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25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
We often say religion and politics don’t mix. And it is true we must be careful to avoid the politicization of religious faith in such a way that religion becomes a vehicle to achieve political ends. However, at the same time, paradoxically we can never separate faith and politics as if we could behave one way in an internal world of spirituality, and another way in the external world of civic affairs. Politics is about choices, and the choices we make cannot but be informed by our discipleship of the Lord. To act otherwise is to develop a schizophrenia in our identity. Jesus calls us to live with an integrity…
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24th Sunday in Ordinary Time Podcast
The mystery of forgiveness is central to the Christian perspective. Forgiveness, though, is a challenge. It is a mystery. And it is a journey. It is an appointment that awaits each and every one of us. Each and every one of us carries hurt, some of them very deep. Each hurt presents with the challenge: to forgive or not to forgive. The challenge is unavoidable. The decision, however, is ours to make or otherwise. It is our Christian discipleship that impels us each day to enter the journey of forgiveness. It is here, perhaps more than anywhere else, that the depth of our Christian commitment becomes apparent or otherwise. It is in the challenge of forgiveness that…
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24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
The award-winning film, Of Gods and Men, tells the true story of seven French Catholic monks living in war torn Algeria in the 1990s. It is the story of a community of men living peacefully in the Atlas Mountains. Inevitably the civil war and the bloodshed that had gripped the country for many years also surrounded them. Eventually they were kidnapped and were held hostage by Algerian extremists. They disappear and sometime later their heads are discovered. What made their deaths remarkable is not so much that they, like so many through the 1990s, got caught up in the political strife of Algeria but that they had made the conscious decision to stay…
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23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Podcast
The Gospel recognises that our relationships are never easy, including the relationships between fathers and their children which we mark here in Australia on Father’s Day. They are always fraught with the possibility of hurt, with disappointments, with projections, with disillusionment. Their demand is constant. Yet, it is what happens in and through them that determines our real sanctity. We do not grow in holiness by practicing more religion. We grow in holiness by practicing more listening, more humility, more love – by genuinely encouraging one another rather than putting wedges between ourselves. https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/content.blubrry.com/davidranson/Homily_for_23rd_Sunday_of_Year_A.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS
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23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
A key focus for the Gospel of Matthew is the relationships that constitute the Christian community. There is a way of living together and a way of relating to one another that is reflective of the Kingdom of God as inaugurated by Jesus, and that is ultimately indicative of the life of God, and there is a way of living and of relating that is not as illustrative. Fear, suspicion, resentment, bitterness draw people away from one another. Listening, humility, openness and dialogue bring people together. It is easy to identify which side of the ledger speaks of the life of God, and which does not. Writing in the 6th century, St. Benedict who drew…
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22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Podcast
One of the most radical truths we will learn in life is that which is expressed by the Australian novelist, Patrick White, “The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.” We can spend our whole life learning the meaning of this. It confuses us given that it is the opposite of what we want. It is the antithesis of the culture in which we have been immersed and which seduces us in subtle ways so that we become despondent because we find we are not as free as we think, not as in control as we want to…
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22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
In the anxiety with which we are living at this time, our uncertainty can easily translate into despondency. We see video clips of large sporting events, gatherings of people socializing and enjoying life, rallies of one kind or another, and we wonder when we will ever experience these opportunities again. Our Year 12 students are being denied the many rituals that mark the end of their school years. We feel the constraint of not being able to be with our families and friends who are interstate or overseas, especially at times of sickness and death. We are acknowledging that our experience of the pandemic will not be over any time…
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21st Sunday in Ordinary Time Podcast
Like the identity of Jesus, our own identity is an ‘event’ that discloses itself in and through a commitment to something other than itself. When we are somebody for everybody, so that nobody is just anybody, the question about our identity is given back its answer. When people see the way in which we live our life, would they too reveal back to us our own God-given identity, as bearers of the Christ, if we asked them who we are, as Jesus asks his disciples who he is? https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/content.blubrry.com/davidranson/21st_Sunday_of_Year_A.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS
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21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
Anxiety may well be observed as one of the defining characteristics of our age. Clearly, we are anxious about the situation of the pandemic in which we discover ourselves. So much that is uncertain stretches out before us. And yet, what makes this worse, I think, is a deeper anxiety that we were carrying even before we had to confront the coronavirus. Whilst, on the one hand, perhaps as never before, we have the opportunity to celebrate individuality and diversity perhaps as never before have we been less sure about who we are. In the musical, The Gondaliers Gilbert and Sullivan once suggested ‑ rather prophetically I think of our own time ‑…
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20th Sunday in Ordinary Time Podcast
Jesus is confronted with a Canaanite woman, a stranger, a foreigner, someone culturally entirely different from himself. At first he reacts as we all do in such a situation: defensively, even with hostility. But her presence persists. He hears her story. His perspective changes. This encounter becomes a turning point in Jesus ministry. https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/content.blubrry.com/davidranson/20th_Sunday_of_Ordinary_Time.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS
Homily Podcasts