The King comes down off the throne

Proper 29 A; November 20, 2011

Ezekiel 34:11-17; Ps. 100 

Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46

Spoiler alert: close your ears if you have NOT read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, because I’m going to tell you the ending. The king returns. The righteous ruler is placed up on the throne. Justice is restored. Power joins with mercy. The meek – or at least the beavers, nymphs, satyrs and other creatures, led by four sturdy, British children – inherit Narnia, the kingdom prepared for them by Aslan.

Spoiler alert again. C. S. Lewis’ friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, also writing in the terrible, war-torn years of the 20th century, ends The Lord of the Rings in the same way. The king returns. The righteous ruler is placed upon the throne. Justice is restored. Power joins with mercy. The meek – this time a Rainbow coalition of elves, dwarfs and swarthy men led by four sturdy, British hobbits – inherit Middle Earth, the kingdom prepared for them by Gandalf.

The British have built this longing for the return of the righteous king into their civic life. When the Tudors came to the throne in the late middle ages, they created a back story to give their ascent to the throne some legitimacy. The Tudors recreated the legend of Arthur, the true king of all the Britons, whose Round Table of equality and chivalry brought order to violent warlords. Even to this day the British monarchs vow to step aside if Arthur awakens from his slumber in Avalon and returns to rule England’s green and pleasant land.

We can chuckle at the quaint notion of “the return of the king.” After all, we Americans overthrew the king in 1776, dethroned in place of democracy. And yes, of course, Britain is a democracy, too – and in fact, democracies do a much better job than monarchies at maintaining order and distributing justice.

But when times are bad, social conditions unsettled and the way to a prosperous future unclear, do not these stories of a righteous king coming to settle account appeal to our deep longings? Maybe we can learn something from them, not to recreate a past that perhaps was not ideal, but how we can look to the future – how we can use our lessons from scripture – of Ezekiel’s description of the Good Shepherd-the Good Ruler, and of Matthew’s description of judgment day as righteous king coming to settle accounts.

How about another story? Ireland, at the turn of the 5th century, was a flourishing pagan culture. Patrick, who had lived there for some time as a slave, heard a call from God to evangelize the Irish. It was a culture governed by kings who were the representatives of the gods, who had to be appeased through blood sacrifice to bring about fertility and prosperity. Patrick did many things in his mission to the Irish, but this one point has relevance here: he replaced their warrior kings with “the high king of heaven,” their angry and fickle gods with a “God they could depend on.” Patrick used the image of the king bringing order to society not in a backward-looking, nostalgic way, but with a bright vision of a new society: a society of peacefulness, of new relationships, of a God who brought life from death.

Move ahead to the end of the 19th century, to Episcopal churches in cities like Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia. It is the height of the industrial revolution, and suffering among the working classes is widespread, without any of the safeguards such as child labor laws, a 40-hour-work-week, health and safety standards. Many Christians are moved to alleviate this suffering, inspired by the reading of passages like today’s Gospel. Among the boldest leaders in this “social gospel” movement are Episcopal clergy and parishes. People at the time noted the paradox of the elite, aristocratic Episcopal Church at the forefront of movement of solidarity with the poor. Oddly enough, it is Episcopalians’ understanding of “kingship,” of a society guided and led by the church, that inspired their activism. The social gospel took what the righteous king would do and democratized it, advocated the spreading-out of power and privilege across society. They took this powerful image from the past – a righteous king restoring order during a time of social upheaval -- and adapted it for movement into the future.

Both lessons from Ezekiel and Matthew overthrow our traditional understanding of the regal monarch, the warrior, “the king.” Kings were to be the shepherds of Israel, feeding the hungry, binding the broken, gathering the lost. Ezekiel denounces those made themselves fat at the expense of the people they were there to serve. The king in Matthew comes down entirely from his throne, not just to help but to identify completely with the poorest and most desperate of society. By loving the stranger and the outcast, we indeed love the king; we love God.

