On a recurring basis, the parish office is contacted by development companies looking for new customers; development companies organize fund raising campaigns for businesses and charitable organizations. Recently, a particularly motivated development company contacted the parish office.
I told the representatives from the development company that the parish didn’t need a development plan, and I didn’t see a need for a fundraising campaign. They assured me that they did not intend to address development or fundraising; they said they were merely interested in learning more about the parish. Against my better judgment, I agreed to a meeting.
The representatives from the development company began the meeting by asking such rudimentary questions that I had misgivings about their motivations; they hadn’t even looked at the parish website. They got past the preliminaries quickly and then made an aggressive sales pitch for the very thing they said they wouldn’t address, namely, money and fundraising.
The development company’s salespeople promised an easy way to get everything from a new church building to a guaranteed revenue stream – if I would buy their services. Several questions came to mind immediately. First, is their promise of easy fundraising any more believable than their promise not to talk about fundraising? Second, is the purpose of a parish to generate money?
As I ushered the salespeople out the door, they made a last-ditch effort to capture my attention by asking my thoughts about the greatest need facing the Church today. I responded that anyone interested in the future of the Church would take a serious look at the declining numbers of baptized Catholics who attend Sunday Mass.
The salespeople struggled with that remark. They thought I was saying that the Church needed a better funded program of outreach to the baptized, or the unchurched, or the young. What I meant was that organized religion too often treats people as if they are things rather than persons and, for this reason, fewer and fewer come to church. Today’s first reading provides some clarity about this complex issue.
In the first reading, the prophet Isaiah adapted a traditional grape harvest song that praised God for the bounty of the harvest and the joy resulting from a good vintage year for wine. The prophet added two surprising elements intended to call his contemporaries to repentance.
Isaiah made the song an allegory by comparing the relationship between a vineyard owner and his vineyard to the relationship between a married couple. The singer suggested that his “friend’s” spouse had been unfaithful. Rather than a celebratory song about the grape harvest, the song became a morality tale about the harm caused by infidelity.
Isaiah’s adaptation was intended to elicit the hearers’ disapproval of the unfaithful spouse represented by the carefully tended but unproductive vineyard. The second surprising element of the song is revealed as soon as the hearers are ready to pass judgment on the unfaithful spouse; the singer says that the hearers themselves are the unproductive vineyard, the spouse guilty of infidelity.
Unfortunately, the prophecy did not have its desired effect; the kingdoms of Judah and Israel continued their infidelity toward God and one another. Their failure to repent resulted from the same misunderstanding about repentance and forgiveness that is common today.
In the Scriptures, repentance is unlike repentance in human societies. In our society, people repent in response to getting caught in damning behavior or in the attempt to avoid punishment for such behavior. The Scriptures contain numerous calls to repentance, not with the intent of merely helping people avoid punishment, but for the purpose of developing a greater sense of responsibility and respect.
Repentance and forgiveness, then, are not about feeling shame but rather, about treating God as sovereign Creator and treating other people as autonomous persons. The residents of Judah and Israel failed to understand this; they acted as if God and people were merely things, objects that existed for their personal benefit.
My apparently incomprehensible remark to the development company’s salespeople was an observation that too many church congregations treat members and non-members as if they are little more than potential sources of funding, or unruly children who need to be controlled, or supporting cast members whose only role is to affirm the opinions of leadership.
The Church’s greatest need today is the same as the world’s greatest need. Humanity’s perennially greatest need is for individuals to repent and treat one another with dignity and respect. This is not as easy as it sounds, and no amount of funding can make it happen. The kind of repentance God offers all people requires that nations, churches, political factions, and individuals stop treating one another as problems to be overcome but rather, as persons to be respected.
If you agree that the world needs repentance and reform, that everyone deserves to be treated as a person rather than as a thing, then this repentance must begin with you. Isaiah accused his contemporaries by prophesying that God, “looked for judgment, but see, bloodshed! for justice, but hark, the outcry!” (Is. 5:7) In this context, “judgment” and “justice” mean devotion and righteousness. God’s only desire is that His People are consistently devout toward God and reliably fair to one another. Repentance is neither self-condemnation nor self-pity; rather, it is a choice to grant justice and dignity to all people.
