RESPONSIBLE
May 5, 1991
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M, Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
1 Corinthians 12:1-12
Matthew 25:14-30

"For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an
abundance; ..." ~Matthew 25:29 (NSRV}

“For, to all those who have, more will be given and
they will have an abundance." ‘

The subject is not money but responsibility. 4 The Sentence could
read, “to all who have much responsibility, more responsibility will be
given, and they will have an abundance." They will algo be very busy,
Jesus might have added... For it is the iron law of voluntary
organizations, is it not? Volunteer once, ‘and you're caught; do a good
job and your reward is another, bigger job. Open your mouth and offer an
opinion on how the task might be accomplished, and you will be asked to do
it; chair the committee, raise the money, organize the dinner, take out the
trash - whatever. “Those who have, get more,,." Responsibility.

Henry Copeland, President of the College of Wooster, began a fine

convocation address on the topic by retelling Aesop's Fable, "Belling the
Cat."

The mice lived in a state of perpetual fear because of the constant
menace which hovered over their very existence. So they held a genera!

meeting to discuss what measures they might- take to outwit the enemy, the
Cat, :

A young mouse rose to speak:

"You will all agree that our chief. danger: consists in.
the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy _
approaches us. Now, if we could receive some signal of
her approach, we could easily escape from. her. I ,
venture, therefore, to propose that a small beli:be
«procured and.attached by a ribbon around.the neck of
the cat. By this means we should always know when she
Was about.and could easily retire while she was in the
neighborhood. .

“This proposal was met with general applause."

What a wonderful idea - brilliant - creative! But there is an unhappy
ending.

A wise old mouse got up and said:
“That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?"

Nobody said a word. No one was willing to be responsible, ta assume.
the very real risks involved in doing what needed to be done.

President Copeland's point, which got my attention, was that the very
notion of responsibility has not fared well in our society. Rather, the
“Me Decade," the "New Narcissism," told us we were entitled not to
responsibility but to comfortability. "Do yourself a favor, take care of
yourself, be your own best friend, you deserve a break today" became the
litanies by which we live, a kind of narcotic, Copeland said, the flip side
of which is “the politics of blame," i.e., whatever is going wrong must be
somebody else's fault: big government, big business, big labor, big
education. "They" are making a mess of things. It's all “their" fault.

The result is that. individuals want to maintain a safe distance
between themselves and their instituions, an intentional avoidance of the
kind of public responsibility upbn which those institutions are absolutely
dependent: the college, museum, symphony orchestra, hospital, church.

The editor of a major urban daily newspaper calls it “the new
cynicism." “As America mopes and the economy falls - we became snide and
cynical." . One way to measure the soul of a culture is to look at its
popular entertainment. And this observer finds it overwhelmingly
pessimistic and ugly, and we're buying it. “Hard Copy," "Unsolved
Mysteries," "Goodfellas," which some people think was the best movie of the
year, is about a mobster with no conscience in a world without rules,
without punishment or regret for the rule-breakers, and without much hope

for redemption. "Roseanne," he says, "cynically shows that we can't change
the world, we can only scoff." [see Jeff Jarvis, in Context, April 15,
1991]

Change the world? Who Me? I suppose there aren't many of us who,
deep in our heart of hearts, would not like to, if not change the course of
history, at least to make a difference, in some way to contribute something
to the well being-of the planet and the human enterprise. And I don't
suppose there are many of us who have not, over the years, come to terms
with the reality that we can't do very much. We are not Mother Teresa or
Martin Luther King or Jonas Salk or Albert Schweitzer. We are simply who
we are and it takes most of our time and energy and strength just keeping
body and soul together. And I don't suppose there are many of us who have
not despaired just a bit about our impotence and in that impotence

retreated from a sense of responsibility, cultivated a bit of that distance
from our institutions, "what, after all," we reason, “can I possibly do?"

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& ~,

And in that tiny dynamic, which does not happen one day once-and=for

ali, but is a process, a slow retreat over the years, in that small dynamic
there is a fatal moral flaw.

