A talk by Reverend Darius Traves, Assistant Minister, Osbaldwick and Murton
During the month of September, we’re going to be exploring the theme of Stewardship. When I did a general search on the Internet this came up: The careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care. We can easily fall into the trap of thinking that Stewardship is just about caring and looking after something. However this quote helps us to realise that Stewardship in its fullest sense is more than just caring and looking after something, it’s about helping that thing that we have been in trusted with to be the best and fullest it can be, and during this month we will be exploring the different types of Stewardship and how we can be better Stewards. Next week we are going to explore Stewardship in terms of our Buildings and Money, the week after we going to explore Prayer, then we are going to explore Vocation or calling and then we’ll be exploring Creation. We will be exploring all these things with the help of some of the clergy in our Deanery.
Today we are going to explore the theme of Stewardship in terms of our time and talents. We all have talents or gifting don’t we? For some of us that is listening to people and making feel welcome. For some it’s putting on events so that people can enjoy themselves. Doing some beautiful flower arrangement is another. All these talents are in our church community and more talents will be among us. All these amazing talents cost our time and our energy. These are all gifts, gifts from our Lord and our God. But are we using our time and talents to the best of our abilities to help bring the love of God to this place or do we think that they wouldn’t be useful here?
Our first reading this morning was from saint Paul’s Letter to the church in Corinth, which was a Roman city. We think this letter was written in the year 53 to 54 C E give or take and we know that Paul knows this community well because of what we read in The Acts of the Apostles chapter 18. After being there for a while Paul left Corinth to start building another community somewhere else. However after a while Paul heard that the church in Corinth wasn’t doing well so he wrote them a letter known as 1 Corinthians, because he wrote it to the people. The letter can be split up into 5 different parts and the reading that we had this morning was part of the area when Paul talked about how they should be as church because at that time the people weren’t being inclusive of everybody’s time and talents. In chapter 12 which we heard earlier, Paul was trying to get them to understand that everybody’s gifts and talents are needed to build the church community.
Paul did this by talking about the church community as a body. In chapter 12 verse 12 Paul says, For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body. They are many different parts of the body, there are the eyes, ears, the mouth and nose but to name a few ( I think that is part of a song) moving on. All these things help us to see, to hear and so on. In some way they all have their own talent which we need. Later on in the chapter Paul says this; The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”’ Or to put it another way ‘ The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of your talents,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of your talents.”’. Each part of the body brings its own gifts and talents to the rest of the body so that the body can work at it best. This is the same with a church community. We all bring different gifts and talents to this community, some more obvious than others but we need all of them, even the ones that we don’t know about yet because it all helps us be the best community.
So, what does this tell us about Stewardship? Like I mentioned earlier Stewardship is looking after something but making sure it reaches its full potential. The question is then, are we stewarding our gifts and talents that God has given us to the best of their abilities? Our second reading was from the Gospel of Matthew chapter 25. The Parable of the Talents. I’m not going to spend too much time looking deeply into this passage because there is a lot to unpack, but there are some things that I think might be useful to us to understand. In the Parable, when Jesus says ‘master ‘ he is referring to God. This understand should help us realise that it’s God who give us our gift and talents. Psalm 139 says ‘O LORD, you have searched me and known me.’ God knows everything about us and because of that God has given us gifts that is right for us. God isn’t going to give us something that is too much for us to handle but God also gives us those gifts to help those people around us. Another thing that I think we can take from this passage is that God loves a tryer. If we try our best with our Stewardship of our gifts and talents God will be proud of us. No matter how much we grow, as long as we try.
So, as we go from this place into our week. Why don’t we spent time with God asking about about our gifts and talents that God has given us and ask how we can use those gifts and talents in this place as part of the body the Church.
Amen.
