It’s that time of year again. It’s Gift Sunday, or Stewardship Sunday. So I want to challenge you to think about what it means to be good stewards of something. I know that most people hear the word ‘stewardship’ and feel financially imposed upon – I once had someone tell me that I had no right to discuss financial matters in the church because Jesus NEVER would have allowed it. (For the record, Jesus talks about money almost 30 times; more than anything else except the Kingdom of God, more often than of Heaven and Hell combined. 11 of 39 parables, and one in 7 verses in Luke’s Gospel speak of money).
So – let’s get right into it. Money. How about money planning – budgeting - how do you make a budget?
Well, you start with your income. Whatever you earn, through job, rental properties, pensions, allowances, gifts, etc. It’s pretty basic, and it’s what you’ve got to start with – and you usually have a decent idea of what the number is going to be.
So let’s turn to expenses. This is the more variable part of the process. So, you need to budget for things like housing, mortgage or rent. Then there’s the car (payments, gas, repairs and maintenance, AutoPac… they’re expensive beasts!) You have to budget for food, utilities, insurance, taxes. Then there’s smaller things like clothing, medication, loan payments, self care (toiletries, etc.), eating out, entertainment, gifts, vacations, and other fun stuff.
So, if your budgeting is anything like mine, the income is a finite number. I’m not independently wealthy. And so the expenses need to be an infinite number as well – in an ideal world the income is not less than the expenses – that’s where people go into debt, which is (in my basic financial knowledge) not a good thing.
So how do you budget? You set your priorities. What you spend your money on identifies what is the most important to you. I try to spend my money on the big stuff first – and I identify big stuff as housing, food, car, loan payments, etc. These things need to be paid first, partly because they’re the biggest amounts, and partly because they’re essential (not optional) – and if I forget this, the bank will happily remind me. Then I can use whatever’s left to identify my smaller priorities like books and dog toys.
I think most people budget something like this – we all recognise that we could buy all the gaming systems and DVDs and books that we wanted to with our money, but without a home to put them in, it would be pointless. We could choose to spend all our money eating out every day, getting fancy haircuts and wearing designer clothes, but if we ignore purchasing our medications, we may not be around long enough to enjoy it.
Our budgets showcase our priorities. They say a LOT about us, about what means the most to us in dollars and cents. And, just as loudly, they identify what does not hold a significant role in our lives by showing what we do not spend our money on.
So let’s think about a different type of budgeting for a moment… let’s think about how we spend our time.
Again, what we have to start with is rather firmly set. Each day we have 24 hours, each week is 7 days, etc. We cannot add to this no matter what we do, so we have to work within these finite parameters.
So how do we spend our time? Well, the average work day is about 8 hours, or one third. Again, not being independently wealthy, most of us need to work in order to support our lifestyles. Add to that our sleeping… we need to sleep, we don’t function well without it, our health will fail. And this is about another 7-8 hours, or another third of our day.
So what else do we do with our time? We cook and eat, and how long we spend preparing and eating food indicates how important this area of our lives is to us – fast food is not a great indicator of health. We spend our time getting some exercise – at least in an ideal world we do – recently a Toronto-based doctor challenged folks to find the ‘magic health pill’ by limiting their sitting and sleeping to only 23.5 hours per day. We spend time with family and friends, we spend time running errands and doing chores. We spend time doing our hobbies, and we spend time being entertained – the average North American spends 6 hours a day in front of computer or TV. That’s one quarter of a day being entertained.
Well – with all of that going on in our lives every day, it’s no wonder we feel we don’t have much time left!
So. When do you pray?
How much time do you budget for time with God?
Some of you today will of course be able to identify your daily prayer time; but others will have missed it, barely even noticed that it wasn’t in that list of daily things to do. And some folks we encounter will make excuses for why they don’t pray daily – the most common one I’ve heard is that they simply don’t have the time.
I don’t believe that though – the reality is not that there IS no time, but that folks are not TAKING the time for prayer. And when that happens, it means that they do not put prayer, intentional God-time, as a priority in their lives. Because we know that our priorities are shown through how we budget – be it money or time or skills, or anything.
So imagine if we took time for God. Imagine going one step further, to intentionally MAKE time for God in every aspect of our busy lives. Imagine if we gave back our gifts of skills, talents, time, as well as financial support for the mission and ministry of the church. If we MADE time to focus how we give our talents to the church; how we represented our love for God through our actions in the community; how we demonstrated what was most important in our lives not just by words but by our actions, by our very beings. Imagine if the whole world could see that God is a top priority for us, simply by seeing how we gave back to God
This type of giving, of all areas of our lives, would take a shift in thinking for some people – it would cause them to re-examine not just their pocketbook, but their priorities. It could mean a shift is necessary – maybe cutting back on something else in order to properly add in God. And who better to teach us about finding that balance than Jesus – our great teacher demonstrated that time spent in prayer is time well spent. In the midst of healings and teachings that were being demanded of him in today’s Gospel, Jesus got up early and went to pray. And not just a quick prayer, either – it was still dark when he got up, and he went out to a deserted place. His disciples had to hunt for him, and when they finally did they revealed that ‘everyone’ had been looking for him. It was a good amount of time that Jesus spent in prayer, and his followers learned from his example. Pray, then act. There was a lot of work to be done, but a lot of prayer to be done as well. And Jesus made the time for it. His time-budget identified prayer as a top priority, so much so that he gave up other things in order to accommodate it.
Our other readings today also show clear dedication to putting God first.
Imagine what Isaiah’s budget must have been like – here’s a man who is SO excited about God that he can’t fathom other people’s complacence. “Have you not heard? Have you not known?” he exclaims – it’s all about God! Here is a man who is giving of his whole being – mind, body and spirit, to celebrate the wondrous gifts that God has given. He’s making his time and his resources available to spread God’s message of love because it is a priority for him.
Imagine how Paul’s budget would have looked like when he shares his energy in the letter to the Corinthians – he has identified that he gives his life, using his funds, his education, his talents all together so that he might proclaim the Good News to anyone who will listen, “becoming all things to all people … for the sake of the gospel, to share in its blessings.”
So… what does your budget look like? How much have you prioritised God in how you spend your time and energy and resources? And how do you want your budget to look like? Does that fit what the reality is? If not, then imagine how it could be, and what you can do to re-arrange your priorities to make it that way. Make a budget – a financial budget, a time budget, a spiritual gift budget. Pray on it, then act on it. Celebrate God’s Glory in your life and in the world around you by identifying God as a main priority in your life. Because that is what stewardship is all about – caring so much about a community that you can’t imagine not being actively involved in its life.
And that is what we celebrate here in the church this Stewardship Sunday. We celebrate that we have carefully, prayerfully, budgeted for God as a priority. Or, as the psalmist said, “Praise the LORD! How good it is to sing praises to our God; for he is gracious, and a song of praise is fitting.”
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