May 14, 2023 – Part of a Larger Story

6th Sunday of Easter, Year A

Readings

Previous Years:

Preached at the Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA

Recording

https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/part-of-a-larger-story/

Transcript

Thanks to T.V. for editing this transcript.

This is the weekend where I am supposed to talk about the Annual Catholic Appeal. I talk about money two times a year, once for our parish stewardship, and then once for the Archdiocesan Annual Catholic Appeal. And every time I preach about it, I always pray: how can I relate this to Jesus, how can I make this homily more than just a financial appeal? In every Mass we’re offering the Eucharist and everything our faith does is focused on Jesus. So, somehow this also has to be focused on Jesus.

This year what I came to know is that the Annual Catholic Appeal is an expression of the fact that we are part of a greater story.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that I love being Catholic. I love the Church, I love the faith and I particularly love the Code of Canon Law. Every aspect of our faith is beautiful and brilliant, and I’ll tell people that regularly. I fell in love with the Church before I fell in love with Jesus. The Church is the one who pointed me to Jesus as someone who was important. I truly and deeply love the Church and the faith. One of the primary reasons I love the Church and the faith is because through it, I feel deeply connected to the rest of humanity. And I don’t just mean the rest of humanity, as in everybody who’s living on earth today, I also mean the rest of humanity that lived before all of us. All past generations and cultures and eras and races. Everybody who has come before me.

It’s easy today to hear the message that we are the best generation yet. All of the other generations were backward, stupid and they didn’t know what we know.  We’re the best. That’s never resonated with me. I think that humanity has always been beautiful and intelligent, and to have a connection to the beautiful and intelligent people that came before me is deeply meaningful to me.  There are plenty of people who say, well, you can do that apart from religion, or you can just generally want to unite yourself with your fellow man. But I’ve always found that somewhat shallow, because humanity is so broken and divided at the same time. that We are good, inspirational, wonderful and loving. We are also broken, horrific and sinful. And so, to unite myself to humanity in general just seems like a vain exercise, because I am also uniting myself to murder, slavery and other horrors. But if I unite myself to humanity through my faith I know that I’m united with them in the best aspects of the human race, which is our relationship with and response to our God and Creator. When I celebrate the Mass, pray, read the Scriptures, pray the Rosary, or enter into Christian service, what I’m doing is I’m following in the footsteps of others who have tried to respond to the self-revelation of God.

God has been reaching out to humanity since our inception, since our very beginning. And that process is existential, it’s deep, it’s profound. How do you respond to the God who has reached out to you? Well, there’s wisdom in our older generations. They know how they responded. And I enter into their experience, they have figured part of it out. They knew how to worship the God who reached out to them, and so entering into their worship helps me worship God better. I unite myself with Catholics today all over the world, in every country and all previous generations, including the Jews who came before Jesus. All of those who responded to the reaching out of God. It’s beautiful. It grounds me. It puts me somewhere that’s larger than myself. Knowing myself, that I’m too broken and sinful to pay any attention to, that I need to be part of something larger than myself. And that’s what living out the Christian faith is, that truth of responding to the revelation of God.

As I mentioned, this is the Annual Catholic Appeal homily. How am I going to turn that exhortation into financial gain? Crassly, I assure you that the Annual Catholic Appeal is our opportunity to concretely remind ourselves that we are a part of something greater than ourselves. The Protestant impulse is to individuality. When Luther did his thing, when Calvin did his thing, when Henry the Eighth did his thing, these churches became localized. They adopted this as their expression of the faith, their personal experience or interpretation of the scriptures. In contrast, the Catholic approach has always been communitarian, we want the widest possible communion. And so we maintain our communion in this Church at Assumption. We maintain our communion with the Archbishop of Seattle, because otherwise we would be individual, non-denominational. There are plenty of non-denominational churches that don’t answer to anybody except the lead pastor, but we maintain our communion with the Archbishop of Seattle, and he maintains his communion with the Pope in Rome. And through that, we know that we have communion with all Catholics all across the world who are also in communion with their bishop, who is in communion with the Bishop of Rome. We are part of something greater than ourselves. And when the Church talks about a local church, we’re not talking about an individual parish like ours. That would be far too individual. That’s not Catholic enough. Catholic means universal. We’re talking about the local church of the Archdiocese of Seattle, a church under the headship of one bishop. We are part of that local church, if we ever think insularly, if we ever think that we at Assumption are blazing our own trail and doing our own thing, then we have lost our Catholicism.

