Silver Anniversary of Ordination of Fr Stephen Wayoyi AJ – Vigil of Assumption – 14 August 2026 – St Leonards Naremburn
Tonight we stand at the intersection of two great songs of thanksgiving. The first is the song of the Church as we begin the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. We rejoice in what God has accomplished in Mary: that the woman who gave herself entirely to God’s purpose, who received the Word, carried Christ within her and gave him to the world, is gathered at last, body and soul, into the fullness of God’s life.
Within that great song of the Church, tonight we hear another song of thanksgiving as we celebrate twenty-five years of priestly ministry in the life of Fr Stephen. We give thanks for the family and community in Kenya from which your vocation first emerged; for the Church which nurtured your faith; for your formation with the Apostles of Jesus, with its explicitly missionary charism; for those who accompanied you towards Ordination; and for the many people and communities whom you have served in the twenty-five years since. In a particular way, we give thanks for the providence of God which eventually brought you from Africa to Australia and into the life of the Diocese of Broken Bay. Over these many years you have become not simply a missionary priest serving amongst us, but a brother and friend, sharing our life, carrying with us the joys, struggles and hopes of our local Church.
Fr Stephen, there is something profoundly Marian about the trajectory of your priesthood. Like Mary, you received something which could not simply be kept for yourself. The young man who entered missionary formation with the Apostles of Jesus in Kenya could hardly have known where the journey would eventually lead. He could hardly have imagined all the people and places that would one day form the landscape of his priesthood. Perhaps that is precisely the mystery of missionary vocation: we allow God to draw the map. Abraham did not know where the road would lead. The apostles did not know where their nets would eventually be cast. Paul could not have imagined on the road to Damascus the cities and communities to which Christ would send him. Mary certainly could not have foreseen at Nazareth where her simple fiat would take her. And at Ordination none of us really knows where the promise we make will take us. We simply say, each in our own way, “Let it be done to me according to your word,” or, with Isaiah, “Here I am. Send me.”
After twenty-five years, those words carry a different depth. At Ordination they are filled with hope and possibility. Twenty-five years later, they are filled with memory. They contain faces. They contain baptisms and funerals, marriages and reconciliations, hospital rooms and school classrooms, parish meetings and quiet conversations, celebrations that lifted the heart and disappointments that tested it. They contain friendships, mistakes, laughter, fatigue, unexpected blessings, and those moments when a priest wonders whether anything he is doing is making much difference at all. Twenty-five years later, “Here I am” is no longer simply an aspiration. It has become a life. Just as it was for Mary.
Mary herself is the great missionary disciple. Our images of Mary can sometimes make her seem still, serene, almost removed from the movement and uncertainty of ordinary life. But the Mary of the Gospel is a woman on the move. At the Annunciation she receives the Word of God, and then she goes. She sets out “with haste” into the hill country to Elizabeth. She carries Christ beyond the security of her own home. Later she journeys to Bethlehem, flees into Egypt, returns to Nazareth, travels to Jerusalem, stands at Calvary, and waits with the disciples for Pentecost. Mary’s entire life is a journey in which the Word she has received is continually carried beyond herself.
That is mission, and in a particular way, that is priesthood. The first word of Christian vocation is “Come”: “Come, follow me.” But inevitably there follows another word: “Go.” “Go into all the world.” “Go and make disciples.” “Go to the lost sheep.” “Go, for I am sending you.” The priest lives between these two words of Jesus: come and go. Come to me, remain in me, let me love you, let me teach you, let me nourish you; and then go. Leave what is familiar. Cross the road, cross the parish, cross cultures, and sometimes cross the world. Take what you have received and give it away.
Pope Francis continually called the Church back to this missionary identity. One of the great expressions of his pontificate was the phrase “missionary disciples.” We are not disciples first and missionaries later; the two belong together. If we have truly encountered Christ, something in us must go outward. Francis dreamt of a Church with open doors, a Church prepared to go to the peripheries, a Church willing even to be bruised because it had been out on the streets rather than safely enclosed within itself. The priest is ordained because the Gospel must travel, and sometimes, quite literally, the priest must travel with it. And in so doing, you have brought something of the Church of Africa to us: its vitality, its joy, its strong sense of community and its confidence in faith. The frontiers of mission, however, are no longer simply geographical. The frontier is wherever someone has forgotten that they are loved by God. The frontier is the young person wondering whether faith has anything to say to their life. The frontier is the family struggling to hold together, the person grieving alone, the migrant trying to find a home, the person wounded by the Church, the person who has quietly walked away from faith and wonders whether anyone noticed. The frontier may be Africa, or Australia, or Broken Bay. It may be the person sitting only a few seats away from us tonight.
Yet Mary teaches us something more. Mission is not simply about going. It is first about carrying. Mary goes to Elizabeth because she carries Christ within her. This is why we must always return to the same place Mary returned: to listening. The missionary priest must first be a listening priest: listening to God, listening to Scripture, listening to his people, listening to another culture, another generation, those who no longer come to Church, those who are angry with the Church, the poor, the wounded, and those whose questions are deeper than the words they use to express them. He listens for the quiet ways in which God is already at work before he arrives. The missionary does not bring God to a godless place. The missionary goes searching for the God who has arrived before him.
Perhaps twenty-five years of priesthood teaches us this more clearly than anything else. In our younger years we imagine priesthood largely in terms of what we will do. With time, we discover that much of priesthood is about learning how to remain. To remain when circumstances become difficult, when enthusiasm fades, when people disappoint us, when the Church herself passes through difficulty; to remain beside the grieving family when there is nothing clever to say, beside the person struggling with faith, with a community through its changes; to remain faithful to prayer when prayer feels dry; to remain at the altar; to remain available; to remain in love.
Tonight the same Word comes again: Stephen, come, follow me. And then: go. Go again, go deeper, go with greater freedom, go with the wisdom twenty-five years has given you, go with the humility twenty-five years has provided you. And so, this jubilee cannot simply be about looking backwards over twenty-five years. Christian jubilee always looks forward. The question tonight is not only, Stephen, where have you been? The more exciting question is: where is Christ still sending you? What people are still waiting for your priesthood? What conversations have not yet occurred? What person will encounter God’s mercy because you were available? What young person might discover a vocation because they saw something joyful in yours? What community will be strengthened because you remained faithful? What new frontier of mission has not yet appeared on the map?
So tonight, dear Stephen, we thank God for your yes twenty-five years ago. We thank God for every quiet yes since. Through the intercession of Mary, assumed into heaven, we pray that the years ahead may bring an ever deeper, freer and more joyful response to the Word that first called you. May you continue to hear that Word, to keep that Word, to carry that Word and to give that Word generously to the people entrusted to you.
