Homily for the Funeral of Father Brian Gelant
Thursday, 7 May 2026
Archbishop Sipuka
Readings:
Acts 15:7-21 | Psalm 96 | John 15:9-11
The issue on the surface in today’s first reading is circumcision, with the question of whether Gentile converts must observe the Mosaic law or not. But the real issue beneath the surface is whether belonging to the Church is determined by the cultural practice of the majority who were there first to believe in Christ, or by the gift of the Holy Spirit poured out to all, including those who came later. Using today’s language, you could say the issue is about traditionalists who maintain circumcision as a condition for belonging to the Church, and reformers who take the outpouring of the Spirit to all as the determining factor for belonging.
What is remarkable about Acts 15 is not that the dispute was resolved, but how it was resolved. It was resolved not by the majoritarian rule or by the loudest voice winning and the soft-spoken losing. Nor was it resolved by the institution simply asserting its authority or the reformers pressing their agenda until the other side gave in.
What happens in Jerusalem is something far more demanding than any of those options. It is not the stubborn maintenance of each side’s position but an openness to what God is doing. Paul and Barnabas bear witness to what the Spirit has been up to in places the institution had not yet mapped out or decided.
And James, the leader of the Church in Jerusalem, does not say the Pharisee party was simply wrong to care about continuity. He also does not say the Gentiles may come in and bring everything unchanged. They are to abstain from idols, from blood and from fornication. Freedom in the Spirit is not the same as the absence of all boundaries. What is released is what was never essential. What is retained is what belongs to the integrity of the Gospel itself. James finds the ground on which both concerns can stand, holding firmly to what is essential and releasing what is not. The temptation of each party to believe that the solution is the disappearance of the other is avoided.
Jesus himself addressed this temptation in a verse from Matthew that is easy to overlook. After teaching his disciples through a series of parables, he says: “Every scribe who has been trained for the Kingdom of Heaven is like the master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”(Matthew 13:52) The Kingdom-trained teacher does not bring out only the old, defending it simply because it has survived the ages. Neither does he bring out only the new, as though newness were itself a virtue just because it’s new. He brings out both, because both belong to the same treasury.
For a Christian, the ultimate question is never simply whether something is old or new. The question is always whether it fits the Kingdom of God. There are old things that cannot fit, and the Church has known this, often painfully and too late. Slavery. The burning of heretics. The silencing of women. These were old and wrong. But there are also new things that cannot fit, because novelty is not the same as truth, and freshness is not the same as the Gospel. The disposal of the unborn. The dictatorship of relativism, the prioritisation of profit over human solidarity and technological development that undermines human dignity and diminish relationships. These are new, and they are wrong. And so, the criterion is neither antiquity nor innovation. The criterion is always the living Christ.”
We can be snobs in both directions, dismissing the new because we are comfortable with the old or dismissing the old because we are excited by what is coming. Neither posture is discipleship. Both, if we are honest, are forms of pride — the pride of the one who says we have always done it this way, and the pride of the one who says we have finally moved beyond all that, labelling others as old-fashioned. It is not about fashion. It is about what leads to Christ, whether new or old.
To quote the classical saying that has guided the Church in moments of division: “in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity”. The truth of this saying demands that we do the honest, sometimes painful work of discerning what is truly essential and what is merely our preference dressed up as principle. What it refuses to allow is what both sides are always tempted to do: to expand the list of non-negotiables until it includes everything that agrees with our view and then call that faithfulness or to discard principles in the name progress and development.
This is, in fact, what Pope Francis recovered from the Second Vatican Council under the name of synodality, not as a novelty, but as a retrieval. The synodal Church, in Pope Francis’s words, is a Church that listens. A Church in which everyone has something to learn. Not a Church in which the outcome is pre-determined by whoever speaks loudest. A synodal process is not a debate to be won. It is a conversation in which the Spirit is trusted to be present, including in the voices we find inconvenient.
And this brings me to Fr Brian.
Fr Brian Gelant was not always perceived as an easy person; he could be perceived as unconventional, as not going along with what is considered normal. He focused more on the Spirit than on circumcision and other conventional practises represented by circumcision. Engaging with him, he could come across as impatient with the institutional aspect of the Church, and maybe even with the Church’s authority.
He was passionately committed to the cause of the workers and the marginalised, a cause the Church sometimes notices only in its official documents, and not always in its daily life. Fr Brian died not in an institution but in a home, cared for by friends, whom I had the opportunity to meet a week before he died. On behalf of the Archdiocese and his family, I would like to thank these friends sincerely for taking care of Fr Brian. Thank you, Mavis, and the circle of friends who took care of Fr Brian, and Fr Francesco, with whom he stayed for most of the time, as well as Fr Christian, who, from the moment of the news of Fr Brian’s passing away, worked hard to consult all people related to Fr Brian to prepare this dignified send off. Thanks Fr Christian.
Fr Brian represented what I would call the prophetic dimension of the Church, the dimension that follows the Spirit into places the institution has not yet drawn on its map. This dimension is not comfortable. It was not comfortable in Peter’s time, when the Spirit was already at work among Gentiles before the Jerusalem Council had finished its deliberations. It is not comfortable now.
In the light of today’s first reading, in the light of Fr Brian’s life and in the light of the synodality of Pope Francis, I would like to say that the institutional Church is wrong when it tries to eliminate the prophetic dimension of the church. And the prophetic voice is wrong when it imagines it can do without the institution. Both are necessary because both carry something of the truth. Both are in the treasury for our salvation and the building up of God’s kingdom.
The error on either side is to mistake one’s own partiality for the whole. The conservative who guards the tradition but forgets the poor has misread the tradition. The prophet who follows the Spirit but breaks with the community has forgotten that the Spirit was given to the Body, not only to the individual. Avery Dulles, in his landmark work Models of the Church, reminds us that the Church is never fully captured by any single image or emphasis; she is too rich, too deep, too alive for that.
And theology has long insisted that the institutional and the prophetic are not rivals but partners, they are both gifts of the same Spirit, given to the same Body. Without the institution, prophecy scatters and creates confusion as we see in the communities that keep splitting and dividing. Yet without prophecy, the institution fossilises and becomes a museum, to borrow a descriptive from Pope Francis. The one Spirit breathes through both, and the wisdom is to hold them both in a balance, as today’s first reading suggests.
Today’s responsorial psalm tells us that God will judge the peoples in fairness. That judgment is God’s, not ours, and this is not a reason for complacency but for humility. We are not required to resolve the tension between conservation and prophecy, between institution and reform. We are required to remain in the love of which Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel, the love that holds things together, even as they appear contradictory to us.
“Remain in my love,” Jesus says, “that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”
Though he was more of a prophetic character, Fr Brian Gelant remained in the institutional Church. Yes, sometimes impatiently, sometimes loudly, sometimes wrongly, sometimes uncharitably, and occasionally to the annoyance of some of us. But he remained.
There may have been times when he was uncharitable in his prophetic utterances, but those who knew him know that in all he did and said, he meant well. He meant well for the poor, for the workers, for the marginalised. It is precisely for this reason that we now commend him to the God who is both fair and compassionate – the God who does not weigh only our failures but also searches the intention of the heart. We come to entrust him to the One whose mercy is larger than our understanding, and whose fairness, as the psalm reminds us, is not our fairness.
May Brian rest in that fairness of God. And may we, who remain, learn from his life and from these readings the art of holding together what God has not put asunder, the institutional and the prophetic.
Amen.