WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?

October 20, 1991

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services.
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Genesis 1:26-31
Matthew 25:14-30

"Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image...and let
them have dominion'..." ~Genesis 1:26 (NSRV)

Ah, Stewardship. The Sunday we all love to hate. The time
when the preacher gets to make everyone squirm with only slightly
outrageous comparisons between what is and what could be; state-
ments like... "the average gift to the church wouldn't buy dinner
for two at the Four Seasons." Actually, we're pretty good - it's
up to dinner for four now. You used to be able to say things
like "if we'd only give to the church the same amount of money we
are spending on cigarettes." But nobody is smoking these days
and so no one knows how expensive a pack of cigarettes has become
and how much money the church would end up with under that ru-
bric. So, cigarettes are out, but the lottery is in - just a
ticket a day.

An Anglican Diocese in Canada came up with a psychologically
sound way to get church people to ventilate all the negative
feelings they had accumulated about religious fund-raising over
the years. They used focus groups and distributed blank slips of
paper and asked participants to write down the first words that
came to mind when they heard the word "Stewardship." They were
astonished. The participants said things like:

"Oh, no!"
"Not again"
"Money"
"Dammit!
and other responses, far too imaginatively earthy to be included

here. [The Steward, A Biblical Symbol Come of Age, Douglas John
Hall, p. 16]

?

That vignette is in a book by one of the brightest and best
thinkers writing theology today, Douglas John Hall, whe teaches
at McGill University. The title of the book is The Steward, A
Biblical Symbol Come of Age, and it is anything but a church fund

raising manual. In fact, Hall has little time for what he calls
"beating the drum for God and money" which is how he describes
most of what goes on in churches on this occasion. "Instead of

periodic efforts at conjuring up deeds of stewardship; instead of
financial campaigns and bazaars and garage sales; instead of
cajoling and harping and begging people... we need to learn how
to teach and preach the gospel and interpret the Christian life
as Stewardship." [p. 243-244]

So, this will not be a money-raising sermon. But before you
relax, let me warn you that the more I have thought about Stew-
ardship as a relevant Biblical symbol for all of life, the more I
hear what I am deeply convinced is the word of God to us, here in
this time and this place, the more it feels to me like a very
expensive undertaking; that you and I are summoned, invited,
called, ordered, by God, to respond with a whole lot more than
5.7% of our disposable income, after taxes of course.

The provocative futurist, Jeremy Rifkin, thinks that the
future of the human race depends on a "fundamental shift in
‘humanity's frame of reference... a new set of governing princi-
ples for how human beings behave and act in the world." We must,
in order to survive, Rifkin proposes, replace the notion of
using, consuming, owning, and discarding with notions of conserv-
ing, protecting, nurturing, and sharing. And the word Rifkin
chooses for this radical shift in the way we think and behave is,

curiously, Stewardship. [Emerging Order, p. 270 - In Hall,
p. 240]

The key concept is responsibility. The critical question is
"Who's In Charge Here?" and it has to do, actually, not so much
with our wallets and bank accounts, as with our souls, our being
itself. And that matter is addressed in our faith tradition in

the first story in the Bible, the story of responsibility given
and refused.

From the beginning, the Bible says that human beings are the
crown of creation. From the beginning, human beings are given
the job of ruling, deciding, guiding the creation project. It is
fashionable today to criticize that Biblical notion as terribly
anthropocentric, and to blame the Biblical notion of humannkind's
dominion over the earth for everything from acid rain to the
Exxon Valdez disaster to farming and harvesting the skins of
little furry animals. Clearly, if human beings have dominion
over creation, we have botched the job. And so, from many sources
today, comes the proposal that we should give up the dominion
business and affirm our harmony with the creation and our place
in the whole family of life, as one participant, not necessarily

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the dominant one, the messiest one obviously, the one endangering
the whole enterprise, but not the most important one. It is
important for us to hear it and to learn from it - but also to
understand that there is a different Biblical prescription here.
We are the responsible ones in the story. We are the ones God
addresses and who have the capacity to know God and in our free-
dom and ingenuity the capacity to put things out of balance to
mess things up. The dominion given the human beings in the
creation story is not the freedom to exploit, consume, discard
and despoil, but rather the dominion of the Shepherd - the pro-
tection and preservation and just management of the enterprise.

The faith word is not that human dominion has ruined
creation, but that unwise, unjust, irresponsible dominion.
The faith critique of the ecological disaster we are making for
ourselves is that we have forgotten something about our essential

being - namely that we are the managers of the project and our
commission is from that creator. We are, that is to say, by our
very nature, stewards. It is the first and perhaps most impor-

tant Biblical word about us.

The story goes on. The Bible is anything but naive about
the human role in the drama of creation. Things begin to dete-
riorate in paradise pretty quickly. In fact, every time I hear
about these people who will be living in a self-sufficient,
plastic domed bio-sphere for several years, I wonder if they plan
to read the first two chapters of Genesis. They really should,
every morning.

In any event, things begin to deteriorate and the problem,
it seems at first is that Adam and Eve won't abide by the basic
rules of the place, want to make the rules themselves apparently.
It's pride, mammoth egotism. And of course, church teachers have
never been able to resist the possibility that it all has ulti-
mately to do with sex, with the fact that they're walking around
in that garden with no clothes on, after all. But, there's
another way to look at it, namely that Adam and Eve cop out, are
not the responsible agents the creator clearly wants them to be.
It's not pride - it's moral laziness, the wonderful theological
word for which is "sloth." They don't think too highly of then-
selves, but not highly enough. The first thing Eve does is let a
snake tell her what to do. Adam is a pushover. He does what Eve
tells him to do. When they are called to account, he biames her
and she blames the snake. [See Apathy, Abdication, and Acadia,
in Who's Killing the Church?, p. 112]

Not a bad description of the human condition, 1991. There
is a lot of evidence that the real human crisis at the end of the

twentieth century is a sudden and remarkably universal abdication
of responsibility.

