Luke’s gospel is packed with stories about wealth and poverty … about our relationship to our possessions. Neither Luke nor Jesus hesitates to step into those complicated, compromised and charged areas of human life. What we own and owe and how much we own and owe cannot help but influence our relationships with God and neighbor and even ourselves.

This morning’s parable takes a bit of a different turn. The parable explores our relationship to things that do not belong to us, but for which we bear responsibility. It also explores our relationship to the owner of those things that do not belong to us, but for which we bear responsibility.

The parable centers on a man who is employed as a steward or manager of his boss’ business. He is confronted by his boss for squandering his boss’s possessions. Panicked over loosing his job the manager hatches a plan. Although his boss is cheated in the execution of this plan – and although the plan is baldly self-serving – the boss nevertheless commends the manager for acting shrewdly or cleverly while under pressure.

Biblical scholars are divided about this perplexing parable. They can’t even agree what to call it. Some call it the Parable of the Unjust Manager. Others call it the Parable of the Shrewd Manager. Still others call it the Parable of the Clever Manager. Whether you see the manager’s actions as unjust, shrewd, or clever surely says something about you! Even for a parable it is unusually baffling and provocative.

The parable does, however, get to the heart of what it means to be a steward or a manager of things that are not, in fact, ours but for which we are responsible.

I propose that with respect to our stewardship of the earth, we find ourselves in precisely the same predicament as the manager in this parable. We are about to be found out for squandering that for which we are responsible, over which we are stewards … but which belongs to another.

Over the past two weeks, as the media were focused on congressional debate over the war in Iraq and a nervous economy, U.S. government scientists announced that the Arctic cap is melting at a far faster rate then they had feared. The World Conservation Union released its annual list of endangered species and warns of a “global extinction crisis.” The Old Farmers Almanac predicts that 2008 will be the warmest year in a century.

We have been found out!

Perhaps the point of the parable is that it is a far better thing to hatch a clever plan in the nick of time, than to hatch no plan at all.

Now, you could argue that the manager’s motives were impure. He acted out of self-interest. He wasn’t really interested in his boss’ welfare or his boss’ goods. He acted cleverly and hastily merely to save his own sorry skin. True enough.

Yet, in the parable as in real life, the interests of one are often bound up with the interests of the other. Sometimes acting in one’s own best interests, has the salutary effect of serving the in best interests of others as well!

In my own mind, every Baptism Sunday at Old South is a stewardship Sunday. In the Litany of Baptism we agreed that we are stewards of the future … we agreed to take collective responsibility for Molly and Samantha … for their Christian souls!

Every time we gather to baptize a child I think about our Old South forebears. Like the clever manager, the founders of this church found a way when there was no way; they hatched a plan in the face of a crisis.

Old South was founded over an argument and crisis over baptism … an argument and crisis over who could and could not be baptized … an argument and crisis concerning our stewardship of the souls of the littlest among us … an explosive argument in the 1660’s in Boston. Our forebears broke away from the First Church in Boston to allow a more permissive welcome at the sacrament of baptism.   

Every time we gather to baptize a child, I think of January 6, 1706, the day a brand new infant named Benjamin Franklin was baptized at Old South … and I wonder: who will Molly Marie grow up to be? What will Samantha Caryl grow up to do?

Every time we gather to baptize a child, we name and reclaim our responsibility as stewards – stewards, both of the children in our care, but also of the future.

We are not perfect. It is hard enough for us to care for that which we own … and even harder to care for that which belongs to another.

In this imperfect world, inhabited by imperfect people who are often motivated by self interest, stewardship is necessarily a process of adjustment and compromise. Individually we are not going to save the Arctic ice cap or the western lowland gorilla or all the children Africa or even all the children in Boston. Yet, the parable urges us to think fast, act now … be shrewd or clever … do what can be done! We’ve got a second chance. God gives us a second chance. Molly Marie is our second chance. Samantha Caryl is our second chance.

Every single time we gather to baptize a baby God gives us a second chance, another chance to get it right … and if we get it right, or even close to right (or even if we don’t get it too terribly wrong) then who knows what Molly Marie Briggs and Samantha Caryl Collins will grow up to do and to be?