BALANCING THE BOOKS

A SERMON FOR THE 8th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

It’s about a year ago now that Pope Francis issued an encyclical to remind the Catholic faithful that, in order to save our souls, we must reduce our carbon footprints.  In a world where fanatical Muslims are beheading people left, right and centre, where the definition of marriage has been perverted out of recognition, where debauchery and human suffering have reached levels of biblical proportion, here is the supposed leader of the world’s faithful, Christ’s personal representative, babbling on as usual about one of his own pet peeves:  this time he wasn’t chastising us for not welcoming perverts into our churches, he wasn’t reminding us that it’s a complete waste of time to be a Roman Catholic because anyone, in any religion, even atheists, can be saved; he wasn’t pushing his Marxist doctrines of social equality down our throat.  Not this time.  This time the theme of Francis’ wretched ramblings was that of global warming, and our responsibilities to Mother Earth.

It’s rather like Nero who is supposed to have played the fiddle while Rome was burning.   If Rome hasn’t yet burned to the ground, it’s surely just a matter of time.  After all, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and the stench of the smoke of Satan has been hanging over the eternal City ever since the Council of John XXIII ended and the new picnic service of Paul VI replaced the true and apostolic Holy Mass.  Francis continues to downplay the true problems plaguing the world today, the onslaught on the sacrament of marriage, the obliteration of the notion of gender, the persecution of Christians, the murder of the unborn.  Instead, he would have us hug trees in a world where the only remaining mortal sin, it seems, is the manufacture and sale of air conditioners.

But you may wonder what this has to do with this week’s gospel.  It’s true that it has more to do with last week’s message about the wolf in sheep’s clothing.  Certainly, we give no credence whatsoever to anything this man says.  His words are the poisonous breath of sulphur that comes from the mouth of the Devil himself.  However, one of those words, so warmly embraced by Pope Francis in his encyclical, actually does appear in today’s Gospel, and it’s this word that we are going to look at today.  The word is “stewardship.”  We are not going to bother delving into Francis’ foolish application of this word to the idea of “saving Mother Earth” by recycling our beer bottles.  We are stewards of all God has given us, true, but more importantly we are stewards of something that will exist long after Planet Earth has disappeared into the nothingness from which it was created.  We are the stewards of our souls.

In today’s Gospel, our Lord admonishes the unjust steward to make an accounting of his stewardship.  One day he will ask us to do the same thing.  Our Lord has entrusted us with an immortal soul, and one day, Judgment Day, we have to tell him what we did with it.  The unjust steward of today’s Gospel parable prepares wisely for the settlement of his accounts.  And our Lord commends him for this preparedness and prudence.  Not for his injustice, mind you.  The fact that the steward is not a righteous man is not the point of today’s Gospel.  If anything, it is a reminder that worldly people are wiser and more careful than good Christians in preparing for their future.  Sometimes, you see, there’s a lesson to be learned from even wicked men.

When the lord commends the unjust steward, it is because he prepared for his future.  And that’s what we are being told we must do—prepare for the future of our souls, which will continue to exist long after our bodies have returned into the dust of the earth.  We prepare our souls in many ways, by tending and caring for them, keeping them free from the stain of sin and cleansed in the Sacrament of Penance, nurturing them constantly with the grace and comfort of the Holy Ghost and nourishing them in the Sacrament of Holy Communion.   Like the boy scouts, we must always be prepared.  “For ye know not the day nor the hour when the Lord of the house will come.”

If we are to be good stewards of our soul, we need to balance our account book, our Book of Life, regularly.  Just as it’s a sign of our careful stewardship of our worldly possessions if we at least take care to balance our checkbooks every month, so how much more important is it to do the same thing with our souls.  This is why we should examine our conscience at least as regularly as our bank accounts.  If we find that our balance over at Chase Manhattan is dwindling, that our expenses are more than our income, we know we have to take steps to reverse the trend.  And when we look at our soul and see the same thing—that our negligence of things spiritual exceeds our fervor, that our lukewarmness and blasé attitude towards God is greater than our love for him—then we have to react in the same way, by reversing the trend, by increasing our generosity and giving more of ourselves to the God who gave us everything, even his last drop of blood.

