We embark together again in just two weeks on our annual stewardship journey. This is a critical time in our corporate life together, and while you will hear many numbers and budgetary successes and challenges discussed at the Annual Meeting, I earnestly hope and pray that in the Lenten weeks ahead, each of us might find a way and a time and a means to focus on the gifts in our lives and what sort of relationship with Our Lord and with our society’s lord (that would be money) we are being called to.
St. John’s parish has run in the black, barely, for three consecutive years now. That this is the case is sign of your faith and generosity and all the ways we have grown in community and mutual trust. It is also something to rejoice about and to offer Thanks to God for!
Numbers are objective and clear and can provide important snapshots of our dreams, hopes, expectations, commitments, and sense of identity. However, I believe that the real pictures of our life together, as well as our vision for that life, spring from what is in our hearts and minds, souls and spirits. What our faith means to us at the most visceral level; how we value and tend our parish relationships; how we talk about Our Lord, the faith that is in us, and our parish; to whom we give thanks for the blessings of our lives; whether we see ourselves as smart and industrious and therefore deserving of success and security; or whether we see ourselves as completely reliant on God’s love and standing always in need of God’s gifts and compassionate mercy, undeserving but redeemed by Christ nonetheless; or whether we have some honestly spiritual combination of these divergent ways of looking at all that we have. The truth of how we see this will have a mighty impact on how we think about our stewardship of God’s creation and our stewardship of our gifts and resources. We all have particular amounts of money and time and specifically unique sorts of talent, skill and wisdom to share. One thing this season calls us to consider is whether we earned all these resources or whether God freely gives them to us.
I choose to believe that ALL that I have….every single relationship and thing, is a gift from God. My husband and children, parishioners and neighbors, friends and pets, colleagues and teachers, home and health, income and savings, food and heat, car and furniture, clothes and trinkets, even my yarn stash and ability to knit, is from God. Even more essential is my certainty that the ways that I steward and maintain these resources; i.e. my intelligence and skills, wisdom and work, intuition and industry, are all made possible by the God who loves me. Whatever my personal and spiritual gifts are, they come from the God who knit me together in my Mother’s womb.
Since I believe this, I must give back to God some significant portion of what God has given me. I do this by living in community with all of you, telling the Good News, inviting people to Come and See, trying to be responsible and industrious, attentively listening to God’s Word, intentionally working to discern God’s will, praying, naming and sharing my burdens and blessings with God and with all of you, and giving thanks everyday to God. I do this by tithing off the top of my income to St. John’s, and supporting those other special charities to which I am connected and which I am convinced go about the business of doing God’s work in the world.
And so, again, this new year, I invite you to ponder these spiritual matters in your heart and to give back to God from what you have been given. I urge you to identify yourself as an evangelist of our Lord Jesus, a servant of God’s will and people, and a witness to God’s love and transformative power alive and at work in your own life.
The Good News is that God’s love working in us can do infinitely more than we could ask or imagine.
Love and blessings,
Virginia