St. Dominic Catholic Church

Homilies

11/19/2017 33rd Sunday Ordinary Time

Do you come to Mass, do you pray and try to be good so that God protects you and your loved ones from harm? We may not even realize we have this expectation; but then, when bad things do happen, we get angry with God, who didn’t hold up his end of the deal. But Jesus tells a very different story; not of a God who keeps us safe, or rewards us for good behavior, but a God who gives us gifts and expects us to take risks. Three servants received 1, 2 or 5 talents. A talent was about 75 pounds of gold or silver. So the man who received 1 talent was given as much as $1.5 million dollars to invest! Jesus is saying God has given us something precious.

I can think of three ways of looking at this precious gift. On the one hand, it is the natural talents that God gave us. Our reading from Proverbs speaks of a wife in whom her husband can trust his heart. She invests her talent for spinning wool in her family. She has a gift for caring for the poor. God says a simple person with simple gifts is a treasure worth more than pearls.

Secondly, we can look at the talents the master gave the servants as the spiritual gifts, or charisms, we each received at our baptism. There are more than 26 of these, and we have at least one, or two or five. Every one of them can only be used for others. We see charisms very clearly in the lives of the saints because risked using them. St. Catherine of Siena had a charism of evangelism and challenged people to holiness. She challenged Pope Gregory XI, who was living in France, to return to Rome, even though there were people in Rome who wanted to kill him. St. Teresa of Calcutta used a charism of mercy to care for the poorest of the poor. St. Thomas Aquinas’ charism of knowledge helps us understand ourselves and God. St. Dominic’s extraordinary faith led him to send his early followers out 2 by 2 to the new universities that were being established in the early 1200s. His contemporaries thought he was crazy – that he would destroy his new Order in its infancy, but he replied, “Hoarded grain rots.”

The natural talents or spiritual gifts God has given us are precious to God. But often we’re scared to take a risk or try something new.  We bury the gift God gave us. God gives us charisms to change the world through the power of the Holy Spirit. On the day of Pentecost, that Spirit blew open locked doors and turned frightened men and women into bold preachers of Jesus crucified and raised.

God wants you to invest the charisms and natural talents He’s given you to make a change in the world.  God didn’t give you faith to make you safe. God gave you faith to take a step, to make an effort, to take a risk… to be His instrument, like Sts. Catherine, Teresa, Thomas and Dominic.

And this is a third way to think of the talents. We can look at them as faith, and however much faith you and I have right now, God expects us to increase it through using it. And, at the end of the story, Jesus says it really is a case of “use it or lose it”. I believe God is asking us to take a risk and to renovate our community center and make it a place where people meet Jesus through retreats, evangelization programs like the Alpha Course and Discovering Christ. A place where people can encounter God in beauty through the arts and our own stories of spiritual transformation. A place for workshops in which we discern the charisms God has given us, and to discern we are called to use them.

We must do this now. Many of you have siblings, children and grandchildren who no longer come to church, who have left the church, or who have lost their faith. We cannot continue as we are and hope that things will change. God is calling us to change how we behave as a parish, and as Catholic Christians. And for many of us that will be uncomfortable and risky. And the first discomfort comes now, because to renovate the rest of the community center we need $1.85 million dollars. Over the last four years the parish raised $350,000 to repair and renovate the large room upstairs, renovate a bathroom, replace the fire escape, and improve the seismic safety of the building. Since August, through the generous donations of families who have made pledges of thousands, tens of thousands and even $150,000, we have over $600,000 in pledges and cash.

Now I am asking every household in the parish to make a pledge over five years of at least $1,500. A recent survey showed that 51% of Catholics don’t give a penny to their parish. So I’m taking a risk in asking for $1,500 over five years. It sounds like a lot, but it’s $.82 a day, less than $6 a week, or $25 a month. How much do you spend each month to have your nails or hair done? How much do you spend at the casino?  Or on a morning Starbucks? I made a pledge of $2,500 because I couldn’t ask you to do what I would not do. I know some of you support family in the Philippines or Latin America. But I ask you anyway to take an envelope and if you don’t have a pen, use a pencil in the pew to invest what God has given you. Let’s take a risk as a parish, and trust that God can do miracles, and that we do not have to stand idly while people we love lose the precious gift of faith and risk being thrown into the darkness where there is wailing and grinding of teeth.