Dear Saints,
One of the explicit themes of our Sunday Gospel passages the past few weeks has been stewardship. I’d like to dig into that in this pastor’s note.
Jesus finds himself in conflict with the people of his day over the way in which Israel lives out - or fails to live out - the stewardship God entrusts to them. He is convinced that his contemporaries are more concerned with their being blessed than their bringing God’s blessing to the wider world, and he is determined to set this right.
As God’s new Israel, we follow Jesus’ lead here: We are to give ourselves entirely to God in praise, and hold nothing back in serving him. As God’s good stewards, we understand that everything we have really belongs to God, whose resources we manage - especially our time, talent, and treasure - for his purposes.
In the context of our Gospel readings, especially Jesus’ line that anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple, I preached on the importance of tithing.
Now, I know that any number of practical considerations prevent us from tithing. For instance, I don’t know what tithing on a fixed income looks like. Tithing as an investor, likewise, is very tricky, although I’ll recommend Frank Hanna’s What Your Money Means for any of our parishioners looking for an in-depth analysis of the issue.
That being said, it is my contention that tithing is the most important spiritual discipline we can undertake. Tithing is our commitment to the reality that everything we have is God’s. Tithing moves us from a worldly way of thinking not only about money, but also about our lives: Giving a full 10% of our income as a weekly offering to the church moves us from the mentality of what we can get and keep to the mentality of what we can give away in God’s service.
Bill Wilson once wrote, “You can’t think your way into right action, but you can act your way into right thinking.” The tithe is a practice that reflects this reality, and I encourage you to discover it for yourself.
Ultimately, this is a matter of embodying God’s radical generosity. By trusting and following Jesus in all things, by relying on his strength to follow him on the way of generous and costly love, we will together grow to become the most generous people - in thought, and word, and deed - the world has ever known.
I love you, my friends. Please know of my prayers for you and yours.
In the Peace of Christ,
Father Daniel
δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