“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” - James 1:17
It's November. In our church, as in many churches, that is the time for stewardship emphasis. Part of the reason is practical; churches that run on a calendar fiscal year are working on their budgets for next year. But stewardship really isn't about raising money. Stewardship is about our relationship with God and our recognition that all we have we hold as a trust from God and we are to use it as God's trustees.
November is a good month to ponder this stewardship responsibility that we have; it is “bookended” by two special dates. November 1 is All Saints Day and Thanksgiving comes at the end of the month.
On All Saints Day, we celebrate not just the famous saints whose names we know, but all the faithful who have been trustworthy in the stewardship that God gave them to practice. They recognized their responsibility to the One who provided their time, their abilities, and their resources. I always think of my parents with their lifetime service and of a retired man in the Boulder church who, with his wife, started a tape ministry and took a recording of the Sunday service and visited all the shut-ins in the church every Monday. A quiet but valuable use of the retirement years God had given him. You have special persons in your life whom you remember. But we also honor those nameless but faithful stewards of God through the ages.
At Thanksgiving, we express publicly and privately our gratitude to God for the many blessings we have received. This abundance leads us to respond to our gratitude with generosity. Generosity is always the outcome of true gratitude. We trace Thanksgiving to the first celebration by the Pilgrims and their Indian supporters in 1621. I read recently that the Pilgrims in that first grim year built more grave markers than houses. And yet, when they had brought in their first meager harvest, they set aside a time for thanksgiving, for gratitude to God for blessings and shared it with the Indians who had helped them survive.
Thanksgiving became a national holiday during one of the darkest times in our history when Abraham Lincoln declared a national day of thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. Even in the midst of brother fighting brother in a bloody civil war, we could recognize with gratitude our debts to God.
Let us remember, then, in this month all of the saints who have gone before us, exercising their stewardship and giving of what they had as an expression of gratitude to God, and our ancestors who praised God for his great gifts even in a time of suffering and deprivation. And let this same spirit fill us as we reflect on our own stewardship in this month.
