WHOSE STUFF IS IT, ANYWAY?

Every so often the National Church puts on seminars on Planned Giving to which clergy are invited. The plan and the hope is that we clergy will understand the importance of planned giving and that we can convey that message to the people we serve so that when they make out their wills, they plan on leaving some of their legacy to the parish. The seminars address the broader issue of that dreaded word stewardship.

At one of these seminars when we were talking about stewardship, one of my colleagues pointed out that the new translation of the Bible replaces the word steward with the word manager. He likes manager better. When most of us hear the word stewardship, we immediately think of the word money. That's probably because we almost always, at least in church circles, use the word in conjunction with annual every member canvasses. We have a stewardship campaigns. And stewardship campaigns tend to be all about money: how much money parishioners will donate/pledge toward the next year’s budget.

My colleague’s point was that a steward, in the original understanding of the word, was a manager of "someone else's stuff", not just his own money. Thus, today we can hire money managers to help manage all our stuff and not just our money.

Stuff. I like that word. I am intrigued by the word. I looked it up.  It meant originally materials or supplies. The verb also meant "to stop up." When something is stopped up, it means that there is more there than can be handled at the moment.

I suspect we need money managers, we need stewards, when we are all stopped up, when we have more than we can handle at the moment. In the old days there were not too many people in such condition: having too much. That is why stewards were probably rare.

There are not too many people today who have money managers, at least in comparison. But we all have too much stuff, as is evident by the vast number of yard sales that take place this time of year. We all would be better off with less and we could manage our stuff better. No, let me restate that: we could manage the stuff we have been entrusted with better. You see, it is never our stuff, my stuff, your stuff, that we manage or mismanage. It's all God's.

All the stuff we have has been given to us by God to use for a while and then to leave behind once we die – or to sell at or give to yard sales. We don't and can't take it with us. Our responsibility is to manage all this stuff as best we can for the betterment of all of us, ourselves included, but not just ourselves. The word we use, steward or manager, is beside the point. What we do with what we have been blessed is the point.

If we are to be good stewards/managers, and that is what we are called to be in and through our baptism, we have to pause on occasion and reflect about how we are using all the stuff we have, all the stuff God has entrusted us with. Yard sales and stewardship campaigns are such times. That said, might this not be a very good time to spend some time thinking about how we are managing/stewarding God's gifts to us?