The way these lessons take old images and turn them around for new, challenging times can be helpful to us Christians in this time of social dislocation. We may have to describe Christ the King in words from the past, using the old monarchical words and images that really don’t work anymore. But the reality they point us to is one very different indeed: it is the reality of God’s justice, where all the poor and neglected are welcomed, where their suffering is even part of God’s own self. This high king of heaven is indeed a God we can depend on -- not a benevolent despot who “knows what is good for us;” but a God who became one of us, and who took all of human nature into the divine.

We enter Advent next week with these “marching orders” of engagement, sacrificial giving, solidarity and hope. “The king shall come when morning dawns, and light triumphant breaks,” we will sing in the hymn at the end of the service. “and let the endless bliss begin, by weary saints foretold, when right shall triumph over wrong, and truth shall be extolled.”

How wonderful it is, even in these darks days, with no human king on the horizon, no Aslan getting ready to roar, no Gandalf on the ridge with armies of thousands behind him to slay the wicked orcs, no Arthur coming back from Avalon – how wonderful it is that we have been given the words to hope for something real.

Encourage each other, build each other up, wake up, and live in the light of God

Proper 28 A; November 13, 2011

Judges 4:1-7; Psalm 123; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30

Times are bad.

Times are bad in ancient Israel, the Book of Judges tells us. The people are living in the Promised Land, delivered there by Moses and Joshua, brought there by God, but not living up to their side of the promise. They can’t get it together. Enemies are attacking. Leaders falter and fail. The people live in hardship and difficulty.

 

Times are bad these days, too, even for us living in our own nation blessed with abundant resources – our own “Promised Land.” In this global economy we fear that bad decisions in Greece and Italy will damage us, too. People are losing jobs, or are under-employed, or find themselves working more hours for less pay. Student loan debt is astronomical, accompanied by doubts that recent graduates will ever have those full-time, fulfilling careers that their parents imagined for them back in kindergarten days. Whose fault is all this mess? Alas, we can’t seem to get any consensus on that. Today’s psalm sounds like a chant – or is it a scream? -- from the Occupy Wall Street movement:

Have mercy upon us, O LORD, have mercy, *
for we have had more than enough of contempt,
Too much of the scorn of the indolent rich, *
and of the derision of the proud.

Paul does not have to remind the people in Thessalonica that times are bad. “You do not need to have anything written to you,” he writes. The people in Thessalonica know the precariousness of existence, how they delude themselves that they live in peace and security, when the all-too-real fear is of sudden destruction, of a thief in the night, of no escape. The people of Thessalonica know that the world they live in is dark indeed.

 

So what do we make of this parable from the 25th chapter of Matthew? This strange and difficult parable where God seems to be playing the part of a cruel and capricious tyrant, seemingly as unforgiving of poor financial management as any banker coming down hard on someone who cannot pay her mortgage?

As we try to make sense of this complicated and weird story, let us remember that the gospels, although accounts of the life of Jesus, were written down by people some time after Jesus’ death and resurrection. They were written down by people living in the joy and knowledge and reality of Easter – they are people of the resurrection, for sure. But they were living in bad times. The community who put together the Gospel of Matthew were city dwellers, probably from Antioch, a densely populated city, full of poor people; a cosmopolitan and diverse city, full of people from across the known world of the Roman Empire – people of different cultures and languages, people crowded into a city where there is not enough good housing, nor enough good work to keep food on the table. The way the world works does NOT work for them. The economic and social rules ensure that they will be – always – losers. Why, then, do they still believe in Jesus? In the resurrection? In the Good News? Why do the people Paul writes to in Thessalonica, whom he rightly describes as knowing they have darkness all around them, believe him when he calls them children of the light, children of the day, people who are encouraged and hopeful and alert?

The Bible – which our opening prayer instructs us to hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest -- is written by and for people for whom times are as bad as can be imagined; why, then, are they people of hope?

