The Holy Spirit
blesses us with a most insightful Gospel reading today. This is the Sunday that I had planned for a
homily on stewardship, to tie it into the readings somehow, and the Gospel
reading today happens to tie in perfectly with this topic. How about that!
We can
start off by looking at the motivation of the Pharisees in asking Jesus their
question in today’s Gospel. They did so
not wanting to grow in their faith, not trying to better understand Jesus’
calling and his relationship with the Father, but rather in an attempt to
entrap Jesus and to make him look bad. As we look at the motivation of the
Pharisees, we see how important motivation is to stewardship, and how stewardship
itself is so integral to the way we approach life and live out our faith.
When I was
at St Richard Parish in Jackson, we started a conference of the St Vincent de
Paul Society, an organization dedicated to serving the poor. When a regional
director of St Vincent de Paul came for a visit, she asked one of our members,
a lady with a Masters in Social Work, to identify the primary goal of the St
Vincent de Paul Society. Without any
hesitation, she answered: “Helping the poor, of course – that is our primary
goal.” The regional director snapped
back: “Absolutely not – that’s not the right answer.” She explained that the primary goal of St
Vincent de Paul is to be an apostolate where members can grow in their Catholic
faith and in their relationship with Christ.
Helping the poor flows out of the faith of its members, out of their
relationship with Christ. Without that,
the works are just good works, not works of faith. I felt the same way about my missionary work,
since what I did as a missionary always started at the foundation of my
faith. Without faith, without the way I
grew as a Catholic, my missionary work would have been different. I still would have done good works, but my
relationship with the people and the work itself would have been very different
taken out of a context of faith.
Likewise, when we look at stewardship, in serving God and giving back to
him, we need to look at it in the context of our faith, which is different from
the way the world sees things.
In asking
Jesus the question, whether it is lawful to pay Caesar taxes from the point of
view of faith, Jesus responds by saying that we are to pay Caesar what belongs
to Caesar, to give God what belongs to God.
Perhaps Jesus’ rather enigmatic response tells us that while we owe the
state our taxes and other responsibilities, we are to pledge our hearts and
souls to God, to make God the focus of our lives. As you can see I have 10
beautiful apples here. Let’s say that
they represent all of the goods and resources, riches and talents, that we have
in life. We have a lot of responsibilities
in life, that’s for sure. The adults
among us can think of the financial obligations we have: taxes, rent or a mortgage
payment, health care, food and clothing, utilities, education – the list seems
endless, doesn’t it, of all that is pulling at the resources that we have. We have many other things tugging at our time
and attention as well, with all we have to do in our work and family and
personal lives. Yet, what if we took one
of these beautiful apples and return it to God, in the same we that we take the
bread and wine that are gifts from God, and then offer them back to God in the
form of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. Even if we give God one of our beautiful
apples, as symbolized by this apple that we place on the altar, we are giving
thanks to God, but we are still retaining all of these other apples for our
other responsibilities in life.
Stewardship
is about giving back to God with thanksgiving.
We can make the connection between stewardship and giving thanks in the
Eucharist, since the Greek word “eucharistia,” means being thankful and grateful.
In stewardship, in giving back to God
and giving to his Church, we’re called to do so gratefully, thankfully,
joyfully and cheerfully. But stewardship
is not to be seen as some isolated aspect of our lives. Rather, we are called
to make stewardship a way of life for us, an integral part of our faith. We can
hoard all of the talents and riches and gifts that God gives to us, we can
selfishly keep them to ourselves, but I don’t think that this is what the
Gospel message and the kingdom of God are all about. And, in a lot of ways, especially from a
perspective of faith, we will not achieve joy in its fullness in our lives
without a sense of stewardship. True joy
is achieved through both love and generosity.
Perhaps the angst and helplessness and lack of meaning many in our
modern world feel in their lives is due to no sense of stewardship, of giving
back to God, in giving generously and graciously of what we have.
In
reflecting upon stewardship, it encompasses not only what we do with our
treasures, but also with the gifts and talents that God gives to us, in the way
we spend our time. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops tells us that the
practice of stewardship can have the power to change not only how we understand
ourselves, but also how we understand the meaning of life itself. God is the origin of life who give us our
freedom, who gives us all that we have and who we are. We are called to see ourselves as a caretaker
of all that God gives to us. If we are
grateful for what we have received and eager to cultivate these gifts out of our
love for God, out of the love we have for our brothers and sisters, the doors
and the possibilities that will open in our lives are beyond anything we can
imagine.
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