​There was a Belgian girl whose name was Nancy. She spoke of her childhood in this way: ‘I was that girl nobody wanted. While my brothers were celebrated, I got a storage room above the garage as a bedroom. My mother kept telling me: If only you had been a boy.’ It impacted Nancy badly. When as an adult she was looking for help she was offered a sex change. She did it and became Nathan. After a series of therapies and surgeries Nancy who was now Nathan realized that the new person she became didn’t meet her dreams. ‘I was disgusted with myself. I didn’t want to be a monster.’ This time the help given was legal euthanasia on the grounds of the ‘unbearable psychological suffering.’ The person was 44 at the time of death.
My Dear Sisters and Brothers! Could you sense any good news given to Nancy at any stage of her life? I don’t. From her childhood to her premature death she was entangled in the spiral of evil. Her tragic life and death are however a diagnosis of what is happening in our society where people anoint themselves as messiahs, saviors of the world. It is a recurring drama from the Book of Genesis when Satan said to the first people: ‘You will be like god.’ In the first centuries of Christianity when our brothers and sisters in faith were committing themselves to the Lord Jesus, when they strived to live according to the Gospel, they were surrounded by images and statues of various gods and goddesses. They had to navigate in the society where there were hundreds and thousands of gods. We don’t see statues of pagan gods at every street or intersection. However we are surrounded by people who have usurped the role of God. They don’t expect us to burn incense in front of them or to light candles in their honour but they do expect that we welcome their new dogmas about the society, life and death, about the nature of human being, with obedience which can be compared to a religious obedience to God. In this situation we hear from Jesus news which is good. It is Good News for our temporal life and for our eternal life: ‘The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the Lord’s year of favour.’ That’s spirit, that anointing to be the Saviour of the world, has been given to Jesus Christ as our Blessed Lord announced: ‘This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen.’ Good News is not a theory or some clever advice. Good News is Jesus Christ himself.
Two thousand years ago he came to the synagogue in Nazareth to offer people the life which flows from God. This Sunday we listen to the beginning of the Gospel of Luke. Until December the Sunday Gospel readings will be primary from Luke.  Among some of the most loved passages there is the parable we call the parable of the prodigal son. However when you reflect on the parable deeply the question appears: ‘Who was more prodigal? The son who wasted lots of money or the father who didn’t hesitate to ‘waste’ his love?
St Luke dedicated the Gospel to Theophilus which translates as ‘friend of God.’ That’s how I call you who are gathered here in this church: Friends of God. You may think that it is only a nice phrase I use. It is not just a phrase but an invitation to grow in your conviction that you are a friend of God. Take this opportunity as you listen to the Gospel of Luke this year to allow the Good News, to allow Jesus to convince you that you are a friend of God. I encourage you to take the parish bulletin home every week and to read prayerfully the Gospel reading as your daily prayer. Let is sink deeply into your soul.
One of the reasons I love coming to your outback parish is that here, in the middle of the desert, the words of my favourite Psalm 62 come so alive: ‘O God, you are my God, for you I long, for you my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water.’ This longing can be only satisfied by God like the longing of that person I spoke at the beginning. Nancy needed Good News; she needed love of Christ to heal her not to become Nathan. This is our mission, to help people to discover that they are friends of God, that they are his sons and daughters, that when it comes to loving - God, whom Jesus Christ has revealed, is truly prodigal. By praying and meditating the Sunday Gospels you will be soaked with the Spirit like the earth gets soaked when a good rain comes.

​In 2013 a new word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary: FOMO. It is an acronym for the Fear of Missing Out. It is the term for a psychological syndrome which is defined ‘as a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.’ The social media which allow people to follow or somehow rather participate in the life of other people contribute to FOMO. Some people, especially young people, get caught in the constant checking of what their friends or colleagues are doing as they fear that they are missing out on those experiences that they miss out on living their own life.
