BEING A GOOD STEWARD

A SERMON FOR THE 8TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

“There was a certain rich man, which had a steward.”  This is how today’s Gospel begins, and right away there’s a question that needs to be answered.  We all know what a rich man is, but how would we define a “steward?”  Basically a steward can be defined as “someone who is entrusted with the careful and responsible management of something.”  So now let’s think for a moment how we are stewards, and about “who” has entrusted “what” to our care.  The essential response to this question is that everything we have belongs first to God who has entrusted us with the care and management of these various and diverse things.  What things exactly?  Everything!  The world around us and everything in it. 

Depending on who we are, this would include many other people too.  For example, a king is entrusted with the welfare of his subjects.  The Catholic faithful are entrusted to the care of their priests, bishops and pope, whose solemn duty it is to provide them with the truths of their faith, valid sacraments, and solid moral values.  If we’re parents, then God has entrusted to us the welfare and moral education of our children. 

We’ve been entrusted with other things too.  The time we have, for example is not really ours.  It is on loan to us from God, and we had better make sure we don’t waste it or spend it on things that take us away from God instead of drawing us closer to him.  Our bodies too are not our own.  We may have been given a body that works perfectly, or perhaps less so, but in either case it is up to us to take care of it, making healthy choices in our lifestyle.  We may have been blessed with intelligence or with good looks, but none of this is for our own benefit exclusively.  We should use any physical or mental advantages we may have for the glory of God, not to gratify our own ambitions and desires.  Thus we should use our mind to learn more about God so we may know him, use our emotions to love him, use our energy to serve him.  And let’s make sure above all that we look after the welfare of our soul, by avoiding the occasion of sin and other sources of temptation, cultivating our virtues, constantly battling against our unbridled passions, our vices, and our general inclination to do whatever we want and not what God wants.

We are stewards of so very much and we must not be careless or negligent in taking care of what we have been entrusted.  Like the steward in today’s Gospel we too shall be judged on how well we actually do manage what the good Lord has loaned us.

The word “stewardship” is very much in vogue today amongst those who imagine themselves to be the enlightened elite of our society.  They constantly lecture us about how evil it is to drive a gas-powered car to work so we can provide a living for our family.  Meanwhile, they consume tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel as they fly all over the world for no other purpose than to chastise us more effectively.   This kind of hypocrisy is typical of how the liberals twist an idea and turn into something perverse, often in complete contrast to the good management of the things God has entrusted to us.  When God entrusts the life of a child to his mother only to have the mother murder this child even before it’s born, this is just one example of the overturning of true stewardship.  It’s a complete betrayal of the trust God has placed in them.  They place the welfare of their own bodies—“my body, my choice”—over the care of the innocent children who are totally dependent upon them to bring them into the world.  A tiny innocent baby is entrusted to them by God.  They kill it.

We can already see a pattern emerging, I think, that shows that bad stewardship stems from one original source, and that is the bad management of our free will.  We have choices.  All through life, we experience the need to make one choice after another.  When we make a bad choice we generally experience bad consequences.  These in turn provoke us to further bad choices, thus continuing the mismanagement of what God has entrusted us with.  When a woman claims that it’s her body and her choice, it’s a choice that is generally made before she finds herself with a child she doesn’t want or doesn’t feel equipped to raise.  God gave us the sacrament of marriage for a reason!  Or if pollution threatens the planet today, is it not because of bad choices that were made in the past to bypass some simple precautions that might have caused them to lose a few dollars in profit?

All these artificial choices we think we must make in the present stem ultimately from the one original sin.  God gave Adam a garden to tend, and a companion, Eve, to help him.  Unfortunately Adam failed in his stewardship of both, allowing Eve to wander off and be tempted by the serpent to eat the fruit of the one tree God had forbidden them.  All our temptations to be poor stewards today stem from this original failure by the first steward Adam.  Nevertheless, we can’t use this as our excuse for the negligence we show today.  We are all entrusted with the same free will that Adam had, and only we have control over it to either be good stewards or bad stewards. 

The easiest way to prevent our own misuse of that free will is to never yield to that first temptation to do wrong.  The consequences of that first mistake are simply more and bigger mistakes as we take the path that leads to destruction.  Avoid each temptation as though it were your first and only temptation, because you never know where it will lead you.  It’s why we first ask God to “lead us not into temptation,” and only afterwards that he “deliver us from evil.”  One thing leads to another, and we mustn’t let ourselves be drawn away from the narrow, difficult and uphill path, no matter how alluring the world and its attractions may be.  Every single one of those alternative paths will take us down a different road—away from our destination, away from salvation.  Be the good steward you’re meant to be and just keep going, taking care of what God has given us and mortifying the deeds of the body, as St. Paul says, so that we shall not die, but live.