A common mistake we make as the church is in
identifying the stewardship of money with donating to a congregation. All too often, when the pastor gives “the
stewardship sermon”, it is a sermon about why you should give more to the religious
organization, a sermon on supporting the mission of the community and the life
of the congregation. When money is in
short supply, we might hear that we need to be better stewards.
And
we do need to be better stewards, but that can only happen when we understand
the breadth of stewardship. When I talk
about the stewardship of money, I am talking about every decision that you make
about money. What you choose to give to
a congregation is one of those decisions, but it is not the only decision that
matters.
If
you find a five-dollar-bill as you are going about your day, there are a number
of choices that you can make. You might
see if the original owner is nearby. You
might spend it on something you need.
You might spend it something you don’t need. You might buy a gift for someone else. You might give it to someone else. You might place it in next offering plate
that you see. You might stuff it in the
back of your sock drawer. You can
probably think of many more choices, but all of them are acts of
stewardship. You have a resource and you
are deciding what will be done with that resource.
Money
is a resource, a means of transacting business, a means of attributing worth to
an item or service. If our economy ran
on rocks, I would be writing a stewardship and rocks article. But our economy is based on money and, laying
aside all the cultural taboos and personal secrecy around money, it becomes
another resource among many. For
Christians, money becomes another tool with which to do the work of the kingdom
of God, a means to continue God’s work of creation and make something
beautiful. We need not fear money as an
evil, but we also must not turn into something more than it is. The amount of money we have or lack says
nothing about our intrinsic value to God or to one another. Money is a thing. Some have more. Some have less. All are called to be stewards.
One
way of stewarding your money is by paying greater attention to how it is
spent. How much do you spend on
food? How much on entertainment? How much on housing? Is it dripping away like a leaky faucet of
impulse buys and automatic payments?
This isn’t about good spending or bad spending but noticing spending
habits. Are there places you could spend
less? How would it feel to give away
more? Are you funding what is truly important
to you? Investing in your priorities?
Jesus
says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will
be also.” How we spend can be a sign of
our true priorities. So I will end with
a challenge. Take a few minutes to think
about something that matters to you and relates to God’s work in the
world. Maybe it is a mission of a congregation: taking care of those
experience hunger or homelessness. Maybe
it is a scientist looking for a cure to a disease or seeking a deeper
understanding of the universe . Maybe it
is an environmentalist looking to preserve an ecosystem or species. Think about the possibility that you might
contribute to that work even in a small way.
My challenge to you is to let your treasure go where you feel your heart
is leading, and let your heart and intention be where your treasure is.
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