“For by grace you have
been saved through faith, -- this is not from you; it is the gift of God.”
Words taken from the second reading
today, the Letter to the Ephesians
People sometimes ask
me: “What is going to happen to the Church? So many people seem to leave the
Church, especially young people, especially our young people. Children who went through years of Catholic
schooling leave the Catholic Church for another church, or for no church.”
What are we doing
wrong?
I have thought about
that question for years. There is a theory that values come from actions. We do
not do things because we value them. We value things because we do them. That’s
perfectly good psychology. The reason people no longer value the Faith is that
they have quit doing the things that strengthen faith. They have quit taking
time for praying to God, for thinking about God, for reading about God. Going
to church once a week is at least an action that reinforces the value of a
relationship with God in our lives. When we quit taking time to do things that
express our relationship to God, things like going to church or taking time to
pray during the day—that relationship no longer has value for us.
I think that story of
why people leave a religion makes sense. But it is a story that a good Pharisee
would have told. A good Pharisee would say “you need to be circumcised and obey
all the kosher laws about what you eat, and observe the sabbath by not doing
any physical exertion on that day. If you don’t do those things, you will drift
away from God.”
That way of looking at
religion has it backward. It makes us
the cause of our faith. If we can just get people to do the external actions
that strengthen faith, their faith will return.
Paul was a good
Pharisee. He was an up and coming star in the Pharisee world. And then Jesus
met him. In fact, you could say that Jesus attacked him. Jesus knocked him to
the ground and blinded him temporarily. Paul came away from that experience
with the conviction that we do not love God because we do things to make that
love happen. We love God because God comes at us first. In the words of the
letter to the Ephesians that I quoted at the beginning of this homily, “For by
grace you have been saved through faith—this is not from you; it is the gift of
God.”
Gift. It is gift that
is the key. We do not love God because we pray. We pray because God first loved
us. Our faith is a gift.
We have said that for
years—faith is a gift—but maybe we have not understood what we were saying.
When we use the word “gift,” we imply that there is a giver. Someone has done
something for us that we did not earn, we did not pay for. That makes us
dependent. We are not in control of the relationship.
Compare this to a
marriage. When two people are married, they have to do things that will keep
the value of the marriage alive. They have to be courteous to each other, to do
little actions that show the love. If they do not do anything physical to show
love, the love will die.
But the physical
actions are not the most important thing. The most important thing is that the
love of the other partner is a gift. We do not earn people’s love. We do not
pay for love. We receive love as a gift. That makes us dependent. We are not in
control of the relationship. Without that sense of dependence, no amount of
loving behavior will work.
We grow out of love
because we lose the realization that the other person is a gift. We take the
relationship for granted. We come to think that we deserve love. We pay for
love by doing the things that love requires. If we pay for something, we expect
that something to happen.
We make the mistake of
the Pharisees. We forget that love is a gift, and every gift implies a giver.
The person we are wanting to love does not have to love us. That person freely
gives us love, freely does things to show us love.
Our relationship with
God is the same way. When we forget that God is a giver, that God does not have
to give us anything, then we forget that God loves us. And when we forget that,
our faith is gone.
We live in a country
where we are used to controlling things. If something bad happens to us, we
blame somebody who didn’t do what should have been done. We sue somebody. We
pay to make sure that nothing but good things happen to us, and that should
take care of any situation.
We turn everything
into a market transaction. We pay for what we get. If we do not pay, we do not
get. If you do not have what you need, it is because you have not paid for it.
You are lazy or have made stupid decisions.
We even turn
gift-giving into a business. Christmas is a huge marketing season. We give
gifts so that we stay in control of a relationship, and we receive gifts
because other people owe us. We
don’t count the exact dollars and cents in a gift, but we make sure that the
balance is fairly even—we get back what we give.
The result is that we
cannot love.
The reason that so
many of us, especially our young people, leave our churches is because all of
us, young and old, have forgotten what it means when we say that God loves us.
To say that God loves
us is to say that we do not earn that love, we do not deserve that love. It
works in reverse. God does not deserve our love. If we love God, that love is a
free gift on our part. We do not earn God’s love by going to Mass every Sunday.
We go to Mass every Sunday because we want to give freely of our time to God.
“Stewardship” seems to
be a big word in church circles these days. “Time, talent, and treasure.” Those
are things we can give to God. But we have to give those things. We do not use those things to pay for God’s love.
Paying versus gift.
That was the big issue for Paul in his move away from the Pharisees. They
wanted to earn God’s good will by doing all 613 precepts of the Law. Paul
learned that observing precepts will not do the trick unless we realize that
God first loves us, and we do the precepts because we want to love, freely, in
return.
As Paul says, by grace
you have been saved through faith—this is not from you; it is the gift of God.
