Scriptures:  Ezechiel 36:24-28, I will give you a new heart; 1 Pet 2:4-10, Living stones in a spiritual house.  John 15:1-8, I am the vine you are the branches. 
 
Dear brothers and sisters, You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people who have been chosen to proclaim His mighty deeds, Who called you out of darkness into His own marvelous light.
 
My first thoughts this evening, as we close our Paisley Synod, are of gratitude.  God has been with us on our journey as our Vine and we have remained close to Him as His branches.  Our Synod has been founded on prayer, sincere prayer from the heart with Our Lady of Paisley, for the Holy Spirit to guide us and for the Her Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, to be the Cornerstone upon Whom we found ourselves secure, the True Vine from Whose grace we might bear fruit that remains. 
 
 As well as to the Blessed Trinity and Mary our Mother, my gratitude is to you, God’s Holy People, for responding so ardently and with such generosity and faithfulness to this call of the Holy Spirit to our diocese in our times.  I thank you, my brother priests, for making such an effort to be close to our people and accompany them on this journey.  Your presence filled them with encouragement and hope.  I thank you, our sister religious and brother deacons, for your enduring prayer for the success of our adventure.  I thank you, our lay faithful especially, who have gathered around me, listened attentively, spoken frankly and hoped with me for a renewal of our diocese.  I thank in a particular way our delegates who came together and lived in Synod like the early Church in the Upper Room, in fraternity, in prayer with Mary and in hope for a mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  I cannot pass on without expressing my profound thanks, firstly to the Preparatory Commission and Secretariat who gave life, flesh, and bones to this inspiration of the Holy Spirit and, finally, to our Sessions and Organising Group whose extraordinary teamwork, skill and commitment brought us safely and surely to this remarkable fulfillment. 
 
Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.  In the Book of Revelations Saint John had a vision in which the Holy Spirit called him to dictate letters to be sent out to seven dioceses.  They amounted to a spiritual audit to show them where they were doing well, where they had grown stale, where they needed refreshed and always offered a path of renewal.  In our Synod, I am convinced the Holy Spirit has been speaking to us and that we listened and really heard His Word.  I hope you see our post-Synod document with this supernatural outlook too, not just as the accomplishment of our people but, above all, as the Work of God to be continued in our diocese in the many years to come.  Throughout our Synod, He has put His spirit in us.  May He now make us follow His statutes and perseveringly observe His ordinances. 
 
He has shown us what it really means to be His disciples.  He has founded this on our better understanding of the first sacrament we all received, the sacrament of Baptism.  He has revealed to us how this sacrament is more essential to our identity than whether we are priests or laity, religious or married, deacons, teachers, young people or parents.  It is baptism that establishes in each of us a personal relationship with God and makes us brothers and sisters, with hearts of flesh, to welcome each other in equal dignity as children of God.  It is by baptism that our Heavenly Father gives us our spiritual gifts and talents and instils in all of us equally the full responsibility for building up our Church and being evangelisers of our villages, towns and nation.  It is in the baptism of every new child that God gives our parishes new heart and it is in the return of each of us to the grace of our own baptism in daily prayer that God gives our diocese a new spirit.  Since all of this is true it must follow that all of us, priests and people, should work together in full, collaborative engagement on the basis of this, our common baptismal vocation.  In such companionship alone we will rediscover with joy that our Church really is chosen and precious in God’s sight.
 
In Synod the Holy Spirt has revealed to us, too, that, in order to lead lives worthy of our vocation as active disciples we need a new formation in faith.  Jesus called His disciples to repent in order to believe in the Good News and the Scriptures this evening remind us that formation first means purification, to be cleansed from any uncleanness and from any idols.  It is only natural to assume some idols and uncleanness have crept into our lives as clergy, religious and faithful in our diocese.  Though the Holy Spirit dictated to Saint John much to commend about the Church of Ephesus He had one complaint that must have seared their soul. You do not love me as much as you used to when I was your first love!  Perhaps our love for Jesus and His commission to proclaim the Good News has grown cold in our daily lives and we have been stumbling because we have been not been listening to His Word.  Perhaps we need Him, the Good Vinedresser, to remove those branches that have borne no fruit, gather them up and throw them into the fire, and to prune those that have borne fruit to make them bear even more.  To the Church in Ephesus, the Spirit said: Repent and do the works you did at first.  Our Synod is surely an invitation from the Holy Spirit in our own time to remove from our midst any hearts of stone and be cleansed by the word He has spoken.  Then, hearts fresh and spirits new, we will grow in learning, by a new formation and new catechesis, of the marvels God has worked for us and spread joyfully among the poor His everlasting mercy and the holiness of His name. 
 
Through our Synod, the Holy Spirit has called us to be a Church that looks, above all, like our Father’s joyful family.  We live full of joy that He took us from the nations and gathered us to be His people with Him as our God.  For once we were not a people at all  but now we are the people of God, and on ce we had not received mercy  but now we have received mercy.  Having been called together to be His new Creation we are to become living stones, letting ourselves be built into a spiritual house, rejoicing to be His chosen race, His royal priesthood, and His holy nation.  But the Spirit has revealed that the first sign He wants our parishes and diocese to show in order to be truly His people is that we welcome everyone with open arms, that we are a welcoming family of faith where all members feel they belong, especially the young and those families we find broken by our topsy-turvy world as they stumble into our midst.  It is by being actively welcoming and open that we will receive the reward from our Father to be the vibrant, growing Church that He bequeathed to our forefathers . 
 
Finally, the Spirit has called us to be a missionary diocese of evangelisation.  Our missionary effort, of course, must be centred on our personal relationship of holiness with Jesus Christ for He calls us to be a holy nation, a consecrated people set apart to worship Him with the fragrant sacrifice of our good lives ; to remain in Him in order to bear much fruit, because apart from Him we can do nothing .  But He commissions us to reach out to all of society, in particular to that ever growing number of those who feel excluded and on the margins, because they have been made to feel poor or unworthy, both inside and outside of our Church, and for us to proclaim to all, without distinction, the mighty deeds of God who calls the whole world out of darkness into His marvellous light.  In the modern world of today, the Holy Spirit has told us that proclamation means communication in all its media, from bulletins to social media, from everyday contacts with family and friends to street apostolate among the citizens of the world.
 
In the end, we do not forget that the Lord Jesus is our cornerstone.  To us who believe, He is the most precious thing.  We want to a bide in Him and for Him to abide in us for He is the Vine and we are the branches.   Abiding in Him with His words abiding in us, we go forward full of trust and confidence that we may ask whatever we wish, and it will be done for us, for the Father of Jesus is glorified by this, that we bear much fruit and become, again,^, His fruitful disciples.