Fall Stewardship 1: Down

Deut. 10:10—22, Psalm 24, Gal. 3:23—29, Mark 12:28—34

I want you to think about something that you love. Something that makes you feel blessed — maybe it’s your family, or friends, or where you live, or double dark chocolate ice cream. Something that you love so much you might be inspired to have a bumper sticker or flag with that thing on it. Something that you might post about on Facebook, or something that you might join a club for to cherish with others.

Now…did anyone think of stewardship? No? Nobody has a stewardship bumper sticker on their car? … No, of course not. Stewardship isn’t really something that one loves.

Actually, stewardship is about how one loves.

Stewardship is how love works. This is not how we normally talk about stewardship, I know. But I think that stewardship is always and only about love.

This is big stuff. A scribe came to Jesus in the Gospel we heard today to ask Jesus about some Big Stuff. He asked Jesus about which commandment was first. In other words…what’s the most important thing? Maybe today the question would sound more like, ‘Jesus … what’s the meaning of life?’

And Jesus responds with a very biblical, but also very relevant answer: he says, the Lord is one, Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

The scribe asks about a commandment, and Jesus gives an answer that’s all about love. And this love has an order to it. Sort of like how our world has gravity, love has a kind of gravity and it moves just as Jesus answered. It begins with God. It fills us and our whole life with a purpose. And then it flows out of us to our neighbors. Love moves down, in, and out.

Down, In, and Out:¹ I believe that stewardship is the path that love takes down from God, into our lives, and out to our neighbors. If it helps you remember, you could think of it the way that you might make the sign of the cross: down, in, out.

Today, I want us to focus on the ‘down’ part of how love works.

There is one central point of knowledge that we have from scriptures, from tradition, from experience: God’s love comes down to us. We live by God’s grace alone. God chooses us. Or, in stewardship language, everything first belongs to God. The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.

This is where the word steward comes from, and why it’s still the best word we have. Now, I know that the word ‘stewardship’ has come to mean something very particular to church folks. Let’s be honest, when you hear ‘stewardship’ don’t you think the once-a-year project that the church takes on in order to get people to give money? That’s an OK way to describe a committee, maybe, but it’s a pretty limiting way to talk about love.

If there was another word I could use to talk about what stewardship really means, and what love looks like in real life — believe me — I would use it. But stewardship is the word that best describes the whole way that God works in the world, in the church, and in our lives.

Because a ‘steward’ is someone who is entrusted with gifts from an owner. The steward does not own the gifts…the gifts belong to someone else. But the steward manages the gifts, the skills, the property, the money — whatever it is — for a particular purpose. This describes us pretty well.

Sure, in terms of our social system, you can own things. Obviously in our community, some things belong to you, some things belong to me. And that works pretty well. (The last thing I want is to go home and find out that one of you has been using my toothbrush, right?) But in terms of the Kingdom of God, nothing belongs to you or me. It all belongs to God. We are stewards — not owners.

If you have a place to live — whether you rent or have held the deed for forty years — it belongs to God…
If you have children…they do not belong to you. They are entrusted to your care.

We are stewards — not owners. Now, this is the kind of stuff that makes sense sitting on pews, but then gets harder to see when we get up and walk away.

We can all be like a toddler who is given a box of crayons to share with his siblings and immediately grasps it and says, “MINE!” We may know in our heads that everything that we have belongs to God, but most of the time our hearts tell us to cling to the things that we’ve ‘earned,’ the things that we ‘deserve fair and square,’ and the things we are ‘entitled to.’

You see, it seems great that our things actually belong to God — until we’re called to share them. To divide them up. Or heaven forbid: to give them away.

Hmm. This is hard stuff. This is why nobody is driving around with Stewardship bumper stickers. It took us so long to build this stuff up, it makes us scared or angry to think about giving it away.

But don’t forget the flow. God’s love comes down. Before we had anything, God had us, and loved us. Before we even had the ability to ‘earn’ something, God first loved us.

God is the source of our life — and that’s just the kind of Good News you’ll need when you discover that you aren’t. When you discover your box of crayons has melted and there is nothing you can do to make another one. God’s love flows down.

All of your heart, all of your soul, all of your mind, and all of your strength is all a gift from God. Each of us is a steward of tremendous gifts of heart, soul, mind, and strength. These gifts of love are not ours to own … but they are ours to use:

All this love has come down to you for a reason. God has blessed you in a particular way, that’s why we look IN… to see how each of us has been formed and made for God’s love.

And looking IN we see that everything that we have was entrusted to us to share. The flow always moves OUT, it never ends with us. God’s love is always flowing.

For the very same reason that we can’t lay personal claim to our gifts and possessions, we can be free from worrying about them: God’s love comes down to us. In the end, all of our hope lies not on the possessions we can acquire, or the skills we can develop, or even the people we can keep on our side. Ultimately our hope lies solely in the promise that we belong to a loving God.

And what we have to share is exactly what we have received from God: our heart, our soul, our mind, our strength — all of us.