"The sin of. respectable people," Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "is
running from responsibility." You know Bonhoeffer's story. I'm sure you
have heard it many times: the German pastor who took a public stand
against Naziism, eventually cast his lot with the resistance and joined
with an assassination attempt against Adolph Hitler, was arrested in 1943
and executed in 1945 just before the end of the war. You know about
Bonhoeffer the martyr. I was reminded recently of an earlier

dimension of the story. I was attending a méeting at Union Theological
' Seminary in New York City. It was held in the recently renovated
Bonhoeffer Room, named because Dietrich Bonhoeffer had lived there for a
year. Pictures on the wall, letters and personal memorabilia *eminded me
that before he was a martyr, Bonhoeffer was an academician, a distinguished.
scholar. Before getting in trouble with the Nazis he was on the

theological faculty at the University of Berlin. He came to New York and
Union for a year in 1933. His academic specialty was Ethics.

And, for Bonhoeffer, the basis of Christian ethics was
responsibility. Traditionally, Christian religion has flirted with the
_ Older, legalistic notion that the basis of ethics is the avoidance of the
evil. . Traditional religion emphasizes the "thou shalt nots" much more than
"thou shalt." The current public flap about the Presbyterian report on
human sexuality is a case in point. We are all being asked, “What are you
Presbyterians up to now?" - “Roll over John Caivin," Newsweek sneered.
Allow me to remind you again that the document is the report of a Task
Force and does not represent the position of the Presbyterian Church. The
report suggests that sexual morality is far more than saying "no" and
avoiding immorality. Many responsible people believe the report is flawed
and that it will not be adopted by our General Assembly. But ane thing it
does, and that is suggest that you can avoid wrongdoing, and not even hear
the distinctive Christian word about doing good.

Bonhoeffer, the Ethics scholar, taught that “personal experience of
God's judgment and grace also included consciousness of a larger humanity
to which we belong. Inescapably, there, the spiritual life includes
attunement to ant response to the social realm." {see Weavings, John
Mogabgab, March/April 1990, p. 2-31] Translate that, “responsibility.”

Bonhoeffer saw the tragic 20th century divorce between private and
public discipleship, perhaps best, but not exclusively, illustrated by the
people who found it possible to go to church on Sunday morning and on
Monday go to work in their jobs in a concentration camp where thousands of
people were being gassed. One of his biographers put it this way:
“Bonhoeffer's fundamental view of ethics was that a Christian must accept
his/her responsibility as a citizen of this world where God has placed
him/her." [See Life Together, John W. Doberstein, p. 7-13]

What made Bonhoeffer a martyr was not a moment of impulsive heroism,
but a carefully reasoned theological position. He had concluded that
believing in Jesus made him a responsible citizen of this world.

cre rnnd ~ / 3

The reminders are on the walls of the Bonhoeffer Room at Union
Seminary. After his year of lecturing and study in 1933, he returned to
Germany, got in trouble with the Nazis, became a parish pastor, helped
organize an underground seminary, lectured and traveled. He returned to
New York and Union in 1939 when it was becoming more and more clear that
the world was headed for tragedy. His friends at Union — among them the
great Reinhold Niehbuhr - arranged for him to remain, to teach, write,
lecture until the war was over. They pled with him to stay. But his ethic
of responsibility would not allow him. He was a German. It was his
country. He would bear whatever his fellow Germans had to bear. He would
' be a responsible citizen. .So he boarded one of. the last: ships to sail from

New York to Germany and became a responsible participant in the most tragic
moment in his country's history.

His faith had led him to pacifism. But his deeper sense of
responsibility, as the foundation of ethics, convinced him to join the
resistance and help plan a violent attempt to kill Hitler; this failed and
resulted in his own imprisonment and execution.

Bonhoeffer's proposal - that Christian discipleship begins with
responsible citizenship — is, I would propose, terribly important today,
even more so than it was fifty years ago.

