May  7, 2018 Chapter 38 An Uprising of Stewardship

I have come to realize that as a priest I am a little bit weird. I enjoy talking about money.  I'm not sure that I always have but I know for the last 15 years or more it has been something I enjoy preaching about and something I don't mind talking about in everyday conversations. I think part of the reason for that is that I have come to believe that money itself has no inherent value, just as a rock has no inherent value. A rock can be used for good or it can be used for evil. The same simple truth applies to money--it is a tool given to us to manage for God.
     Two things struck me in the reading for this week. The first came on page 193 when McLaren writes: "But what hasn't changed, and what must never change, is this: we realize that the systems of this world runs on one economy, and we in the commonwealth of God run on another." That is a powerful statement about the Christian view of money. We should see it differently from non-Christian people. As said before, money is not a bad thing. Having money is not a bad thing. It is our use of money that has in it the potential for judgment.
     A few weeks after I was ordained in 1990, I asked a classmate to go on vacation. He said that he didn't have the money. I was a little shocked at that because shortly after ordination he had told me that he received gifts totaling around $10,000. A few years later I heard that he had given all but $1000 away to a family that was going through a difficult financial time due to an illness.
     That story leads to the second thing that struck me in this reading. It comes from a paragraph on page 194. It is the paragraph that begins with the words: "When it comes to how we spend our earnings, stewardship means living below our means." What challenges me about this paragraph is that it turns upside down and inside out the manner with which I typically talk about stewardship. When I talk about stewardship, I say that God gets the first 10%, and then we can use, and save and spend the rest. The early Church, according to McLaren, reverses that order. First, they would decide what they needed to live on--to provide for themselves and their family. Then they would save what they felt they needed to save for their future--the wisdom of foresight.Then finally, the rest would be used for God. When I reflected on that, it was call to reevaluate yet again how well I practice biblical stewardship.
     Talking about money is a challenge. Dealing with money is a challenge. None of us, I suppose, gets it right all the time. But, nonetheless, we must always continue to deal with it, wrestle with it, adjust it here and there, so that in all that we do with money, we do it in the name of God.