The Greatest Commandment

By The Rev. Christian Carroll, Priest Associate

If you have been here the last two Sundays or opened your mail in the last two weeks then you know we are in the middle of our stewardship season. I don’t like the word “stewardship”.

What does it mean when we add “ship” to a word? Think about it. “Friendship”, “Companionship”, “Leadership”. To me they’re concepts that point to activities. It’s the activities we’re interested in. The meat is in the “friending”, the “companioning”, the “leading”, the “stewarding”. So what’s “stewarding”?

If a steward is someone given the job of maintaining and spending assets (think of a wine steward with the key to the wine cellar where the good wines are kept and maintained) then stewardship would be reflecting on stewarding or how the job of maintaining and spending assets is going.

So when I say we’re in stewardship season I mean we’re at the time of year when we start reflecting on our individual and joint “stewarding” or how we’re doing at the job of maintaining, protecting and spending assets.

We’re asking “how am I, how are we doing at maintaining, protecting and spending the assets that we’re charged with.”

In a church the assets are not bottles of wine and the job is not just maintaining the correct temperature so they’re ready to be enjoyed. In a church our asset is God’s grace in our lives. Jesus gives us our most important charge in this morning’s gospel. That is, loving the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind and loving our neighbor as our self.

Stewardship is reflecting on the “our stewarding” that is the actions that flow from our conscious desire to know love and serve God with everything we’ve got.

So every year at this time, a stewardship committee, made up of congregation members is gathered and charged with leading the congregation in reflecting on how we as individuals and as a congregation are responding to our charge to be stewards of God’s grace in our lives.

During this time we think about God’s grace. We think about God’s presence and impact on our daily lives. We think about, how or if we are motivated to respond. We ask “How are we doing with what Jesus calls the greatest commandments?” We listen to members of the congregation when they step forward to bear witness – to share their reflections and their experiences in stewarding. As we will again in a few minutes.

We take a step back and take an inventory of ourselves, our talents, our finances, our gifts, our time – all the stuff of our individual households – all the stuff that makes us who we are – and we acknowledge that – all things come of thee oh Lord – and question how – we are giving from what has been given us.

This inventory is not so we can passively offer thanks to God with a grateful heart but to see how we have lived the greatest commandment to “love the Lord our God with all your heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind”.

This inventory is not so we can passively offer thanks to God with a grateful heart but to see how we have “loved our neighbors as ourselves” using what is given us by God. Have we loved our neighbors as God has loved us?

And we form a committee to get us started. I have served on the stewardship committee for two seasons. And it’s not easy. Each year the members of that committee struggled.

We were uncomfortable. We struggled with the fact that the word “stewardship” seems to take center stage in our corporate life only when it’s time to plan next year’s budget.

Stewardship seems to always come down to the action of asking for money so we can keep the doors open, the lights on, the silver polished and the place warm, and ourselves doing all the things we have been doing here.

And each year the committee laments that we know that stewardship is not all about money. We know it’s about individual and corporate ministry. We know it’s about how we individually and corporately seek to witness to new life in Jesus Christ.

I think part of the struggle with stewardship as we practice it in this season occurs from a sense of embarrassment. That is embarrassment that, although we know better – stewardship always seems to get brought back down to money, despite the many ways we do indeed share our blessings in ministry both inside and outside these walls. Why is that?

We seem unable or unwilling to embrace stewardship as an ongoing reflection that can be a celebration of how we spend ourselves to the glory of God. We seem inattentive to integrating the joyful celebration of “our responses to God’s grace in our lives” throughout the church year.

I think I have an idea why. It has to do with fear and forgetting.

Because stewardship gets linked to money the whole reflection on blessings gets tainted. We taint the whole practice of seeing how we’re doing at using what we’ve been given. Linking stewardship only to money links stewardship to a resource we have that can become scarce at the drop of a hat. Poof, “money”, now it’s here, now it’s gone, will it ever come back? That particular asset is so tied to our self-esteem, our value and sense of security that money becomes hard for us to talk about. “Money”, now it’s here, now it’s gone, will it ever come back?