The topic of a responsible sexual ethic will not go away,
unfortunately. If we know anything about the topic, it is that
articulating the traditional moral maxims about sex may make us feel good,
but will have absolutely no impact on the way people behave sexually. And,
in fact, because of religion's refusal to be responsible, it may contribute
indeed dees contribute - to an epidemic of unwanted pregnancies, abortion,
sexually transmitted disease, child abuse and abandonment.

The kind of society we want to be ~ the kind of nation, state, city -
continues to be before us, and is determined in the political arena as
representatives struggle with the hard realities of money.

Someone has to balance the budget. The current proposal based on the
very simple premise that you and I are already paying too many taxes, is te
do that at the expense of poor peaple. And so 80% of the necessary S00-
millien-doliar reductions comes from services to the poor.

* 100,000 people on general assistance will
be cut off next January.

service for the medically indigent - like
dental care, wheelchairs - will be eliminated.

* Medicaid will be further reduced, which
the Illinois Hospital Association warns
will “sound the death knoll for hospitals
serving poor people," thirteen of which
have already closed.

The people who are writing the best theology today are pleading for a
renewal of morality, not in the traditional sense of saying "no" to

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immorality, but an ethic of responsibility for the life of the whole world,
responsibility for the existence of the planet, the integrity of the
nation, the well-being of the city, the life of the church.

It is the nature of the topic to be difficult and controversial.
“Belling the cat" is very risky business. To make matters worse there is a
long and venerable tradition in this country that discipleship is a private
matter, that religious faith is a matter between God and me and that there

is and should be no connection between personal faith and public political
behavior. ~ .

Bonhoeffer would disagree with that. So would the one who said "to
all those who have, more will he given" and meant "responsibility."

This church is doing something important today. It is recognizing
the centrality of the ethic of responsibility. By ordaining and installing
thirty-nine members of the church as officers, we are celebrating the
notion that believing in Jesus means responsible participation. These are

the people who have agreed to “Bell the Cat" around here for three years or
so,

The very notion that they should do this - that lay members, not
solely clergy, bear responsibility for the life of the institutional
church ~ is what makes us Presbyterian. 450 years ago it was a revolutionary

notion. People fought and died for it, were thrown in prison and burned at
the stake for it.

it is revolutionary still. It is a reminder to all of us that God
calls us to be responsible: to be involved responsibly in the life of our
society, the institutions we care .about and our church. It is a reminder
to all of us, whether we are officers installed today, or even if we've
never been elected to anything, that believing in Jesus means living
responsibly in the world God has given us, and that. we, particularly we who
have so much, citizens of this nation, this city, this neighborhood,
particularly to us,. the burden of responsibility is given. It is a
reminder that God intends for us to ba responsible and that we are fully
human, fully alive, fully the men and women God created us to be ~— insofar
aS we assume the responsibility far the life God gives.

It was a moving and great moment tast year when Vaclav Havel,

President of Czechoslovakia, addressed the United States Congress. He
said:

"The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else
than in the human heart... in human responsibility...
the only backbone to our actions, if they are to be
moral - is responsibility. Responsibility to something
higher than my family, my firm, my country, my success -
responsibility to the order of being where all our
actions are indelibly recorded and where and only where
they will be properly judged." [See "Belling the Cat,"
Henry Copeland, The Wooster Review ]

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And so the matter rests finally in your heart and mine. No matter
who you are - CEQ-of a major corporation, or simply the CEO of your own life
- God's love for you and the world translates into responsibility.

Jesus Christ, Ged calls you to live fully in the world, to passion
love it, to be responsible for it.

In

ately
It is our burden and our glory

Jesus said:

"To all those who have, more will be given
and they will have an abundance."

ttt et +

Dear God, we thank you fer this world, for our nation, our state, and

our community. We thank you. for our church and for all those institutions
which serve us.

We thank you for making us responsible and giving us the gifts we

need, the courage, patience and love to be your faithful people. Through
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. , ,

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