Catholicism has to exist in the context of a greater story, the story of humanity, and the story of a worldwide Christian faith. When we talk about the Annual Catholic Appeal, we are talking about our opportunity to participate in the mission of and to support the Archbishop of Seattle, the one who helps us maintain communion with the worldwide Church. And we also remind ourselves that we cannot live out the mission of Christ alone. There’s a lot that we can do here locally, and we do our best, but there are some things that are beyond us. Seminarian education, for example. We’re not going to be able to take a guy all the way to priesthood with our financial resources. It just can’t happen. Or maintaining a summer camp. We have two summer camps for youth elementary school through high school. We can’t do that by ourselves. Running a tribunal, or all of the work that’s done to support annulment investigations and canonical work, again, deeply close to my heart. We can’t support all of this ourselves as we don’t have the resources for that. But together as a local church part of the Archdiocese of Seattle, we can do things greater than ourselves. The work we do locally matters incredibly, as we’re always focused on the person directly in front of us. But the work we do on a Diocesan level also deeply matters. So every year we come to you with an opportunity to participate in that wider mission, an opportunity to reconnect yourselves to the greater mission of the Archbishop of Seattle.

Now, I must share a couple of things that I say every time I preach about money., Number one, tithing is a spiritual practice more than a financial necessity. If we had the endowment of Harvard University where we could just skate on that forever, we would still ask Christians to tithe because money is a powerful temptation against holiness. It is very easy for money to become something that’s never satisfied. I never feel financially secure enough. I never have enough money to feel comfortable. I’m never to a place that I’m working toward. Money is constant acquisition, I just need more and more and more. And so the only way we can fight that is to have a habit in our lives of giving it away, to prove to money that we are the boss, we are in control. And this idea that I always need more is false, it’s a lie from the devil. And so, we as Christians build into our lives a discipline of giving away the first part of our income that comes in. Now, I used the word tithing specifically. It used to mean and still kind of does mean 10%. The Christian practice was to give away the first 10% of all income. Now I know that the way life is structured today none of us really planned to give away 10%, and I don’t expect that. I know that our lives aren’t structured that way. Something to aspire to, but not necessarily an expectation. But I still use the word because it’s percentage based. Our giving should always be percentage based. The first X percent of my income should be given away. And the reason is because there’s also a powerful temptation to govern our lives by our feelings. Sometimes I feel super joyful and super generous, and I just want to give away all of this money and sometimes I don’t. Well, that’s not going to serve us well. I see this in Confessions all the time. With prayer, people will come in and say, Father, I don’t think I’m praying enough. And I ask them, well, how do you pray? And they say, well, I’m doing 20 minutes of contemplative prayer and a daily rosary and a chapter of Scripture. Well, that’s a great prayer life. Why don’t you feel like you’re praying enough? Well, it’s because the evil one will use our feelings against us. He’ll make us feel like we’re never good enough for God. And the same is true with money. We’re always going to be tempted to either feel like I’m giving totally enough and everything is fine when we’re not, or that I can never give enough and it’s useless, right? I’m never good enough for God.

A percentage eliminates that temptation. A percentage says, okay, I’m going to start this year with 3% of my income. I’m going to give it away. And then regularly every six months or a year, we reevaluate whether that percentage is appropriate, not based on the vicissitudes of our feelings, not based on the up and downs of whether it’s bright outside or not, but based on a logical analysis of this worked well or not. Or perhaps I am putting more in savings than I planned on and thus I can increase my tithe each year. That discipline based on a percentage is really spiritually good for us.

