The last time I stood here, I started by telling you about a particular ‘D-Day’. Just last Monday was yet another kind of ‘D-Day’! Monday 21^st January was officially the most ‘Depressing’ day of the year. The lull after Christmas, debt all around, no money, stock markets were falling, serious miserable weather, tax returns had to be in and the list could go on. It would be very easy to fall into a cycle of depression, but it’s over, the days are getting noticeably longer, and, hopefully we are on the up!

It’s easy to forget the high days when all around seems gloomy. Relationships are the same. It’s easy to forget the excitement of new relationships when time moves on; even our relationship with God. We can’t be constantly on an incredible high. Like any relationship, it has its ups and downs, ins and arounds. But sometimes something often comes along and reminds you just how special that particular relationship is.

The Gospel for today talks much about the Old Testament and there are many occasions when it says in the New Testament something like, ‘so that it might fulfilled’, or ‘as it was spoken of in the prophet Isaiah’. In fact, there are 322 prophecies which are fulfilled in the work and ministry of Jesus Christ. I’ve expressed it before in mathematical terms; that, according to the law of compound probability, the chances of 322 prophecies in the Old Testament being fulfilled in just one man is represented by a fraction of one over 84... followed by 100 noughts! Now I don’t really understand that, but the point is made that for this to happen is a phenomenal thing. To a mathematician it is staggering

And it is the kind of thing that would lift any depressive mathematician out of the doldrums, and it should affect us too. Every now and then something comes along and we can be lifted from our melancholy and put back on an even keel.

It has been said of Christianity that it started in Israel, then was taken to Greece and turned into a philosophy. Then it was taken to Rome where it was made into an institution. Later, it was taken by the rest of Europe where it became a culture, and then it was brought to America where it was made into a business enterprise!

That’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but how on earth it has survived over the centuries, and the people that have carried it, is astounding. How could such a movement have started so inconspicuously on the shore line of a small inland sea with some simple fishermen? Some of you may remember Capernaum and Peter’s house. Beautiful as it is, it’s in the middle of nowhere and how such a movement turned in to anything is remarkable. There is something incredible about this Jesus.

Last Sunday evening we were wondering what happened to some of these disciples of Jesus. We know a lot about a few of them. But most of them disappear into folklore and legend. There are some stories that Thomas went as far as India with the Gospel. Whatever they did, it was their drive and commitment and conviction that turned their small movement into a world-wide faith. What a difference their humble lives have made to the whole world.

It’s people that make the Church and it’s people that build the Church. I was very tempted this morning to focus on the work of the Leprosy Mission, but, perhaps we’ve covered that ground already. But this is a case in point. The founder of the Leprosy Mission was born in Abbeyleix in 1846, where my father was rector for eighteen years and his name was Wellesley Bailey.

(There are still Baileys all around Abbeyleix and I’m sure some must be relations). In 1974, there was a special Centenary Service held in Abbeyleix Church to mark its founding.

When Wellesley Bailey first saw Leprosy sufferers in India he said, “I shuddered…but if ever there was a Christ-like work in the world, it was to go among these poor sufferers and bring to them the consolation, the hope of the gospel”. Although he had to return to Dublin because of his wife’s ill-health, his passion for these people went unabated. So much so that the society was founded in 1874. Wellesley Bailey, an ordinary man from Abbeyleix doing an extraordinary thing.

Time and time again, ordinary people have made a difference for God. Again and again, it is the ordinary simple act which has changed the world for good. I’ve heard this quote attributed to several people, that ‘One man can’t change the world, but you can change the world for one man’.

One extra-ordinary act by a very ordinary man has always left a deep impression on me and a suitable story to tell on

this Holocaust Day. He made a difference not only for one man but for generations. His name was Father Maximilian

Kolbe and he was a prisoner at Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

To deter prisoners from escaping, the prison warderswould pick out ten random prisoners for a slow agonising

death in a specially constructed concrete starvation bunkerif anyone did escape. On one such occasion after an

attempted escape, ten inmates were rounded up for a slowexecution. Father Kolbe shouted out from the crowd! He

was an unimpressive figure of a man with sunken eyes and round glasses in wire frames. He pleaded

with the commandant to let him take the place of one ofthe men who were about to die. Pointing to one particular

man he said, “He’s from my village. I know him. He is a good man and he has a wife and children.

On the other hand, I am a priest. I am not married and I have no children. I do not have a family that needs me.

Please let me take his place. The commandant acceded to this startling request and Father Kolbe took the place of

this man.

On the 10^th October 1982 in St. Peter’s square in room, Father Kolbe’s death was put in its proper perspective. Present in the crowd of 150,000 people was the man he replaced, his wife, his children and his children’s children. The Pope said, ‘This was victory won over all the systems of contempt and hate in man – a victory like that won by our Lord Jesus Christ’.

Father Maximilian Kolbe, an ordinary man doing an extra-ordinary thing and making a difference not just for one man, but for generations.

We’re ordinary people called to do extra-ordinary things – we’re called to make a difference.