“Poverty of Faith” – 08.07.22 (19th Sunday OT- C)
“Poverty of Faith”
By: Fr. David Schmidt
Regina Coeli Parish - St. John Neumann Church - Franklin Park, PA
Mass Readings- https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/080722.cfm
In the Gospel Jesus makes mention about selling our belongings and giving alms. He points to poverty being an important part of attaining the Kingdom that He desires to give us. When Jesus speaks of poverty it is not just material poverty, but poverty of spirit as well as the type of poverty that is related to faith.
We hear in the 2nd reading today that “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.” There are many things throughout our lives that we have faith in that we have not yet received. These situations that we are put in that require us to have faith gives us the opportunity to show our trust and confidence in God that He is who He says He is, and that He will be faithful to His promises, and that He will come through for us.
The type of poverty that our Lord wants us to grow in is the type of poverty where we are put in situations that all we can do is rely on our faith in God. He’s going to have us in situations where we are like “Lord, this is crazy. There’s no way that this is going to happen. But if you say it will then I trust you.” He puts us in situations where our human logic can’t comprehend His promise because His promise or what He says will happen seems to defy all human logic and seems to be impossible. But we say to Him, “OK, Lord if you say this will happen then even though it makes no sense. I trust in you.”
The example that we are given today is Abraham, who the Bible points too as the ultimate example of faith. God made a lot of crazy promises to Abraham, and Abraham was put in a position of severe poverty in the sense that what God was promising and telling him to do made no sense and defied human logic and seemed impossible. He first had to follow God in faith into this unknown promised land that he was to receive as an inheritance. Then, he was told that him and his wife Sarah were going to have a child, and through that child, descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, even though Abraham and Sarah were advanced in years and Sarah was sterile. Despite this, it says, “for he thought that the one who had made the promise was trustworthy.”
God puts us in these positions where all that we can depend on in that moment is a radical faith in Him because it forces us to be in a position where we can’t rely on anything else but the fact that God is trustworthy. Again, we say, “Lord, this makes no sense, but I know you are trustworthy, so I’m placing my trust in you in this impossible situation.”
If this wasn’t enough, God stretched Abraham’s faith in Him to the absolute limit as after his son Isaac was born, and it seemed that God’s promises were coming to fulfillment, God then tells Abraham to sacrifice his own son. Abraham is now in this position where he’s like, “I was promised this child and descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, but now God is asking me to sacrifice this child to him as a sacrificial offering. This makes no sense. How can this be? How can God’s promise come to pass if Isaac is dead? I don’t know, but I trust in God, and maybe He can raise him from the dead.”
As we come to know, the angel stops Abraham from sacrificing his son, and he passes this test of faith by the Lord. And Abraham and Isaac then become a foreshadowing of God the Father offering up His own Son, Jesus Christ as a sacrificial offering for our sins.
What’s really interesting about this 2nd reading from Hebrews that has always fascinated me is that if you read the entire chapter 11 of Hebrews it gives other examples of faith of people from the Bible in addition to Abraham. Then it says, “All these died in faith. They did not receive what had been promised but saw it and greeted it from afar and acknowledged themselves to be strangers and aliens on earth, for those who speak thus show that they are seeking a homeland.”
What does it mean that they all died in faith and did not receive what had been promised? What this is referring to is the heavenly realities that they were promised. At the point of their deaths, they had not yet received what had been promised to them in regard to the heavenly realities.
This promise land that Abraham was promised, yes it was fulfilled in one way in the earthly piece of land that he was led too, but it was not the ultimate Promised Land that God was eventually going to lead him too in heaven.
God puts us in many situations throughout our lives that requires great faith. As I said earlier, He does this to increase our faith and trust in Him that He is who He says He is, and that He is trustworthy. He ultimately does this because He wants us each to die in faith. We can die in faith seeing and greeting from afar, what has been promised, but not yet received, and recognize that we are strangers and sojourners on this earth and that we are made for a heavenly homeland that God desires to give us at our death.
An example from my own life of God putting me in this position of radical faith and trust was my decision to enter the seminary. I grew up with this deep desire on my heart to get married. I felt that the Lord had made a promise to me at one point that He was going to fulfill this deep desire to love and be loved and to have it fulfilled in marriage with this incredible person that He was going to lead me too. As I went through college I began to grow in my love for the Lord and discover how incredible His love is, and the more He showed me, the more incredible it became. When I went to grad school, the Lord began to put on my heart the possibility of the priesthood, which I wrestled with a lot. It didn’t make sense, I kept thinking, “God promised me to have this desire to love and be loved to be fulfilled in marriage. Why is He asking me to think about the priesthood? It makes no sense.” But I kept moving forward trusting in God, and I thought to myself maybe this is my Abraham moment and I’m just being tested and He’s ultimately going to lead me to marriage.
However, as I kept journeying forward, I got to the point in my discernment where it seemed like seminary was the next step, which again made no sense to me because I just kept thinking, “If I enter seminary, then I’ll never have this love that I’ve always desired. How is God going to fulfill this desire of my heart by asking me to give up marriage and to go into the priesthood where I have to give up the very thing that I’ve always wanted, and the very thing I thought God was leading me too?”
So I was at the point where I was like, “If I enter seminary that means I’m never going to date, never going to marry, never going to have a family, or any of these things that I deeply desired.” But I trusted that if this was God’s will then I would be happy even though it made no sense at the time and seemed contradictory to everything that I thought He was leading me too.
All I had in that moment of deep poverty was faith in His goodness and faith in His promises. So I made the leap of faith in complete trust and entered seminary, and it’s been about 7 years since that moment, and I can honestly say that God was more than faithful to His promises, as He fulfilled this deep desire of my heart to love and be loved in ways that I never could have imagined. He showed me that it was His Love that I have desired my whole life, and it was His love that was enough to satisfy all the desires of my heart.
Even with this fulfillment of His promise that continues to deepen and evolve in so many incredible ways, I, like all of us, still have not received what has ultimately been promised to us, and that’s entrance into His heavenly homeland. A heavenly homeland where we encounter in its fullness the Love that we have so deeply desired our entire lives. We cannot receive this promise in its fullness in this life. However, the hope is that we build enough faith and trust in God through the various experiences on our journey, so that we too can die in faith. We can die in faith in these heavenly realities that await us after our death. We can die in faith knowing that there is a Love that awaits us in the next life that is far greater than anything we could ever experience on this earth. We can die in faith knowing that we will be led into the Promised Land where we will dwell with God for all eternity.
