“Stewardship: The Big Picture”
Genesis 1:26-31; Hebrews 12:1-3
Ann Dixon, Kristen Eiswerth, Mim Jacobson, Marian Korth
Oakland-Cambridge Presbyterian Church, Cambridge, WI
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time -
Stewardship Commitment Sunday
November 12, 2006
AD:
It’s great to have this opportunity to
share ideas and images of what stewardship is, and what it means for each of us
to be a good steward. Many of these ideas were touched upon at the St. Olaf
College conference that the four of us attended last July; after all, a
conference with the theme “For the Fruit of All Creation” is a great place to
think about our responsibilities to one another and to our world. Before we
share with you some of the nuggets of insight that we heard there, perhaps we
should tell you a bit about why each of us went.
MK:
I went to the conference because it’s a
great place to get new ideas and inspiration for worshiping God through music.
This is the third year I’ve gone to the St. Olaf Conference on Worship, Theology
and the Arts, and I’ve always come home from the conference with lots of ideas
and new enthusiasm for planning music for worship.
MJ:
I went because I read an article in
SOJOURNERS magazine about St. Olaf and their support of sustainable agriculture
in their own dining hall. Having time to think about the moral ecology of
everyday life with Dr. Farrell piqued my interest. Plus I knew from past
experience the worship services would be wonderful.
KE:
I went to the conference to sing in the
youth choir.
AD:
I went to the conference to be a dorm
roommate and chaperone for Kristen, and to get involved in three of my favorite
things: drawing, music, and the natural environment. And it didn’t hurt that I
have spent five years living in Northfield, so I was also able to reconnect with
old friends and old haunts.
AD:
So back to the topic of stewardship. The
stewardship question facing many Presbyterians around this time of year is: how
much am I going to pledge – financially, that is? And, of course, that is not a
trivial question. And yet we all know that that question does not really address
the Big Picture. Our PC-USA website comments on stewardship, and sure enough,
its commentary is Big Picture all the way. It says, “… Stewardship is not just
one part of Christian discipleship; it involves every aspect of life in all the
stages of life….Stewardship is the grateful response to God's grace and
goodness. It requires a consideration of how our choices affect us and others,
of how we can be good caretakers of the created world, and of how we can best
serve God as disciples of Christ.”
MJ:
So the Big Picture has something to do
with the link between our commitment to Christ and the way we use all of our
resources – our money, our time, our land, our water, our air. On a daily basis,
we make decisions all the time about our resources – how much to spend, how much
to save, how much to give, what to drive, how far to drive, what to eat and
drink, what to wear, what to do with our time.
AD:
It was pretty easy to feel that I could
be a good steward of God’s creation during that week at St. Olaf. Staying on
campus, and attending a conference with 300 or so very friendly people, I felt a
real sense of community right away. Meals were communal, and they featured
organic food from a nearby, local farm. My use of petroleum and electricity was
minimal: I parked the car on Sunday and didn’t use it again till Friday. Since
Kristen and I shared a bathroom down the hall with about 20 other people, I
conserved water—your showers have to be quick in those circumstances. And even
though it was July, there was no blasting the AC – that dorm wasn’t air
conditioned. But I know that’s not my real day-to-day world. I’m an American,
and Americans are really good at environmental impacts.
MK:
In fact, they’re an essential part of the
American way of life. In a book called
We’re Number One,
Andrew Shapiro notes the accomplishments of American culture. Many of them are
quite wonderful. Others are problematic, including many of our environmental
achievements. Among the nineteen major industrial nations, for example,
Americans were first in the world in green house gas emissions, and first in
contributing to acid rain; first in air pollutants per capita; first in forest
depletion.
AD:
First in paper consumption per capita,
first in hazardous waste per capita, first in gasoline consumption per capita,
first in oil imports, and first in offshore oil spills.
MK:
First in garbage per person, first in TVs
per person; first in cars per person, and first in use of cars instead of public
transportation.
MJ:
Among major industrial nations, the
United States was number one in infant mortality, number one in children and old
people in poverty, number one in big homes and in homelessness, and number one
in executive salaries and inequalities of pay. We’re number one in time devoted
to TV, and last in books published per capita. This, too, is the nature of
American life.
MK:
In a wonderful book called
Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday
Things, John Ryan and Alan
Durning explore the environmental impacts of stuff that most of us use every day
– a cup of coffee, a newspaper, a computer, a t-shirt, and so on – where does it
come from? Who does it impact? And what
resources are used? Once you follow a day in the life of an average American and
see the secret lives of your food, your clothes, and your toys, your world will
never look the same.
AD:
So I’m in favor of huge tags on
merchandise that will begin to tell us exactly what we’re buying into. On
t-shirts, for example, I think it would affect my purchasing if I knew where the
cotton grows and how.
MK:
How does this cotton culture affect the
soils, the watersheds nearby, and people downstream? What kind of emissions
enter the atmosphere and what effects do they have on air quality and climate
change?
MJ:
Who spins the cotton and sews the shirts?
Do they work in conditions I would work in? What’s the employment record of this
retailer? Would I feel good about working here?
AD:
Information like this is called
“full-cost accounting,” and it’s hardly ever practiced in America because we
don’t really want to be held accountable for our social and environmental
impacts.
