31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
Previous Years: 2019
Preached at Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
The Pastoral Plan mentioned in this homily can be found here.
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/responding-to-love-concretely/
Transcript
It helps to understand why tax collectors were so reviled in the ancient world, or at least in ancient Palestine. The Romans were an occupying force in that part of the world, and really, only recently had they come in and taken over ancient Palestine. So, the tax collector was an agent of an oppressing foreign government. And not just that, tax collectors were on contract. The governor of the area would say, “This area owes me this much tax.” And then, the tax collectors would bid on that tax contract.
Tax collectors generally already had to be wealthy because they needed some sort of “security force” to enforce what they were doing. They were sort of bullies, in that sense, but they had to coerce the payment of taxes. And then, it was up to them to figure out how to go around and make sure they collected the amount of tax that they had told the Roman government they were going to collect. So, they would have to make individual decisions for individual people about how much tax they were going to take from each person in the town. And, because the tax collector had to make up the difference–had to pay his staff and also make a little bit of a profit for himself so that contract was worthwhile: They were thought and usually known to extort people, to tax them heavier than they needed to be taxed, so that the tax collector could make a rich profit off of that contract.
So, that’s who Zacchaeus is. He’s working for a foreign, oppressing government. He is in–if not directly responsible for, but–in cahoots[1] with people who are bullies and extortionists. And, he’s the one–of all of the people in the city of Jericho, the one that Jesus chooses to stay with.
So, you can understand why the people of Jericho were grumbling. They were not very happy with that choice. Zacchaeus was, in a sense, the worst among them. And yet, Jesus says, “Yeah, that guy, the guy that you all hate, the guy who is your bully and your oppressor–the guy who is a traitor to your people (because he’s working for the Romans, even though he’s a Jew). That’s the guy I’m going to stay with!”
I might be grumbling, too.
But that’s exactly why this Gospel story is so important–why it’s so important that Jesus took and chose such an exile, such a bad example, because the point of the Gospel writers–and Saint Paul makes all of this very explicit: the point of the Gospel writers is to tell us, “We are Zacchaeus!”
We did nothing to merit the love of Jesus. We did nothing to merit the idea that He would become human and save us from our sins. We are an exile; we are corrupt; we are an extortionist; we are a bully. All of us are sinners, and we’re all broken. And so, the idea that God would choose us anyway–that He would look at us and say, “Yes, that’s the one that I want!” That’s a wild idea! That’s a crazy idea.
We, humans, were so connected to the idea that we have to earn the things that we’re given. We have to be good, so that God would love us. But, it’s the opposite.
Zacchaeus showed no sign of conversion before this. He was merely curious. There was a prophet going through Jericho, kind of the new and shiny thing. At that time, he just wanted to see Jesus. He showed no sign of repentance, conversion, or faith. But Jesus chooses him, and because of that choice, Zacchaeus responds in love.
And that’s how it works with us.
Unfortunately, many of us are catechized as children, and our catechesis stops there. With children, they understand consequences. So, a lot of times when we talk about God, we talk about, “Okay, you have to be good because that’s what God wants.” And they equate that with their parents.
“Well, if I’m good, that’s when I get dessert.”
Or, “If I’m good at math, that’s when I get to go have a donut.” [This week: Brought to you by the eighth grade class.]
That connection with consequences is helpful for children; less so for adults. And, because we stagnate with our childhood catechesis, unfortunately, we never hear the message, “God chose you when you didn’t deserve it.” You have done nothing, nothing to deserve the love of God. And you can do nothing to lose the love of God. He is going to choose you either way.
Your responsibility, your choice is: “how are you going to respond to God’s choice of you?” Knowing that God loves you and died for you anyway, before you did anything–knowing that, what are you going to do in response?
Well, what Zacchaeus does, in response, is: he says, “Lord, I am going to give away half of my possessions, and if I have extorted anyone, I am going to repay them four times over.” He responds with a concrete commitment.
