Over the last four weeks we have been decorating our Christmas trees. So as we sit in front of our Christmas tree let me tell you the tale of three trees.[1] Three little trees stood high upon a mountain discussing their dreams for the future.  The first little tree looked up at the dazzling night sky and said, “I want to carry the treasure of kings and queens. I want to be beautiful. I want to be filled with the riches of the world. The second little tree saw a nearby stream, and said, “I want to be a mighty sailing vessel. I want to sail in the roaring oceans,…

I think from every account we would say that the past year has been eventful in our world. The events that have played out on different levels continue to suggest that we are not only in an era of change but a change of era. Changing moments evoke the paradox of fear and hope deep within us. We glimpse the enormity of time and our fragility and insignificance before it whilst at the same time we wonder about new beginnings, about something new emerging.  We have the sense that something is passing, we are leaving behind something.  We sense that we are crossing over into something unknown and new.  We…

Christmas is associated with family for us, and often enough with family reunion.  Maybe family members who have been away for awhile are coming back home. Christmas is often a time, too, when we re-unite with friends with whom we have not been able to enjoy a great deal of contact over the year. Christmas is an expectant time, and as the time towards Christmas becomes shorter we are full of expectancy about it – even if this expectancy from time to time becomes a kind of dread! This kind of expectancy is, in different ways, at the heart of the Christmas mystery, and today’s gospel takes us to this…

The year now, of course, has the sense of beginning to wind up.  The HSC exams are over, university exams will be over in the coming week or so, the committees we might be on are having their final meetings for the year, the diaries are filling up with all the end of year social activities that we try and fit in before Christmas.  So, too, the Church’s liturgical year is coming to its end.  Next week it comes to its finality in the celebration of Christ the King, and then we begin a new year in the life of our Church with the season of Advent. A year ends,…

One of the most memorable Masses I have attended was in a little parish church in the Chianti district of Tuscany. In many ways it was a rather ordinary liturgy but what made it extraordinary for me was the presence on the sanctuary throughout the Mass of a Downs Syndrome man and an intellectually disabled man.  They were there in the form of altar servers although most of the work was done by the intellectually disabled man.  Nonetheless the Downs Syndrome man was with the priest throughout the liturgy:  sitting beside him high on the presidential step and even standing beside him throughout the Eucharistic Prayer.  That was the amusing…

In so many ways the gospel reverses the ordinary way that we think about things.  It certainly reversed the ordinary expectations that first century Palestinians had about God and the signs of God’s favour.  In the society of the time wealth was a sign of God’s favour, a sign of God’s blessing.  The underlying logic ran that the wealthier you were the more God was smiling on you. Therefore, those who were poor were looked upon as those who had missed out on the blessing of God, and at worst, who were cursed. Jesus, however, confronts this logic.  And he confronts this logic by putting forward poverty as a virtue. …

In a beautiful comment on the gospel for this Sunday Pope Francis observed some year ago:   “God did not want to come into the world other than through a family. God did not want to draw near to humanity other than through a home. God did not want any other name for Himself than Emmanuel. He is ‘God with us’. . . He is the God who from the very beginning of creation said: ‘It is not good for man to be alone’. We can add: it is not good for woman to be alone, it is not good for children, the elderly or the young to be alone. It…

We have all heard the expression, “Cleanliness is next to godliness” (to which some might add, “and if you can’t be godly, at least be clean.”)  We have also probably met some people at different times who are preoccupied with cleanliness to an extreme degree, so that it becomes an obsession.  Sometimes this kind of obsession can even be a sign of neurosis as in the case of people who feel the need to wash their hands continuously even though there is no apparent need to do so.  Compulsive hand-washing is a symbolic act:  it represents the person’s unconscious desire to be rid of some deep mental preoccupation.  The process of washing expresses the…

I’m sure many of us have at some time enjoyed the English television comedy, “The Vicar of Dibley.”  You may recall at the end of each episode, the vicar tells Alice, the church warden, a joke.  The joke is often quite funny but Alice never quite gets it.  She applies a literal logic to the joke, and she tries to reason the joke out, all of course to the frustration of the vicar.  I often think that before many of the stories of the gospel and before the parables of Jesus we are a bit like Alice in the “Vicar of Dibley.”  We apply to what we have heard a logic that is quite foreign…

How often we can fail to recognise the presence of God in the ordinary things of life.  We want God to come in the grand scheme, in a form that takes away all our doubt and anxiety, in the miraculous gesture. This is at the base of the apocalyptic cults such as QAnon amongst others.  And in so doing, we miss the presence of God in the smile of a stranger, the challenging word of a friend, the simplicity of the scene outside our window. This is at the heart of the gospel this Sunday. Who could think that this peasant from Nazareth was the prophet long expected? The people in today’s gospel…