“Remain in my love.”  This magnificent church was built 125 years ago.  It is a great sign of the determination of the people who built it to remain faithful. It is a monument to their love for God who first loved us and sent his Son to take our sins away.  The building of this beautiful church must have been a massive and daunting undertaking.  Even with our JCBs and our big cranes and our scaffolding, we would have to think very hard about setting out to build something of this magnificence today.

Because it has stood here for all those years, this church is a visible sign of how the generations of parishioners for a century and a quarter came here to express the same desire to remain faithful in their love of God.  They lived through two World Wars, through the struggle for independence, through many hardships, through good times and bad. .  They celebrated God’s love in the Eucharist when that love is made visible in the presence of his Son who died and rose for us.  They received the great signs of that love in Baptism and in all the other sacraments celebrated in this church and parish. They heard the Good News preached here and they tried to live it in their lives. They brought their loved ones to the House of God for their funeral Masses, entrusting them to that love and praying that they would remain in the joy of that love for all eternity.

We come here today to say that we are part of that same tradition and that now it is up to us to ensure that our generation and the generations that follow us will remain in God’s love.  Perhaps for the first time in that long history we find ourselves wondering whether, that tradition will survive strongly here in the future.  We wonder how vibrant the faith may be a hundred and twenty-five years from now in 2134!

What today’s readings tell us above all is that the tradition of faith that exists here is not our possession or our achievement.  It is a gift that we have received.

The people in the first reading were learning that lesson: “They were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit should be poured out on the pagans too.”   They had never expected to see ‘these pagans’ being favoured by God.  The Gentiles were outsiders, not part of God’s people.  What that attitude showed was that, instead of seeing God’s love as a gift, something that God gives with absolute freedom and generosity, they were seeing it as something that was theirs, something to which they were entitled, something that was given only to them.

Peter had learned that lesson: “The truth I have now come to realise is that God does not have favourites, but that anybody of any nationality who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to him.”  In other words, God’s love is always bigger than we imagine.

That tells us something very important about what it means to be a Christian community – a parish.  We have been baptised into the Body of Christ.  . None of us did, or could have done, anything to deserve such a gift. What makes us a community is not what great people we are, but a gift that none of us has deserved.  The most important thing about us is not our achievements or our qualities, not even ‘our love for God ‘but God’s love for us when he sent his Son’ so that we could have life through him.

So we are a community where nobody has any grounds for excluding or looking down on anyone else. We are a community where nobody should be judging him/herself against other people.  It’s a temptation that is very hard to resist – to say something like, “whatever my failings, I’m a lot better than him!”   Each one of us is loved by Christ who laid down his life for us. And we are to love one another as he has loved us. We need his love and we have no more right to his mercy than any of the people we disapprove of or to whom we feel superior.

The gift we have received from God through those who have gone before us, is not meant to make us feel superior, it urges us to share what we have received.

What we are to be to one another is clearly indicated by the Patron of this parish.  Andrew was a disciple of John the Baptist.  One day he heard John describe Jesus as the Lamb of God. He followed him and listened to him and then brought his brother, Simon Peter, to meet him.  So Andrew was the one who began to gather the followers of Jesus.  He gathered the first small group that included Peter, Philip and Nathaniel.  That is the task that generations of people in Kilfinane and throughout the diocese have been carrying out down the centuries – to reach out and welcome a new generation and other new people helping them to receive the gift of God and to live in the hope that it brings. And this parish, like so many others, sent many of its sons and daughters to bring that gift, that Good News, to every corner of the earth.

Andrew was among the apostles to whom Jesus first spoke the words: “I chose you and commissioned you to go out and to bear fruit, fruit that will last.” 

That is the commission that is given to us as we look to the future of this parish and diocese.  I pray that the Christian life of this parish will bear much fruit, fruit that will last for the next century and far into the future. But it can only do that if we remember whose fruit it is. “Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (I Cor 3:7).  May the Lord richly bless you and this parish and help us all to appreciate the gift we have received.

+Donal  Murray