Most Reverend Vincent Long Van Nguyen OFM Conv DD STL, Bishop of Parramatta
Homily for the 2026 Golden and Diamond Jubilee of Religious Profession celebration for the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart at Mary MacKillop Place, North Sydney.
Readings: Wisdom 7:24-27; Ephesians 3:14-21; Matthew 6:25-34
22 January 2026
Setting our hearts on God’s reign
Dear friends,
It is a great joy for us to gather in this special place where many of you joined the Congregation and made your Profession. I fondly remember when this place was still teeming with life 45 years ago, when I was a novice with the Franciscans just down the road from here. It was not quite like “the hills are alive with the Sound of Music”. Nevertheless, it was a time of relative stability and visibility.
Now, religious life is going through a profound transition. This often means a diminished presence and even a sense of introspection. We believe, however, that this transition can catalyse religious into a more purposeful and even more radical mode of living and service. Just as the Church as a whole is being called to be a humble yeast in the dough, religious – like the advance party in the time of Moses – can blaze a new pathway for God’s people in the post-critical belief era.
It is so easy for us to be seduced by the temptation of security in numbers, institutional visibility, prestige and influence. The lure of nostalgia can make us blind to the newness of God’s unfolding design. The book of Wisdom today tells us that wisdom makes all things new and makes those who are guided by her into friends of God and prophets. We have been through the time of plenty, plenty in terms of numbers, prestige and visibility. Mind you, it wasn’t always the best of times. Now is a time of diminishment but also a time of new possibilities, of pioneering and trailblazing. The Church and the world need the gift of prophecy and wisdom of religious to rise to new things. We are not primarily ground troops but sentinels that point others to new thresholds and crossroads where the God of the journey beckons.
This is fundamentally what Jesus teaches us in the Gospel. Setting our hearts on God’s justice is the concern of his followers and the core business of ours. As religious, we do so with passion and conviction. Jesus teaches us to set our priorities right. At the end of the day, what matters to us is the living and building of the kingdom vision of Jesus, which was revealed in his teaching and ministry.
Dear friends in religion,
The Japanese have developed an art called Kintsugi, which specialises in repairing and mending broken vessels. This reminds me of the visit of Jeremiah to the potter’s house where he was told that Israel would undergo the process of being recast into the kind of vessel the Lord desired. The exile would act as the furnace and Israel would be refashioned in the same way the Kintsugi artist refashions the damaged ceramic. I wonder if this is the metaphor for religious life as we are heading towards diminishment and even completion. I wonder whether the “laying down of one’s life” that Jesus asked of His disciples would involve us undergoing the process of being disassembled and recast into something else we are yet to comprehend.
Recently, I officiated a ritual of closing the chapel at Marymount. There were a lot of mixed emotions during the ceremony: sadness, grief, pain, but also gratitude, trust and even hope. It was a kind of “laying down one’s life” in action. For us religious, it is not the building, or the property or any other temporal thing that we attach ourselves to, absolutely. It is the security of insecurity that is often what we are called to embrace. It is the discipleship of vulnerability, humility and powerlessness that religious are challenged to model for others. Hence, the ritual served as a reminder to us that we must learn to travel light, that we must radicalise our sense of trust by not holding on to things like possessions, wealth, institutional prestige, visibility and even numbers and membership.
The Church is like a vessel adrift on the choppy waters of the post-Christian world. Many of us, like the Jews of ol,d are fearful of the unknown and uncertain future ahead. We yearn for the certainty and security of the past. Yet the call of authentic discipleship is the call to walk into the deep rivers, the burning coals and the baptism of fire. Mary MacKillop ventured into the colonial backwater of Penola do something about the injustices and sufferings of the people. We are called to rise to the occasion, to let loose the spirit, to rouse the comfortable, to radically embody the Gospel of justice, love and mercy.
We give thanks for the witness of love and service, of exchanging everything for the advantage of knowing Christ. May what we celebrate today serve to remind us of our commitment to the vision of Jesus. Let us go forward in our mission to make a difference in the world, confident of the victory of Christ and his promise to be with us till the end of time.
Let us be the sign of an unflinching faith through which the apparent impossibility of transformation can be achieved through the power of God. As we pray for you today, we pray with gratitude. For we are sure that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