The other thing I believe about the Annual Catholic Appeal specifically is that there is a tax on the Parish.  The Diocese hates that I say this but I expressed my position directly to the Archbishop in the Presbyteral Council last week, so I feel like I’m not breaching my integrity in saying this. The Annual Catholic Appeal and giving to the parish at this point are exactly the same thing.  Last year 8.22% of our income went directly to the Diocese. That’s in Canon Law. That’s how the Diocese is supposed to raise funds, we have an income tax. But to prevent that number from going higher, to 15% for example, the Diocese implemented the Annual Catholic Appeal. Thus, we can raise money outside of the normal stewardship process and our income tax isn’t 15%, it’s 8%.

The reality is that if we don’t make our Annual Catholic Appeal goal, we pay the shortfall out of the parish budget, and if we go above our goal, it goes right back into the parish. This all means when you give money to the parish, or when you give money to the Archdiocese, you’re giving it to the same place. It’s the same pool of money. We have to pay it either way. Again, the Diocese wants me to talk about the ministries and how wonderful they are and they are wonderful. But honestly, you’re helping the parish by doing this too. Our goal this year is $105,000. If we make zero of that, then $105,000 comes out of the parish budget. If we make $120,000, then the parish nets $15,000. The reality is it’s all giving to the parish.

So how do I do this? I think in thirds. Because the parish and the Diocese are functionally the same, I give a third to the parish and a third to the Diocese.  Because it looks better if we make our goal, knowing that when we go above our goal, that third to the Diocese, much of it goes back to the parish. And then I give gave another third of the money I’m giving away to other organizations. So, a third, a third and a third. 

Personally, I give money to an organization called Eden Invitation. I think they’re doing  hands down, the best outreach to LGBTQ Catholics in line with the teaching of the Church, but in a way that actually hits people in their humanity. I also give money to a college classmate of mine who is a  Protestant missionary, so I don’t give her as much as I give to Eden invitation, but still I support her. She gave her life to mission and so I want to support her financially. It works for me very well. I pick a percentage and I give a third to the parish, a third to the Diocese, and a third to other worthy causes.

Now I’d like to end this with Jesus, just like we started with Jesus. Tithing is a spiritual practice, it’s good for us spiritually. But today, what I really want to reflect on is the fact that this is part of a wider narrative, a story that’s larger than ourselves. I just want to use an example from our first reading. That’s the institution of Confirmation. If you didn’t pick up on it, there were people who were baptized in the name of Jesus and they didn’t receive the Holy Spirit. They were baptized by a deacon, Philip, but they didn’t have the Holy Spirit. So they had to send the Apostles down to confirm these new Catholics in Samaria. We still confirm people. We did it three weeks ago. This is A2000 year old tradition, and we do it exactly like they did it here. They’re baptized by a priest or a deacon, and then they are confirmed by a bishop. That’s been going on for millennia. We’re part of something greater than ourselves, a story that transcends us. And it might feel crass to talk about money from time to time, but how we use our time and our money and our lives matches how we live out our faith. Our story is not just Assumption Parish. It’s not just Father Moore. Our story is the story of the Archdiocese of Seattle. French fur traders who asked for a priest who came from, I believe, Montreal, right? A French speaking first bishop, a World War II generation, a Boeing, a greatly expanding Archdiocese building. All of these new churches, particularly in King and Snohomish counties. A missionary group here where the first churches built here were on Lummi and Swinomish for the Native Americans. And only later did these churches come into play. We have a greater story than ourselves. We can participate in that story in prayer, of course, in worship as the source and summit, obviously, but also by participating in the mission of the Archbishop of Seattle. Thank you for your generosity to this parish and to the Archdiocese. It’s the same thing. Thank you for your generosity and time. Thank you for everything that you’ve done to live out your faith. That faith is inspiring and I hope it inspires all of us today.

Published by Fr. Moore