The Bible is written by and for people who know that if they play the game by the rules the world sets down, they will lose, big time. That’s what this strange parable is about. The slaves do the bidding of the master; they are to invest his money and make a profit. Some of the slaves are better investors than others; one is extraordinarily prudent, and buries the money, keeping it just safe enough to return it to the master in tact. This cautious slave even has the courage to confront the master, to call out this cruel system for the harsh and fear-mongering system it is. Yet the prudent slave, the one we think did safe thing with the master’s money, the one who took no risks and lost nothing, is called worthless and thrown into the outer darkness. What did the prudent slave forget? What did the prudent slave do wrong?

The prudent slave believed the world. The prudent slave believed he had to hide the money, to hoard it in darkness. The prudent slave believed there was no risk worth taking with something as valuable as the master’s money, that the best he could do was come out even. The prudent slave followed the world’s assumptions of scarcity and fear. The prudent slave didn’t get the memo that God was the God of abundance, wild, profligate and overflowing abundance.

 

Sometimes I wonder if we do not understand the urgency of the 25th chapter of Matthew -- if we think we’ve gotten ahead because we’ve played by all the rules -- if we think we live comfortable lives because we’re lucky -- if we cannot hear the crisis in other people’s voices, or see the worry in other people’s eyes – sometimes I wonder if living lives of moderate comfort means that we will not “get” the resurrection. That we will think that all Advent is about is getting ready for Christmas, for the birth of a beloved baby.

Advent is about getting ourselves ready for a new way of living, a way of living that is not characterized by prudence, or fear, or worry, or one-upsmanship. Even St. Paul, living on the edge of the end of time, reminds us: It’s never too late -- to encourage each other, to build each other up, to wake up, and live in the light of God.

Two sermons: Seats and Saints

All Saints Sunday; Nov. 6, 2011

Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34

1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12

All Saints is not about just ONE saint. It’s about all of them, all around us, the communion of saints.

All Saints is not just about the fancy ones, the ones with the BIG LETTER names. It’s about the ordinary ones, the ones who wiped brows, who cooked meals, who built houses, who fished and farmed, who followed Jesus, who prayed out loud, who prayed in silence.

All Saints is not just about those who died glorious deaths. It’s about people who died in terrible pain, and people who died in their sleep. It’s about people who died not knowing what hit them, about people we miss terribly, terribly, because they were such a part of our lives. It’s about people who died without thinking about themselves, because they were so focused on who they had to save, people who walked in front of bullets, people who ran into burning buildings to rescue others.

All Saints is not just about people who lived comfortable lives. It’s is about the people who were generous to a fault. It’s about people who gave money to feed the poor, to build homes for people who would otherwise have nowhere to live, to care for people with shattered lives and broken hearts. It’s about the people who gave money to every bum who asked for a handout, and it’s about the people who lived their whole lives disguised as bums, but underneath their messy exteriors, no one but God knew they were saints.

All Saints is not just about people who never took risks, who walked the straight and narrow. It’s about people who dared to climb mountains and sail seas, people who would never take no for an answer when it came to something they knew God was calling them to do. It’s about people who dared to tell the world that God loved them, and who went to far away places to do that.

All Saints is not just about those who were brave. It’s about those who endured terrible pain and loss, who had everything taken away from them by war or famine or flood or fire. It’s about those whose parents abandoned them, and whose children left them, but who came to know that God was with them through it all, until in the end, God welcomed them home.

All Saints is not just about them, the famous ones, the people we have heard about who did extraordinary things. All Saints is about people we know, who have been saints to us in our lives, who have shown us what it means when we say, “God loves us,” who have shown us what it means to love one’s neighbor, because we have been the neighbors who have been loved.

For these, and all the saints, we give thanks.

