What Belongs to God?
Isaiah 45:1-7; Matthew 22:15-22
October 19, 2014
So, one day last week I went down to the Arlington County
Courthouse, raised my right hand, and solemnly swore to uphold the Constitution
of the United States of America and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of
Virginia. Never mind that, with respect to the one “authority” vested in me by
the commonwealth, the two documents appear to be in subtle disagreement if not
downright sharp conflict, I am now an agent of the state, part and parcel of
the reign of Caesar.
“Render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar; render
unto God that which belongs to God.”
So much of life gets lived out in the tension captured in
that deceptively simple-sounding phrase.
For example – a timely one, to be sure – take the whole
question of marriage. As the late Will Campbell put it,
What is a marriage license but a
legal contract? And what does any legal contract promise and offer except the
right to sue one another at another time and place before another of Caesar’s
agents? Perhaps such contracts are socially necessary but what does that have
to do with us?[1]
What does that have to do with the church, with the
community of faith, Campbell wants to know.
Now, if you don’t know Will Campbell, well you should –
especially if you’re a Southerner, or white, or a Protestant who grew up in the
20th century. His writing, more than anything else I’ve ever
encountered, has challenged me regularly to meditate over this fundamental
distinction, this line through the middle of our lives that separates what
belongs to God from what belongs to Caesar. This line, as Campbell’s note on
weddings suggests, runs through our love lives, our relationships. It also runs
through our economic lives, our political lives, and, certainly through our
faith lives.
Moreover, if Walter Brueggemann is correct in his assertion
that, in the Bible, justice amounts to sorting out what belongs to whom and
returning it, then this simple-sounding instruction from Jesus runs right
through the middle of our ethical lives, and is crucial to more than we can
imagine.
All of which is to say, there’s a whole lot going on in this
little back-and-forth between Jesus and the Pharisees. It helps in the
unpacking if we understand a few cultural and religious touchstones that frame
the encounter.
To begin with, this story is a fine example of politics
making strange bedfellows. The Pharisees and the Herodians generally could not
stand one another and held nothing in common. Well, OK. One thing: neither
could stand Jesus. So, united in their hatred of the upstart prophet they conspire
to trap him.
The Pharisees know that if Jesus endorses paying taxes to
Caesar then most of the crowd will turn against him. It’s not that the people
hated taxes – at least not more than anybody else. But they especially hated
paying tribute to Caesar for that tax essentially funded the occupying power
that dominated their lives.
On the other hand, the Herodians were basically supporters
of the occupation, and knew that public opposition to this particular tax would
be considered sedition.
Both sides figured to put Jesus in a rhetorical vice.
But his response turns the tables completely – and not just
on his tormentors. The tables have been turned on the bystanders, as well.
For one thing, those in the crowd, most of them faithful
Jews, would have heard several things in Jesus’ rejoinder – “show me a coin,
whose image and likeness does it bear?” First, they would have understood that
Jesus himself did not have any money. He did not carry the coin of the realm.
But his inquisitors were complicit in the system they pretended to critique,
while Jesus was clearly not a part of it or party to it.
Second, the crowd would likely have heard, in Jesus’ words,
an echo of the creation story from Genesis in which God says, “let us create
humankind in our own image and likeness.”
In the early days of the church, these distinctions between
God and Caesar were sharp and sharply felt. Then, in the early 300s, the
emperor – Caesar, himself, as it were (although, actually, Constantine) –
converted to Christianity.
Although, as Brian McLaren put it in a talk last week, “what
we call Constantine’s conversion to Christianity is more accurately understood
to be Christianity’s conversion to the mindset of Caesar.”
McLaren went on to say that if we don’t come to terms with
our violent past – that is to say, with the history of Constantinian
Christianity, imperial Christianity, Caesar’s Christianity, Christendom itself
– if we don’t come to terms with that past we don’t deserve any future.
So, you see, the tables have been turned on all of us, in
Jesus simple turn of a phrase.
For now we must ask ourselves some key and troubling
questions, including
·
What belongs to Caesar?
·
What belongs to God?
·
And, in whose image and likeness am I created?
We could, perhaps productively and faithfully even, follow
Dorothy Day on this. She said, “after you render unto God what is God’s,
there’s nothing left for Caesar.” There is certainly a great deal of truth to
that assertion, and it rests on firm Biblical footing. After all, as the
psalmist says, “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein.” Or,
similarly: “the earth belongs to God; the earth and all its people.”
I’m certainly not going to argue otherwise. Instead, I’ll
push in a slightly different direction, not because I think there is some realm
that does not belong to God. No, that
line of argument, which some take from reading Jesus’ words in our text today,
leads to the tradition of withdrawing from the world to live at pious distance
from the godless realm filled, one supposes, with godless sinners.
Here, again, I rely on Brother Will Campbell. Campbell
writes of being pushed by his friend P.D. East to define the Christian faith.
“Okay. If you would tell me what
the hell the Christian Faith is all about maybe I wouldn’t make an ass of
myself when I’m talking about it. Keep it simple. In ten words or less, what’s
the Christian message?” We were going someplace, or coming back from someplace
when he said, “Let me have it. Ten words.” I said, “We’re all bastards but God
loves us anyway.” [2]
Which means that none of us gets to claim any special piety
or privilege, we’re all part of the same muck and mass of humanity. None of us
gets to withdraw to some place apart, holy and wholly unblemished. We’re all messed
up; but that’s not the end of the story, because God loves us anyway. We all
belong to God.
Nevertheless, we live in a world that looks for Caesar, and
looks to honor him, to bow before him, and to conform to his expectations and
his orders.
Perhaps, to run with Campbell’s metaphor, we spend our lives
looking for a Caesar because we are all bastards, or, perhaps more gently and
more generally, all orphans, and thus spend our lives trying to find a parent
who will claim us, guide us, shape us.
The pressing question, for me, thus becomes: who is Caesar?
Who is the false god to whom I give my allegiances in life? Who are the Caesars
of our lives?
*****
It’s easy, perhaps too easy, to say in this place that we
belong to God. Heck, we might even actually believe it while we’re sitting
here, and we might say we’re going to live as if it’s true. But then we go out
into a broken world, full of, well, lots of other bastards, and lots of Caesars
clamoring for our allegiance. Out in the marketplace we often forget who we are
and to whom we belong.
One American ethicist famously said, “show me your check
book and I will show you your values.” Jesus put it like this: where your
treasure is there will be your heart. In still other words, the path to Caesar
is paved with our gold.
So I invite you to an exercise in remembering:
You got a pen when you came in this morning. I invite you
take out a credit card and use the pen to draw a little symbol on the card – a
fish, perhaps, as the early church used for its symbol, or a cross. Either way,
but a mark, a sign to remind you to whom you belong. (The sticky note is in
case you can’t write on the card itself – write on the note and fold it around
the card.) For the next week – or longer – I invite you to ponder these question
every time you use this credit card: does what I am spending my treasure on
right now reflect how I belong to God? If all that I am and all that I have
truly does belong to God, does this purchase reflect that fundamental and
God-given identity?
In our brokenness we turn, too often, to false gods, and,
what is worse we miss the Mother and Father of us all, who will, above all
else, love us, even though we are all bastards.
In those moments, all too rare for most of us, when we
remember who we are and to whom we belong we begin to render unto God what
belongs to God. We can, as Paul put it, give thanks to God and recall faith,
love, and hope in the One who challenges, even now, to know the difference
between God and Caesar, and to trust that we do, after all, belong in life and
in death, to God. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
6:22 AM
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