“Blessedness Compels Us to Stewardship”

Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time – A

          Our gospel reading encourages a reflection on what a “Beatitude” really is. Considering our faith and our baptismal call to be good stewards, the beatitudes help us to see God’s goodness in our lives and to respond to His love in a grateful way, through our Time, Talent, and Treasure; and the first reading reminds us to be humble in our stewardship.

          We are blessed by our loving God, gratuitously, that means we did nothing to earn it.  This blessedness can help us define who we are as a Christian Community and our obligations to respond to this generous love of God in our lives.

          “A beatitude is described as an expression of praise or thanks, or congratulations:  someone is praised because of wealth or accomplishment or because of wisdom or religious virtue.”  So, I thought I would share some of these beatitudes from our parishioners that I have received.

(Share the two notes)

The gospel does call us to some action, as we’ve seen in past weeks: repentance, following Jesus, proclaiming the gospel, healing the unfortunate.  First, however, the gospel calls us to an encounter with Jesus.  It is in this context of the presence of the holy, when Jesus takes them up the mountain, that Jesus begins to teach his disciples about their own holiness – blessedness.

God takes care of those who encounter the divine and remain faithful to what God has made them:  blessed!  Any action we might do through our stewardship is the accumulated effect of a divine encounter and is motivated by being blessed, and then compels us to practicing our stewardship.

Stewardship entails using our hidden, as well as our obvious talents.  God works through us not only in our assets, but also in our weaknesses.

Let me share with you a story about the importance of practicing stewardship from the youngest member to the oldest of our community.

A man was watching his eighty-year-old neighbor planting a small peach tree.  He inquired of him as follows: “You don’t expect to eat peaches from that tree, do you?” The old man rested on his spade and said: “No, at my age I know I won’t. But all my life I’ve enjoyed peaches-never from a tree I planted myself. I’m just trying to pay back the other fellows who planted the trees for me.”

That is what stewardship is all about – it’s about giving of ourselves, our Time our Talent, and our Treasure because of those who went before us and gave of theirs.  Stewardship is about recognizing our blessedness from God and exercising our freedom to give back to God through our Time, Talent, and Treasure.