the lights, so it's hanging in the pencils,
so you can see the picture when we come back.
Good morning everybody and welcome to our Eucharist celebration this morning.
It's the fifth Sunday in ordinary time and our celebrant is Father Mark.
Please would you stand for the opening hymn.
Let's welcome each other to mass this morning.
If our children would like to go over for their children's time this morning, Tang will be there.
So we gather and let's hold the Sisters of Mercy in our prayer.
as they have been grieving Sister Mary Crowe.
We gather in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The peace and grace of Jesus be with you.
Christ have mercy.
And may Almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sin and bring us to life everlasting.
Speaking his praises from the sky...
and accept the thanks we bring.
All is our love, God the Father,
man who takes our sin away.
Now have you been triumphed, Savior, for your mercy all the way.
Jesus Christ most high and low.
Out of your compassion, O God, you sent your Son to our afflicted world to proclaim the
day of salvation, heal the broken, bind up wounds, bring us health of body and spirit,
and raise us to new life.
We ask this prayer through Christ our Lord.
The first reading is a reading from the book of Joe.
Jobs sparked to his friends.
Do not human beings have a hard service on earth, and are not their days like the days of a laborer?
Like a slave who longs for the shadow, and like laborers who look for their wages, so
I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are a portion to me.
When I lie down, I say, when shall I rise?
But the night is long, and I am full of tossing until dawn.
My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle,
and come to their end without hope.
Remember that my life is a breath.
My eye will never again see good.
I will praise your name forever, my King and my Lord.
How good it is to sing praises to our home.
For he is gracious, and a song of praise is fitting.
The Lord builds up Jerusalem.
He gathers the downcast of Israel.
The Lord heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds.
He determines the number of those pairs He gives to all of them then and then.
Praises our Lord, and abundant in power.
His understanding is beyond measure.
He cast the wicked to the ground.
a reading from the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians.
If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is
laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel.
For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward.
But if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission.
What then is my reward? Just this, that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel.
For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them.
To the weak, I became weak, so that I might win the weak.
I have become all things to all people, that I might be all means, save some.
I do it all for the sake of the Gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.
The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Mark.
As soon as Jesus and his disciples left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John.
Now Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told Jesus about her at once.
and took her by the hand and lifted her up.
Then the fever left her and she began to serve them.
That evening at sundown they brought to Jesus all who were sick or possessed
with demons and the whole city was gathered around the door and he cured
many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons and he would
not permit the demons to speak because they knew him.
In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place and there he prayed.
and Simon and his companions hunted for him.
When they found him, they said to him,
everyone is searching for you.
He answered, let us go on to the neighboring towns so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came to do.
And Jesus went through Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons. The Gospel of the Lord.
When a person takes up a significant role, we watch their first days and weeks to pick
up their priorities and policies.
We've been seeing this in the United States and even in our own country when any new government
takes up office.
When Pope Francis was elected in 2013, this was the case.
People watched eagerly, waiting to scrutinise his first public statements to find out what sort of man this was
and where was the direction in which he might seek to leave the church.
In his case it was not just what he said that was telling, but even more importantly what he did and where he did it.
He was just elected when in his first Holy Thursday he publicly washed the feet of prisoners
from a Roman jail, including a young Muslim woman.
The picture went round the world.
Then he travelled and made a visit, not to a holy shrine, but to the Mediterranean island
of Lampedusa to commemorate the thousands of migrants, men, women, children, babies
who have died crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
He proclaimed a jubilee year of mercy, not from the marble steps of the Vatican, but
in the Central African Republic, one of the poorest and most troubled countries in the world.
Pope Francis was saying clearly that these people were his priority.
These were the situations to which he turned his face.
This was the center of his world.
In Mark's Gospel something similar is happening.
At the very beginning of his Gospel, Mark is setting out before us the priorities of Jesus.
As he steps from obscurity into public life, emerging from the waters of the Jordan
and the temptations of the desert, what does Jesus do first?
He begins to teach.
He chooses his closest followers.
He starts to clash with evil spirits.
And in today's reading, he starts to heal people.
I particularly like Mark's gospel and sometimes it reads like an eyewitness account with all the details you'd want to know.
Peter has met these fishermen and after a visit to the synagogue, Peter takes him home to his house.
There, the very minute they arrive, there's no, come in, sit down, would you like some
water?
Can I take your cloak?
But Peter's mother-in-law is sick, that's the first words that greet him.
And what follows this is a series of actions.
Jesus goes straight to her. He takes her by the hand. He lifts her up. She gets
better and starts to serve them. It's very real and homely.
But Mark is not just telling us a simple story of events. He is writing the good
news of Jesus Christ. There is a lot more in this story. Jesus was emerging as a
rabbi, a teacher in the Jewish religion. He was gathering his followers, his pupils,
the disciples. He was a significant person.
of the time, a rabbi was set apart.
He must not become impure through contact with the sick,
for sickness was seen as a work of evil spirits.
A rabbi must not allow himself to be touched by a woman,
as that would also sully his purity.
The actions of Jesus as Mark describes them are giving a message about who he
is and what are his priorities. This rabbi does not avoid the sick woman. He
goes right to her and he takes her by her hand.
Then he lifts her up and she serves him.
The words in the original Greek are very carefully chosen.
He lifts her up.
These are big words in the early church where Jesus was lifted up on the cross and then
raised up to new life.
She serves them. The Greek word here is diachania, the word from which we get deacon, and it
describes a very important role in the early church.
So Peter's mother-in-law was resurrected to new life and took on a role in the
Christian community. Jesus was not just a kind man who healed, he was the Son of
God who defeated the powers of evil and called women and men alike to a new kind
of life.