Now, we’re loved by God! All of you–chosen, loved by God. Our moral life (what we do) is in response to that love. It’s not to earn the love. It’s in response to that love.
A lot of times what happens is we hear that God loves us. We have an experience of that love. We see directly how incredible it is that God decided that we would be the ones to be chosen. And, we have this incredible feeling! We’re uplifted, we’re happy, we’re joyful. The Gospel says, “Zacchaeus responded with joy.”
Okay, but our feelings are fickle, just like our hearts. We feel great. We’re connected to the love of God and then life goes on. Zacchaeus had Jesus in his house–the high point of his life! And then, the next day, Jesus goes to another town. And Zacchaeus is like, “Oh, so cool! I had Jesus!” And a week later he’s like, “Yeahhh, I’m the guy who hosted Jesus.” And then a month later, he’s like, “Yeahhhh, that Jesus guy was here at one point, I guess.” A year later, maybe he doesn’t feel close to God anymore, maybe he doesn’t feel joyful anymore. The memory of Jesus has faded for him. The connection to the love of God has faded for him.
That’s why it’s so important that he made a concrete commitment. It was something that the other people in Jericho could hold him accountable to, even after Jesus left, even when he didn’t feel particularly close to the Lord, the people of Jericho could say, “Look, Zacchaeus, you said you were going to give away half of your possessions to the poor!” They would know whether he did that. They would have said, “If you extorted anybody, you were going to pay it four times over.” They would know if he did that; that concrete commitment to which he could be held accountable would have sustained him in the ups and the downs. It would have sustained him from using the energy of that initial connection to God, that initial choice by God. Even as it fades, that commitment would have been constant.
That’s also very important for us, that concrete commitment. As I was trying to think of an analogy to daily life for what it’s like to make that commitment, the best I could come up with was the stereotype of adult children living with their parents.
Now, I know some adult children are actually doing much better than this, but the stereotype, the stereotype is that you’ve got a kid living at home who has no ambition and no plans to move out, and so, their parents; they go to them and they’re like,
“Hey, what’s the situation? Like, what are we going to do about this? How is this going to go?” And the kid will say something like,
“Oh yeah!” You know, “I think I’m going to be an accountant! That’s going to be, that’s how I’m going to get out of this and that’s how I’m going to move out. I’m going to be an accountant.” Or, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to–I’m going to go and…I’m going to get a degree in computer programming.” Or, even something as simple as, “Yeahhh, I’m going to apply for jobs this week.”
Well, again, the stereotype: the parents will always come back and say, “Okay, that’s great… What specifically have you done to do that?” Right, okay. “You’re going to be an accountant. Have you looked for classes? Do you even know how to register at Whatcom Community? Or, “Okay, you’re going to apply for a job…Do you have a resume yet? Like, is that something that you’ve made yet?”
Well, all of us are that adult child because the Lord comes to us. He chooses us, and we say, “Yeah, Lord! I’m really excited, and I’m super into following you! I’m going to give you my life!!” And then, we just go back to playing video games.
A concrete commitment is very helpful because it holds us accountable to ourselves. When we are super excited about the Lord, in that moment of excitement, in that moment of knowing that we are chosen and loved, that’s when we make that commitment and we say, “Lord, this is how I am going to respond to your love.” Not by trying to feel good about you all the time. (We don’t have control over that.) But love is a choice. It’s a decision. And so, “Lord, this is the decision I’m going to make for You. This is the commitment I’m going to make for You, in response to Your love for me.”
To that end, you all would have received in your email box, on Friday or Thursday and then when you walked into mass, this annual discipleship commitment. Now, every year, I preach about tithing twice. One about tithing to the parish, the other about tithing to the archdiocese. And we will talk about tithing today!
But I’m finding it’s really important to contextualize the tithing. Tithing is saying, “I have been blessed financially by God. And so, I am going to give part of that blessing back.”
