What leaders say and do is important to the people if the people believe they are important to the leader. There is no simpler way to say “you’re important” than by remembering a person’s name.
Mass Readings Audio
http://ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/18_11_11.mp3
Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time – November 11, 2018
Welcome to the thirty-third episode of By Your Life. Thank you for joining me. If you haven’t already, please subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, or on the right side of the page so I can send you notifications when each new episode is posted. And please forward to a friend you think would benefit from By Your Life.
My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular, business world. It is my desire to help you live our Catholic faith in the marketplace and to trust that it is good for business. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.
In this edition, we will reflect on the readings for the Thirty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time. These readings reminded me that our modern culture has it all wrong in terms of who we honor and what we think is important.
In the Gospel, Jesus warns us to “Beware of the scribes, who like to go around in long robes and accept greetings in the marketplaces, seats of honor in synagogues, and places of honor at banquets. They devour the houses of widows and, as a pretext, recite lengthy prayers.” (Mk 12:38-40)
Given we just held the midterm elections, I couldn’t help but draw the connection to politicians! I know it is usually a bad thing to make generalizations and I have no way of knowing the heart of every politician, nevertheless, I see a lot of similarities. But my point is not to denounce politicians because it isn’t entirely their fault. We are the ones that create the problem that Jesus warns us against.
You see, the scribes could not accept greetings in the marketplaces if the people didn’t revere them. They could not accept seats and places of honor, if the people didn’t honor them.
Think about it. Today, we honor the famous, the rich, and the powerful. Just look at how we spend our money. Every weekend, people spend $100 for the cheapest ticket to an NFL game and on average we pay double that. And who are we going to watch? Well, if you’re in San Francisco, it is a quarterback who is paid $37 million a year. Even crazier than that is the value we place on stuff that the rich and famous have touched, like $525,000 someone paid for a signed copy of John Lennon’s Murderer LP or over $388 thousand for a baseball autographed by Babe Ruth.
This line of thinking—honoring the rich, famous, and powerful—is prevalent throughout our culture. We even find it at church. We recently completed a capital campaign for our new church. As a means of thanking donors, a wall was constructed in front of the new building to hold plaques with the names of all who contributed to the campaign. The bigger your donation, the bigger the plaque that was engraved to honor you. Now, I’m not opposed to thanking donors for their contributions. I think it is absolutely the right thing to do. What I question is, is it the right thing to give greater thanks to those who have a greater means to contribute more by honoring them with a larger plaque? Is it right, that by default, those of lesser means are honored less?
In our Gospel reading, Jesus answers this question. “Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury. For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.” (Mk 12:43-44) But I think the more important message in the Gospel isn’t about the size of her donation, it is about the widow herself. Most people didn’t even notice the poor widow. If they did, they likely dismissed her as unimportant, but not Jesus.
A while ago, I was working with a small manufacturing firm and the CEO was lamenting how hard it was to find and keep good employees. He shared a story about the interview for a candidate for the shipping department. Evidently, this person did not rock the interview, but they hired him anyway. Now, the candidate wasn’t going to be part of the shipping department, this company was so small that this one person was the shipping department.
When I asked my client why they hired him even though he was so unimpressed by the interview, he said, “It’s only shipping.” “Only shipping?” I said, “That’s the most important job in the entire company. It doesn’t matter what happens upstream in the manufacturing process if shipping screws things up and doesn’t get the product to the right place on time.”
But the real issue with my client’s perspective was that it had greater ramifications than his hiring decision. The value he placed on the position was reflected in the value he placed on the person in the position, and that was the bigger problem.
We are guilty of this kind of thinking too. When we see someone rich and famous, we get all giddy and want to take a selfie with them, post it on social media so all our friends can see it. I’ve done this. I’ve never taken a picture of the person who bussed my table at a restaurant, even though I’m very grateful that they did.
The morning after this week’s election, a young woman posted her reflection on her experience working as an intern on a campaign. She said the first day was her fondest memory because the candidate introduced himself to her “as if he was a regular person on the street.” She added that at the end of the day, he enthusiastically thanked her for her work and remembered her name. Now even though I don’t agree with this particular candidate’s policy agenda, I have to admire him. He remembered her name.
I’m probably one of the worst when it comes to remembering people’s names. What is even worse is I’ve had people tell me that we’ve met or worked together or even had coffee and I don’t remember them or the event! Now that is truly pathetic. What does this say about me and how I value other human persons?
In his book, The Pope and the CEO, Andreas Widmer shares how Pope St. John Paul II, probably one of the most recognizable men on the planet, had a gift for recognizing and remembering you. Widmer served Saint JPII as a Swiss Guard for two years in the late 1980’s. It was a role that allowed him to learn a great deal about his faith and God by observing how the pope bore witness to the One he served.
