13.12.2022
New access gate and gifts dedicated at Holy Trinity Killiney
Parishioners of Holy Trinity, Killiney braved snow and ice on Sunday morning (December 11) for the dedication of a number of new developments at the church.
Archbishop Michael Jackson dedicated the church’s new heating system, major repairs to the organ, a new webcam and wifi, and a new access gate to make it easier for those with disabilities to get to church. The webcam was dedicated to the memory of Natalie O’Brien and the gate to the memory of Joan Bewley.
The Archbishop preached during the service and focused on John the Baptizer who is celebrated on the Third Sunday in Advent. He said that in Sunday’s Gospel [St Matthew 11: 2–11] John can be seen downcast, depressed and sending his disciples to check with Jesus if they had got it spectacularly wrong in understanding Jesus, his cousin in the faith, to be the Messiah.
“One has no idea, of course, through what distorting filter John was hearing what Jesus was doing; the church of today is replete with distorting filters; there are always, in each and every ecclesiastical context, mischief–makers who have turned deceit into a virtue. But, for John, there was something that did not add up; and being in prison had given John a new clairvoyance. Jesus may not have been manic enough in his quest for justice. John may have thought Jesus had gone soft and was wasting precious eschatological time that was not going to return. We do not know so we are allowed to speculate,” he said.
The Archbishop said that there was little time left to make use of the Season of Advent. However he said there was a divine opportunity if we do what Jesus asked the disciples of John to do: ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see’.
“Listen and look; hear and see. God reveals in the world of our hearing and of our seeing. The prize and the promise are clearly spoken of by the same Jesus who is about to come down to earth from heaven: there is nobody greater than John the Baptizer; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. The invitation of Christmas is to enter the kingdom of heaven holding by the hand The Prince of Peace as the Child of Bethlehem. Spiritual ideas; adult ideas; infant ideas – God plants seeds everywhere and in every heart. It is the direct invitation in and through the humility and the frailty of an infant to share redemption and salvation, to join others whom we have never yet met at the banquet of the Messiah – that is if we prepare,” he suggested.
Christmas 2022 was yet to unfold, Archbishop Jackson said. It will be a harder, more cruel Christmas than many have ever experienced and a colder and hungrier one, he added.