We have to be good stewards of our earthly possessions by keeping the wolves from the door.  You’ll remember that we spoke of those wolves in sheep’s clothing in last week’s bulletin, and that we spoke in the sermon of the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost (“By your fruits shall ye be known.”)  Now it’s time to point to one of those fruits in particular in the context of keeping those wolves from our door, and that is the fruit of generosity, by which we are prepared to sacrifice something for the greater good.  We should take care to be known by our fruits, our good fruits, and in this case the fruit of generosity.  Through our generous sacrifices we can maintain the common good and preserve our souls and those of our children from the wolves of modernism and apostasy.  In today’s bulletin, in the announcements section, you’ll find a plea for such generosity, for a small financial sacrifice, small for some that is, more significant no doubt for others.  It’s a plea that must be made, unfortunately, so that our little chapel here can continue into the foreseeable future.  That delicate balance between income and expenses, between stability and financial ruin, is in need of being re-established, and so, like good stewards, we are faced with either reversing the trend, or going under.

I’d prefer not to go under.  And I’m sure you would too.  So much is at stake here, and we must do everything we can to prepare for the future of our souls by ensuring our chapel can continue to provide you and your family with your weekly injection of faith, hope and charity, with the blessed absolution from your sins, with the holy Bread of Angels we receive in Holy Communion.  So I’d like to encourage you this morning to heed this plea for help in the bulletin.  Look around you.  All these people are your brothers and sisters in the faith.  Just like you, they are all struggling along to make ends meet financially, but more importantly struggling to save their own souls and those of their children, and their children’s children.  In the bulletin, we are asked to give just a little more in the Sunday collection, $10 more, I think, is the additional amount we’re asking for so that we can sustain the chapel and ensure its future.  If you can afford more than $10 extra, please remember that others probably can’t.  It is the responsibility of those who have more to give more, to bear the heavier burden for the sake of those who have less.  If we can be generous, willing to sacrifice a little, I’m confident that our bank account can be set straight and we can maintain an average weekly income of five hundred dollars that we need to stay in operation.

To be honest, God has no interest whatsoever in bank accounts.  But he is interested in our souls, our Book of Life.  He is interested that we balance the spiritual accounts of our soul, and that means he takes note of what we do with all the gifts he gives us—including not only our finances, but more importantly the spirit of generosity with which we are stewards of our money.  He is more impressed, let’s remember, by the widow’s mite than by the huge donations of millionaires.  We’re not being asked today to give large amounts of money.  God simply asks of us to give the equivalent of our “widow’s mite,” an amount that represents a true sacrifice.  He asks us to be cheerful givers, even though it may take away a little from what we would like to have.  But if we think what our sacrifices enable us to have, we should be cheerful.   Our additional contributions will make the difference between this chapel being able to continue to preserve and pass on to future generations the true Faith, the valid sacraments, and the only worthy form of adoration to God, the Holy Apostolic Mass… and going under, failing in our endeavors to provide these needful things for you and your children.   

By our fruits shall we be known.  Shall we be known for our generosity, for our bighearted response to this plea for help, or for our lack of response, our failure to provide for the things we need most to save our souls?  The latter would be embarrassing enough, even in the eyes of men, but we must also remember the accounting we’ll have to give to God on Judgment Day, when we’ll have to explain our lack of prudence in failing to provide for our spiritual future.  “Did we do enough to secure the future of our chapel, and keep the wolves from the door?”

Once we’ve figured that out, we should thank God for everything he gave us.  We could make a list but it would take too long to catalog every gift he has given us from the creation of our soul to its redemption.  But if we think hard and long on that list, we will quickly ask, in the words of the priest at Holy Mass, “What can I render unto God for all the good things he has given unto me?”  And we will cheerfully follow the example of the unjust steward, not in his wickedness of course, but in the great care he took to preserve his own future.  “The lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.”  We are those children of light.  Let’s preserve our future.