Discipleship is saying “I’ve been blessed in everything by God, and so I’m going to give him back my life.” You have to give him your life before your money really even matters. So, what I’d like us to do is in this moment where we’re accustomed to making a deliberate choice for the Lord, previously, financially…But I’d like us to use this moment this year to make a deliberate choice for the Lord in discipleship, to go to the Lord again and to say, “Lord, I know that you love me. I know that you’ve chosen me. This is what I’m going to do in response. This is the concrete, specific thing that I’m going to do to try to respond to your love.”
So, what I and the Pastoral Council have done is we’ve taken the Archdiocesan Pastoral Plan. There are three categories: Encounter Jesus; Accompany each other; and Live the unconditional love and joy of the Gospel. And, we put bullet points beneath each one. “What would it look like to live this out concretely in our lives as Christians?”
And these are S.M.A.R.T goals[2], which means that you can be held accountable to them. They have a number, and they have a time frame. So, the first one: attend Mass every weekend. Well, you can check. “Is it a weekend? Have I gone to mass?” That’s either a Yes or a No. It’s accountable.
Same thing with engagement: Sacramental Confession at least twice a year. Well, you know what a year is. And, you know how to count to two: Accountable. You can evaluate it. You know, whether you’ve done that or not. That’s the goal of every one of these.
Now, some of them toward the end are a little more ambiguous, which is to say, you know, “Practice the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, either of my own initiative or through a parish outreach ministry once a year. Well, you have to understand the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.” They’re concrete things. It’s a list of 14 things. So, you can look at that list and you can say, “Have I done any of these 14 things over the last year?” So, some of them, you have to do a little bit more work to see how it’s an accountable goal. But, they’re all accountable.
The point here is to do what Zacchaeus did, to respond to the love of the Lord and say, “Lord, this is what I’m going to do this year in response to Your life.”
Now, some people are going to look at this list and they’re going to say, “I’m actually doing very well, like I’m doing everything on this list, and I’m happy to commit to continue to do it.” That’s great. The growth point for you is probably going to be in the core values. Those are ambiguous. They’re not S.M.A.R.T goals. But we can always improve in living out those core values, trying to do better in all four of those areas.
But, if you read through this list and you say, “I’m not doing everything; there are some of these that I really struggle with.” Well, that’s your commitment this year. Pick one of those bullet points and say, “That’s what I’m going to work on for the next year. This is the deliberate decision that I’m making to respond to the love of the Lord this year.” Circle it. Initial next to it. Make it clear that that’s what you’re signing.
And, if I can make one final suggestion on that, I find that it’s very helpful to go top to bottom, because in a sense, the closer you are to the top, the more control you have over it and also the more foundational it is to your spiritual life.
So, if you are not attending Mass every weekend, that’s what you should work on. Don’t worry about the rest of the list. None of it matters. Work on coming to mass each weekend.
If you’re not going to confession, work on that, because not having your sins forgiven is going to be an impediment to everything else on the list. And, just start at the top. Go down ‘til you find a bullet point that you’re struggling with. Pick that bullet point. Commit to it for the rest of the year.
Now, tithing is one of those bullet points. It’s number seven. So, there are a couple of things that you might want to look at doing before you worry about tithing if you’re not yet tithing, but it is important.
We cannot do what we do at this parish without the generous financial contributions of our parishioners.
And I’ll reiterate what I say every year, which is we don’t tithe just because people need money. We tithe because it’s good for us. It is a healthy spiritual practice. Money is a very powerful temptation. Greed is a very powerful, destructive force. In order to decrease the power that our money has over us; in order to decrease the temptation that greed is, it is very helpful to give away the first percentage of our income, whatever that percentage is.