10/20/91

Williiam Rasberry wrote a column, "When Social Conscience
Gives Way to Despair," which described a dynamic everyone of us
has experienced. Discussing homelessness and the complex reasons
for it - the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, the fact
that mentally ill persons don't always take their medications on
time so become more mentally ill, the fact that government is
less and less willing to provide social services and shelter, the
fact that there is little profit in low cost urban housing - said
Rasberry, "I no longer see it as a problem that's likely to be
solved anytime soon and as a result I find it hard to sustain
much interest in it. You don't have to be mean to walk away.

All it takes is the certainty that nothing can be done" [Chicago
Tribune, 9/9/91]

That's what we're doing. We're simply walking away. Did
you see the picture in the paper last week of the bulldozer
flattening the pathetic shacks of the homeless in New York? On
that day it happened I was talking to Peggy Shriver, who lives
and works in New York City, who said one of her most vivid memo-
ries and worst moments came when she was visiting a third world
nation in Africa and witnessed government bulldozers flattening
the shacks of poor people. She said she shuddered and wept and
thanked God for being an American, a society where something like

that would never happen. "Look at what we have become," she
said.

Of course, it's complicated and tough and multifaceted. But
what we're doing about it, as far as I can see - and about urban
crime, poverty, health care, education, is walking away. We
can't even do something so absolutely clear and simple as elimi-
nate from our cities, from gangs, from the possession of patho-
logical killers, semi-automatic assault weapons whose sole pur-
pose is to kill as many people as quickly and as efficiently as
possible. And we'll walk away from it again, won't we? In fact,

the House of Representatives did the day after the massacre in
Texas.

Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow, in The Struggle for
America's Soul, observes the steady decline in the percentage of
the population that votes and that in some local elections only
five per cent of the eligible voters are going to the polls.

Robert Bellah's new book, The God Society traces our dete-
rioration and refusal to be responsible. America is experiencing
a massive failure of civic courage, he says. Voters rebel against
taxes necessary for sustaining public services. Politicians
encourage the rebellion. The federal government shifts responsi-
bility down to the states. States depend on lotteries and casino
gambling schemes to balance the budget and hand it on down to the
cities which are chronically broke. One of the most familiar
political phenomena is the fiction that public spending must be
Slashed because there is no money. There is, or course, plenty

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of money. We simply are not willing to use it, to be responsible
about the life of-our nation. We have become, someone wrote
recently, "consumers of our own lives."

Instead of the ethics of responsibility, we are more and
more willing to live by the politics of blame, and when possible
to sue. A Time cover article last summer suggested that we are a
nation of blamers, and cited a recent viewing of Walt Disney's
"Fantasia" which attracted a half a dozen different protests and
pickets, including people who thought that tutu-clad hippos
frolicking to the Dance of the Hours were ridiculing the over-
weight and Fundamentalist Christians who bewailed the depiction
of evolution in The Rite of Spring.

Time editorialized that "the victim's passion for blaming
everyone except himself - has about it the immobility of addic-
tion," a sentiment echoed by Sam Keen writing about men and men's
taking responsibility for their own lives. Keen says that in our
zeal to not "blame the victim we have created a sanctuary of
victimhood into which both the truly innocent and the truly
guilty can retreat...gamblers, drug dealers, sexual harassers,
child abusers...victims all. "Is no one responsible?" he asks.
" No one guilty? No one to blame? Are we fated to play predes-
tined roles in a techno-economic social system that is stuck on
automatic pilot?" [Fire in the Belly, p. 205]

The word of faith for this hour is responsibility. The
saving word is that human beings, you and I, have the high and
holy calling of God upon us. We are not to be victims, passive
observers of gigantic forces far out of our control. We are the
stewards, the managers. We are the only managers there are,
whether we want to be our not. We are in charge here.

Jesus told a simple little story one time about a man who
goes away on a journey and entrusts his property to his servants.
In fact, it is the last moral teaching Jesus did before he died

and we might conclude that it was a kind of summary of all he
said.

You know the story. The man with five talents invested,
made five more and was rewarded for his good management. The
same thing happened with the man who had two talents. The man who
had one talent, hid it, returned it to his master and was uncere-
moniously thrown off the estate, condemned for his laziness.

The story is about responsibility and it brings this whole
matter close to home.

You and I cannot single-handedly solve the problems con-

fronting the world, the nation, the city. But we can, in the

name of the creator who gave us dominion, and in the name of

Jesus Christ, who calls us to discipleship - we can refuse to
5

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throw up our hands in despair, we can refuse to walk away, refuse
to abdicate responsibility. We can continue to protest, com-
plain, argue, telephone, discuss, vote and we can in modest ways

work to change things. We can hope and pray and love...without
ceasing.

We can shift the basic way we think about our own lives -
the talents, skills, the resources, the money we personally have
been given - shift from thinking of ourselves as consumers to
managers. We are in charge. You are the CEO of your own life.
You are responsible.

It's a highly and deeply personal matter finally. "There is
a huge space of pain inside each of us - of grief for some life
we never led," Ellen Anthony wrote recently. [Weavings,

May/June, 1991]

There is a place of pain inside each of us at missed oppor-
tunities,

at decisions not made,

gifts not given,

great projects not tried,

high aspirations not attempted,
of love not expressed,

passion not experienced,
devotion not invested,

faith not lived.

It does not have to be. God calls us to life - to dominion -
to responsibility - to stewardship.

We are the whole point of the project...hard as it is to say
and to understand. We are what God had in mind. We are God's

beloved. It is our glory and it is our responsibility.
Amen.

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