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Whoever exalts himself will be humbled,
whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
I remember my days in the seminary,
when I spent six years learning all sorts of
theology and philosophy and ecclesiology
and all other types of “ologies” that I did not even know existed.
It was a wonderful time of learning and of knowledge gathering.
In a sense I got bloated on knowledge.
The temptation is to let that bloating go to your ego
and give you an inflated opinion of yourself and your new found knowledge.
The professors at the seminary tried to teach us this nuance,
but we think at the end of six years, we know everything,
we have an answer for everything.
It does not take long in the parish to figure out
that we do not know quite as much as we thought we did.
But that happens to a lot of us in our different careers
whether it be an engineer, doctor or teacher.
It reminds me again about that book
you have been hearing me quote from
by Brian McLaren called “Learning how to See.”
One of the C’s in the 13 C’s is confidence bias.
It is defined as “the brain preferring a confident lie over a hesitant truth.”
In America in particular, we like confidence.
We have to be a confident leader.
The more confident we are, people tell us,
then the more people are going to follow us.
Look at all the interview processes for most of corporate America.
We are told we have to ooze confidence.
We have to know exactly what we are talking about.
When we get into the job, we just have to do it, right?
There is, in a sense, overconfidence, fake it till you make it.
That is overconfidence, and it is exactly
what Jesus is taking about in today's gospel.
The Pharisees and the leaders are on the chair of Moses, as he says.
He tells the people you can do everything they say,
but just do not do what they do because they are not practicing.
That temptation is our temptation,
not just for religious leaders, for all of us,
to have this overconfidence that we know
exactly what God wants us to do at any one moment,
and that we have the corner on the truth especially for others.
And that is dangerous!
Jesus basically condemns it.
And he says we need to be humble,
we need to have humility at all times,
not only before each other, but before God.
That will be a way to measure it.
And so, what are we to do in our own lives?
One way is listening to others for wisdom.
I was fortunate when I received my very first assignment as a priest,
I had a pastor who knew the eagerness
that would come out of the seminary
and he gently invited me to be nuanced,
to wait and to understand.
That pastor was Fr. Warwick, the pastor here as my predecessor.
When I left that assignment,
I found another mentor priest
that would enable me to keep measured,
to keep a checkpoint, if you would, in my life.
Additionally, everywhere I have gone,
I have always had a leadership team at the parish
that is made up of members of the community at large
and some members of the senior staff.
I go to them every other week with what is on my mind to checkpoint.
When we go to prayer there is the temptation,
that what we hear in prayer can often be
a projection of our own voice onto Jesus.
What we hear back from Jesus is exactly what we are thinking
because we have projected it onto Jesus, and we hear it right back.
How do we test the spirits?
How do we figure that out?
Of course, first being men and women of prayer,
a boy or girl of prayer and we really do listen to Jesus in our hearts,
but then we also must test the spirits.
We must ensure that what we are hearing in prayer
is validated by other people who also are men and women of prayer.
And that is where a mentor comes in,
and that is where the community comes in.
We have to then trust each other to have this.
We can have confidence
but it must be tested by the community in prayer.
We can go from overconfident to having no confidence.
We can be confident in Jesus Christ.
We are confident in the truth that he gives us,
but we still need to test it.
So let me go back to the example.
About six or seven months ago, I was very confident in prayer
that we needed to put on a parish wide retreat;
it has never been done anywhere.
It is not like we pull out the sheet of where is has been done elsewhere.
No one ever does a full onsite retreat in their parish.
So, when I initially brought it up, there was some hesitancy,
and there were even some people who did not think I should do it.
But when I brought it to my mentor,
and when I brought it to my leadership team,
when I brought it to the pastoral team,
they all embraced it and we worked hard to bring it about.
Last weekend we had 250 people who came to the retreat
and had an amazing time.
Yes, we can be confident in the right thing,
but we still have to validate and make sure it is what we have.
Now, speaking of confidence, two weeks ago,
we sent out the financial reports for the parish,
to show how well we have done.
And we are confident.
I want us to be confident but not overconfident.
So, I invited one of our finance committee members to come forward
and give some words to highlight, to ensure the confidence,
the rightly placed confidence we have in what we are doing.
Here is our 2022-2023 annual report (click here):
After hearing the pastoral highlights of the financial year,
we ought to share the confidence that we are doing well,
but we do not want to be overconfident.
We do not want to move to this bias of confidence.
But what are we really confident in?
We are confident in the message of Jesus Christ.
This is a powerful message and one that needs to be heard,
not just by us, but by more families
who are in our parish who need to hear it more often,
and those who are yet to be part of our parish.
That is the confidence that I want us to invest in.
That is what I'm asking you to do.
Let's just recap some of the things we have invested in this last year;
with confidence we invested in hiring a new full-time youth minister,
because we need to build back our youth ministry.
We invested more hours in communications and community building,
which led to that wonderful retreat.
And we have invested in a lot more prayer resources.
That is what we have done in this last year.
What we are asking in this year ahead is
to invest more in the youth ministry.
Father Mike's suite that used to be over here in the corner,
we are turning into a youth center.
We are nearly finished,
but we do not have the funds to completely finish.
We are almost there but we need $50,000 more for that.
Our success comes with more people attending church, and that is wonderful.
We are slowly building back to where we were,
but we still have a long way to go.
A lot of people still are staying online,
and we want to encourage them,
all of you to come and join us in person.
But we also need to invest in our audio visual system
as it currently over 25 years old.
It is great, but every now and then you will hear it just kind of go out.
The screens are also in need of investment.
The whole new AV system is going to cost $150,000.
These are large ticket items that we need to invest in.
We also did some overdue repair work on the pew chairs.
We want to continue to invest in our music program
and in more prayer resources such as an annual retreat like last weekend.
So, what am I asking of you?
You will receive an email from me on Tuesday,
and in that email we will summarize what we have just talked about here,
and then we will give you what we have recorded for the last year of giving.
Then I'm going to ask for a dollar amount to ask you to give.
Please do not be offended if I ask for too little, right?
But also, do not be offended if I ask for too much.
Rather prayerfully consider what you can afford to give;
maybe you cannot increase your giving,
but you can give a one-time gift for some of these projects.
Whatever it is that you feel comfortable with,
I ask you to prayerfully consider giving that gift an increased gift.
I am confident that we are doing what is right for the parish.
We have grown our music ministry,
we have grown our prayer ministry,
we have grown back many different ministries.
We still have a long way to go.
Yes, but we are definitely doing what is right.
I hope you share that confidence.
We do not want to be overconfident,
but we want to be confident in the message of Jesus Christ,
that this is what the message the world needs to hear now more than ever.
We are that community that can bring that message.
I ask you, please be generous as you can be.
***[If you are an online receiver of this weekly
and would like to give a one-time gift to support our new AV system,
I would really appreciate it.
Please also consider establishing a recurring gift of $20 a month
through our online giving platform by clicking here. Thank you for your support.]
Whoever exalts himself will be humbled,
whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
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