Buck
Once upon a time when wagon trains moved back and forth across the country and adventurers from the East Coast were trying their hand at life in the Wild West, it was a common scene in every town big enough to have a saloon to see a group of guys huddled around a table playing poker. And if you would have walked up to one of those poker tables, most likely you would have seen a big buck horn handle knife stuck in the table in front of one of those guys.
The players called that knife “the buck,” and they stuck it in the table in front of the dealer so that, as the game progressed, the buck would travel around the table in front of each player when it was his turn to deal the cards.
But if ever one of the players did not want to deal the cards when his turn came and the knife was stuck into the table in front of him, he would "pass the buck" by taking the knife and sticking it in the table in front of the next guy.
A lot has changed since those wild western days. Passenger jets zip back and forth across the sky high above the old wagon train trails, most of us don’t play much poker, and hopefully, we keep sharps objects off the table when we do.
But passing the buck? Man, that has turned into an art form.
Once upon a time, passing the buck was a simple symbol that meant you were passing up your turn to take the responsibility of being the dealer. But these days, passing the buck is more like a way of life. Responsibility is hard sometimes. Nobody likes to be wrong, and nobody likes to fail, and passing the buck to the next guy when we do, somehow feels better than taking ownership of the fact that sometimes we are wrong and sometimes we do fail.
And there’s a reason for that that goes back much farther than the days of the Wild West.
Long, long before that there was a time when everything was literally perfect. The world and the whole universe were young, God had created everything from nothing, and it was exactly how He wanted it. He had made the first couple, Adam and Eve. And He had made them a perfect place to live and every day He would come down and take an evening stroll with them. Adam and Eve had a perfect relationship with God and with each other and with the world in which they lived. They even had a perfect relationship with themselves—no internal conflict or confusion or doubt.
But then the unthinkable happened and they traded it all away in pursuit of a lie.
That evening when God came down to walk with them, they hid from Him. And when He talked with them about what they’d done, they did the most fascinating thing: they passed the buck! Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed a snake. And in a backhanded kind of way, Adam even blamed God.
That's right. At ground zero of the first wrong thing ever done, passing the buck was the immediate reaction.
Since then, not much has changed. We are all very different people with very different skills and abilities and interests. But every one of us is a master of self-justification. But self-justification or passing the buck or self-righteousness, as the Bible likes to call it, didn't do a thing to help Adam and Eve, and it's not doing a thing to help us either. Instead, it locks us down into life-long patterns of guilt and shame.
So, realizing that gives me an idea.
Today, let’s stop passing the buck.
Let’s be like President Harry Truman who had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that said, "The buck stops here." Whatever you've got going on today, own it. If you need to do something, do it. If you need to stop doing something, stop it. And I know you need to be forgiven for something, so go to God and ask for it. The greatest thing about Christianity is that Jesus took all of our bucks on Himself when He came and died for our sins. So let’s stop passing them around and let’s start accepting the new, free life that only He can give us.
