[NOTE: This article is a lightly edited version of the sermon that I delivered at St. Catherine’s Episcopal Church on October 26th, 2025.]

As someone with a lifelong interest in American political history, I can think of no better way to introduce myself than by borrowing independent candidate James Stockdale’s unforgettable opening statement from the 1992 vice presidential debate: “Who am I? Why am I here?” With not even an entire year attending St. Catherine’s under my belt and my official reception into the Episcopal Church still in the future, I am on paper probably one of the least qualified people in this room to speak about stewardship in the context of this specific faith community. I hope, then, that by answering those two questions and sharing what made me who I am and how I got here, I’ll be able to impart some of the lessons in stewardship I’ve picked up along the way.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me now that I was precociously bright as a young Catholic, but those early years were just as defined by how exceptionally antisocial I was. Church wasn’t a place where I built a relationship with God or even connected with a community of peers – it was just one more set of correct answers I could memorize and steps I could execute flawlessly. (And as many of you know firsthand, there was no shortage of memorization and ritual in the Catholic Church!) I still remember coming home from my first ever night of teen youth group extremely put off by all the icebreaker activities and praise and worship music, grumbling to my parents, “I thought I was too old for Vacation Bible School!” Needless to say, those early years are entirely devoid of stewardship work to my recollection – after all, what’s the point when you already get to go home and feel good about how much Required Religious Knowledge you’ve acquired? I clearly must have glided over today’s Gospel message that “all who exalt themselves will be humbled”.

It wasn’t until my mandatory pre-Confirmation retreat – another waste of time as I saw it, since I already knew all there was to know about the sacrament – that someone finally broke through my shell. One of my fellow candidates for Confirmation was even more intensely knowledgeable about his faith than I was but somehow also more straight-up fun than everyone else there as well, peppering his vocabulary with Bruno Mars lyrics and slang like “turnt” that you would never expect out of the mouth of someone who could (and would) also recite the Rosary in Latin. He could see that there was absolutely no reason other than my own self-imposed stubbornness that I couldn’t have both sides too, and he insisted on dragging my inner social butterfly to the surface throughout that retreat and the months that followed. And pretty much as soon as I clicked into the social scene with my peers, the stewardship just started flowing – I went on mission trips to repair homes in the Gullah islands of South Carolina, did yard work for elderly parishioners, stepped up to assist in the formation of the next cohort of Confirmation students, and even discovered I wasn’t too old to have a good time helping out at Vacation Bible School after all. 

Somewhere in the middle of all that work, my faith stopped being a mere two-dimensional intellectual exercise and really came alive, both on a personal level and as a member of a community. For the first time, I could see God at work in my relationships with and work on behalf of others in a way that had been imperceptible when religion was just me and words on the page. The “who” of community”, the “what” of stewardship, and the “why” of faith are all inherently tangled up in each other – each of those elements is simultaneously caused by and leads to the other two with no clear beginning or ending. (A perilous thought to my young brain that valued logical progression from point A to point B over all else!) Many of us grasp that intuitively from the get-go, but we can all get there in the end, and I’ll always be grateful to my friend Miguel the future Dominican monk for giving me the on-ramp I needed at just the right time.

Now, life has a tendency to yank the sunshine and roses away from us as we cross the Rubicon into adulthood, and I certainly felt that dynamic at play as I graduated high school and started to become more independent. I became loosely attached to my parish’s Knights of Columbus group and their charitable works, made a half-hearted attempt at cataloging the church library, and had a brief but trying tenure as a middle school youth group volunteer, but overall felt quite adrift in my stewardship, community, and faith in comparison to the rootedness of the previous years. All of that very real unease might as well have been a whisper on the wind, though, in comparison to the maelstrom that came upon me when I fell deeply in love with someone of the same gender as me. It was fully within my power to decline to pursue that relationship and stick with the path I’d always imagined of marrying a nice Catholic girl and having six kids just like my parents did – it certainly would have been the option that was most consistent with the catechism I spent all that time poring over and memorizing. But I also knew firsthand from my stewardship journey that sticking rigidly to a prepared script, as bulletproof as it might seem, was inherently insufficient to fully manifest God’s self-sacrificing love in this broken world. And so I leapt. 

Understandably, I took a long time to fully detach from the church that had taught me to recognize the very same love I now got to live out every day. Eventually I would let my remaining volunteer commitments lapse, start rotating between a handful of unfamiliar parishes to avoid becoming too familiar in any one place, and no longer be quite so strict with myself about attending every single Sunday. But before I progressed to any of those stages, the very first concrete change I made was that I stopped putting money in the collection basket every week. I don’t think I could even articulate a rationale for it at the time, but when I look back I can’t help but think of what Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel – “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”. My body was still in the building for the time being, but my heart was already out the door, and my treasure, talent, and time would all eventually follow. And once all of me was finally in sync on the other side, I was ready to find St. Catherine’s. 