Some of us, the recommendation on the discipleship commitment is one hour a week, which is about 2.5% of your income. So, some of us start at that: start at 2.5%. I’m blessed to be at the ten or eleven percent level. I forget where I committed last year. [That’s bad. That’s why I have the sheet; I should look.] But I’m blessed to be up there because the parish takes care of me in a lot of ways and that sort of thing. That’s fine. What matters is you pick a percentage deliberately and you live into that for a year. If you don’t have a percentage, start at 2.5. If you do have a percentage, your prayer point this year is, “Is that an appropriate percentage? Does it work for me? I’ve lived into it for a year. Did it work or do I feel like the Lord is calling me to give more maybe?”
“Maybe I need to increase that by half or a full percentage.” Or maybe, “That’s not the appropriate level. I bit off more than I can chew. I really do need to decrease my percentage.” Okay, that’s fine, but that deliberate prayer and choice about the percentage is what’s going to carry you through the good times and the bad. Whether you feel good or bad about tithing, it’ll carry you through and you’ll see fruits.
So, to that end, we’ve given you a handy-dandy worksheet. It’s about as complicated as the 1040 EZ form from the IRS, so your mileage may vary here. It’s very simple. You take the income that you reported to the IRS (whatever you make in a year), multiply it by your percentage, and that gives you a number. That’s the hard part. That’s the commitment part. That’s the spiritual part.
Once you’ve committed to give that percentage away, the rest is actually really fun because essentially you have a stack of money and you’re just skipping through the street giving it to people! “You get some money and you get some money, and here’s some money for you.” You’ve already decided to give it away. Now, you get to decide where.
And so, that’s what this worksheet is. It gives you all of the things that are going to come up over the course of the year: the parish, the school, the archdiocese, the outreach envelope, all of our second collections.
You have a number based on your percentage. That’s what you’re going to give away. Just fill it in. And then, when it comes up throughout the year, you’ve already made that commitment. All you have to do is write the check.
I should say, I don’t need these back. These are for you! These are for your refrigerator. These are for your personal accountability.
It would be nice if we got this one [pledge card] back. Once you’ve decided where you’re going to give your money this year and you’ve decided on an amount for the parish, we appreciate the pledge card. It helps us to budget.
It helps us to look at: “Are people who are pledging previously still pledging? Do we have new pledges this year? And, if people are pledging across years, are their pledges increasing relative to inflation or not?”
So, if our pledges keep up with inflation, then we maintain the same amount of ministry offerings. If the pledge is outperforming inflation, then maybe we can increase what we offer. And, if the pledges do not outperform inflation, then maybe we need to look at some cuts next year. It just helps us gauge that in our budgeting.
Now, to reiterate the spiritual principles: It is impossible for us to repay the love of God. He chose us with no merit of our own. We were–as I don’t have the first reading in front of me. But it talks about how small we are. We’re like a grain on a balance. A balance with a tiny little, tiny little grain. We’re not moving anything!
We are insignificant compared to the grandeur of God. And yet He, like the Lord in the Gospel, notices us in the sycamore tree. He sees us, even in our sin. Even if we’re just there out of curiosity, He sees us and He chooses us. And there is nothing we can do to pay Him back. We honor Him.
We worship Him because that’s what we have to do in justice. We try to pay him back, even though, again, we make no difference really, like a grain on a balance.
But, because it’s impossible to pay back His love, we pay His love forward. We commit our lives to him. We live our lives being an agent and a vessel of His love into the world. We cannot pay back all of the blessings that He’s given us, but we tithe as a way to respond to those blessings.
The Lord has chosen you and to make a deliberate commitment, to show your love in a concrete way to the Lord, that’s going to bear incredible fruit. It’s going to get you through the good times and the bad; the ups and the downs. No matter what you’re feeling on a given day, that commitment will remain. And, by staying true to that commitment over time, over the course of a year, you are going to see spiritual fruits.
[1] def. “questionable collaboration; secret partnership”
[2] S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym used as a mnemonic device to establish criteria for effective goal-setting and objective development. These goals are Specific, Memorable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.
Fr. Moore 
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