Proper 26-A     October 30, 2011

Joshua 3:7-17; Psalm 107:1-7,33-37

1 Thessalonians 2:9-13; Matthew 23:1-12

Every church (I learned in confirmation class) contains a cathedra, the special chair for the bishop when he (in those days always a “he”) would visit the parish. Cathedral churches, especially the big ones, which are the bishops’ churches, have very grand and big chairs. If any of you have been to Canterbury Cathedral, you may remember, high up, beyond the choir, the Chair of St. Augustine, the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Like Moses’ seat, from these chairs our religious authorities pronounce on the law and dispense orders. An “authority” is an author, the one in whom a text – in this case, the law – originates. Whoever sat in Moses’ seat would acknowledge that it was the law handed down to Moses that he would pronounce. He sat there on Moses’ authority, just as the various archbishops who sit in Canterbury today do so following the authority of that first one, Augustine, who came to England in the year 597.

St. David’s, you will notice, has no permanent cathedra. A chair like this, or any other, is brought out when the bishop comes. This is a house of worship, then, without a Moses’ seat, a church in which the Word of God emanates from … where?

I imagine that within this congregation there are many different understandings of the authority that would be granted to someone who would sit in this seat, ranging from at least grudging obedience to outright skepticism. Like other Americans, we would demand that our authorities, religious and civic, are as good as their words – that they practice what they preach. Aren’t we furious when we find out someone has been saying one thing, but doing another? Do we not find something hollow in the phrase, “Do what I say; not what I do?”

There are times, however, when even the words of these authorities are out of joint, when our outrage is directed not at their two-faced hypocrisy, but at the very words they utter – when the injustice is in the words as well as the deeds.

This is the case with Jesus, and the charges he levels against the Pharisees in today’s gospel. Moses’s seat indeed contains all the authority God gave Moses, but the ones Jesus saw sitting in it had twisted that law so that it was impossible for the ordinary, faithful Jew to fulfill. Biblical scholars tell us that

… the Pharisees imposed on the people, "a myriad of rules, standards, and directives, and the whole process easily degenerated into moral bean counting. The procedures were so cumbersome that no human being could possibly accomplish them; no one could ever hope to keep the full weight of all these laws and carry the heavy freight of this ethical load, not even the scribes and the Pharisees themselves."[i]

Jesus is furious at the religious “fashion statements” these people wear, so obviously more concerned with their outward appearance than their inward righteousness. The garments and fringes and little torah scrolls attached to their heads were to remind them of the duty and joy of obedience to the law, to be aids to prayer and devotion. Jesus was outraged that these emblems of status and privilege were paid for by taxes which crippled the poor people who lived in the cities and in the countryside.

Where you sit, of course, determines where you stand. Other scholars remind us that the Pharisees viewed their special garments and special seat as “the focal point for the community. … Pharisees were visible for the faithful and the Roman rulers who needed a contact with their subjects.”[ii] That was an argument, I think, which would have carried no weight with Jesus. For Jesus, the measure was their following of the law, not their twisted pronouncing of it. Did they put God above all other rulers – above other gods, fashionable gods, even Roman rulers? Did they love their neighbors – especially the poor, the vulnerable, the hungry, the displaced – as much as they loved themselves?

Measuring the legitimacy of authorities is an age-old challenge, and, once again, where you sit determines where you stand. There are rulers we can hold accountable, who will remember, when prodded, the just law that put them in that seat in the first place. Think of the triumphs of the civil rights movement, the voting rights act, the laws guaranteeing fair housing and employment, equal protection under the law. Today we would all agree that is the law, but it took many years of prodding those who, from where they sat, “separate but equal” was doing them just fine.

The “Occupy Wall Street”ers seem to be finding our whole economic system lacking in justice and equity. Many explain what they are doing with Biblical language: religious leaders are to be “repairers of the breach,” one seminary president said, citing the prophet Isaiah. “… the question is how can we come together, Wall Street and Main Street, to come up with solutions that are going to work for all of us?”[iii] Another protester, more of a “man on the street” than a lofty theologian, said he and other protesters “would like to see a little more economic justice or social justice–Jesus stuff–as far as feeding the poor, health care for the sick.”[iv]

Where we sit determines where we stand. We are a parish church without a cathedra. Do we see the breaches which need repairing, and can we imagine some solutions to these larger social problems that are driving everyone mad? Do we do the “Jesus stuff,” the feeding, the caring, the housing, the welcoming? Surely we don’t need someone in a fancy chair just to tell us that.

