“You must provide for the redemption of all the land you’ve inherited” (Leviticus 25.24).
This sounds, to me, like a great, underused text for a stewardship sermon. Good stewardship ones are always about…well, about being stewards, which means “your” wealth and treasures are just things you’re holding in trust—allowed to use but never to be misled into thinking that you can do whatever you please with them. They’re not really yours, in other words.
In context, that’s what this verse is saying. In the discussion about the Jubilee years, Leviticus reminds the listener that every fifty years all possessions revert back. So you need to treat the property you hold as though you’re holding it for someone else.
You could argue this as part of a stewardship drive. You’re not giving your money and your treasure, you’re just turning over a portion of what you’ve been holding on God’s behalf. It’s cool, of course, if you use some of it to buy groceries and keep the lights burning, but you shouldn’t get too used to having it. It’s not like you get to do whatever you want with it.
It’s not a perfect verse. You have to stretch a bit to get to talking about money from a text that’s really all about property, about the earth stretching out beneath your feet. You can’t spend the land, after all. It’s more about how you use it, good or bad.
Of course, if you think about it, God does declare that the earth is Theirs. That includes money and all other sorts of treasure in it; so, we’re not too far off by thinking just about money and giving. Though, I am starting to wonder if the passage above is less about giving back than about caring for what we have been given to hold.
One day, this verse tells us, you’re going to have to pass all this on to someone. It may be your family, it may be to the family that originally owned it. Whomever it is, you should want to give them something that is at least in as good a condition as when you received it, if not better. No one wants to come along and find a weed-choked plot where crops used to grow, or find a pond grown dark and dead with misuse.
And what child would want to find their once green inheritance stripped to the dust, and filled with rotten and stinking trash?
Makes me wonder if this makes a good sermon about stewardship, but not so much the kind that helps you meet budget. Maybe it really is about land, and water, and sky. It could be its crux is not to get us thinking about how much we should give, but how much we should preserve for those who come after us. That we should be thinking, as the Children of Israel were instructed, that one day someone will come for their land, looking to reclaim it, as it was in their memory.
Looking to find it the way They left it.
Redeemer, may we leave this world better than we received it.