February 22, 2009 Des Moines
Ephesians 4:1-7, 15-16
Using Well the
Tools – Stewardship of all God’s Gifts
We take inventory every now and then, and vow to
somehow do better. But as the annual
Rummage Sale at the church routinely shows, no matter how much we clear out and
give away, it’s like withdrawing your finger from the ocean: it never leaves a hole.
Years ago, the irreverent and now-late comedian
George Carlin riffed on our propensity for accumulating “stuff.” “All you need in life,” he observed, “is a
little place for your stuff. That’s all
your house is: a place to keep your
stuff. A house is just a pile of stuff
with a cover on it. And when you leave
your house, you gotta lock it up. You
wouldn’t want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. That’s all your
house is: a place to keep your stuff
while you go out and get more stuff.
Sometimes you gotta move – got to get a bigger house. Why? No
room for your stuff.” [1]
Stuff:
gathered and hoarded and hovered protectively over. There is, most of us have to confess,
something truthful about that rather nondescript characterization of our
accumulations. “Stuff.” But we do have other examples.
There was, I vividly recall, always a sort of comic
awkwardness to graciousness in my grandparents’ Berclair home. You know how it is as a grandchild: you grow up around certain knick-knacks and
decorative elements that, over time, become more “artifact” than “decoration” –
this vase or that frame or this chair or that candy dish. As I grew into young adulthood and old
enough to notice the familiar features around their house, there developed what
was at least a fondness for them if not outright reverence – quite irrespective
of any real monetary value. Sometimes I
would even express that fondness out loud.
Invariably my grandmother would respond, not with a
“thank you” or “that was given to us by…” or “we bought that when…” but rather
“I’ve promised that to “so-and-so” – an aunt or a cousin or a friend. And sure enough, if you were to look on the
back of, or on the bottom of, virtually anything around the house you were
likely to find a piece of masking tape on which had been written a name.
I use to think my grandmother’s “distributive
anticipation” was rather morbid – like she was constantly preparing for a near
end to her days and she was getting her affairs in order. I didn’t know anybody who seemed quite so
conscious of their own mortality as she seemed to be, and the awkwardness
notwithstanding of trying to find a way, then, to clarify that I wasn’t really
trying to hint my way into her estate planning, the whole “death thing” made me
rather uncomfortable. She seemed to me
old enough to have already lived forever, so I didn’t really see any point in
worrying that that would ever – at least in my lifetime – change. Why, then, make all these plans for household
distribution?
What I finally figured out much later – and
unfortunately long after my grandparents’ things were, indeed, distributed for those
very reasons – was that they weren’t preoccupied with death, as I had presumed;
they simply weren’t preoccupied with possessions, either. They had them, yes, and used
them, sure – and certainly enjoyed them – but weren’t possessed
by
them. More like “trustees,” my
grandparents were merely the current stewards of things that no one finally
“owns.”
My grandfather’s application of that principle showed
itself in the form of land. Somewhere
along the way – and partly for family reasons and partly for investment reasons
– he had begun to accumulate land. A
field here, a parcel there, a waterway, grazing pasture, hunting acres and
every now and then a crop. He had it all
as far back as I can remember – the Bee County farm, the Hartman Place, the May
Property, Loma Alta. And it was those
designations that always mystified me.
“May” I recognized as my grandmother’s maiden name, but who was
“Hartman” and why was Grandad’s land
still known by his name? “When,” I
always wondered, “does it ever become “the Diebel
Place”?
Well, never
as far as my granddad was concerned.
Land, he seemed instinctively to understand, was something that
stretches out on all sides of us – before us and after us. We may hold title to it for a time, but we
are only taking care of it for a season.
Bill and Patti Sutherland seem to “get” all of this
as well. Having indulged for years a
love of Italy, and after traveling there whenever they could, and ultimately
ready for a change from their successful commercial real estate business in
Texas, they sold the company, their home and most of what was in it and moved
to the small, medieval Tuscan village of Montefollonico where they had found an
acreage and a house they could purchase and renovate as their own. The stone house, built 500-700 years ago,
sits just a mile or so outside the walled community, on a hill, nested in a
grove of olive trees and grape vines planted long before they arrived. There they live each moment with the
magnitude of time and their small part in it.
“We don’t own this
place in any real sense of the word,” Bill told me as we walked around the
barn. “Sure, we bought the title to it,
as far as that goes, but all we are really doing is borrowing it for awhile and
taking care of it as best we can.”
They are “stewards” of it, in other words, for
however long they are privileged to share its beauty and its history and
responsibility for its well-being.
My mother’s parents, in a very different place and in
very different ways took those principles to an even more active
application: more than care-taking, for
them stewardship was partnership. They
did their best to reduce what is now called their “carbon footprint” long
before Al Gore was born, let alone popularized the phrase. They composted kitchen scraps long before I
had ever heard the word, and carefully tended the fruit and nut trees they had
planted behind the house that my grandmother’s father had built for them by
hand.
Those trees, to their way of thinking, were living
beings that warranted no less attention and tender loving care than they,
themselves, did. Indeed, they saw those
trees and their own lives as deeply inter-dependent and co-existent: a kind of complementarity that benefited not
only themselves and the trees, but also those with whom they shared the
harvest, and now a subsequent generation who live there and enjoy the harvest
precisely because of their careful tending.
Stewards:
caretakers, so to speak, of that which no one can finally “own,” and
co-workers in the growth and well-being of the whole. It is an ancient way of viewing the world
around us and all that it contains; a sense that we are part of and partners in
something larger than ourselves. We have
a role to play, to be sure, and our own narration to contribute, but it isn’t
finally our story. Different cultures have had different ways of
talking about it, but children of Abraham and followers of Jesus pretty quickly
get around to talking about God, and the sense of profound abundance.
“Christian
stewardship,” writes one theologian, “is about the activity of God who showers
us with gifts and invites us into a covenantal responsibility for the benefit
of all of creation. A stewarding
community is a community of overwhelming gratitude and overflowing generosity.”[2]
Over
and over the New Testament calls attention to the gifts that are full within us
and all around us, and that our role is to take good care of them and make good
use of them; that the ultimate purpose of them is to glorify the God who put us
in charge of them and to build up the community in need of them. They are not ours to possess, but are ours to
prosper and contribute.
That perspective of
wealth takes some strength and steadiness in a season like the one weighing
down on us just now, so taut with the chill of apparent scarcity. Scarcity drives people to lock up and shut
out and hold tight – instincts quite in conflict with God’s assurance of
abundance. We become afraid and selfish
and competitive and protective in ways that finally shatter the community we
are partnering with God to build, and sucks the joy from our souls. But both the testaments that inform our
spirits assume a “world of plenty, where, when God's gracious righteousness
reigns, there is more than enough for everyone.”[3]
As
a people with roots in Eden who were guided to a land of milk and honey and
plentifully fed with a couple of loaves and a few fish, scripture nudges us
toward tithing – even in the leaner years; toward sharing and generous
compassion grounded in God’s assurance of adequacy. But our culture – even when the global
economy is humming merrily along – encourages us to believe that enough is
never enough; that there is always more “stuff” to want and covet and finally
add to our “pile of other stuff with a cover over it.”
The gifts of God,
however, were never meant to pile. Like
horns and drums and keyboards and strings, those gifts were given for music – offered
up and woven into harmonies with others generously shared. And God knows we could use a little more music
in our lives these days. Using well the
gifts we’ve been given – accepting the ministry of stewardship – begins, then,
with the recognition that we have them; and that once taken out from under
cover and faithfully used, the whole community can sing.