Stewards of Everything
Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church
October 12, 2014
John Buchanan
The powers that be around here wanted to make sure that the visiting preacher knew that today was the beginning of Stewardship season, with the hope, I assume, that I might say something to encourage your generous financial commitment to Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church and its mission. The assumption, of course, is that the topic of stewardship, and anything having to do with money – as in giving it away – is distasteful, awkward, uncomfortable at least, and offensive at most. As a matter of fact, William Sloane Coffin said once that if he visited a church and discovered, too late, that it was Stewardship Sunday, he would try to leave discreetly, and if that was not possible, he would spend the time reading the newspaper. Coffin was one of the brightest, creative and certainly bravest ministers I ever knew. I was privileged to count him as a friend, but I think he was wrong about Stewardship. In fact, one time John Calvin, the theological father of Presbyterianism, said: “We are stewards of everything.”
Stewards of everything…It’s about money, but it is about much more than money. Someone in the church fundraising business once said that if what the churches all do in the fall under the guise of stewardship is merely about money, we should stop all the fussing, the meetings, promotional materials, pledge cards and simply raffle a Buick. It’s quicker, easier, and far more lucrative.
Stewardship, quite simply, means that way you and I express our Christian faith by the way we live and conduct our affairs. It is about money and how we use it but it is much more. It is, I believe, how you and I respond to our Lord’s invitation to give our lives away, to live as God’s people, in God’s kingdom, to be fully and completely alive. Another good word for stewardship is responsibility.
Do you remember the first time you were entrusted by your parents or some other authority figure with major responsibility? For many it was the day you first drove the family car without an adult present. For me, it was building a fire in the furnace. Life with a coal furnace was a challenge and building a fire in the furnace was something of an art form, long lost with natural gas and thermostats. I’m not even sure there were ever coal furnaces in Texas. Well, in western Pennsylvania, when the weather turned cold (I’m not even sure it does that here) you had to go down into the basement, to the coal cellar, shovel coal into the furnace and figure out how to light it. It involved wads of newspaper and the coal stacked just so, the stubborn grate opened enough to allow a draft from below. I watched Dad do it for years. He was a master at it – almost like watching Renoir paint. Mother hated doing it. So the time came on a chilly autumn afternoon. Dad was at work, and I was summoned to go to the basement – we called it a cellar because that is what it was – and build a fire, which I did with great fear and trepidation, but also pride at being given a man’s job, a man’s responsibility.
It did not go well. The coal was reluctant, my paper wads didn’t do the job, and the coal refused to ignite. I tried several times. I noticed a paintbrush on the workbench, standing in a jar of liquid. I’ll give it a little help, I though. It was turpentine, maybe even gasoline. I carefully made the coal pyramid over the paper wads, lighted the paper with a match and threw the contents of the jar through the furnace door. A fire started all right – unfortunately not in the furnace. The flames shot up the stream of liquid and into the jar, which I dropped, of course, and it shattered, and now the concrete cellar floor was a lake of fire. I called for help. My mother came, and my little brother. She grabbed a blanket – all I had was the big coal shovel. Together we beat the flames back and because there wasn’t much liquid, it was soon extinguished. My little brother, I recall, very much enjoyed the excitement, sitting on the cellar steps, watching. Heart in my throat, so absolutely frightened I could barely breathe, I said to her, “Maybe you ought to build this fire.” “No,” she said, “You do it. Do it right this time.”
Responsibility. Risk. Philosopher-theologian and Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks wrote an important book, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid a Clash of Civilizations, in which he argues that personal responsibility is the most critical, and the most promising idea in the 21st century. It is an idea central to all three Abrahamic faiths, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. It is there on the first page of the Bible when God says, “Let us make humankind in our image and give them dominion” – responsibility, stewardship of the whole creation: turn it over to human beings to manage. The gods of ancient religions ran things, ran everything, from weather to fertility, to warfare. Humans merely acted out the script the god wrote for them. But here, on the very first page of the Bible is a very different idea, a stunning concept – we’re in charge. We have responsibility for the whole place.
That radical idea is expressed in the sublime poetry of Psalm 8.
Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name,
When I look at the heavens – the moon and stars – what are human beings that you are mindful of them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
crowned them with glory and honor – and given them dominion over the work of your hands.
There it is again: responsibility, dominion, stewardship.
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From the very beginning, our faith tradition defines human beings as responsible moral agents. And, when things go wrong, as they frequently do, more often than not it is because someone has failed to take responsibility, to exercise proper stewardship. On the second page of the Bible, when sin enters the story a snake persuades Eve to eat forbidden fruit. Eve persuades Adam. When God catches up with them and demands accountability, Adam blames Eve – “she made me do it,” and Eve blames the snake. No one accepts responsibility.
It is the subject of one of the last stories Jesus told.
A man goes on a journey. Before he leaves he summons three servants and entrusts them with a responsibility – the management of his property, his resources. It’s in the form of talents, money, that is. To one he gives a lot, five talents. To another two; to the third, one talent.
The question is, what to do next? How to exercise faithful responsibility, or stewardship?
The first servant takes the money to market, invests it, takes a considerable risk, and it pays off. He doubles his investment. Servant number two does the same thing. The third servant plays it safe; prudent, cautious, conservative, he buries his master’s money in the ground for safekeeping.
The man returns from his journey and his servants report. Servant one tells him about his successful investment, and his master says, “Congratulations! Well done! You’ve been trustworthy in a few things. I’ll give you responsibility for many things.” The exchange is repeated for servant two. Now, the man, we have to assume, was astute. He knows the two servants took risks with his money and could have lost it all, but he likes their creative management, their ambitious stewardship.
I wonder what servant three was thinking as he watched what happened with his more ambitious friends. He pulls out his one talent and proudly exclaims: “Here it is, master, exactly what you gave me. I’ve protected it, kept it safe for you while you were gone.” To his great surprise, for his efforts he is treated as harshly as anyone in the Bible: stripped of all his possessions, kicked out, his money is added to the account of servant one.
Jesus is talking to a group of people about to face the most dangerous and critical weeks of their lives. He’s about to be arrested, tried, and executed, and he seems to know it. They will be on their own now: now they will be in charge. He desperately wants them to begin to assume responsibility for their own lives and of the fragile enterprise he has started with them, this quiet kingdom of compassion and kindness and reconciliation and justice and peace. They are stewards of it now, responsible, in charge.
Social science has tried to convince us that we are not in charge, that personal choice and responsibility are illusions (see Jonathan Sacks).
Freud said we’re not in charge: our subconscious drives are. Karl Marx said it’s economics that form and shape and motivate us, economic determinism. At the opposite end of the spectrum, market capitalism says something similar. The market, consumerism, will determine who we are and what we do. B.F. Skinner says it’s all in our genetic code. Free will is an illusion, personal responsibility a great and dangerous myth.
And sometimes it feels as if we don’t have the power, the strength, the authority to be responsible for anything. We seem to be in the hands of huge forces completely out of our control. We do not feel like active moral agents, we do not feel like we have dominion over anything, we feel like victims.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the sin of respectable people is running from responsibility. Bonhoeffer’s distinguished academic career – and his life were cut short when he assumed personal responsibility for what was happening to his beloved Germany in the 1930s. He left the safety and security of life at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, returned to Germany, joined the resistance, helped plan an assassination attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler, was arrested and a few days before the end of the war, executed. His major academic work is a classic work on Ethics, and the heart of his ethical theology is the idea of responsibility. Bonhoeffer concluded that to believe in and follow Jesus is to become a responsible citizen, a responsible moral agent, responsible for the life of the community, the nation, the Church.
“Let this, therefore, be our rule for generosity and beneficence: we are the stewards of everything,” John Calvin said.
This wonderful church, for instance: its faithful witness to the gospel, its elegant music and worship, its care for the needy, its warm embrace of children and young people, its representation in the community of what it means to be God’s people, the Body of Christ in the world. All of it is nobody’s responsibility but yours, its members and friends. And one very important way you exercise that responsibility is by investing in it, by pledging, and committing and giving money to it.
I think this story Jesus told his disciples turned them around, got them to thinking that the way to be faithful to him and to his vision of the Kingdom of God was to invest their lives, not to scurry to safety, but to plunge ahead, to speak out, to go public, to put it all on the line.
And so it is his final bidding to you and me. He invites us to be his disciples, to live our lives as fully as possible by investing them, by risking. To be his man or woman, he said, is not so much believing ideas about him as it is following him. It is to experience renewed responsibility for the use and investment of these one and only precious lives of ours. It is to know yourself as responsible for the lives of those dear to you, and also the life of the community, the nation, the world and the church.
It is to be bold and brave, to reach high and care deeply. It is to hurt when brothers and sisters hurt, to be impatient and angry at injustice and unnecessary suffering, to weep at the world’s brokenness and rejoice at its goodness and beauty.
God has created us to be responsible. Jesus Christ invites us to the adventure of faith, the high risk, bracing venture of discipleship, stewards of everything.