Diocesan
Life Columns
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Bishop Paul's writes a monthly column for the Diocesan Newspaper, Diocesan
Life, edited by Communication
Minister, Bill Lewellis.
For more features from the life of our diocese, check Diocesanlife....ONLINE; and Bethlehem
News.
Christ Calls Us to Radical Living
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
[Diocesan Life, November 1996]
I want to clear the air before opening three windows on stewardship.
It is legitimate, I believe, to think and talk unblushingly about
the church's financial challenges and the theology of personal
stewardship at the same time. When people say, "This isn't really
about money," do we believe that? Yes, stewardship is more than
the church's need for money, but it is not less. I also think it's
true that our spiritual biographies can be written by looking in
our checkbooks.
Through the first open window, we look at Jesus preaching his
first sermon. He said to people of all kinds, "Repent and believe
the gospel." In other words: Stop living the way you are living,
and redirect your life according to new principles of God's realm.
That's from Mark's gospel where the demands Jesus makes about discipleship
and the management of power are not padded.
Jesus brings in a new world where sins are forgiven, the sick,
lame, and blind are healed, and where the descendant of David,
the Messiah, appears, astoundingly, as a servant, and walks the
way of the cross. Why? So people like you and me might find our
true citizenship in God's realm, our place at God's table, and
find our vocation as Jesus' disciples. The healing of the sick
is especially important in Mark. It is Jesus' way of interrupting
his culture's understanding of the sick or handicapped as being
under God's curse. Jesus comes to say we do not have to wonder
whether life is a gift or a burden, whether God loves us or is
looking for a chance to punish us.
What, then, are we to repent of? Repentance means turning around,
turning away from something and turning toward something. In terms
of stewardship, we are called to turn away from idols -- things
we think will give us security, but cannot carry us in the long
run -- and from our obsession with poverty. What are your idols?
Mine include financial security, my children, my notion of myself
as productive. Turning away from idols, we are called to discipleship.
What about our sense of poverty as an idol? We tend to measure
ourselves in this culture by what we don't have. At whatever level
we find ourselves, we tend to think about what people at higher
financial levels may have. In our culture "making it" isn't so
much about living a fulfilling life as it is about having. That
makes us think of ourselves as worth less or simply worthless in
terms of what we have. J Paul Getty helped nothing when he said, "If
you can count your money, you are not really rich."
I wonder, should any consideration of our fascination with our "poverty" involve
a challenge to our notion that we can "have it all," that we should
have it all, that we are entitled to having it all? I'm just asking.
Instead of "having," Jesus calls us to a way of "living," a conscious
reshaping of our lives to make us God's agents in the world. I
do not think Jesus' call to discipleship encourages poverty or
a running away from power. In a way, it almost suggests a kind
of duty to be rich, to have the power that money means, power to
do good in the world. Now this is where Christianity gets radical.
The normal reaction to getting a raise is to consider what one
can now buy, what one can now enjoy having. The discipled reaction
to getting a raise is to consider how much more good one can do.
A Christian's discipleship means putting all aspects of life in
the service of Christ, managing assets in a way that advances the
realm of God in the world. That means that on a day-to-day basis,
and here it comes, watch for it: Christians are those people who
choose to have a lower standard of living than their peers, because
they are on a mission. Most of us know what it means to make major
changes in lifestyle so that our children can be educated. It is
just that sort of sacrifice that Jesus calls everyone, young or
old, to make if they are to use their power in the world to follow
him.
Is it possible - and I'm just asking - that if being a Christian
has not really affected your standard of living, you may well be
a believer, but perhaps you are not yet a disciple of Jesus? Each
of us to called to wrestle with the question of how we are to manage
our resources for the mission we are on. Discipleship is the way
of willing obedience, the way of repentance relieved to have discovered
the right way.
Through the second window, we look at worship. St. Paul says,
in Romans 12: "I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters,
by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice,
holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do
not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing
of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God
-- what is good and acceptable and perfect." Be a living sacrifice,
be transformed.
Sacrifice is not a positive word for us. We think of it in terms
of deprivation. It is conventional to think of sacrifice as killing
something. Paul, however, looked for "a living sacrifice." He knew
that the most common sacrifice in Judaism was not for sins; that
was relatively rare. A much more common sacrifice in Judaism was
one of grain and drink offered as "a sacrifice of thanksgiving." Paul
was looking for lives lived gloriously, lives lived as acts of
worship, as offerings of praise and thanksgiving.
Each of us is the priest who offers that sacrifice. It's not a
ritual. It's an ethical act, a way of living.
The key to sacrifice, the late Alexander Schmeman reminded us
Westerners, is not value given but surrender. Christ's altar was
the world. If I surrender my life as a sacrifice of praise and
thanksgiving on the altar of the world, that life is transformed.
The everyday implications of this transformation are stunning.
Home, marriage, job, school, church -- always and everywhere --
can be where I worship God by giving myself.
We remember the Good Samaritan not for the fact that he cared about
the plight of the man who fell among thieves, but because he acted.
Through our window of worship and sacrifice, time and money management
questions take on a different light: "How will I organize my resources
so my life looks to me like a dance -- a graceful, connected series
of acts of love?" Sacrifice of self in ethical living is transformative
only when it is driven by love.
Through the third stewardship window, we focus on humility. Whatever
we've got, we can't keep it. Safely through mid-life crisis, or
at least a major installment of it, I no longer take pleasure in
shopping; it does nothing for me because I realize that he who
dies with the most toys is just as dead as he who dies without
any toys at all. It's amazing how little we actually need.
There's also a positive side to humility that speaks to stewardship
of creation, stewardship of relationships. Thus conceived, humility
is our ability to learn from everyone and everything. How many
people do we cut off speaking because we think we know what they
will say? Stewardship means letting creation and our relationships
teach us, even when we don't expect or want it.
Is it possible that we ought to mean it when we pray about God
giving "more than we can ask or imagine?" Perhaps we imagine a
happy life in too limited terms. Might we be accused, as Herman
Hesse accuses the conventional mind, of choosing preservation over
intensity, a quiet mind over contending with God, convenience over
liberty, and a pleasant temperature over an inner consuming fire?
Might we be accused of wanting too little because we mistake having
for living?
The sober humility we need to face our inevitable death frees
us for an intensity of a life lived with God. The steward's life
of discipleship, worship, and humility invites us to receive, in
abundance, God's unsearchable riches.
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Index)
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