A Stewardship Reflection on the Book of Exodus

Mark Roberti

Directors of Stewardship Heartland Parishes of Ellis County

As Catholics, we journey as a community… just as the Israelites in the Book of Exodus.   In the Old Testament, God chose the people of Israel to be His people and He to be their God.  Likewise, through the coming of Jesus, God has ordained the Catholic Church to be the New Israel to ultimately lead all people to Him. 

You remember the Exodus story well.  God chose Moses to lead His people out of slavery, through the desert, and into the Promised Land.

Pharaoh wouldn’t free them, he wouldn’t let them worship their true God.  So God gave  both the Israelites and Pharaoh signs and wonders:  staffs turned into serpents, the ten plagues, the crossing of the Red Sea, the cloud that lead them in their journey, manna and quail, water from a stone…incredible miracles.

Yet the people didn’t trust God.  They would not obey.  They griped and complained the whole way. They ended up staying in the desert.  They wandered 40 years.  That whole generation died in the desert.  Only Joshua, and the and the descendents of the original Israelites who went into the desert, crosses over into the Promised Land.     

The message to us readers is clear.  If they had trusted and obeyed God, it would have been a quick journey… as God had desired. Instead, they wasted away in the desert.  There was no earthly reward.  Only God knows if there was a heavenly reward.

Today, we also journey as a community.  The Catholic Church is the New Israel, the Pope is our new Moses.  This time, we wander through a spiritual desert.  We, too, witness miracles, both directly and indirectly, in our lives.  Every week (and every day for some) we eat of the New Manna, the greatest of all miracles, the Eucharist.  Like the Israelites, God is with us throughout our journey.  Yet, we too complain and disobey.   

At the first Stewardship conference I attended in the Fall of 96, Archbishop Thomas Murphy from Seattle, told us that the bishops anticipated it would take 40 years to engrain a Catholic  stewardship mentality into the consciousness of the American Catholic…one and an half generations.  Wow! I thought to myself, what a parallel.

At the same conference, Bishop Robert Morneau from Green Bay said, “The Catholic Church does not have a money problem, we have a faith problem.”  I wholeheartedly agree, when we talk stewardship, people hear money.  But it’s really about conversion and putting God first…first above everything else.  God must be the God of our time, our talent, and our wallet. Our lives must be directed to Him, not possessions and securities which in the end come to naught.  

Stewardship is the way out of the desert.  It is about conversion and being faithful to what we teach and believe as a Church.   We can find our way out of the desert any time.  But the same rules apply.  WE MUST TRUST AND OBEY GOD.  Though men and women’s ways change, God’s ways don’t.   

Stewardship is a holy way of life.   It is the right path down which God wants to lead us into the Promised Land.

Why, do you suspect, we resist?