If you hear stewardship in a church context, you may find yourself groaning and deciding not to listen before another word is said. Christians have a bad habit of using the word stewardship as a euphemism for fundraising. You hear stewardship and it won’t be long before the pledge cards come out and it’s time to do the church budget.

I share the blame for this. For years I worked at the Ecumenical Stewardship Center. You would have to dig deep to find any materials on environmentalism or homelessness. While we tried to promote theological reflection, the most popular request was still for pledge cards.

Stewardship goes way beyond what we donate or do not donate to the church. As a Quaker core value, what we call Testimonies, stewardship–specifically stewardship of the earth sometimes gets left out. Stewardship, however, is deeply related to the values of Community and Equality. How we treat property affects how we treat one another

If you are going to start a sermon about the human relationship to the earth, Genesis 1:26, would be a typical place to begin. The King James Version is probably what comes to mind. This translation makes the negative aspects of how people misinterpret this verse particularly apparent:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

People interpret this as God giving us the command to knock Mother Nature to the ground, handcuff her, and spray pepper spray in her eyes. There’s a lack of respect and honor, but power is clear.

It gets worse when you throw in the idea that this life is unimportant compared to the afterlife and that one day God is going to rescue us from this world and destroy what’s left. If it’s going to be destroyed anyways, then why bother keeping it clean and caring for it. Why not just treat it as one big, giant, single use, disposable diaper.

Sometimes we have to swim upstream against history to be good stewards. Two historical notes come to mind. The Romans played an outsized role in early Christianity. Their approach to nature was to bend it to their will. They were well known for their roads. Part of it is their craftsmanship which means their roads are still around more than a thousand years later. There is another aspect, though, too. Roman roads ran straight across the landscape regardless of the terrain. They saw their will as superior to the shape of the landscape. Let us work with nature, not against it. 

The second historical note is about Christian missionaries in France. Local Saxon worship combined worship centered on holy trees and sacred springs combined with Christian folk traditions. St. Boniface backed by Charlemagne’s troops worked to cleanse the local religion of nature elements. One major way they did this was chopping down the people’s sacred trees. They had neither respect for the ways of the people nor nature. We can respect the knowledge and wisdom of those we encounter and Christianity does not need to be stripped of its connection with nature.[i] 

 In a more modern translation of the passage from Genesis, the Common English Bible, says the far more neutral “take charge.” I picture a transfer of authority. Maybe at a military base one commander officially accepts command from another. Perhaps a shift change happens at the hospital. One shift reports to the next and ensures continuity of care. There’s authority involved, but no implication of aggression. We can manage and care for creation. We are not called to beat it into submission. 

You will notice that we started this morning in Leviticus and not Genesis. You may think of Leviticus as the section of the Bible that says who you can have sex with or the rules against your dinner at Red Lobster, but here in the section on the Jubilee year you will find something more profound.

God says, “The land must not be permanently sold because the land is mine. You are just immigrants and foreign guests of mine.” We may be living on the land now, but it does not belong to us. It belongs to God.

This is where the stewardship part comes in. Merriam Webster defines stewardship as “the conducting, supervising, or managing of something.” We care for the world and its resources, but it never truly belongs to us, because it is God’s forever. 

Picture yourself working at a restaurant. The manager went home at 5pm and asked you to close. You are in charge for now, but you know the manager will be back in the morning with expectations about cleanup and the money. In the same way, respect creation and supervise the use of nature. 

Or consider this: A friend has asked you to pet sit while she’s gone. She wants you to feed the cat and scoop the cat litter. She gave you permission to eat what’s in the cupboard and sleep in the bed. She expects the house to be in good condition and the cat healthy when she returns.

In the same way, we steward the earth. It belongs to God. God lets us use its resources and stay here, but God would not be amused if we let the whole thing go to pot or mistreat the others that live here.

There’s more to that passage in Leviticus. From time to time, the land must be allowed to lie fallow to let it regenerate. The people who lived through the Dust Bowl learned this lesson up close and personal. Overuse of the land degrades it’s fertility. We must respect the land and care for it.

There is also an element of economic justice to the passage. Land must go back to the families who once owned it so that no one is left without land. And in the ancient world there was a direct association between land and food. Since no one is landless no one goes hungry. We are called to care for those around us. This Jubilee where land us returned is set to happen every 50 years. It is not enough to balance the scales once, but it must be done again and again. 

Read this along with the Deuteronomy 15 command to lend generously and forgive debts every 7 years. Regularly people get reset to a baseline of resources. No one remains in debt or without land.

As good stewards, God expects us to treat one another and the world well. God expects us to return the world to God in good condition when we are done with it. God’s justice requires that we share the world so everyone has somewhere to live and something to eat. The world is God’s and everything in it. We are only stewards.

Queries

·  When has being responsible for something or someone mattered to you?

·  How does viewing the world and everything in it as God’s change your approach to life?

·  How would taking seriously the Jubilee year change our world?

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[i] pg 226-227, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire by Rebecca Ann Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock