Harden Not Your Charity

Homily: Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Many years ago, there was the grill incident. Miss Knott-Albright, who was going to be a new teacher in the fall for our school, moved in on the next street over. The house came with a grill that has been one grease fire away from the evening news. Legend has it that, six years before, the former owner, in protest, had stopped cleaning it when Nixon gave Elvis Presley an honorary Bureau of Narcotics badge after Elvis showed up unannounced at the white house, asking to be made a federal narcotics agent — while himself being a heavy user of prescription pills.

Everyone in the neighborhood knew this. But no one bothered to tell her. During July, she fired up the grill for her parents. Flames shot out of it, making the Burning Man Bonfire look like a mere matchstick.  Our neighbor, Gary the Gossip, watched from his porch with a beer in hand and said, “I knew that would happen.”

The fire department arrived. All three trucks from the station. Four police cars escorted them.  Miss Knott-Albright met them on her front lawn, as flames could be seen peeking over her house. She was wearing oven mitts, shouting that she had it under control.

At the next block party, Gary the Gossip told the story as if he had been a first responder and had personally saved the entire township from going up in flames. He had not gone over beforehand because that would have been awkward. 

Ezekiel would have made a poor guest at that party. Jesus would have made a worse one. He does not say, “If your sister’s grill is dangerous, let her have her truth.” He says: go to her. Alone. Then take two. Then, if she will not hear, let the Church become involved—which is a very old way of saying the porch committee is not a sacrament.

Gary the Gossip is, in his own way, a kind man. The Kindness that never crosses the lawn for another. Today, we have gone from porches to group chats. “Awkward” has become the mortal sin of our culture. Grease fires are only venial.

We live in an age that has made a dogma out of two extremes. The first is that naming a wound is viewed as violence upon a person. The wound itself is treated as a lifestyle. Benedict XVI called it the dictatorship of relativism:  in other words, the strange modern creed that the only unforgivable act is to say that something is actually wrong. We call this tolerance.

A friend is destroying himself with a habit everyone can see, and no one will name, because naming it would be “judgmental.” So the group chat sends laughing emojis while the man walks into the same wall for the fourteenth time. We call this support.

A public figure recites a slogan that treats a human being as a product rather than a person, a problem rather than someone lost. The room applauds. An actual moral challenge would ruin dinner. We call this kindness.

On social media, “You do you” has become the virtue-signaling slogan of couch potato charity. It is offered with great solemnity, usually by people who would not let you “do you” with the car keys if you were drunk. The one place we still believe in objective danger is the parking lot. Everywhere else, we have decided that truth is a form of assault.

Refusing to correct someone, dressed up as tolerance, is often just cowardice. Real love wants what is actually good for the other person. Admonish the sinner. A comfortable lie, told because the truth would be unwelcome, is not mercy. It is abandonment of the other.

Note that the opposite danger also exists in our culture, where we name evils to signal our goodness rather than out of love for the other. Doxing and cancel culture. A way of “correcting” that has nothing to do with helping your brother and everything to do with winning the likes.

Nagging. You are no longer talking about the sin. You are now the fire alarm that will not shut off. The content has left the building. Only the pressure remains. This is why some people could be talked out of a burning house by a quiet friend and will stay in the burning house if their mother mentions it one more time. Squeeze a person’s freedom, and he will reassert it, sometimes by doing more of the thing you forbade.

Contempt. Sins are named to belittle a person. The point is not his conversion. The point is your virtue. Gary the gossip trumpeted his virtues on the porch. Social media has industrialized. 

Triangulation. You do not go to your brother. You go to a third party, then a fourth, then a group chat titled “Just praying for Uncle Uther.” This is not correction. Uncle Uther never hears the thing that might save him. 

Passive aggression. The sigh heard ’round the parish. The “bless his heart” that could cut glass. The post that is about “some people” the way a heat-seeking missile is about “some buildings.”

Silence can be a sin. So can the wrong kind of speech.

Both are failures of charity.

That is why Jesus starts between you and him alone. Private first. Always private first. Heaven is not impressed by your group chat.

None of this is Matthew 18. One person. Then two or three. Then the Church. The camera is not invited.

What actually works is almost insultingly humble.

Gregory the Great warns that correction is not about how loud we speak but how we speak. What steadies the proud will crush the fearful. What wakes the lazy will snap the already-broken. The one who is too gentle becomes an accomplice: by not naming it he shares in it. The one who is too harsh drives people into despair or into rebellion.

Gregory’s answer is discernment—looking at the actual human person in front of you before you open your mouth. Not the human being you wish you had. The one you have.

People change more reliably when they still feel the decision is theirs. Jesus knows this. He does not begin with a tribunal. He begins with a conversation that could still end in an embrace. “If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.” Not: you have won the argument. Not: you have won audience approval. You have won your brother. That is the prize. 

If today you hear his voice—harden not your hearts.
And if today your brother needs a voice—harden not your charity.

Go to him. Alone, if you can.
Tell the truth as if he were your own soul.
Leave the audience outside.
And if you must err, err in the direction of the man who ate with tax collectors, who appointed watchmen, and who still prefers a living brother to a perfect post.