---

[i] Thomas Long, Matthew, Westminster Bible Companion, quoted in Kathryn Matthews Huey, http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/October-30-2011-thirty-first.html

[ii] Larry Broding, http://www.word-sunday.com/Files/a/31-a/A-31-a.html

[iii] Katharine Henderson, president of Auburn Theological Seminary, quoted in http://global.christianpost.com/news/religion-joins-occupy-wall-street-movement-59101/

[iv] Bold Faith Type, the blog for the advocacy group “Faith in Public Life,” http://blog.faithinpubliclife.org/2011/10/occupywallstreet_and_jesus_stu.html

God, Mammon and the Archbishop of Canterbury

The “Occupy Wall Street” movement generates heat, light and more than a little anxiety in the financial capitals of the world. In some cities, the church is forced to be involved – by virtue of location, or by virtue of how much capital those churches themselves may own. Here in the U.S., Trinity Episcopal Church, at the head of Wall Street, has opened its community center, Charlotte’s Place, for rest, revitalization and hospitality for those involved in the occupation of Zuccotti Park. Here is a link to the statement of the Rec. Dr. James Cooper, Trinity’s Rector, on how that church deals with the movement on their doorsteps, and to sermons and statements from other clergy and staff of Trinity Church.

In London, one of Anglicanism’s other major houses of worship, St. Paul’s Cathedral, found it more difficult to decide to embrace or to reject the Occupy London movement. For some, the protestors came too close; for others, the church was not close enough. Two of St. Paul’s clergy, a canon and the dean, resigned over whether the cathedral should join with the City of London to take legal action to remove the occupiers.

This week, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote about this crisis at the confluence of the spiritual and financial center of London. Archbishop Williams’ theological writings have frequently addressed social and economic issues. In this case, he looked at both sides of the economic and political divide marked by the Occupy movement, and noted, as others have, that the movement strikes a chord with many. He mentioned “a widespread and deep exasperation with the financial establishment” and “a powerful sense around – fair or not – of a whole society paying for the errors and irresponsibility of bankers.”

If you read Rowan Williams essay in The Financial Times, you will see that he is well versed in economics, making the various options and challenges facing the U.K. and the world economy understandable. As he says, these “do not amount to a simplistic call for the end of capitalism, but they are far more than a general expression of discontent.” He mentions the Roman Catholic Church’s recent statement on the imperatives for Christians to engage in economic and social justice. He concludes that the Church Universal is indeed the proper place for these discussions to take place, that we “have a proper interest in the ethics of the financial world and in the question of whether our financial practices serve those who need to be served – or have simply become idols that themselves demand uncritical service.”

Trinity Church, Wall Street – St. Paul’s Cathedral, London – St. David’s, DeWitt: all of us, in churches everywhere, are closer than we think, or that maybe we want to be, from the challenges posed by the Occupy movement. And it is within each of these churches, equipped as we are with scripture as our basis, tradition as our guide, and reason as our tool, that we can come to grips with what God wants us to do with the abundance we have received.

Single-tasking

Proper 25-A; October 23, 2011

Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Psalm 90

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46

We baby boomers – born between 1946 and 1964 – are used to seeing ourselves at the center of the universe – well, of the marketing universe that caters to our desires. We are the great bulge, moving from babyhood to elementary school to fast times at Ridgemont High. We went to college in a tie-dyed, denim-clad group, entered the workforce in our Oxford button-downs at the same time – and are now, in our relaxed khakis and comfy sweaters, entering our 60s. We read a passage like this one, from Deuteronomy, with new eyes – eyes perhaps not as clear as those of Moses:

Moses was one hundred twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigor was not abated.

That sounds good to me. I’m not even half-way there!

