Decisions

[The first homily I ever gave at my home parish, Saint Mary on the Hill in Augusta, GA during my 10th year high school reunion]

In 1989 my family came to Augusta on vacation, we still lived in Peru. My parents had come here many times before since we had family living in the area, but 1989 was the first time I came along, I was seven years old. I remember coming to Mass here at Saint Marys when we visited, we arrived late and stood by the doors on the back of the Church. That was the first time I entered this church.

Twenty years later I entered this church as a newly ordained priest to celebrate my first Mass. If someone in 1989 had predicted the future and told me this, I wouldn’t have believed it, it would’ve been incomprehensible, simply not possible.

I would’ve gotten that feeling we would get during the first week of school when we looked at the last chapter of the math book, we look at it and it’s scary because we have no idea of how we will ever understand how to resolve those math problems.

So how did I get from a seven year old boy visiting this church on vacation to a newly ordained priest celebrating Mass in here? In the same way we go through the math textbook one page at a time. The pages of the book of life are our decisions. Life is full of decisions, good and bad, that get us from point A to point B slowly. Each decision is a small step, but when put together, we realize we are definitely moving in a particular direction. We are today a collection of past decisions, small and big, our own or decisions made by our parents for us.

In the first reading today we hear of men who cheat their customers, giving them less for their money by making the ephah smaller, the shekel larger and rigging their scales. They even worked on the Sabbath. I doubt these merchants all of a sudden woke up one day and decided to cheat their customers in such a large scale. They probably did it a bit at a time, decision by decision, checking how much they could get away with, each time becoming more daring and ruthless in their treatment of others. It didn’t happen overnight. They became who they were decision by decision.

The steward in the Gospel passage makes a questionable decision that earns him the praise of his master and secures a good future for him. This parable is probably the most puzzling of the Gospel and there are many interpretations out there. Stewards in the ancient world made money by adding hefty extra charges to the bills of their master’s debtors, many times twice the amount owed. So the steward here reduces the debts, not only reducing what is owed to his master, but at the same time reducing his own income. He is a clever man, he charges less so others may be good to him later. Whether it was a good or bad decision, it was a decision that he made and certainly affected the rest of his life.

So decisions are important because they mold the course of our lives. If we are good at making small decisions we will be good at making big ones. How do we make sure we are making the right decisions in our lives?

We need to be open to the presence of Christ in our lives, trusting that He wants to guide us to happiness. We must be willing to follow him. We must allow God into our decision making process: not just personal decisions, but decisions for your small children, decisions made as a married couple, as an employee or employer, as a member of the community, as a voting citizen etc.

If we are open, Christ will lead us on an adventure and take us to places we never imagined.

If we are not open to Christ, the opposite can happen to us: we may end up doing bad things we never imagined doing.

The most important decision of our lives is our decision to be faithful Christians. To live out to the fullest our baptismal promises: to reject Satan, his empty promises and sin and to embrace our faith in Jesus Christ. Today since we have a baptism, we all get that opportunity, to firmly answer I DO to the call of Christ in your hearts.