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Stewardship The other day I was reading a book about the desert fathers. These were aesthetes, men and women who withdrew into the desert region of Egypt in order to live a life of simplicity and prayer way back in the early days when Christians were still subjects of the Roman Empire. These Christians took the call to ‘sell all you have, give to the poor and follow Jesus’ literally and so lived a life of extreme discipleship. Many inspiring stories have emerged from the lives of these incredible people who have become an encouragement to Christians throughout the generations. One delightful story is the one about the desert father, Moses who returned to his hermitage to find that he was being burgled by a thief who had a donkey. As the thief loaded the donkey with the desert father’s humble possessions, Moses instead of stopping the thief started to help him load up the donkey. The thief not realising that he was addressing the owner thanked him and with that Moses blessed him and sent him on his way and then thanked God for giving him such a wonderful opportunity to be generous. This month is stewardship month and so we are called to preach and teach on the subject of giving and managing our time, talents and treasure according to Gospel principles. Chatting to my colleagues in ministry, I have come to realise that the one topic we all dread no matter where we are on the theological spectrum, is the theme of stewardship. Money is one of those difficult topics of conversation like sex and politics. Let’s face it, for most members of the congregation, when the preacher mentions the word ‘stewardship’, what they hear is the word ‘money’. As I said the word ‘money’, I wonder what reaction it triggered or what thought popped into your head? For at least some of you the response might well have been a negative one. The word money seems to touch right into the centre of who we are and when we talk about money and about giving of our money, we engage with a part of us that sits right at the core of who we are. In the Gospel reading for today we discover that the money which the master entrusted to his 3 servants triggered two different responses. Two of the servants were challenged by the money they were given. They were empowered by it and immediately set out to maximise it for the master’s good. The third servant was paralysed by fear on account of the responsibility he had been given. So, he went off and dug a hole in the ground and buried the master’s money. It is clear from the story which response pleased the master and which did not. We learn from the parable that God gives us his servants, resources which he expects will challenge us and empower us and which he intends will energise us to use for his glory and for the extension of his kingdom of love and truth. Stewardship. To be sure stewardship includes our relationship to money, but it also embraces much more than that. The English word we use for stewardship comes from the Greek root word from which we also derive the word ‘economy’. Essentially stewardship means: “to manage a household”. It does not mean “own the household”. As Christians we believe that God owns everything and so in theological terms we merely manage the households which God has given us to oversee, we do not own them. Much like the Master in the story of the talents, one day God will turn to us and settle accounts with us and require of us to explain how we maximised the households he gave us to oversee. Consequently whatever gifts and talents we possess, we do so only in the sense that God owns them and lends them to us to manage. Anything that Christians manage, becomes a household we govern. For example we are Christian stewards over our influence, faith, time, vote, gifts, spiritual life, listening, prayer, cooking, love, encouragement, good will and so forth. Understood this way we could name hundreds of stewardship households. Anything we manage is a stewardship household. Clearly our households include our money, but stewardship reaches far beyond the mere concept of money. In the Epistle reading for today, we learn that the church is a unit that is like a biological body, made up of many parts and though its parts are many, they form one body of Christ. No matter who we are, we become part of that one body when we ‘drink’ of the Spirit of Christ. To pick up the metaphor in the Gospel, we have all been given different gifts and talents to manage. These are some of the households identified in the Epistle reading: Apostles, teachers, healers, administrators, interpreters and so forth. We are all called to manage the talents we have been given to the greater good of the body of Christ and to the glory of the Master. So why do we need to talk about stewardship in regard to money and talents in church? In a sense the principle of Christian giving is the lifeblood of the body of a local congregation. There is nothing more hands-on in a church’s life than deploying a congregation’s ministry gifts to the world or encouraging people to give of their money as an act of discipleship. Now it would seem that in general we are more comfortable talking about giving our talents and our time than we are about giving our money. However, much as I your vicar, might dislike talking about stewardship in terms of financial giving, the truth is that if one neglects this seemingly mundane task then the body of Christ suffers. Whether we like it or not, if preachers do not address the need for people to give of their financial resources and offer theological guidance for a healthy relationship with money, then that valuable resource will be overlooked by the faith community and it will drop off the radar. Consequently financial giving will decline and in no time at all the ministry and mission of the faith community will suffer. You can relax a little though for it is not my intention to try and prescribe to you how much you ought to give, when or how you might give or even that you need to give. My intention is simply to foreground for your prayerful consideration, the importance of resourcing the church for mission and ministry through the financial giving to the body of Christ. In any family, the resources of money, time and talents are needed for the good of the whole family. When any of the above is scarce or inappropriately managed, the whole family suffers, choices are reduced and the ability for individuals in the family to be nurtured and to make healthy contributions to society is curtailed. Churches are no different. As in families when resources are reduced, the ability of the church to function efficiently in its call to mission and ministry is hampered. The strength of the ministry of Christ’s church is greatly determined by the prayer and the resources of time, talent and money that support it. Thus it is that at least once a year the Parish of Devonport, Congregation and vicar alike must tackle the hard question of Christian stewardship and fully and prayerfully discern where, how, what, and why we are being called to give to the Body of Christ, the Church. After all in the words of David Mosser: ‘stewardship is simply discipleship in its working clothes’. I return to the story of the desert fathers. Christians are called to be in the world not of the world. We are called to detach ourselves from selfishness and to give ourselves away for the good of others. We are called to minister to the needs of others sacrificially And we are called collectively to be the body of Christ to the world. God requires team work from his church. The acronym for team being a useful explanation of what this means: together everyone achieves more for God. The story of the talents teaches us that we must wisely manage the resources God has given us and invest them in the world in such a way that they are a blessing to others. We do this best as a team, the body of Christ but we can only do this if each one of us is prepared to take generous risks for God, if we have hearts that are generous towards God and towards His Church. Together we can make a difference for good in the world. Giving of your time, your talents and of course your money to your faith community to be used for mission and ministry is one sure way of putting this theology into practice. I’d like to conclude as I began with a feel good story about generous giving. On Thursday I had occasion to go to parliament. I heard there a good news story that probably would never make it into the newspaper and mores the pity. Tell the story of how the parliamentarians clubbed together to buy a hearing aid for a poor man who used to sit in the public gallery to keep warm. May God’s Holy Spirit inspire us to random and generous acts of kindness and giving as we reflect on stewardship and the managing of the resources that God has entrusted to us to bless and prosper. |