MK:
We say we believe in conservation,
freedom, fairness, and justice. But our operative values – the ones we actually
put into practice – say something else. When we look honestly at our lives, we
basically buy into different values. When push comes to shove, we’d rather have
low, low prices than high, high values.
MJ:
To some extent, we don’t respond to our
environmental impacts because life in America has become a culture of
distraction. Religious people – which is most of us in America – believe that
people were created by God for important purposes. But most of our culture is
designed to distract us from thinking about those purposes. As Professor Jim
Farrell puts it, “We begin to think about vocation, but advertisers ask us to
think about vacation instead.
AD:
We begin to think about good work, but
society asks us instead to think about a good job, which is one that pays well
so that we can afford the luxuries of life.
MJ:
We start to think about the meanings of
the incarnation, but the SUV ads tell us about a different kind of car nation.
MK:
We begin to think about family time, but
we have TVs in every bedroom so that we don’t have to fight about who watches
what.
AD:
We want to think about tilling and
keeping the earth, but society asks us to worry about keeping up with the
Joneses instead.
MK:
We’re waiting for inspiration from God,
but we need to check our email first. We want to go deep, but we’re constantly
encouraged to pay attention to the surfaces of life.”
MJ:
Given this picture of American life, how
does our faith connect human nature and the natural world? Both ecology and
religion are about relationships. At its root, the word “religion” means
connectedness. The Latin verb “religare” means “to bind together,” and it is
meant to bind people to God, people to each other, and people to God’s creation.
MK:
In the Genesis passage we just read, God
says, “Let us
make human beings in our image, make them
reflecting our
nature.” Why does God say “us?” Rabbi and
author Harold Kushner says, “My suggestion for understanding that sentence is to
see it as connected to the sentence immediately before it, in which God creates
animals. Having created the animals and beasts, He says to them: … “Let us
fashion a creation who will be like you, an animal, in some ways… and will be
like Me in other ways…. You animals will contribute to his physical dimension,
and I will breathe a soul into him.” Here we can see that we are bound, not
only to God, but also to God’s creation. We are related, inside and outside, to
the world around us.
AD:
In the King James version of the Bible,
the Genesis passage says to “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the
earth.” Replenish the earth. This part sometimes gets missed in all the language
of being fruitful and multiplying and taking charge of the earth. But in fact it
tells us how we should treat creation. That simple sentence – “Replenish the
earth” – is an invitation to Adam and Eve, and to you and me, to take part in
the gift of God’s creation, by acting as co-creators with God.
MJ:
At most churches, members contribute
money to sustain their church according to the standard operating procedures of
American culture. But what if we acted differently? What if our Christian
values and our environmental values were the same thing, and
that’s
where we put our money?
AD:
What if we said, “Let there be lights,”
and sold compact fluorescent bulbs to the congregation?
MJ:
What if the coffee served at coffee
fellowship was organic, fair-trade, shade-grown coffee? What if the office
furniture came from a company making desks and chairs from recycled milk
bottles?
MK:
What if our congregation joined an
Adopt-A-River effort and regularly picked up trash from the Koshkonong Creek?
Wouldn’t these practices be a witness to our faith?
AD:
Some of this is happening in some
churches across the nation. Several projects promote sustainability among church
congregations. One of them is the wonderfully named Interfaith Power and Light.
It sounds like a utility company, but it’s really a coalition that promotes
efficient energy use and religious resources for caring for God’s earth. This
group and a number of others are listed in your bulletin, and you can learn more
about them online.
MK:
At the end of the day, we’ll need to make
creation care a part of our institutions – our churches, our schools, our
workplaces, our homes. It needs to become standard operating procedure. In a
good society, institutions would make it possible to live justly by just living.
When flipping the light switch always means that we’re powered by sustainable
energy, we won’t need to worry about our energy choices. When shopping at the
supermarket means that we’re connected to a food system that’s good for people
and the earth, we’ll only need to think about our tastes.
MJ:
This may be pie-in-the-sky today, of
course. But this is the way the world works. This is how change happens. A
hundred years ago, millions of Americans had to think about drinking water. Was
it pure or polluted? Should we boil it before we use it? These days, for the
most part, we don’t think twice about water. We turn on the tap, and fill up our
glasses. When institutions work well, we can take good things for granted.
MK:
So let’s sing about “the fruit of all
creation.” That hymn, which we are about to sing, provides a great model for our
worship and our expressions of faith and beauty.
MJ:
The hymn tells us that life is a gift,
and that we are called to live in a gift economy, where we offer our gifts as we
accept the gifts of God’s garden. The hymn connects stewardship of the earth to
caring for each other, and harvests to sharing.
AD:
The best word in the hymn is “all.” We
are put on earth for God’s glory, for the good of ourselves and other people,
and for the fruit of all creation. This means that we’re responsible not just
for the fruits we eat – the apples and grapes and bananas – but for all the
fruit of all creation, whether or not it’s useful to us.
MK:
This is the story we need to tell,
AD:
both in our churches
MJ:
and in our lives.
Many of the ideas and examples cited
above are from a presentation entitled “The Nature of American Life” by James
Farrell, chair of the History Department at St. Olaf College. Farrell also
serves as the Director of American Studies and teaches Environmental Studies at
St. Olaf College.
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