Moses is astounding, not only for his long-lived clarity of vision, but for his single-mindedness. Once he took on God’s plan to move the people of Israel out of Egypt and to the Promised Land, that was all he did. His eyes were on the prize, and he kept going, despite all the setbacks that whining people and wilderness roads put in his path.

Commendable as that is, the culture we live in seems to pull us in another direction – or rather, far too many directions at once. Have you seen that commercial about the man who has forgotten that it’s his wedding anniversary? His wife calls up, while he is focused on some project at his desk, and all of a sudden, through the magic of this particular cell phone, he can simultaneously reassure his wife that he has NOT forgotten their date, make a reservation at their favorite restaurant and have flowers delivered at their home, all at the same time. But we don’t see this couple at dinner. Is the husband frantically finishing his work project from the restaurant table, texting while his wife is looking at the menu, e-mailing a document while she goes to the ladies room, pretending to calculate the tip while he is really tweaking a spreadsheet?

I’m enough of a baby boomer to be shocked! shocked! that college students aren’t necessarily taking notes on their laptops connected to the internet in their lecture halls – but also to agree that it is kind of handy just to send that one more text from my phone while I am sitting at a red light on Genesee Street. Sitting in the driver’s seat, of course.

Multi-tasking and its discontents are in the air we breathe.

Today’s gospel is for us:

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"

That question cuts through all the noise, doesn’t it? In the face of all that is around us, Teacher, all the confusion and crashing that affects even us little people here, what does God want us to do?

The Gospels present us with the picture of a changing world. The old understanding of faith in God – follow all the many laws, listen to the authorities like scribes and Pharisees – the ones who symbolically sat in Moses’ seat – is being challenged by this one particular teacher, this Jesus, who seems to embody in his person all the hope and good news and promise of God, the God who has been made known through the law and the prophets. Whom do we follow? We can hear the concern in the voices of the people: if we follow Jesus, do we have to abandon everything we have known about God up to now?

From the midst of all these questions and confusions and options and interpretations, Jesus breaks through with remarkable simplicity:

"`You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

What Jesus is saying is, Keep your faith where it has always been: with God. As he spars with those religious leaders trying to entrap him into making some big mistake, he makes it clear that his faith is with God, and with the essentials that God has always, always, always been trying to get across to us. This is the big thing that everything hangs from. This is the start, the first, the banner headline screaming across the top of the newspaper: Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself. Everything starts with this. Anything else is distraction, multi-tasking with no result, mere interruptions that take us away from giving ourselves fully to the God who loves us and wants us to love back, and wants us to love all these other people whom God loves, too. In this ever-widening circle of care and concern lies our treasure, our heart, our true home.

 

Yesterday, when we were raking the yard and cleaning up the building, we found this: a robin’s nest, a work that took extraordinary focus, determination and clarity of purpose. It is an astounding creation, hard as concrete yet light as a feather. The bird knows just what nest works for those eggs and those babies. All the grass and twigs and paper and I don’t even know what in the world comes down to just this one, perfect nest.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. You, too, can learn the art of single-tasking.

Render unto ...

Proper 24-A; 10/16/2011

Exodus 33:12-23; Psalm 99

1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22

The newspaper headlines Friday morning were scooped, as is often the case, by the radio and internet. It turned out that the Occupy Wall Street protesters were not after all to be evicted from their camp in a park in lower Manhattan. Mayor Bloomberg announced that a deal had been struck; the protesters and the owner of the park would negotiate how to keep the park clean. The newspaper pictures showed earnest, long-haired, tattooed-types pushing brooms on sidewalks and heaving huge plastic bags of demonstration detritus. For the time being, Caesar, or at least Mayor Bloomberg, had been rendered unto. In the words of “the street,” a deal had been done, and the Mayor got what he wanted, apparently a promise of a cleaner park, a mollified property owner, and orderly protesters.

