We’re in the offseason for stewardship talk but, just so, a jaft [just a few thoughts]. Stewardship is about the way we live and what we live for. It’s about asking who we are and whose we are. But when you’re a priest as I am and you say the word ‘stewardship’ some people start edging toward the door. Like a family story told too often, it can elicit groans. Soon after I came to Saint Francis, I remember being at a stewardship committee meeting where themes were considered for the upcoming campaign. I cheekily proposed this one: Either life is holy with meaning or life doesn’t mean a damn thing. You pay your money and you take your choice.

Blank stares and furtive glances. I kept a straight face until a committee member said it seemed a little wordy. We ended up that year with Charting Our Future Together in Christ. This lacked punch, I said, but Carol Tutera and Brenda Bell assured me with a knowing wink that it meant the same thing.

Stewardship asks where we are going and how we plan to get there if we get there at all, and what we are going to find if we finally do. Vestries are responsible for that planning, and the only reason for asking yourself what your role — and your checkbook’s role — will be in the life and mission of Saint Francis is that you want to be part of where we’re going and how we plan to get there. Period.

We pay our money every day, to one thing or another. By the way we use what we earn and what we’re given, we show what really matters to us. If you’re a member of my parish then four or five months from now in your mail you’ll receive an envelope from Saint Francis with a pledge card in it. Hmm. You’ll ask: What to do with this? What numbers to scratch there? How much of what I work so blessedly hard for should I give gladly away?

It’s early June. The train’s not in the station, but let me lay some track. If you believe in what we say and do at Saint Francis — if you believe that God is busy in your life here — then when the pledge card comes this fall do this: say your prayers, take your pen, and surprise yourself.

The struggle we have with money is really with Jesus himself. And the truth about Jesus is that if indeed he is everybody’s friend the way the old Jesus hymns proclaim, he is at the same time everybody’s worst enemy. He is the enemy at least of everything in us that keeps us from giving him what he is really after. And what he is really after is our heart’s blood, our treasure, our selves.

On the twenty-third of June, 1993, Victoria, Evan, Gabriel, Gillian and I took a train from Seekonk, Massachusetts to Boston to visit the New England Aquarium. I remember the sea lions, as we call them (it would be interesting to know what they call us) racing around in their tank, leaping through hoops, balancing beach balls on their whiskered snouts, and delighting us all.

On the train ride home that night, Gabriel and Evan were sitting in front of us on opposite sides of the aisle. At one stop, I looked up and noticed Gabriel patting people on the arm as they passed by him. Victoria saw it, too. She leaned forward and said to him, “Gabriel. What are you doing?” “I’m petting them, Mom,” he said. “What?” she said. You shouldn’t do that, Gabriel.” “I’m only petting them, Mom.”

At the next stop, I overheard Evan encourage Gabriel to pet a steward whom Gabe must have mistaken for the conductor. Gabriel said, “No.” “Why not?” Evan asked. “Because I don’t pet abductors [sic].”

There’s a steward in this story but that’s not why I tell it. I tell it because I ask myself: Why would a boy barely four pat on the arm people he did not know from Adam? And why do I love him for doing it? It was a crazy thing to do. It was a risky thing to do. It ran counter to all standards of New England practicality and prudence.

It was debonair. He did it because he saw the people on that train not as strangers but as compagnons de voyage. It was not a level-headed, play-your-cards-close-to-the-vest thing to do, just as giving away your hard-earned cash is not level-headed, not playing your cards close to the vest. But to live this way, to give this way, is to make visible who we are and where we are going together, you and I. It is to see the world lit up as if by lightning on a dark night.