When stewardship gets linked principally to money it gets linked to fear and fear gets linked to giving. “If I give it – anything – I will not have it, – I will not have it and I will not be safe. If I am not safe, I might die.

The scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “Stewardship is not about raising money for church, but about asking if there is any alternative to the culture of death in which we live.” Translate “the culture of death” in your mind to the “culture of not enough”. To restate Brueggemann then “Stewardship is not about raising money for church, but about asking if there is any alternative to the culture of not enough in which we live.” In the culture of not enough fear replaces stewardship – that is – our responding in action to God’s graces in our lives, becomes something fearful. “Fear that there won’t be enough.”

And the fear that there won’t be enough, says Brueggemann, is really about seeing our past, individual and corporate” as “barren of miracles”. “A past without gifts and a future without hope gives a present that is an arena for anxiety.” If there is no acknowledgement or a denial of miracles, of God’s beneficence, then “the only way to get anywhere is to invent yourself and scramble for whatever you can get.”

If we leave unchallenged “a culture of not enough” or if we turn away from challenging our own fears of what will happen to us if we do not have enough than Brueggemann suggests we end up living as if our neighbors are a threat and the greatest and second greatest commandments are too much for our fears to bear.

The alternative is to step away – even if only in small steps – from whatever it is that stymies us from embracing in celebration all the ways we do spend ourselves to the glory of God. The alternative is to step away from whatever it is that stymies us from integrating the joyful celebration of “our responses to God’s grace” throughout the church year. The alternative is to reclaim stewarding and “stewardship” from money and fear.

I’m convinced we have a new opportunity here. We can throw open clouded up windows and take a new look at stewardship. Reclaim the word. Take it away from money; dissociate it from a financial burden. Don’t think about the money.

Think about this. Let’s look at reality – the reality of how this congregation has been maintaining, protecting and using its gifts.

There is palpable new energy in St. George’s that doesn’t have much to do with money.

We have neighborhood kids joining the choir camp. Our kids are inviting friends to join them in church. Our music program keeps getting bigger and better. We have a new liturgy for people in recovery. We have the willingness to experiment with the shape of our worship space. We have the ability to change.

We have women in the congregation stepping up who want to offer the congregation and the community more. Women who want to pray and learn together. We have new adult leadership jumping in and getting involved in guiding our young people. People from the outside, our neighbors, come in here to take a look at us to see if we have what they want or are trying to find.

We have people in our midst who greet those newcomers with joy and enthusiasm. New people are interested and excited about learning about the church and they come to seekers class. People come here to have their relationships blessed in weddings and civil unions. People come to hear our musicians in concerts. People come here to do yoga. People come here to celebrate the changing of seasons in ritual celebrations. People come here to learn how to stay sober and help other people attain sobriety. We have new people stepping up and teaching Sunday school and new people on the behind the scenes committees like property and finance. We have a talented and generous web master. Our wardens are active and vestry members supporting individual ministries.

And there are other ministries going on behind the scenes. Volunteerism, the pastoral visits, the gardeners, the people who pray with people for healing, the people who loving and prayerfully maintain the sanctuary, the people who make our worship function smoothly and all the helping hands giving unbeknownst to all of us. We have people serving on not-for-profit boards. We have people hammering nails for the Abraham House project. We gave over $20,000 to community organizations whose work reflects our commitment to be of service. If I’ve forgotten you or your ministry activity forgive me.

Let’s get used to speaking about the plenty we have here and let ourselves be inspired to keep using it. Let’s keep holding up our graces. Let’s keep holding up God’s beneficence in our lives. Use it, Use it, and Use it.

We each are an opportunity to witness to God’s grace. Your life itself is the opportunity. I challenge us to free stewardship from fear and concentrate year-round with stewarding – active intentional spending our treasures.

If I could I would give you all little keys to put on your key chains. They would be reminders like the wine steward’s key. They would be like the key to the wine cellar but our wine cellar has the bounty of the kingdom of God and we’re going to keep opening it up everyday to every neighbor we touch. And we’ll commit to doing this when we remember the miracles and when we fear they’ll stop. We keep doing it with or without fear. That is our charge. We’re going to keep opening the Kingdom up everyday to every neighbor we touch.

© 2008 The Rev. Christian Carroll