HomeGood Morning!
My sermon this morning will start off sounding as if I am merely doing a social commentary. I am not, but current social issues are perfect examples of my spiritual point, so I ask you to bear with me.
Some social and political thinkers in our country have attacked the Welfare State on the grounds that it is built on a faulty foundation. They claim that the liberal approach of seeing people as caught in a set of circumstances they cannot control and giving things to people based upon need fosters dependency not self-reliance. They counter propose the hypothesis that having people need to support themselves and pay for services while linking those approaches to building an ownership society is the proper approach for us to take. And so some years ago a proposal was made to change our federal housing programs from rent subsidies towards fostering home ownership and now some are pressing individual ownership of Social Security accounts on the same grounds. This philosophy has also affected human service programs over the years, so that it became fashionable a while ago to say that if people are charged a fee for services, no matter how small that fee may be, they will take the services more seriously. So, in the field of substance abuse counseling that I was in, many agencies stopped providing free services to clients and set minimum fees even if those were only five dollars per session.
I am going to suggest this morning that this hypothesis is incorrect, that it ignores important truths, that it denies an important religious concept, and that it threatens our future.
First, I reject it on the basis of my own life experience. When I personally borrow or rent something, I tend to take better care of it than when I own something. The reason for that is that I feel a special responsibility to the owner. If I neglect something of my own, only I suffer the consequences. If I neglect something that belongs to another, something they have put into my trust, then I violate that trust by not properly caring for the item. I do not believe that I am alone in this attitude.
Let us look at the housing issue. The assumption that is used is that we have slums—Harlem, Bed-Sty, Jamaica, etc—and run down buildings because the people who live there do not care for them properly. Give them ownership and they will tend their buildings. In response I would point out that many areas of New York City have very expensive rental properties that are well tended and kept up. Some will blame socio-economic status for that fact—poor people just do not take good care of things. I deny that. I believe it is not the renters but the owners who are responsible. How long does a broken light bulb or light fixture remain broken on Central Park West? How long does a broken window last? In that neighborhood how long does a broken boiler remain unfixed so that there is no heat or hot water?
Now, I acknowledge several things: owners of low rent properties have less income, lower profit margins and are generally dealing with older and less reliable equipment. Those facts do not transfer the blame for lack of repairs and upkeep to the renters.
I also acknowledge that there are very few people in buildings in the high rent districts who are intentionally breaking light bulbs and disconnecting security cameras so that they can more readily carry out their drug deals. But again, how long would that be tolerated in a high-income area?
It is the fault of the owners that this continues, not the renters.
In public housing projects it is we the taxpayers who, as a group, have decided we want lower taxes and therefore under fund housing for the poor, meaning lack of security, lack of repairs and lack of proper maintenance.
In the counseling field, it is true that when a fee is charged, the lived experience of counselors is that there is a higher level of cooperation in the counseling experience on the part of clients. However, I believe the reason for that has nothing to do with the fact that individuals are more committed because they are paying. I believe it is because many people are pressured into treatment that do not wish to be there and they are looking for any excuse to avoid it. Charging a fee is a screening device that eliminates many of those people before they get into the counselor’s office. Well, then that is a good thing even if does not directly increase individual commitment, right? I think not, because it is also screening out people who really, truly, legitimately cannot pay any amount for treatment. Not even a mere five dollars? That’s right; even five dollars a session is too much for some, especially in an age when we are cutting other forms of social support.
So I believe that ownership is not a “golden bullet” solution for our social problems and that, in fact, it can create many problems. For example, in environmental terms ownership is a concept that encourages exploitation of the earth’s resources. The concept of stewardship—in which one holds a belonging in trust for the real owner—is a better approach. In fact, I clam that an attitude of ownership is the problem; an attitude of stewardship is the solution. Ironically, many of the people who encourage an ownership philosophy as a cure to social ills believe in the stewardship philosophy in other areas of life.
Most conservative Christian congregations rely, like us, heavily on the stewardship concept for their pledge drives.
And economic conservatives, who most fervently push for the idea of ownership as a welfare program, rely heavily on the concept of stewardship within corporate culture.
The officers and Trustees of a corporation are not—at least ex officio—the owners of the corporation. They are Stewards. Board members, CEO’s, CFO’s each of these people is a steward who serves the shareholders. They ace not for themselves, but in the shareholders’ interest; at least, legally and philosophically.
As an aside here, I find it fascinating that in the dismantling of governmental human service programs, the concept of personal responsibility has been pushed by conservatives: let people care for themselves. But in the corporate field there is a strong tendency to deny personal responsibility: has the factory polluted local rivers and streams? Has the company moved jobs overseas? Has the company produced shoddy goods? All of this is required by broad economic forces over which executives have no control. Do not hold them individually accountable for the decisions they have made; there is no personal responsibility for these decisions.
Now, on some of these issues I can accept that argument as true. Shipping jobs overseas, for example, has become necessary for a corporation to remain economically competitive and therefore to survive. Forces greater than them are in charge. I just want the same principal applied back to issues of crime and drugs and poverty; I want it applied back to unemployment and homelessness and hunger.
But I digress. My point here is that in many areas of life, stewardship is a better concept than ownership because it reminds us that we are accountable to someone or something else, that we have responsibilities beyond ourselves to do well.
Kahlil Gibran reminds us in his writing “The Prophet”:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
We do not own our children; their lives are in our keeping when they are young. It is our job to care for them, top provide them with a strong foundation, until they can control their own lives, when we must release them to do so.
We are going through the pledge campaign right now, the annual request for the resources needed to help this congregation grow and thrive. The more it grows the more it serves our needs. But it is also true that we hold this congregation in trust. It belongs not to us alone, but to all who preceded us and to all who will be here generations after you and I are gone. We ought to treat it not as if we are owners, doing with it what we will; and not as if we are consumers, taking from it what we desire; but as if we are stewards, charged to tend it, to care for it, to leave it better than it was when it came into our hands.
When it comes to caring for the Earth, it is important for us to see ourselves as stewards of this wonderful creation. Stewards are accountable to someone else. If we own it, then whatever we choose to do with it is fine.
Twenty five percent of all the earth’s primates are in danger of extinction. So?
We are in the midst of the greatest die-off of species this planet has ever seen, and it is happening at a faster rate than ever before, and we are causing it. So?
Let us clear cut the forests if the wood gives us heat and furniture and homes.
Let us dispose of our waste as cheaply as possible, pouring filth
and chemical effluence into our streams and rivers and soil and air.
Let us use the earth as profitably as possible, making money
as quickly and as abundantly as we can.
Leave people in days to come the job of taking care of themselves. We will have fulfilled our personal responsibilities, let them fulfill theirs.
The concept of God is important here: seeing ourselves as stewards in the service of God, ultimately responsible to God for the state of the world, would have us treat the earth very differently than we do. But we can and ought also to feel the same responsibility to future generations and to all forms of life. We hold the Earth for them..
The truth is that we live on a stunningly beautiful and wondrous planet. We live in the Garden of Eden. We are there right now. The story of the expulsion from the Garden is not a story from our past; it is a story from our future. It is a prophecy which we are working hard to fulfill. We will be expelled from the Garden—or our children or grandchildren will—unless we see ourselves as stewards of this planet, stewards for God, stewards for future generations and stewards for all life forms.
May we be wise; may we overcome shortsightedness; may we overcome greed and may we overcome the false belief that we own the Earth.
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