He said the pope never looked at people in general, rather, he looked at people in particular. What John Paul II saw was the person’s innate human dignity. Widmer wrote, “You felt more important in John Paul II’s presence than you did anywhere else, not because he was so important. You weren’t basking in the glow of his papal majesty. It was because he saw how important you were and treated you that way. What he said and did mattered to us, because we mattered to him.”
Last week’s gospel, if you can remember that far back, was about the Great Commandment: “To love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no simpler and yet more difficult thing that you can do to demonstrate love of neighbor than to remember their name.
There is no simpler and yet more difficult thing that you can do to demonstrate love of neighbor than to remember their name.The second point that we might want to take away from Sunday’s readings and apply to our work lives is the importance of faith. Faith, like love, is a theological virtue, that is a gift of grace from God, but it is also an act in response to God. In admirable acts of faith, both the woman in the first reading and the woman in the Gospel, gave their whole livelihood in response to God.
In one of his YouTube videos, Bishop Robert Barron talks about what faith is and what faith isn’t. Faith is not irrational, and it is not superstition. Rather, faith supports reason. It is a surrender and a leap into that which is beyond reason. Faith is a trusting confidence in a God who cannot be controlled by reason.
“Faith is not irrational. Rather faith supports reason. It is a surrender and a leap into that which is beyond reason.” ~ Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarronOver 15 years ago, I made the decision to leave my “real” job and start my own business. At the time, my husband was also self-employed, so I was the source of steady income and insurance for our family. But I was also traveling a lot and doing a pretty poor job of being a mom to our two young daughters. So, when there was a reduction in force and I was given the option to stay or leave, I took the paltry severance package and a leap of faith and left.
The backstory is that for a couple of years leading up to this decision point, I wanted to leave, but didn’t know where I would go or what I would do. I prayed every day “God, help me to use the talents you have given me to do your will.” When I was presented with the option to leave, I took a look at our finances and determined how long we could survive before either of us began generating a steady income again. I had some idea of what I was going to do (although in the end, that changed dramatically). I also had a plan for what I was going to do next to pursue the opportunity. Faith was the extension of the reasonable plan.
We can’t survive in business without faith. Innovation would grind to a halt. Nothing new would ever happen. People would never take new jobs, start new companies or develop new products. There is never a perfect plan. We can never foresee all the obstacles. We never have all the information we need. Faith is that bridge from what we can reasonably know into the unknown.
We can’t survive in business without faith. Faith is that bridge from what we can reasonably know into the unknown.But too often, we place our faith in ourselves to carry out our plans instead of aligning our plans with faith to God’s will. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says “By faith, man freely commits his entire self to God. For this reason, the believer seeks to know and do God’s will.” (CCC 1814) How do we know God’s will and how do we trust him enough to place our faith in him? We must ask, through prayer.
Years ago, I was at a weekend retreat and there was an image of the Divine Mercy in the room where we gathered. This was only a few years after St. Pope John Paul II promoted the devotion to Divine Mercy and I wasn’t familiar with St. Faustina or the history of the image. All weekend I kept staring at that portrait and the words, “Jesus, I Trust in You” printed at the bottom. Finally, I asked myself, “Do I trust in You?” and my honest response was “No, I trust myself because I don’t really know You.”
You can’t trust someone you don’t know. So, I made a commitment to get to know him through Sacred Scripture and began reading the Gospels. I made a Lent commitment to daily Mass, and I have continued these practices ever since. But it still took me many years to turn over the reigns of my business to him. Although I’d turned over most of my life to him, for some reason, I felt I needed to keep control over my work life.
Spoiler Alert! God doesn’t just want part of our lives. He wants all of it. Perhaps you, like me, are afraid to let go of our business life and turn it over to God. Well, to quote Elijah, “ Do not be afraid.” (1 Kings 17:13) If we believe that God created the heavens and earth, in all its intricate complexity that is beautifully and rightly ordered, why would we not be able to trust him with our livelihood?
So, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite challenges and blessings from Saint Pope John Paul II:
“Do not be afraid! Open the doors to Christ. God works in the concrete and personal affairs of each one of us. Don’t let the time that the Lord gives you run on as if everything is due to chance. With this expression of my hope I send you all, from the depth of my heart, my blessing.” ~ Saint Pope John Paul II
“God works in the concrete and personal affairs of each one of us.” ~ Pope St. John Paul IIGod does work in the concrete and personal affairs of our lives, if we let him. Do not be afraid to take a leap that faith in whatever you have going on in your work life this week.
Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, enkindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created, and You shall renew the face of the earth.
May God bless you abundantly and may you glorify the Lord by your life. Amen
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