19th Sunday - Ordinary Time
Abraham was asked by God to pick up everything and take the risk of moving to a place he had never seen. This was a dangerous thing at the time. He had to worry about bandits and finding a way to eat along the journey. Sometimes, when things were especially rough in his travels, it must have felt like he had been taken in one of those land scams. Our story is similar. We are traveling in a foreign land without a clear vision of our goal, of heaven. No one has pictures for us to see, there are no eye witness accounts.
How did Abraham make it through his journey to the promised land? He walked by faith. “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.” Abraham kept putting one foot in front of the other.
When he got there, God gave him another promise. Finally he had a son, the promise of “descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky.” Then God told Abraham to sacrifice that son. What would we do if we were asked to sacrifice, not just something we love, but someone we love. God doesn’t want anything or anyone between Him and us. Neither did Abraham, so he put Isaac on the altar. Abraham was about ready to kill his son when God stopped Him. God can’t be out done in generosity. Abraham was willing to give God his son but God effectively said, “no, don’t sacrifice your son, I’ ll give you mine.”
The first reading tells us this is how our faith has been passed on from one generation to the next until it is now in our hands. Many people were willing to sacrifice anything and everything for the greater good of eternal life, and for passing on the Faith. Some gave their lives in martyrdom, countless others gave their lives to the daily little sacrifices of love. That is the heritage of our Faith. Rather than hanging onto something for ourselves, we give it away out of love for God and for the people around us. We shift the focus from us to others.
There are many stories about Msgr. Tarrent, the founding pastor of our parish. An elderly couple told me once how he used to come visit them. They would offer him one of the nice cushioned chairs in the living room but he always insisted that they bring a hard chair from the kitchen. I asked them why? Did he have some kind of health problem and was more comfortable in a hard chair? They tell me they think he did it as a sacrifice. We know that every Christmas he would take up a collection for the orphans in Alton. This was not just for the orphans. It was also because it is good for the parish, all of us, to make a sacrifice for others. Of course we don’t have that particular cause to support today because of abortion. Some people would rather abort their babies than have to give their child away. So now those who can’t have children but want to, have to go to foreign countries to adopt. Many couples are left unable to have children now because they can’t even afford to adopt.
So how do we live this faith that has been passed on to us? Sacrifice is part of our faith. It has value because it ties us to the redemptive action of Christ on the cross. We do as others have before us. By making our own little daily sacrifices we are conformed more closely to Christ. Jesus defines the sacrifices that we are called to make a little clearer in the Gospel. “Sell your belongings and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is there also will your heart be.”
A missionary once went to convert the Eskimos. After listening to the missionary, one of the Eskimos approached him with a few questions. He said, “I believe everything you said. But it seems like a difficult life. What will happen to me if I don’t live the kind of life you have talked about?” The missionary said, “you will put your soul at risk of going to hell.” The Eskimo asked, “and what if you had not ever told me about all of this?” Just as we heard Jesus say in the Gospel parable today, the missionary told the Eskimo that God would have been more lenient because he does not punish genuine ignorance. The Eskimo replied, “so why did you tell me about all this?”
Maybe we have been told about all this because God also gave us the gift of a capacity to use what we have. Most of us have what has been called an embarrassment of riches. I’m not just talking about money and stuff. Its true that on the world scale or the scale of history, we have more material possessions than any other culture ever has had. Most of us also have health, intelligence, and family. And we Catholics have the riches of all the treasures of the Faith to help us on our way to eternal life. This carries with it a profound responsibility.
I know a couple that has been married for over 40 years. For the first 23 years the wife was married to a brilliant man with a lot of class. Then he had a stroke. He lost his health. He is paralyzed on one side and now in a wheel chair. He lost some of his intelligence. He can speak fairly well but he is not as quick as he used to be mentally. Worst of all, his personality changed. Some days he is mean and something of a jerk. She receives no real help from the children. This woman takes care of her husband every day by herself.
She prays every day that it will be a good day and that God will help her. Like Abraham, she takes just one step of faith at a time. People have told her she should divorce the guy, get someone or some place to take care of him and get on with her life. She says, “When I made my vows, I said for better or for worse. I said for life. And I meant what I said.” Many of us would not be up for that kind of a life. Yet if it happens that we are called to some kind of life of suffering like that, then God will give us the gifts we need to take one step at a time. These are difficult things to do alone. So God expects the rest of us, who don’t have such burdens, to share our gifts with those who do. Look around us. We’ll find broken families, single parents, people with health problems and those who are just very much alone. Each of us has a gift that someone else does not have. Our faith calls us to step out and help those whom we can. In the Gospel parable today, servants are waiting for their master to return. In those days, the streets were dark and dangerous. The door would have been barred. The servants needed to be alert and ready to open the door for the master and then bar it behind him as soon as they saw him coming. They needed to be looking out for their master. This was for his safety and for theirs.
Then they would typically wait on him and help him prepare for bed. The surprise in this story is that when the master comes, he has the servants sit down and he waits on them. You see, we should be watching and waiting for the Christ we see in people around us, and serve Him with the gifts He has given us. If we do this, we should find that same surprise in heaven. We will find that it has not been us waiting on God but God waiting on us. God is the one looking out for us. When faith brings us, one step at a time, to heaven, we will find that God has been doing all the giving and waiting all along.
Let’s pray for the grace of an increase in faith. Let’s pray that we may have the grace to walk through life, one step of faith after another.