I feel like I landed here at just the right time – not just in terms of what I take away but what I am now in the perfect place to contribute through stewardship. The same kinds of work that were a little too much for me to handle as a newly-minted adult, such as a church library revamp or working with youth, are now well within my grasp. The cooking skills I hadn’t yet developed while still living at home with my parents can now be put to good use in as many places as a homemade meal comes in handy, from a community event to a family in need and everything in between. And of course, I have just enough life experience under my belt at this point to draw on for stories like this one. 

Now, there are plenty of other places in the world where I could just as well apply that experience and energy instead; what makes St. Catherine’s stand tall among all those options is just how much that energy is matched by the community in return. I am constantly inspired by how much everyone here is willing to step up and chip in, regardless of their official title or role within the parish, and by drawing on that example to give more of myself, I get to set an example of giving for others that serves as one more step in this back-and-forth positive feedback loop of stewardship. Having such an active community also gives me the peace of mind to be intentional with how I direct my time, talent, and treasure instead of feeling like I personally have to jump on every last need in order to keep everything from falling apart. I have said “no” or “not yet” more than a handful of times in the year that I’ve been here and never once felt like my decision was single-handedly bringing down the endeavor in question or that the person asking me thought any less of me for my choice. I’m not overwhelmed when I see how many different things I could be doing as I browse the bulletin or the Wheel – knowing how we as a community always manage to come together lets me make considered, prayerful decisions that draw on my unique talents while still pushing me out of my comfort zone. And as stewardship and community reflect off each other so beautifully, that third element of faith simultaneously grows from and underpins them, ensuring our giving is always informed by and rooted in God’s perfect gift of Jesus on the cross.

I hope that I’ve sufficiently addressed those two questions about myself that I posed when I began, but I do want to tack on one more that will provide a little more insight into stewardship as it applies in the real world: “Where am I going?” Many of you know that I am currently in a voluntary (but hopefully temporary!) period of unemployment, and this has very real effects on how stewardship manifests in my life – first and foremost, that money is tighter and I can no longer contribute financially to St. Catherine’s and other causes at the level I previously was. It’s easy to be gung-ho about stewardship when the wind is in our sails, but we all know there’s no shortage of rough seas out there that can and will disrupt our best hopes of how we can give. And even when there’s not one or more tangible obstacles in our path, there can be a tug-of-war relationship between those key elements of time, talent, and treasure that makes it feel like we’re always falling short of our potential. For example, many of our skills that we draw on in our stewardship require setting aside a significant amount of time, money or both to develop and hone. Sometimes earning the money needed to support the people and places we care about takes up time and energy that we wish could also devote to those same people and places. 

It’s really easy to carry these very real dynamics down the road to despair and feel like we will never be able to give as much as we’re “supposed” to. To break out of that mindset, then, you have to shift your perspective – it’s not about what doorways of stewardship feel like they’re closing themselves in your face but instead which ones are thrown open by the force of others shutting. I may have less cold hard cash to put in the offering plate for as long as I am unemployed, but I certainly have more free time that can be channeled into church and community work or long-term personal development that will eventually put me back in a better spot to give monetarily. While there is much truth in the saying that it’s not possible to pour from an empty cup, we also have to keep in mind that our varied and complex capacities as human beings can never be reduced to a single mundane vessel. Until we are at last fully “poured out as a libation, and the time of [our] departure has come”, as it was for Paul in today’s Epistle, it remains well within our grasp to find those stewardship opportunities. And even when you do feel like you are truly at the end of our rope and have nothing left to give, you can always lean on this wonderful community in full confidence that they will come through for you out of their abundance and help you back on your feet. The best part is that it doesn’t matter whether you ever find yourself in a position to directly and equivalently repay the specific people who helped you in your time of need – that chance to exercise stewardship, build community, and live out faith is in and of itself a reward for whoever is brave enough to claim it.

That’s really how stewardship works in our lives – it’s not measured in dollars and cents, as necessary as those are to make our way through the society we inhabit. It’s not a futile attempt to repay God in kind for the blessings we’ve been given, it’s the recognition that we have been given more than we could ever hope to repay and can accordingly give freely and without expectation of repayment. And it’s not a logically ordered list of busywork handed to each of us directly from God that we check off to earn our A+ in Christianity and our admit-one ticket to heaven, it’s a neverending and sometimes paradoxical dance between all of us, all of creation, and the Creator who underpins it all. Let’s move forward together in that dance, taking the steps we each find ourselves called to take and creating a whole that is so much more beautiful than the sum of its parts.