We Americans -- founded on biblical principles since the Puritans came to a reformed England in North America to found a city on a hill, a beacon of righteousness for all the world to see – we Americans have a long history of protesting economic arrangements, from taxes to big banks, that strike us as unfair. The tea in Boston Harbor was neither the beginning nor the end. Andrew Jackson became president on his opposition to the central banks. Nineteenth-century populists nearly elected another president, William Jennings Bryan, who was opposed to putting the currency on the gold standard. Explicitly Christian, Bryan’s famous “cross of gold” speech equated what the banking interests were doing to ordinary Americans with the crucifixion of Jesus.

Nothing is certain but death and taxes, goes the old saying. Just as certain, it seems, is the human propensity to acquire, and the matching propensity for others to rail against the injustice and unfairness of systems which give too much to some, and too little to others. And on top of it all, it seems, Caesar always looms.

People in 1st century Palestine paid a lot of taxes. Jews had to pay the Temple tax – 21 percent! Everyone had to pay customs taxes on what goods they traded. If you were a farmer (and 90 percent of the population were farmers), two-thirds of what you earned went to the Roman and Jewish elite, through a combination of how much you were taxed and who owned the land you farmed. In those days, they really ensured that the rich got rich and the poor got poorer.[i]

But it was the coin with the face of Caesar that was deeply offensive to all Jews, who lived by God’s commandment not to make graven images. This coin with the face of Caesar had to be used to pay the tribute tax to the Roman Empire. If you used this coin with the graven image to pay the tribute tax, you were breaking one of the Commandments handed down by God to Moses. If you did not use this coin – if you did not pay the tax – the Romans would lock you up for sedition, and that is much worse than being audited by the IRS.

Just about everyone who reads this passage from Matthew acknowledges that Jesus knows that his opponents are trying to trick him with this question, and so he cleverly avoids the trap. He dismisses the problem with the coin as not a theological one at all: this coin obviously belongs to Caesar, so give it back to him. So what? It’s only money.

Then he lays out the theological problem: Give to God what belongs to God.

In our lives, what does belong to our equivalent to Caesar? In our lives, what does belong to God?

Most of us, most of the time, pay taxes. “Caesar” has to know how much money we have, or how much we spend, in order to tax us, and here in the United States, many people spend a lot of money, both legally and under the table, to avoid paying taxes. A lot of people aren’t even “rendering unto Caesar” but shaving a little (or a lot) off the top before Caesar knows what’s happening.

So what do we do with that money that is NOT rendered unto Caesar? With that money that, in the United States at least, does not go into fixing the roads on which we all drive, or the emergency services we all hope will be there when we need them, or the schools where we learned to read and write? How many people seem to exercise a “preferential option for middle class living over living the gospel?”[ii] If we’re not giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s, are we giving to God what is God’s?

Think about it: What is God’s? What do we owe to God?

In this gospel passage, Jesus raises the question without answering it. But the way Matthew has arranged these latter chapters of his gospel, we are hit with parable after parable that tell us what Jesus has in mind.

Think about the context: in Chapter 21, Jesus enters Jerusalem – the story we read on Palm Sunday. Chapter 26 is the Last Supper. In between, we read parables, speeches, teaching moments, difficult conversations about the world – often illustrated in the stark economic reality of his day – and about how God’s followers should live in place that has clearly become unjust.

Read over these chapters some time. It is easy to see how they are overlooked, misinterpreted. It is easy to see how the church over the centuries has been domesticated, concerned with small things, with being nice, with being proper, with worrying about sexual morality, who’s in and who’s out. It is much easier to put the stuff we “render unto God” into our buildings or staff or heating bills.

But think about it: if this building and this staff and these heating bills are what we render unto God, what are we doing with them, especially when we look at all that we have in light of the urgency Jesus speaks in these last chapters of Matthew?

Yes, it is stewardship time. What we put in the plate is important, but it is only the beginning. If we are only paying for our maintenance, then yes, we are rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But if we realize that what we are paying for – this building, this place, this community, this table – is a launching pad for what Jesus wants us to do in this unjust, unhealthy and broken world, where people are lonely and isolated and poor and hungry and where what we can do can make a world of difference, then yes, indeed, everything we give, we render unto God.

