Dear St. Nicholas Cathedral Family,
As today is our Fall Parish Assembly, a relevant topic to today’s Assembly is Stewardship. Before you close your bulletin or dismiss this article all together because I used the word Stewardship, think to yourself, “What does stewardship look like in our lives today?” Like many Christians today, we only associate the concept of stewardship with messages, letters, appeals asking you for money to help cover church budgets and buildings expenses, that the reader doesn’t even get to the part where they speak about volunteering for events and offering talents. But what was my question? What does stewardship look like in your life? Over the past few months I have had an overarching theme of my sermons and that theme is ownership. In taking ownership of our faith, as you have heard, we now have a greater sense of responsibility and accountability.
Stewardship by definition is “a job of supervising or taking care of something, such as an organization or property.We hear in Genesis, God creates everything and puts Adam in the Garden to work it and to take care of it. Man, was created to work and that work is the stewardship of all the creation that God has given him.We must rewire the way we think about stewardship because it isn’t just giving up what is ours. God owns everything, we are simply managers or administrators acting on his behalf.Stewardship is the commitment of one’s self and possessions to God’s service, recognizing that we do not have the right of control.
When we take ownership of our Faith and are committed to the Church we have a responsibility and are accountable to how it is treated and what we do with it. This reminds me of the Parable of the talents where the master gave his servants talents according to their ability. Two of the three servants went and actively used the talents given to them by God and the amount of talents grew. There was one who did nothing with their talent and therefore nothing accrued from it. The master returns and holds the servants accountable. In this very same way we will be called to give an account of how we have administered everything we have been given by God, including our time, money, abilities, information, wisdom, relationships, and so on. We must make a choice, to serve the Lord or to not serve. Will we have done all that we can? Will our heart be fulfilled in the doing the Lord’s work?
In Colossians 3:23-24 Paul writes, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”As Christians in the 21st century, we need to embrace stewardship as it connects everything we do with what God is doing in the world. We need to be faithful stewards of all God has given us according to our ability in turn to glorify Him.
With Love in the Lord,
+Fr. Sampson N. Kasapakis
