September 20, 2009 Des Moines
3rd in the “Getting Started in the Right Direction” Series
Genesis 1:26-31; Psalm 24:1
In the
Direction of Stewardship
It was awhile ago now – I don’t know; perhaps as many as 15 years ago. I was alone at the home of my brother and sister-in-law, though I no longer recall just why. All extraneous details of the visit have faded, while the events of that evening have been seared into the linings of both my stomach and my heart. Either by design or by default, I was left in charge of the family pet – a small, curly-haired dog named Chasy – at least for the evening if not for the night.
It would have been a comfortable enough assignment – I like dogs and whatever else I had to occupy my time in those hours by myself, Chasy’s company would have been welcomed. As I say, I don’t remember details – perhaps I had gone outside to retrieve something from my car and had left the front door ajar; perhaps the door had never been secured. Who knows? What I remember is that it was raining, and that the house was quiet – quieter, I suddenly became aware in that terrorizing way of knowing, than it should have been under the circumstances.
Where was Chasy? I called her name. I inventoried the rooms. I looked out back, and then forced myself to scan the pavement up and down in the street. Nothing. No one. I don’t know how long I kept looking. I don’t know how long I paced around the house, sick with the condemnation of knowing that I had been left in charge – entrusted with the care of this life beloved by my brother’s family – and almost before I had begun, I had failed.
This, of course, is the real definition of stewardship: taking care of that which belongs to another; standing in their place; acting on their behalf; tending to that which has been entrusted to your care. And in this particular stewardship – stewardship of a home and a family pet – I had miserably failed.
I don’t know how long the fingers of the silence and the shame continued to tighten around my throat; I only know that at some point the telephone rang. And I know that for some odd reason I answered it. And I know that the caller was a woman inquiring about a dog – a little curly-haired and rain-soaked one that had taken refuge on her porch – at a townhome complex on a very busy thoroughfare several blocks away. The tag on its collar was inscribed with this number. And I know that I tore out of the house hardly bothering to hang up the phone and tore off to the scribbled-down address, where no longer worrying about the rain and my soggy clothes and the upholstery of the car, I thanked the woman profusely, cradled the shivering dog in my lap throughout the drive home, and abandoned whatever else I had had to occupy my time, resolved to never let Chasy out of my sight again. Given this precious second chance, resolved to be a more responsible steward.
That, as I say, is what stewardship is all about. I recognize that it’s not the word’s typical connotation – even among the experts who ought to know better. I pulled down several stewardship books this week from my library shelves as potential resources for this sermon. In virtually all of them the Table of Contents listed only chapters dealing with the subject of monetary giving – “Giving Principles”, “Motivations for Giving,” “Encouraging a Spirit of Generosity” and the like.
I don’t really understand how this word so expansive and multi-faceted; that wants to talk about our relationship with all that is and how we were intended to fit into the whole, evaporated down to this tiny and shriveled remnant of itself. That’s not to suggest that financial generosity isn’t a faithful expression of the stewardship of the monies placed in our care. It is – for all kinds of good reasons! It’s just that giving and generosity neither begin nor exhaust the meaning of stewardship.
Christian stewardship is a vocational responsibility that grows out of the prior belief that everything that exists belongs to God – the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil we till, the people with whom we co-exist; or as the Psalmist put it, “The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it...” And lest there be any confusion as to why that is, the Psalmist goes on to explain: because God “founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters.” It is the same assertion spelled out in Genesis 1 in much greater and more poetic detail. God made it, and has not seen fit to sign away title to any of it. Everything that is belongs to God.
But, says the writer of Genesis, people have a special role in the midst of it all. We are to have “dominion.” Unfortunately, through the generations that word has mistakenly gotten associated with domination, leading humankind to behave like a child asserting to his playmates about one toy or another, “It’s mine and I can do with it whatever I please.”
A closer inspection, however, of the original Hebrew behind those two provocative words in the Creation story – “image”, as in “created in the image of God,” and “dominion,” turn up a behavioral expectation that sounds quite different. The word, “image”, for example, comes from the same root as the word for “Viceroy” which refers to a person appointed by a king to rule over a province. “A viceroy has the responsibility to rule the province as the king would. Being created in God’s image then suggests that humans are to be God’s responsible representatives on earth.”[1]
And “dominion” is better understood as stewardship rather than domination. Humans, in other words, “are commissioned to take care of the earth, use it appropriately, keep it healthy and beautiful.”[2]
Because the earth is not ours to do with as WE please, but to do with as pleases the Lord who made it. And our collective record on that score earns marks about as high as I earned taking care of my brother’s dog.
It is no small thing, then, for us as a congregation to name
stewardship as one of four key areas of focus and attention as we lean into the
ministry to which God is calling us: to
be a Stewarding Community that models
and advocates for a faithful, responsible use of all our gifts and
resources. Since
the first Sunday of this month we have tried to get this new season started in
the right direction by giving attention to these key focus areas – our
determination to be a Caring
Community that builds and nurtures active relationships that
respond to human concerns, joys, and needs, and a Welcoming Community that
is intentional about extending hospitality to all people. After today there is one more to consider,
but today our attention is turned to stewardship.
So, what might it look like to act as a Viceroy on behalf of that kind of
King? What might it look like to live as
stewards – “responsible representatives on earth” of all the holdings of
heaven? Surely it would begin with
speechless awe and reverential honor at the intricate beauty and glory of it
all. Surely we would approach it and
take it into our hands like we would the most precious crystal in our
grandparents’ cabinet. Surely it would
mean not squandering or poisoning or using for ill or selfish satisfaction
anything within our charge; but more than that, surely it would mean constantly
paying attention to learn all we can about the unintended implications of the
various things we do, and once discovering some way we are doing harm, to cease
it.
We can only do the best we can with the knowledge that we have, but when
our knowledge increases, the “best we can do” must change accordingly. Learning, for example, of the destructive implications
of land-filling all our garbage, we resolve to reuse and recycle more and throw
away less – using neither paper nor plastic, for example, but reusable bags at
the grocery store. Realizing how
precious and limited is our water, we determine to take shorter showers. Learning that the chemicals we are spraying
on farm fields runs off into rivers, destroying fish and aquatic life all the
way down into the Gulf of Mexico, we stop it and do something else. Ooops.
Unfortunately, we haven’t done that.
Our knowing has
left unaffected our doing. And not only the earth, but we will
be the poorer for it.
I think about the decades of
argument around the prospect of global warming – is it happening? If so, are we really the cause of it? If so, is there anything we can really do
about it? – and how after awhile all the arguing about the concept of it
became just a clever way of avoiding any action relative to the potentially
catastrophic implications of
it.
But that would hardly be
stewardship – which is defined as the best and most protective and considerate
use of that which belongs to another, put only temporarily into our care...
...Stewardship of the earth, or the air, or the water or the trees; the
money we spend, the relationships we develop, or the gifts that reveal
themselves manifest in us. We are God’s
representatives in this place, and setting off in the right direction we intend
to act in God’s best interests – as a community of stewards, living each day in
the image of God.