Saint James UCC of Hamburg, NY

Genesis 1:14-31: Luke 12:41-48

Preached by Rev. Robert Matlack
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"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" so begins not only the book of Genesis, but the Bible itself. With these words we find described the very beginnings of history, as the Hebrew people pass on their faith understanding of how the universe, and how life itself began.

Far too often at this point the discussion degenerates into a conflict between creationism and evolution, a discussion which I believe misses the very point of this passage in Genesis, for our that discussion focuses on HOW creation took place. Yet for the Hebrew people the details of the how were unimportant. That's for a more modern mind-set. We want the details. We want to understand how something happened or could happen, but they approached issues like this in a far different way. For them, this account was meant to focus on WHO - it is God who created, in ways that we will never fully understand, God is the one who created the universe.

In very poetic language, filled with symbols and metaphors, we hear this creation described. There is order. There is complexity. Yet throughout this description the focus remains unwaveringly on God. It is God and God alone who created the universe, and this world in which we live. It is God and God alone who has given us life. And, as our text from Genesis reminds us, it is God who looked at all that had been created and was very pleased.

We take this creation for granted! That's why we have to have special celebrations such as earth day, or the town-wide clean-up coming Saturday. In a sense they are a way of calling us back to reality, of reminding us that we have a responsibility to this creation. The rest of the time it's too easy for us to go through life using and abusing. Oh we do make some pretty good efforts to recycle things, but we're still big time consumers, and most of the time we're much more concerned about what we want than we are with what our responsibility is to this creation. It's so easy to assume that the part of creation which we touch is ours - to do with as we will - instead of remembering that it was all created by God, that it all belongs to God, and that we are but here for a while. It's easy to take this world for granted!

In the town hall in Copenhagen, Denmark stands the world's most complicated clock. It took forty years to build this clock at a cost of more than a million dollars. That clock has ten faces, fifteen thousand parts, and is accurate to two-fifths of a second every three hundred years. The clock computes the time of day, the days of the week, the months and years, and the movements of the planets for twenty-five hundred years. Some parts of that clock will not even move until twenty-five centuries have passed.

What's intriguing about that clock is that it's not accurate. It loses two-fifths of a second every three hundred years. Now that doesn't seem significant to you and I, and it certainly won't cause us to be noticeably late, but this impressive clock in Copenhagen still needs to be regulated by a more accurate, more complicated, more impressive clock - the universe itself. That mighty astronomical clock with its uncountable number of moving parts, from atoms to stars, rolls on century after century with movements so reliable that all time on earth can be measured against it.

In the midst of the complexity of our universe, there is order and reliability. The Hebrew people were thankful for this gift of creation. In the order and reliability they saw God's hand at work. They experienced God's presence. In the blooming of a flower, in the new leaves growing on the trees, in the rush of the wind, and in countless other ways they experienced God's presence, and they gave thanks.

In our text from the gospel of Luke, Jesus compares faithful and unfaithful servants. Now his comments don't say anything surprising, except possibly that we might find the punishment for unfaithfulness to be a little harsher than we would like.

Basically, a faithful and wise servant is defined as the one who is put in charge, who knows what his or her master wants, and then does it, even when the master is away. The faithful servant is the one who doesn't need the boss always looking over his or her shoulder, but is able to find inside the sense of responsibility and commitment needed to serve faithfully, even when unsupervised.

On the other hand, the unfaithful servant is the one who when the master is away, decides that he or she is in charge and can do whatever he or she wants. The master's gone and won't be back for a while. If I feel like beating the other servants, so I just go do it. If I feel like breaking into the master's private stores of food and drink, so I just go do it. The unfaithful servant is the one who assumes that he or she has become the master in the master's absence, instead of remembering that he or she is only acting on behalf of the master, and therefor is responsible to serve as the master would want.

That's a significant difference. The faithful servant always stays focused on that responsibility to act on behalf of the master, while the unfaithful servant is carried away by that sense of power, by that feeling of being in charge.

When we talk about creation, about our responsibilities to this world in which we live, when we talk about stewardship of the earth, often our discussion focuses on very specific issues like how we can cut back on our carbon footprint or stop polluting Lake Erie or clean up some of the pollution that has already taken place.

Those issues are extremely important, and I believe that we have a real responsibility to face them, to struggle with them, to respond faithfully to them. Yet today I want us to focus on a more fundamental issue. I believe that before we can really deal with specific issues, we have to grapple with what it means to be a faithful servant versus an unfaithful servant.

This world has been created by God. We all agree on that. It belongs to God, the Creator. We all agree on that as well. We have been created by God and given a responsibility for stewardship. As our text from Genesis says: "I am putting you in charge of the fish, the birds, and all the wild animals." We have been made stewards of this corner of God's creation. As stewards, we have a responsibility to know how our master wants us to care for this creation, and then to do it, even when our master is not looking right over our shoulder.

I think that's our problem right there. Too often we are like the unfaithful steward. Because God has given us some freedom, some free will, we act as though God has disappeared, and then we live as if creation has somehow become ours. Our behavior says that this piece of property that I have bought is mine. I can do with it as I want, and the only restriction on that is the ordinances that the town or village might impose. We never stop to even ask what restrictions God might impose.

Even worse is our attitude towards the air and the water. They just sort of flow by. How do you claim ownership for a piece of the air? You can't, so we assume that nobody owns it, and that it's all ours to do with as we want. Whatever we do is okay - except for a few restrictions that the government places on us. Again, where is our understanding of stewardship? Where is our sense of responsibility to the one who created, the one who really owns the air, the water and the soil?

Jesus reminds us that the faithful servant is the one who finds out what his or her master wants and then does it, whether or not the master is there. It seems to me that our responsibility is clear - to do the same.

Think about it. We are all people to whom much has been given - oh yeah, there are things that each of us want that we don't have, but let's get real, we are people to whom much has been given! Without exception we have been entrusted with much. Some have been entrusted with more than others, but each and every one of us has been entrusted with a great deal.

With that comes great responsibility - the responsibility to live as a faithful servant. You see, God expects no less of us. God has entrusted us with much and expects us to work at finding out how God wants us to care for this creation, and then to do it - without wondering what we can get away with, without wondering whether or not God is looking over our shoulder or will even notice. I believe that God just expects us to do it.

Amen.