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.
