Steward, Shepherd, Servant

Peasant Times-Dispatch Issue 19

Hello Again!

Dear Readers,

I hope you all are preserving yourselves on the journey of lent! Some quick housekeeping:

I posted Episode 6 of the Podcast, Is That So? on the 10th, and Episode 3 went behind a paywall!

This is from January: PSA about Community Curation. I think it’s still worth keeping on your radar so check this out if you haven’t already!

Thank you as always for reading!

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Steward

This post was going to be about Stewardship, but a different, bigger, and more expansive sense of the word. Steward didn’t quite do what I wanted it to do: when I hear the word, I think of money management, stand-ins for absent kings, or sloppily eating tomatoes while the armies of Mordor approach.

So instead of making this post about stewardship I’m going to write about a few different words that go into this superordinate category that I am having trouble defining.

Which brings us back to Steward. In the “stand-in for absent king” sense, we are talking about taking care of something that isn’t ours, making sure we keep the ship steady until the King comes back. When talking about money management or other “mundane” forms of stewardship, we got rid of the part of the definition that says it’s stuff that isn’t ours, and we focus instead on taking care of something responsibly. A good steward of ones finances makes sure everyone in a household is provided for and all needs are met and a reserve is kept for the future.

Spiritual stewardship adds the sense that the wellbeing of our souls is important and must be considered in the caretaking-regime of a good earthly steward. But it has this odd quirk of adding back in that what we have isn’t ours. Our lives, our money, our possessions, our blessings, our virtues, our vices: every atom of it, start to finish¹, comes from God. So it’s not just about using these things responsibly but about sharing the fruit of these blessings with our spiritual siblings, our fellow humans. Lent is intentionally about Almsgiving, but what if a skill you have is heroic patience? How can you share your heroic patience with your fellow man? Perhaps by listening to the bank teller tell a long story about her dogs trip to the vet? Perhaps by listening to one’s spouse vent about some quagmire at work? What other virtues, skills, resources do we have that we can share with our fellow man?

Stewardship is less about the sharing and more about the responsible management. If patience is your virtue, and you had a day that taxed your patience, you are not going to be able to extend that patience to others the way you normally might. You cannot give what you do not have—so making sure you can refill your own cup is an essential part of this discussion of stewardship.

Shepherd

This nebulous, superordinate category of stewardship, in my mind, includes some ideas we have in the word Shepherd. A Shepherd looks after a flock of sheep (for example), makes sure they have enough to eat and drink, makes sure they are healthy and satisfying for their purposes.

When we think of a spiritual shepherd we immediately turn to the priesthood, which in a specific sense is absolutely true. They are spiritual leaders of a parish flock and in addition to their material needs also look out for their spiritual needs in the form of the sacraments.

But as lay-folk, you and I can think of ourselves as shepherds too, in a unique sense that does not diminish the importance of the priesthood nor usurps authority which is not due to us. This spiritual shepherdship² involves us ordering not just the living things (sheep) in our lives, but also the resources of the world. A shepherd, in addition to his sheep, also has fields under his care. He rotates which fields his sheep graze in so as to make sure they don’t deplete any one field too dramatically. There’s a very subtle resource management element to being a shepherd. We, also, have the responsibility to shepherd our resources to ensure that we do not deplete them. We can consider ourselves shepherds of creation in the sense that we want to help lead our local corner of creation to the Good, True, and Beautiful. It’s like maintaining and taking care of our little corner of Eden. Which people flit through our lives? What impact are we having on our community? Are we taking care of even the ground that is under our authority?

You see how this is related to the ideas of Steward but not quite the same. If you are feeling overwhelmed by all these responsibilities hang on. I’m not done yet. I’m hoping that, by the end of this article, you are not overwhelmed but have a new perspective. Let’s press on.

Servant

The final word whose meaning is assimilated into this superordinate category of stewardship is Servant. A servant quite plainly does the will of the master. A servant to a king does what the king commands, and a servants joy is in the satisfaction of the king.

God’s instruction in Genesis was to rule over creation (in communion with God); but after the fall we needed to relearn these instructions. Christ gave us two commandments, which are really different expressions of the same idea: Love God with all our heart, soul, and mind; Love our neighbors as ourselves. These are our commands, and if we are to be good and faithful servants our joy will be in the satisfaction of the King with how we carry out these commands.

But I want to point back to Genesis for a moment—ruling over creation is the original plan and all of salvation history is trying to bring humanity back to that ideal. We were servants of God in Eden, and can be again even here in our fallen world thanks to the grace of God, the Holy Spirit working through the sacraments, and the blessings of Christ. We can go out into the world and help make it Eden by ordering our lives to God and working to order our communities to God.

Priest

So what is that superordinate category that assimilates the ideas of steward, shepherd, and servant? I kept on coming back to the idea of priest. You can find discussions of the universal priesthood in scripture—not to abrogate the duty of the capital P-Priests ordained by the Church, but rather to show how every man, woman, and child has a responsibility to do God’s will.

Adam and Eve were like a royal priesthood, indeed you can find discussions of the “Adamic Priesthood”. They were the first people ordained by God to do His will on earth. Adam and Eve were like stewards—they were responsible for managing creation and doing so responsibly, and doing so as best as they could in the eyes of the King. Adam and Eve were like Shepherds—they were responsible for the living things under their care, as well as the ground beneath them, and ensuring no patch of earth was overgrazed nor too long left fallow. Adam and Eve were like Servants—they were responsible for doing the will of the King and their joy was in His satisfaction with their work.

Or…should have been.

Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, these are important because it’s what God has been working towards, slowly, with us after the fall. The Priesthood is someone who represents God to the world, and who represents the world to God. We lost that role with the fall, but that calling is still in our DNA.

Peasant

You should have known I would circle back to this word. The Peasant. In our fallen state, the word “priest” might be the goal, but “peasant” is our reality. We peasants, we have to make the best of what we have around us. We don’t have the benefit of the glorious Garden of Eden. We do have the benefit of prayer, of a relationship with God, of the sacraments. We can take these with us to every person we encounter in our daily lives, and work, slowly, on ordering our communities towards God, and ordering our resources to God too.

Our job, right now, is to be Stewards, Shepherds, and Servants of this fallen Eden, and to see if we can’t turn one little piece of it, even if it’s just our own backyards, into paradise.

God is still at work doing the heavy lifting. How can we help?

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Thank you for reading!

Ad Jesum per Mariam

1. OK maybe not our vices, those come from us.

2. A real word