A homily for the Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 7, 2021
1 Kgs 17:10-16, Heb 9:24-28, Mk 12:38-44 or 12:41-44
Shortly after I started college, I turned my back on the church. Oh, I’d drop in occasionally to the Sunday evening everybody-sits-on-the-floor-around-the-guitarist Mass in the private dining rooms opposite the main cafeteria, but for the most part, I stopped being a church-goer.
I wasn’t being lazy, and I hadn’t lost my faith or sense of spirituality. (I wound up minoring in theology.) But I was annoyed at my home parish’s incredible preoccupation with money. Well, anyway, that’s how I perceived it.
Every week, no sooner had the priest (no deacons back then) closed the Book of the Gospels than he started with the commercial:
Today is the 22nd Sunday of the year. Seat collection is 25 cents for all adults. Two collections will be taken up today, the first for parish administration and the second for the debt fund. There will be a special collection next week for the new roof. There will be a special collection this week for the old roof. Bingo Wednesday evening 7:45; Group No. 1 will work. Bingo Saturday evening 7:45; Group No. 3 will work. First-semester tuition payments are overdue. Please take home and read this week’s bulletin. My dear friends…
After that, I don’t remember a thing despite 16 or more years of Sundays in the fifth or sixth pew on the left at 8 a.m.
How un-pastoral. What a turnoff.
By the time I was a high school graduate, I probably understood that churches and their parochial schools need to pay for utilities and maintenance and many more expenses, but those “announcements” back then were as annoying as Jimmie “JJ” Walker is now while peddling Medicare upgrades on cable TV.
What I really needed to hear — and what I still prefer to hear — was spoken by a college senior at a talent show fundraiser in the days when I was avoiding church:
Don’t give until it hurts. Give until it feels good.
Aurora’s words nailed it. They still do.
Generosity is a gift of ourselves, done, ideally, in God’s name, because any act of kindness, charity or justice we perform is actually paying forward all the gifts we received from God, starting with Creation and culminating with the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Oh, and our individual lives, too.
True generosity comes from the heart. Each of us can give unique gifts back to the world, whether one person to another or one grand transformative act to the whole world.
Don’t give until it hurts. Give until it feels good.
And give until it does good.
