticism is the revelation, and it is most valuable when applied to one's own cherished faith, measuring it against the standard of love that religion intends to uphold. To take a blatant example of what drives the rejection of religion, consider anti-female violence, on a continuum from intellectual assumptions of male supremacy to pornographic denigration to physical abuse to enslavement and murder. Misogynist sexism is a special symptom of religious disorder, and among the mainstream institutions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, it is, to one or another degree, endemic. The opposite of male supremacy is not female supremacy, but equality. For many, there can be no God for whom such equality is not essential, which can lead many to conclude, from the evidence offered in the religions, that there is no God….. the rejection of religion that cozies up to injustice can amount, in biblical terms, to a repudiation of idolatry, for in regard to women, as to many others, the religions have betrayed themselves by accepting transient cultural forms, like patriarchy, as divinely mandated…Thus the single most compelling test facing the three monotheistic religions today is how they define the place of women. Given the breakthrough understandings that have illuminated global culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—how women fare is how the culture fares—the religions will disqualify themselves as agents of God's presence or work unless females can claim therein positions of complete equality.
Good religion is not perfect religion, and knows it. Renewal of religious practice, doctrine, cult, creed, tradition, and worship must be ongoing. This radical commitment to purification is built into the tension between the sacred text and its forever unfolding interpretation, a process by which belief is measured against its real-world consequences. In other words, experience takes precedence over doctrine.30 Beliefs that lead to transgressions of the primal law of love must change. Religion that leads to violence must be reformed. Which is to say, every religion is forever in need of reformation.
James Carroll, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World Kindle Edition.
God beyond our reckoning,
make your dwelling-place with us,
and move us beyond our own limited glimpses of your presence.
Dwell with us also in our struggles against all that oppresses us,
that we may not demonise others
but call them, with us, to grow beyond where we are. Amen.
OutinScripture
Reflections on the readings…….
God wants our decisions to be in relationship to be a completely free choice, not one born of guilt, obligation, or half-interest. Decisions need to be renewed. ‘…… decide today whom you will serve …. ‘(Joshua 24:15). Serving God involves being in solidarity with God's chosen ones: the least among the people. ‘Choose this day’ unequivocally and without delay. This is particularly difficult when we experience situations of cruel violence and the destruction of innocent life. We have to be convinced that solidarity in working to overcome poverty and injustice is possible. The choice is the God who has and continues to liberate and be a source of life in our lives. This recommitment to liberation is still necessary as we deal with many situations of injustice. Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, in She Who Is, writes: ‘The fundamental sin is exploitation, whether it be expressed in the domination of male over female, white over black, rich over poor, strong over weak, armed military over unarmed civilians, human beings over nature. These analogously abusive patterns interlock because they reset on the same base: a structure where an elite insists on its superiority and claims the right to exercise dominative power over all others considered subordinate, for its own benefit.’ The God of Joshua and the God of Peter is a God of liberation from all such exploitation.
The temptation is to walk away. May our response to Jesus be Peter’s: ‘To whom can we go?’ But this is not also put to Jesus. It is put to us so many times in our daily lives as individuals, as communities, churches and as nation. It is the question put to us by the refugee, by the homeless person, by the person in need of aged care, the person who is unemployed as the one just out of prison, by the peoples of the Pacific nations as they face the rising waters of the oceans through climate change and global warming.
Joshua today calls the people to embrace the same power that stood by them and liberated them in their past. This God ‘has eyes for the just, and ears their cry’; who is ‘close to the broken hearted; and saves those who are crushed in spirit’ (Ps 34:15-18). Do we choose the old system and ways of doing things or do we choose God – the liberator.
Joshua showed the people the gods they could follow. These were/are the gods and images inherited from the past who continue to dominate, control, hang on to power and are blind to injustice. James Carroll (in Jerusalem, Jerusalem) says the rejection of a religion that cozies up to injustice can amount, in biblical terms, to a repudiation of idolatry, for in regard to women, as to many others, the religions have betrayed themselves by accepting transient cultural forms, like patriarchy, as divinely mandated. In terms of our relationships they are lame duck gods that support arrogant heterosexism, closeted racism, unashamed homophobia, rampant and recycled patriarchy and greedy corporatism. In the midst of this Joshua calls us to look to God who liberates us from various forms of slavery [guilt, fear, vengeance, etc.] and the one who preserves us and struggles with and for us. Like Jesus’ words today about his flesh and blood, this is hard teaching. A politics of fear is seeping into many aspects of our lives. People who speak against it can find themselves marginalised (refugee advocates, UN and international law experts, health professionals, psychologists, legal experts, church leaders. Reasoned debate was stifled when talking about people whose minds and bodies were abused and still are abused in order to send a message. We knowingly do harm to innocent people deserving of help – harm to their bodies and their psyches. The gospel still calls us to grow and be truly revolutionary. Ephesians calls for new covenants and arrangements in our relationships as well as between the sexes.
When many walked away, Jesus asks his own, ‘What about you? Are you leaving too?’ Peter answers ‘Where would we go? To whom would we go? You have for us the words of life. You have the liberation we came seeking. You have the nourishment we need for the revolutionary new world we are headed for.’ What about us? How often have we taken the Bread of life and it has made little difference in our response to injustices in the church and country; what difference did it make in our treatment of or silence about refugees; what difference did it make with regard to the abuses imposed on Indigenous people, or violence that we know about in our work places or neighbourhoods, what difference did it make to our action or silence on the vilifying language in Parliament or media against ethnic or social groups, or threats against our perceived enemies’ rather than try to understand them; what difference did it make when we avoided ridicule from those who might disagree with us? Who cares? Does our way of thinking and acting change at all? Do we become more capable of recognising Jesus’ other presences among those who are dispossessed of life?
To eat this Bread is to eat, to assimilate something of the spirit of the Beatitudes and the law of love. It is to drink the life, the practices and words of Jesus. This is how we are nourished by God’s life to continue the work of building God’s reign of peace and justice.
This is not a meal taken in solitude but to be shared in fellowship. The same Jesus who says, ‘I am the Bread of Life,’ and says ‘I was hungry and you fed me.’ (Mt 25,35).
So, all three readings today speak of the necessity to live up to obligations. Let us remember today the vulnerable, threatened, tortured people who come to us hungry for life, for freedom, for security, for peace. There are times when we think it is just too much trouble, or too dangerous, or perhaps just not worth the effort, to do what society calls us to do. Jesus experienced the same thing in today's Gospel. He was beginning to attract followers. And as one might guess, some were more dedicated than others. Some said, ‘This is a hard teaching,’ and turned back and no longer followed him. What do we say? The disciple of Jesus has to respond to the question: ‘Where shall we go to?’
We can often approach God incorrectly. We look for God in all the wrong places, and amongst the wrong people. The gospels point to the ones where God in the person of Jesus is to be found. Jesus embraced the human condition instead of running away from it. His humanity expressed his divinity. It did not contradict it. We are meant to find God here in our lives so that we can experience God in the thick of it. We experience God: in the deepest recesses of our humanity. If we take seriously the call to remain faithful to Jesus, we cannot avoid ‘eating his flesh and drinking his blood’ – taking the life, the values, the mission, the purposes, the attitudes, and his priorities into our hearts. We never have an excuse to stop loving, and we cannot justify putting others down or condemning them. May we look beyond individuals and persons when resisting injustice to the institutions, systems and ideologies that oppose God’s Reign. We need this Jesus perspective if we are to work together for the good of all. In the gospel today, Jesus asserts that he is God’s love ‘in the flesh.’ May we too be God’s love in the flesh.