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[i]  From Marcus Borg, “What belongs to God?” http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2000/04/What-Belongs-To-God.aspx

[ii]  From the Rev. Patrick Brennan, “30 Good Minutes,” http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/brennan_3711.htm

Jesus' business model

Proper 22-A    Oct. 2, 2011

Exodus 20:1-4,7-9,12-20; Psalm 19

Philippians 3:4-14; Matthew 21:33-46

What if the Federal Reserve, or the U.S. Treasury, or the International Monetary Fund, ran by God’s rules? God cares a lot about the economy, if the Gospels are any measure of God’s interests and activities. So think about it: in this perplexing and violent parable – sometimes titled “the wicked husbandman” – Jesus is making the case that God cares about what we do with what we have been given. “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”

What if God said that to the Federal Reserve? To the U.S. Treasury? To the lenders of sub-prime mortgages? To the bankers who have just decided to charge us for using the debit cards they told us to use? To those who spread the risk around and keep the profits to themselves?

“God’s economy” means the way God organizes God’s household, and so what are the rules for living in God’s household? This text reminds us that the penalty is pretty stiff for breaking them – “a miserable death” – so let’s look a little closer at what we have here. If God’s household is this vineyard, then one of the crisis points in the year is the time of harvest. The crop has ripened at once, and there is not a moment to lose to get in all in. Such a crisis is fraught with opportunity and peril. “The harvest is plentiful,” Matthew has Jesus say elsewhere, “but the laborers are few.”

The vineyard, in Biblical imagery, represents sacred land, God’s land, the symbolic place where the people live in obedience to God, to the Torah, the comprehensive way of life that marks what it is to be a Jew. The Torah, or the Law, begins with those 10 Commandments God gave to Moses, and you could say that for a faithful Jew – a faithful Jew like Jesus, or his disciple, Matthew – obedience to the Law is like living always in God’s sacred vineyard. Outside the vineyard, beyond the hedge, is the land of the unfaithful, the wicked, the disobedient, the alien.

But as we read this story, God is not pleased with those who were given the vineyard, who were given the great gift of this relationship with God, this great abundance of the goodness of life. They have squandered all these opportunities. The grapes are sour, wild, useless; all will be laid to waste, the laborers sent “to a miserable death.” All that privilege, all that power, all those riches – all will be taken away from the original tenants and given to those who know the rules of God’s economy, to people who will produce “the fruits of the kingdom.”

When we talk about the kingdom of God, or the reign of God, we know who is on top, who is King of kings, Lord of lords. But the more I think about it, the more I find the word “commonwealth” gets to the heart of what God has in mind for us. I used this word last week, to illustrate another parable of God’s economy. God has created the world, which the people of God hold in common. We are all stewards of this common wealth. The vineyard is an especially rich and blessed part of this commonwealth, and God sends some stewards in just to care for it. But they have neglected their duty to the common good. They have squandered the resources, or kept the wealth to themselves, rather than producing the fruits to be shared for the general welfare of all the people.

When we think of this world as a “kingdom,” our lines of responsibility or accountability only go up, to God. Or take the more modern image of “corporation,” where the managers are accountable only to the shareholders and their bottom line. But by using the word “commonwealth,” those ties of accountability and responsibility reach out to all the community, as well as up to the one who has created this wonderful world we all share.

Maybe this is where “secular” economists have gotten into trouble. They were hoarding this wealth as “theirs alone,” rather than understanding that the wealth belongs to God, and that the uses to which we put this wealth should be God’s uses, for God’s people, for the restoration of the vineyard, for the repair of God’s broken world.

So all this talk of the commonwealth, of God’s economy – these are challenging parables to hear. Jesus means business here, but is it a business model that we recognize? That we can live with?

Or is it one that we cannot live without?