Proper 24 Year A

Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.

Matthew 22:15-22

A cynic once said, death and taxes may always be with us, but at least death doesn’t get worse every time congress meets.

And better yet, Arthur Godfrey hit it right on the head when he said, I feel honored to pay taxes in America. The thing is, I could probably feel just as honored for about half the price.

I know that you have heard many a sermon on this Gospel upholding the Separation of Church and State, especially as it is manifested in paying your taxes every April 15^th. I really think that what this Gospel tells us factually, for sure, is that the Pharisees and the Herodians wanted to catch Jesus in a trap in order to tame his bounding reputation. I hope I don’t disappoint you when I say that I don’t see anything in Jesus’ answer except a very brilliant avoidance of an interrogation under the hot lights. Nothing more.

Since there isn’t much of a sermon in the actual facts of the stories, over the years, preachers have strayed away from this passage into the deep forest of allegory and metaphor. I don’t see a message in this Gospel about the Separation of Church and State, or about the ethics of Taxation. I think Jesus is showing us that in God’s eyes there is no separation between things sacred and things secular, because in God’s eyes EVERYTHING is sacred!

Let’s take a minute to back up just a bit, to just before Jesus gives his Render to Caesar answer. If we do, then we can glean some glimpses into Jesus’ worldview that I think are not only fairly revolutionary for his day, but good news for us at the same time.

The first thing Jesus does is he asks them to show him a coin. Without hesitation one of them pulls a Roman coin out of his pocket. I’m not sure if the Pharisees were embarrassed to have their complicity in the Roman occupation exposed so publically, but it was, nevertheless.

The point here is that the sacred and the secular are hard to distinguish between because actually they are all tangled up together, and for Jesus that is the way it always has been. To exaggerate their differences leads inevitably to the heresy that creation is basically bad, and that our spiritual lives should be directed to escape this nasty, dirty world all around us. The heresy was called Gnosticism, and the Church declared it a heresy because it was a real slap in the face of the Creator God. 

Normally, Jesus does not engage in the spiritual warfare of the Sacred versus the Profane. We are, after all, talking about a man that billions proclaim to be the Son of God who was born in the equivalent of a barn.

Some well-intentioned folks might have hoped that Jesus would have answered, no, to the question posed by the Pharisees and the Herodians. But I ask you, do we really want Jesus to pit God against government? 

The Gospel appointed for this week can’t be about delineating between that which belongs to God and that which does not because we know that EVERYTHING, in the final analysis, belongs to God. That’s why I could never stand in the pulpit on Sundays, even during the time of stewardship, and tell people to think about how much of what you own belongs to God because it all belongs to God. Instead, I would ask them to consider: how much are willing to give back? How much is your church of God worth to you?

God looked out upon Creation and declared it all sacred. Nothing in God’s world is relegated to the profane or the ordinary; everything is holy and set apart for our use in this world. That’s why coins with presidents’ pictures on them can be raised above the same altar where the Communion of Christ is shared.

Even the malicious intent of some First Century Pharisees is redeemed. Because of their efforts we get a glimpse not into heaven, and not into the universe, but as the great philosopher Whitehead put it: Into the God-Universe. The two are inseparable!

I attended a workshop not too long ago on Centering Prayer (Is it just me, or do the words workshop and prayer in the same sentence seem problematic?). 

Anyway, after we all tried 20 minutes of Centering Prayer, we were asked to tell the group what we found difficult. The number one answer was something like, I couldn’t shut out the world long enough to find God. As fond as I am of Centering Prayer, if one sees the purpose of it to shut out the world in order to meet the sacred, I’m afraid it is doomed to failure. God speaks to us through the world most of the time. God has interwoven the world and God’s presence into a quilt that defies unraveling! 

I can’t help but wonder what the world would be like if we all walked through every door and approached every person with the expectation that we were about to meet the sacred? Things would have to change wouldn’t they? As the old Rabbi put it, there should be an angel on every street you walk down blowing a horn and shouting before you,MAKE WAY FOR AN IMAGE OF GOD!

I dare to say that even an image on a coin can be an image of God.