My Dear Sisters and Brothers! As we listen to the Gospel about the wedding at Cana we get a sense that Jesus was comfortable there, don’t we? He enjoyed the time of the joyful celebration. When you flick back one page of the Scriptures you will find Jesus in a different environment. Before he came to Cana he was with John the Baptist in the desert. From other Gospels we also learn that after being baptized by John Jesus spent forty days in the desert on his own where he was tempted by the devil. He embraced that too. Jesus shows us the life which is the life of communion with God. Such a communion led him to embracing the situations he was in with full attention and commitment. Jesus was not seeking new and exciting experiences because his relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit was an ever new and exciting reality he was living.
Some people apply FOMO to the Christianity. They fear that by embracing faith, that by following Jesus, they will miss out all the excitements of life. What they face is the choice they are compelled to make. As Jesus himself said: ‘No one can serve two masters.’ It was the choice which St Paul revealed in his Letter to the Philippians: ‘Because of the supreme advantage of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord; I count everything else as loss.’
The wedding setting of today’s Gospel is an example of such a choice. To enter the marriage covenant one needs to choose to leave behind lots of other experiences. This choice however opens to something truly fulfilling and life-giving.
A married man who was working in the office where all the other employees were single started feeling sorry for himself that after work his colleagues were going to pub while he had to go to his wife and children. He began thinking how much he was missing out. Then one day his coworker said to him: ‘I wish that soon I can be in your situation. That I can have a home, that I can have a wife and children I can go to after work.’ This conversation realized the married man that what he had at home was far more precious than what he thought he was missing out.
In our Second Reading taken from the First Letter to the Corinthians St Paul wrote: ‘There is a variety of gifts but always the same Spirit.’ May this same Spirit of God lead us to see our Christian faith, our following of Jesus as something exceeding all other experiences we might have.

​​‘The skies are brass and the plains are bare,
Death and ruin are everywhere;
And all that is left of the last year’s flood
Is a sickly stream on the grey-black mud;
The salt-springs bubble and the quagmires quiver,
And this is the dirge of the Darling River.’
            We can relate to these words of Henry Lawson written in 1891, can’t we? Last week when I was doing Mass at Menindee I saw the green toxic liquid filling the Darling River, which has caused devastation to the fish. The extent of the disaster has triggered some fresh discussions and analyses. Among the voices contributing to the discussion on the condition and the future of the Darling River, which is the third largest river in Australia, there is the voice of the Barkindji people who have lived on the Darling for millennia. They have called the Darling Barka which in their language means simply River. The anthropologists call them the ‘Darling River folk’ while they call themselves simply ‘people of the river.’ During a community march in Wilcannia to draw attention to the situation the aboriginal children sang: ‘Oh, the Darling River. We are the people of the river. The Barkindji people of the river. The river is our home.’ One of the elders said: ‘We don’t want the government’s billions of dollars poured into our community. We want our water flowing because that gives people hope and it brings people together.’
            My Dear Sisters and Brothers! I hope and pray that this voice is not ignored. It is a different insight. It is not based on economy or politics but it reveals the profound connection of the Barkindji people to the Darling. The river makes them who they are. However I hope and pray also that we, Catholics, can listen to this insight as a prophetic message for us. This Sunday, which concludes the much loved Christmastide, the Church takes us to the Jordan River where Christ allowed John the Baptist to immerse him. His Baptism was not to clean him of his sins. His Baptism was like the rains in Queensland which send the water down the Darling River.
St Ignatius of Antioch, who was a disciple of St John the Apostle, meditating on Jesus’ Baptism wrote: ‘For our God, Jesus Christ was conceived in the womb of Mary by the Holy Spirit. He was born and baptized, that by His passion He might purify the water.’ That’s why the Eastern Church Fathers saw the water of our baptism as a miniature of the Jordan.
St Paul wrote in the Letter to Titus that out of ‘his own compassion God saved us, by means of the cleansing water of rebirth and by renewing us with the Holy Spirit which he has so generously poured over us through Jesus Christ our Saviour.’ We who have been baptised are the people of the Baptism River.
St Paulinus of Nola asked for the following words to be written on the baptismal font in his cathedral:  ‘From this font, which gives life to souls in need of salvation, flows a living river of divine light. The Holy Spirit comes down from heaven upon this river and joins the sacred waters with the heavenly source; the stream teems with God and from the eternal seed gives birth to holy offspring by its fruitful waters.’
