As I set out to write this sermon for our stewardship drive kick-off, I was asking myself how I would define stewardship. What came to mind was this: stewardship is a caring and responsible way of being in relationship with people and the rest of God’s creation for the sake of the present and hope for the future. All of us are stewards and act as stewards on countless occasions every day. We live and breathe stewardship, we’re born for it! It is our shared vocation.

When I think of where I learned some of my most important lessons in stewardship, I have to say that I learned them from my mother. She was a child during WWII, a madness that Germans brought on themselves and millions of others. As a consequence of the war, my mother grew up knowing about hunger, poverty and interdependence and it shaped how she responded to need with everything that was at her disposal for the rest of her life. Let me tell her a bit about her life. One of her lasting childhood memories was being lined up by her father along with her nine siblings according to age in order to receive a certain portion of the one loaf of bread they had for that day and perhaps the next. Her father occasionally left for days to go into villages where he had taught elementary school to see if the farmers could spare a little food. Dandelions and potato peels were sometimes all they had for a soup.

Her brothers followed the coal trucks in the hope that a few pieces would fall off the back of the truck so that they could be used to heat the house. Even into her sixties, my mother pondered whether it had been OK to sneak into orchards in those days to pick up some the apples that had landed on the ground. Food was not the only shortage they encountered during the war. They eventually lost their home in a bomb attack and the family was divided up and sent to live with people they didn’t know in remote villages for a time before a relative took them in. Thankfully, relatives from Nebraska also sent clothes from time to time and my mother often mentioned the black pair of shoes that arrived in the mail from them that she wore every day as long as they fit while some of her siblings wore sandals with rubber tire pieces glued on as soles.

I am sure that my mother learned many things from her childhood experience. What I witnessed in her as her child was a tremendous comprehensive generosity and sense of hospitality. We could bring home oodles of friends to stay overnight and crowd our tiny apartment. Sometimes that meant bringing home people we had met on various travel adventures. I remember giving an African American woman I scarcely knew my mom’s number when I found out that she was visiting Germany. She ended up staying with my mom for a week who in turn told me many times how interesting it had been to meet a person of a different race. When she was living alone, my mom once invited a whole Dutch family she had met in the grocery store to stay over for a few days when they had trouble finding an affordable place to stay in town. You see, strangers had given her a home and she was committed to doing the same regardless of the circumstances.

My mother was always buying or collecting things she thought someone she knew or someone they knew could use. When my niece came to visit, there was a new set of pots and pans my mom had gotten on sale. I would come home from the States to a collection of traditional German pottery she had found at a flea market so that I could have a piece of home abroad and on and on it goes. She was a good seamstress and purchased many a quality bargain knowing she could change it to the appropriate size. The downside of all this good stewardship was that our attic was jam packed with things someone might some day be able to use.

She also knew how to treat herself and saved money from her small pension so that she could go on trips and have a good time even if it took a long time to make that possible. She didn’t know the first thing about finances or how to maximize her income but when a disaster struck somewhere, she got on the bus and went downtown to her bank to send money to a worthy organization that could help. She spent many hours visiting with people who were ill or grieving. My mom was a also volunteer at the children’s hospital where she spent time with kids whose parents weren’t able to be there during the day. She just wanted them to know someone cared.

Theologian Timothy Bagwell once commented that Jesus did not try to persuade people by arguing minute points of the law but by helping them to picture the kingdom of God and then to see themselves in that picture.¹ I think my mom saw herself in that picture of a caring and responsible way of being in relationship with people and the rest of God’s creation for the sake of the present and hope for the future. Life in God’s kingdom is marked by such living. It was easy for her to imagine because she knew what it was to be in need and to depend on other people’s care and she knew the value that presence and generosity had in restoring hope to people who might otherwise despair. She was a steward of hope.

Sometimes faith in such hope is demanded from us when we feel least in a position to afford it. This is the case of the widow to whom God sends Elijah. There is a drought in the land that is to mirror the drought of people’s faithfulness to and trust in God. The widow of Zarepath and her son have seen their few resources dwindle down to a little bit of meal in a jar and a few drops of oil. When Elijah meets her, she is busy collecting sticks so that she can make a fire to prepare a last meal for themselves, certain that death is the fate that will await them next. She feels totally isolated, powerless, and hopeless.

Elijah, the prophet, has nothing better to do than to ask her to fix something for him before serving her son and herself. He is dependent for his own survival on the widow’s generosity. He promises that if she risks sharing what she has, the jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil not run dry until rain returns to the parched earth. Somehow, into the midst of her despair, Elijah interjects a vision of a future with hope that will depend on her willingness to take a risk in the present. This is not a hoax. It is the word of the Lord. She abides by Elijah’s request and they all get to eat for many days until the rains return and they can once again plant and harvest. She leaned on the hope for a better future and was therefore able to make a choice in the present that was risky but yielded plentiful results. She was called out of her despair, isolation, and powerlessness to take faithful action and herself became a steward of hope. God provided.

We are called to be stewards of hope, people who are committed to a caring and responsible way of being in relationship with people and the rest of God’s creation for the sake of the present and hope for the future. It is a way of living in gratitude for all that we have received, especially in times of need. It is a way of recognizing that we are all in his together whether we live in Boxborough, Massachusetts or Biloxi, Mississippi or in the earth-shaken mountains of Kashmir. It is a way of looking at the glass not as half empty but as waiting to yield an increase. It is a way of daring to envision what all can be accomplished with what we have to give and how manifold the increase may be from investment. It is to picture, to envision what God can accomplish right here on earth and to make ourselves part of that picture. 

The truth of the matter is that by giving ourselves to such a broader vision we are forever enriched, wealthy beyond measure. Let me close by telling you one more story about a woman who took tremendous pride and pleasure in the riches that came to her: Oseola McCarty is a Mississippi washerwoman who had to drop out of school in the sixth grade, but celebrated her long life of faith, work and stewardship by giving $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi for scholarships? She never got such an education, but she wanted others to have it. When word got out of what she had done, she said that people often asked her, Miss McCarty, why didn't you spend the money on yourself? Her answer, with a smile: Thanks to the good Lord, I am spending it on myself.²“

What amazes me most about this story is not even the impressive amount of money she saved up from her hard work. It is that Oseola regards the fact that someone else gets to fulfill a dream she couldn’t, by virtue of her gift, as the greatest gift she could give to herself. Ms. Oseola McCarty knows how to be good to herself! Her secret is that she is a woman who is committed to a caring and responsible way of being in relationship with people and the rest of God’s creation for the sake of the present and hope for the future. She is a steward of hope.

I think her ability to teach the world deserves a gazillion honorary doctorates! May our lives be touched and shaken and inspired by such witness. Amen.