Jesus heals and he drives out evil spirits. There is plenty of evil in our
world and sometimes it seems as if the greater our affliction the more selfish
we become.
It was shocking to hear that the bulk of COVID vaccines were going to the 10 richest countries
in the world, and in one of the most poor countries, 25 vaccines had been given.
Lies abound in our world. War and injustice seem never to diminish.
The natural world is groaning. What are we to do with all of this?
Today's gospel assures us that Jesus desires healing, our healing and the healing of our world.
The amazing thing is that being with those who need healing is Jesus' preference.
He longs to touch us in our woundedness. He longs to take our hand and raise us up.
This is his joy. This is one of the places where he feels most himself.
And when he raises us up, he does not just put us back the way we were before.
Like Peter's mother-in-law, we are healed for something, and that something is about serving others.
During the week I happened to flick on breakfast TV and I caught Jenny Mae Clarkson interviewing a woman.
This woman had been nominated for Older New Zealander of the Year. Her name was Alison McLennan.
Her story is that many years ago she had a son who at the age of 19 was in a very serious
accident that left him severely brain damaged.
She spoke about what a lonely struggle it had been with this son who was able to do very little for himself.
She spoke of her desperation that she had lost the son that she had.
The son that you've got, she said, the son you've got is not the son you had anymore.
The grief of it.
But Alison did not finish there.
She went on to speak in the simplest way
about learning to love that sun again.
What a depth of love and courage is in those few words, learning to love that song again.
That's the place where we see grace in action.
That's the point of healing.
There's the finger of God.
There's no cure, but there is deep healing.
Alison went on to see another people did not have the lonely struggle that had been hers,
establishing an organisation for the support of families.
with of people with brain injuries that has now spread throughout the country from Auckland
to Invercable. Like Simon's mother-in-law, she was raised up and she went on to serve.
This is an ordinary, extraordinary woman.
And such is Jesus. Such is our God. God who loves us just the way we are created and does not withdraw love when we are wounded.
when we fail, when we are broken, damaged in mind or body.
Jesus is drawn to us when we are in need of healing, and which of us is not.
God comes close to us when we're struggling with addiction, with harm received or
harm done, when we are not who we want to be, when we are ordinarily tired or
angry, unforgiving or bitter, like that mangrove in the first reading today.
we crowd around his door and this God who is never tired of raising us up
sets us on our feet to try again and as we are healed we can be that person for
others loving accepting
Forgiving, understanding, we can be that person, and together we can be that community.
So let us pray not only for our own healing and the healing of those we love, but let
us pray that as we rise from our scars, we together may be Christ to others.
And gracious God, we pray.
We continue to pray for all those affected by COVID-19 and for those engaged in vaccine
research and in the managing of this virus.
We pray that we can go on living our lives in response to you, other than God.
May the Treaty of Waitangi continue to serve our way of respecting one another.
We pray for all peoples of our world, seeking ways to live more justly with one another.
We pray to the Lord.
Let us pray for those who have died.
Sister Mary crowed,
and for those whose anniversaries are about now,
and especially those we recall in January.
A note of mining.
We pray to the Lord.
and we make our prayer through Christ our Lord.
Pray that our sacrifice will be acceptable to God, our gracious Lord.
Loving God make holy our gifts that they might reshape our hearts and so
deepen our union in you and we ask this through Christ our Lord the Lord is
with you lift up your hearts and let us give thanks to the Lord our God
It is right, it's just always to give you praise for filling your will and gaining for
you a holy people.
Jesus stretched out his hands as he endured his passion so as to break the bonds of death
and to make manifest the resurrection with angels, martyrs, saints and each other we pray.
You are holy, Lord, you are the fount of holiness, and make holy our gifts we pray,
by gifting us with your Spirit, that they can become the sacred body and blood of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
At the time he was betrayed and entered willily into his patch and he took bread, he broke
it, he gave it to the disciples saying, take this, all of you and eat it.
This is my body.
in a similar way as supper ended he took the cup and again he offered thanks he
gave praise he gave the cup to the disciples saying take this all of you
and drink from it. This is the cup of my blood. The blood of the new and eternal covenant,
it will be shed for you and for all, for the forgiveness of sin.
Therefore, as we celebrate the memorial of his death and resurrection, we offer you, Lord,
the breed of life and chalice of salvation, giving thanks that you have held us worthy.
to be in your presence and minister to you.
In humbly we pray that,
partaking of the body and blood of Christ,
we can be gathered into one by the Holy Spirit.
Remember your church spread throughout our world and bring the church to the
fullness of charity with Francis, our Pope, Michael, our Bishop and all of your
holy people. Remember our sisters and our brothers who've died, especially Mary.
I'm glad in them with the light of your face.
Have mercy on us that with the blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of God, St. Joseph.
the apostles and all the saints who have pleased you through the ages, we might
receive eternal life and praise and glorify you through your Son Jesus the
Christ.
with Him and in Him, a God Almighty Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit or glory and
honor is yours for ever and ever.
Deliver us, Lord, we pray from every evil and graciously growing peace in our day,
that by the help of your mercy we can be free from sin and safe from distress as we await
the blessed hope in coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.
and the peace of the Lord is with you. Let's share peace with each other.
Have mercy on us, Lamb of all you take away the sins of the world.
The day away, the things of the world
And behold, the Lamb of God, and behold Him who takes away the sin of the world,
and blessed are we called to the supper of the Lamb.
Lord, we are nourished and made whole by the sacred body and blood of your Son.
In your kindness grant that the mystery we've celebrated may bring us the fullness of your
life, and we make our prayer through Christ Jesus, our Lord, and invite our children to
come forward for their blessing.
And the Lord is with you, and may Almighty God bless us, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Let us bless the Lord.