My Dear Fellow believers! The Baptism River is not on the maps like the Darling River, though even the Darling may soon be erased from the maps as it becomes a story of the past. The Baptism River can be detected by the presence of Christian communities. It is determined not by geography but by the power of the Risen Lord. If there is a Christian community striving to live by the Gospel it means that they live on the banks of the Baptism River. Like you here. Even if the maps don’t show any river flowing through your town remember that there is the River here made of the sacraments we receive, the Word of God we listen to, acts of charity, forgiveness and unity, all these are filled with the power of our God.
We can apply to ourselves the words of the Barkindji people: ‘The Baptism River is our home…  It gives people hope and it brings people together.’ This River doesn’t dry up; only people can cease drawing from it.

            Did you ever play the game of hide and seek when you were children? Some players are so good at hiding that it is impossible to find them. Every now and then there is also someone who simply wants to be found. A number of times I have heard that our God plays a hide and seek game with us. This Sunday, as we observe the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, we can say that God is like those friends from our childhood who wanted to be found when we played a hide and seek game with them. If God wanted to hide himself from us he wouldn’t have sent the angels with trumpets to the shepherds. If God wanted to hide himself from us he wouldn’t have sent a star to lead the Wise Men. If God wanted to hide himself from us he wouldn’t have left information about his whereabouts in the prophetic writings quoted by the advisors of King Herod: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, you are by no means least among the leaders of Judah, for out of you will come a leader who will shepherd my people Israel.’
            My Dear Sisters and Brothers! Originally Epiphany meant ‘manifestation’ or ‘revelation’ of Divine and that was the spirit of the celebration of Jesus’ Nativity by the first Christians. They expressed their joy at Jesus being born and at being revealed to the world. How powerfully the gifts of the Wise Men capture this. By the way a few weeks ago I saw in a magazine a cartoon depicting the Wise Men. One of them was saying: ‘I decided to be safe. That’s why I’ve got him gift cards.’ I think that the cartoon speaks more about our modern attitude ‘get-me-what-I-want’ or ‘give-me-the-money-I-could-get-what-I-want’ then the story of the Wise Men. The gifts the Wise Men brought to the newborn Jesus indicated the transformation which had occurred in them. Church Fathers, like St Irenaeus who was born in the Second Century, taught that the Wise Men offered gold because they professed Jesus as King. They offered frankincense because they professed Jesus as God. They offered myrrh because they professed Jesus as Priest who was to sacrifice himself for people’s salvation. Myrrh was perfume used to anoint the bodies of the deceased. Think of Mary Magdalen running to Jesus’ tomb on Easter Sunday with perfumes.
            We may focus on those gifts and their value that we may overlook the conversion which had happened in the Wise Men. Before they found the Baby Jesus in Bethlehem they had found him as their King, God and Priest. A few centuries earlier God spoke through the Prophet Jeremiah: ‘You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.’ It is not God who hides himself from us. It is our heart that makes God obscure to us. You may have seen this commercial of the Free TV. A man thinks loudly which button to press on his remote-control to get the Free TV. Then his dog starts bringing all sorts of green things but the man doesn’t make a connection. King Herod and his people were given all clues needed to find Jesus but because their hearts were selfish and ambitious they failed to find him as their Lord and Savior. It reminds us of Adam and Eve after they sinned. What did they do next? They hid themselves from God.
‘You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.’ My Dear fellow believers! I wish I knew the conversations the Wise Men had on the way to Bethlehem. Why? Because I see in those men what the Church should be like. The Church is a community of disciples of Jesus, where we support each other to find the Lord Jesus in our daily life, as our King, God and Priest. St Matthew didn’t however give us details of their conversations. What he has given us though is this image of the Wise Men travelling together to Jesus. Maybe that was the secret that they had found the Lord. On my own it is easy to get confused, lost, discouraged or fascinated by other things. But if I have a fellow believer I can trust there is a hope that if I miss the Lord my sister or brother in faith will point him out to me.
Happy Epiphany.