Endowed Presbyterian Churches Conference
Worship Service
Saturday, October 5, 1991, 8:30 a.n.
THE VALUE OF OUR COMMITMENTS
John M. Buchanan, Pastor
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, TL

Matthew 25:14-30

"For to all those who have, more will he
given, and they will have an abundance."
[Matthew 25:29a]}

The subject is not money but responsibility. The sentence
could read, "to all who have much responsibility, more
will be given, and they will have an abundance of responsibili-~
ties." They will also 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. What better example than us?... a beautiful fall
Saturday morning when most of the world is playing goif, taking
walks, enjoying coffee and paper, sleeping in - and here we are,
at a church meeting!

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 general 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
gome signal of her approach, we could easily
escape from her. I venture, therefore, to propose
that a small bell 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 neighborhoad."

‘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,
to agsume the very real risks involved in doing what needed to he
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 scothing moral narcotic. The flip aide 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
ail "their" fault: General Assembly staff in Louisville, church
bureaucrats, Angela Davis, liberals, conservatives, evangelicals,
social activists, and now, John Carey and the members of the Task

Force on Human Sexuality.

The result of this combination of “entitlement thinking" and
"the politics of blame" is that individuals maintain a safe dis-
tance between themselves and their institutions, an intentional
avoidance of the kind of public and personal responsibility upon
which those institutions are absolutely dependent: the college,
museum, symphony orchestra, hospital, church.

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
Iuther 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. I don't suppose there are
many of us who have not despaired just a bit about our impotence
and in that despair retreated from a sense of responsibility,
cultivated a bit of that distance from our institutions, "What,
after all," we reason, "can I possibly do?"

And in that tiny dynamic, which does not happen one day
once-and-for-all, 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 ~-
the German pastor who took a public stand against Naziism, even-
tually cast his lot with the resistance and joined with an assas-
sination attempt against Adolph Hitler, was arrested in 1943 and
executed in 1945 just before the end of the war. Before he was a
martyr, Bonhoeffer was an academician, a distinguished scholar.
His academic speciality was Ethics.

And for him, the basis of Christian ethics was responsibili-
ty. Bonhoeffer, the ethics scholar, taught that "personal expe-
rience of God's judgment and grace also included consciousness of
a larger humanity to which we belong."

That tragic 20th century divorce between private and public
discipleship, which Dietrich Bonhoeffer identified, is ironically
seen best in the people who found it possible to go to church on
Sunday morning and on Monday go to work in their jobs in a con-
centration camp where thousands of people were being gassed. One
ef his biographers put it this way: "Bonhoeffer's fundamental
view of ethics was that a Christian must accept responsibility as
a citizen of this world where God has placed him/her." [See Life
rogether, John W. Doberstein, p. 7-13}

Bo you ever wonder what you would have done? I do... and I
conclude that we might, in a moment of impulsive heroism, have
done the right thing. But what made Bonhoeffer a martyr was not
a moment of impulsive heroism, but.a carefully reasoned theologi-~
cal position. He concluded that believing in Jesus made him a
responsible citizen of this world.

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 wa 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'ts refusal to
be responsible, it may contribute - indeed does contribute ~ to
an epidemic of unwanted pregnancies, abortion, sexually transmit~
ted disease, child abuse and abandonment.

The Kind of society we want to be, the kind of nation, con-
tinues to be before us and is determined in the political arena
as representatives struggle with the hard realities of money and
national defense and education and health care.

‘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 immorality, but an ethic of responsibility for
the life of the whole world, responsibility for the existence of
the planet, "the integrity of creation," the World Council of
Churches called it, the welfare of all people, the well~bsing of
the city, the life of the church.

It is the nature of the topic to be difficult and controver-
sial. "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 be given" and meant

"responsibility. ®

It was a moving and great moment when Vaclav Havel, poet,
political prisoner, now 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 responsi-
bility..." (sounds like secular humanism, but
listen!) "The only backbone to our actions, if
they are to be moral ~- is responsibility. Respon-
sibility to something higher than my family, my
firm, my country, my success - responsibility to
the order of being where all sur actions are
indelibly recorded and where and only where they
will be properly judged." (See "Belling the Cat,"
Henry Copeland, The Wooster Review]

And so the matter rests finally in your heart and mine. No
matter who you are - CEO of a major corporation, or simply the
CEO of your own life ~ God's love for you and the world trans-
lates into responsibility. In Jesus Christ, God calls you to
live fully in the world, to passionately love it, to be responsi-
ble for it. It is our burden... but it is also our glory.

Jesus said:
"Yo all those whe have,

more will be given, and
they will have an abundance."