Stewardship and the Wealthiest Nation on Earth

The earth is the LORD’s and the fulness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein; for he has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the rivers.  (Psalm 24:1-2, quoted at the burial commital)

For “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.”   (1 Corinthians 10:26)

“The Fathers‘ fundamental understanding of property was as gift or more often as a loan, something that God has given to the rich for use of all.  Every owner is therefore a steward, someone charged with the social administration of goods for the benefit of one’s poorer brethren.  When they refuse to share, the wealthy become evil and, paradoxically, thieves with respect to their own property, for they divert it from its proper destination and thus have deprived it of its being a loan for social use.

St John Chrysostom was the most radical, truly an apostle of social ethics. ‘The rich are stealing from the poor even if what they have is honestly acquired or legally inherited.’  ‘In refusing to give and to share we thus earn the punishment of thieves.  We are as guilty as the tax collectors who use the money of all for their own needs.’  ‘The rich are a kind of robber.’  ‘Do not say, I enjoy what is mine.  You are enjoying the property of others.  All the things of this earth belong to all of us together, just as the sun, the air, the ground and everything else.’  Even later, in the eleventh century, St Simeon the New Theologian would echo what St John Chrysostom said in his homilies. ‘Money and all other goods are the common property of all,  just as the light and the air we breath.’

… The sole owner of the earth is the Lord and this is why the earth is holy and belongs to all.”  (Paul Evdokimov, IN THE WORLD, OF THE CHURCH, pp 82-83)

“… your Father who is in heaven… makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”  (Matthew 5:45)