November is the month, at the ending of one year of the Church's Calendar, and the beginning of another on Advent Sunday, when we at St Nicholas think about Stewardship.
The concept of Stewardship comes from the biblical account of creation in the book of Genesis, when God creates the first man and puts him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. Some environmentalists have accused the Judaeo-Christian tradition of causing the ecological disasters that threaten our planet, because it has taught that God gave human beings dominion over the whole of creation, to use it and exploit it as they saw fit. But in truth, this is a misunderstanding of the creation story. Human beings were always intended to use their dominion as stewards, not lords, of creation; and a steward is one who manages and takes care of a property on behalf of someone else, its true owner. A steward will be expected to give an account at the end of his stewardship.
When we think about stewardship, then, it is an opportunity to reflect on how we use all the things of this life that ultimately come from and belong to God: our time, our possessions, our energies and our natural abilities. We mean to use all these things not only in the context of the church and its activities, but in the whole of our human life, in our daily work and as members of a community.
This is not only useful as a means of doing our own accounting and housekeeping as a church. It is also a powerful witness to the fact that the first essential of true humanity, and true spiritual health, is to take responsibility for how we live and what we do. We live in an age when taking responsibility is the last thing many people want to do. It is so much easier and more attractive to blame someone else, to hold someone else, anyone else, accountable when something goes wrong. So we have people suing tobacco companies for selling cigarettes, instead of acknowledging that it was their own chosen habit of heavy smoking over decades, that caused their lung cancer or heart disease. We have people blaming the banks for giving them easy credit and luring them into debt with promises of having now and paying later. Of course, there are irresponsible lenders, who prey on people's greed and folly; but they would never be able to do so if people were not greedy and foolish in the first place. The way out of the hells we make for ourselves is not to blame someone else, but to take responsibility, to say "It's my fault, I am to blame, I'm sorry, forgive me," - and then to get on with amending our lives. This is what repentance is about: asking forgiveness for what we have done, and opening the channels for our lives to be transformed, and made over anew.
As with most other spiritual truths, we are walking a tightrope here between taking too little and too much responsibility. For much of its history the Church has inflicted great damage on sensitive souls by encouraging excessive guilt, and this guilt can prove more harmful than the sin and its consequences. Don't feel guilty, we should be saying to people; just say you're sorry, receive forgiveness, and get on with it. But in addition to misplaced guilt, there is also the taking of inappropriate responsibility, and maybe the controversial issue of global warming is an example of this. Many scientists argue that the changes in climate we think we observe, are not the result of the build-up of 'greenhouse gases' through our squandering of fossil fuels, but an effect of natural fluctuations in the earth's temperature such as there have always been, throughout history. If this is true, then 'taking responsibility' for changing the earth's climate may be another way of inflating our importance, or usurping the place of God - exactly what Adam and Eve tried to do in the story of the Fall. No doubt we should be more careful stewards of fossil fuels, but so that our descendants may still have some to use, rather than because we are afraid of destroying the planet. The human race is more likely to destroy itself by war, or be wiped out by disease or some natural calamity we have no control over, like a meteorite colliding with the earth.
So what we seek, at this time of Stewardship prayer and renewal, is to make a realistic assessment of what we can and cannot take responsibility for, and having done so, to use all our knowledge and skills, our time and our wealth, to live in a way that furthers God's agenda, and the good of all the people and creatures with whom we share this beautiful, fruitful, fascinating and enchanting world. If you would like to receive our Stewardship literature and have not already done so, please contact me or one of the churchwardens.
Published in the MarstonTimes, November 2003