THE LORD BISHOP’S CHARGE – PART ONE

THEME:   “FAITH RESPONDING TO CRISIS AS A CALL
                      TO STEWARDSHIP”

TEXT:       1 Cor. 4:1 & 2

                    “This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and
                     stewards of the Mysteries of God.

                     Moreover it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.”

CONTEXT: Psalm 8: 1 & 3-6                                 

                     “O Lord my God, how majestic is Thy Name in all the earth . . . .
                     When I look at Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon
                     and the stars which Thou hast established;
                     What is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that 
                     Thou dost care for him?
                   
                     Yet Thou hast made him little less than God,
                     and dost crown him with glory and honour,
                   
                     Thou hast given him dominion over the works of Thy hands;
                     Thou hast put all things under his feet.”                   
                                                                                           R.S.V.
WELCOME

Your Excellencies The Governor-General The Most Honourable Dr. Patrick Allen and The Most Honourable Patricia Allen, Mr. Dennis Meadows, representing the Prime Minister, The Honourable Chief Justice Mrs. Zaila McCalla and Mr. McCalla, Chancellor of the Diocese, Honourable Mr. Justice Lensley Wolfe, Honourable Custodes, Chief of Defence Staff, Major General Stewart Saunders, Brethen of the Ecumenical Fraternity, my brother Bishops, my Brothers and Sisters of the Clergy, Deaconesses, Church Army Officers, Brothers and Sisters of the Laity, Brothers and Sisters in Christ, I bid you welcome to the Opening Service of the 139th Annual Synod of the Church in Jamaica and The Cayman Islands in the Province of the West Indies.

THE CHARGE

Stewardship, again!!  I can just imagine the reaction of some of my hearers.  Is this going to be a sermon about giving more money to the Church? – again!!

Well, let me say straight up, I have no apology to make for an  honest acknowledgement that The Church always needs more money for  its work.  May God Who is infinitely rich in mercy, forgive us for always passing these penny pinching, minimizing budgets that cannot finance the great work He is calling us to do; and even when we are so presumptuous as to cut back  the scope of works prescribed by His blueprint, we go on to grumble like the Hebrews in the wilderness that the demands are too much.  As we try to understand the widespread sense of depression, fear and emotional disturbance in our time, we would do well to recall the words of Psalm 95:11 where God says of these people “Therefore, I have sworn in My wrath that they shall never enter into My rest.”

However, before we consider “The money problem” whether it is our personal finances, the national budget or our Church’s budget, let us seek to rediscover the deeper, broader meaning of the word  “STEWARDSHIP”.
By definition, A STEWARD IS A SERVANT WHO ADMINISTERS THE AFFAIRS OF AN OWNER.

Every servant is entrusted with valuables belonging to his or her employer.  Even those householders who lock up everything still look for servant, who can be trusted to be honest and to handle certain things with care.  But let us not dwell on the word “servant” since many servants are not given any great authority.  So, let us say that “A Steward is an official who gets paid to oversee responsibly the resources belonging to another.”  This definition invests the steward with authority commensurate with great responsibility.  He or she has almost unlimited freedom in deciding how to invest, deploy, use or allocate these resources.  The so-called “unjust” or “dishonest” steward of St. Luke Chapter 16 certainly displayed a great sense of freedom and initiative in unilaterally reducing the debts of all his Master’s debtors. Mark you, I said “almost unlimited freedom.”  There is always THE ULTIMATE  LIMITATION OF ACCOUNTABILITY

                                    TO THE OWNER OR MASTER
and the greater the authority the more serious the responsibility and the more stringent the system of accountability.  Or in the well known words of Scripture “To whom much is given of him (or her) will much be required; and of him to whom men commit much they will demand the more”  Luke 12:48.
Psalm 8 transposes the stories of creation in Genesis 1 and 2 into prayer and worship, but the Psalmist reiterates the teaching of Genesis that God has given to us humans, “dominion over the work of His hands and has put all things under our feet.”  BOTH THE PSALMIST AND THE BOOK OF GENESIS GIVE THE STRONGEST POSSIBLE AFFIRMATION OF HUMAN DOMINION BUT ALWAYS WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF CREATION BY GOD.

Thus, we are cast into the role of stewards  with extraordinary authority accountable ultimately to God as the Owner and Master of the universe.  By establishing this link between stewardship and creation we learn that stewardship is not primarily about tithing, freewill offerings, collections or Church financing.  It is not even about the Church as such.  It is about life in general.  As a principle built into creation, it determines our relationship to God, to each other, to all other creatures as well as the environment in which God has appointed us to represent and work with Him.  It is how life is, not only part of our personal DNA and         identity but built into the fabric of the universe.

Psalm 8 asks the pertinent question:

            “WHAT IS MAN?” Verse 4
and answers the question by saying that

           MAN IS A STEWARD                                
It says that God has “put ALL THINGS under His feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatsoever passes along the paths of the sea” Vv 6-8.  We are also creatures created for a purpose, created in the image of God, charged with responsibility for the entire eco-system .
OUR DELEGATED DOMINION is of fundamental importance.  In the first place, it means that NOTHING IN ALL CREATION MUST EVER BE ELEVATED TO THE STATUS OF A GOD OVER US.  We must “master” nature and not let nature be our master.  Thus, from the very beginning all the idols we have known - money, power, beauty, pleasure are put into their place.  The story of creation in Genesis Chapter One, came out of the experience of the Babylonian exile.  In Babylon the people were exposed to a religious culture in which people worshipped the forces of nature including the sun, the moon and the stars among other things.  Genesis One takes time to portray all these things, not as gods but as creatures.  The writer or writers seem to deliberately name them one by one as they are created.  As for the sun and moon they are described as lamps created on the fourth day while light itself was created on the first day, Genesis 1:3.  Then finally, man was made in the image of God to reflect God’s own dominion over it all.  In other words, man was not made for them, but they for man.  To be in the image of God is to share something of God sovereignty over the natural world.  To claim in faith this identity, as one who bears in some mysterious way the image of The  Divine, is to bow to no other God but the One Whose image and superscription is sculpted on our souls.  It is to worship the Lord  our God and no other and to refuse to let any created thing have power over us.

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