Sermon: What is the Currency of the Kingdom of God?

Year A

Matthew 22:15-22

As a seminarian, I’m often asked a few questions by nearly everyone I meet at diocesan convention. Questions like:  What is seminary like?  How is seminary going?  For me, the experience of seminary is hard to boil down into something simple, but I will say this:  sometimes seminarians are put into awkward positions. 

For instance, if you were a seminarian, there may come a day when you haven’t been to your home parish in over a year, and on the day you return to preach, the reading from the lectionary is one of the Bible’s most explicitly political passages.

What do you do with that?

Contemporary American thought tends to support keeping religion and politics separate.  We do not often want to hear politics preached from pulpits.  We tend to think that religion is above politics—that religion should remain unstained by political processes. 

Or maybe it’s the other way.

Maybe religion stains politics…

We’ve seen through history and in current events that mixing religion and politics

can yield deadly results and oppressive policies.  Maybe, we think, it’s better to see religion as purely the realm of the spiritual, and politics the realm of the material—what we experience in the real world, outside of the church.

Still, the Gospel reading shows Jesus in the thick of a political situation, and reminding those around him of their responsibilities to God. 

I beg your indulgence, because in a time when many of us tend to live dualistic lives in between the secular and the religious, I believe it makes a difference if one’s faith leads one to allow constraints and divisions and oppressions that are already present in the world (and in the church), or leads one to participate in a faith that seeks to set people free.

But let’s begin at the beginning.  What’s going on in this story?  What is so political about it?

Jesus has come into Jerusalem just days before his death.  He and his entourage are in the temple.  He has been telling parables in which the Pharisees appear in a bad light.  Jesus makes them appear to be hypocritical and unbending religious purists. 

The Pharisees have had enough.  So the Pharisees think about ways to embarrass and discredit Jesus.  Maybe, they think, we can get him to say something embarrassing or treasonous.  The Pharisees send some of their own to Jesus with a question, along with some folks named in the gospel as Herodians.

Some background may be helpful here, because this is an odd part of the story.  You see, the Pharisees and the Herodians would not have liked each other.  ‘Herodian’ means a supporter of Herod Antipas, who was not a very nice guy.  He’s the guy who had John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, beheaded.

Herodians were folks who supported the Roman occupation of Jerusalem.  Pharisees did not like the Herodians because the Pharisees were not fans of the occupation; the Pharisees thought the Herodians were sell-outs.  But a mutual hate can make for strange friends, and Jesus made both the Pharisees and the Herodians nervous. 

Jesus threatened the power they had fought to keep

For the Pharisees’— it was their bid for the people’s religious lives,

For the Herodians— control of the occupational government. 

This meant that both groups had the most access to power; And someone like Jesus, who called their use of power into question, was a problem to be ‘resolved.’

The group comes up to Jesus, and they ask their trick question.  A yes or no question which should have embarrassed Jesus no matter which way he answered it.  If Jesus said to pay the tax, He would appear to be a sympathizer of the oppressive government and lose credibility with many of his followers; the Pharisees win.

If Jesus said not to pay the tax, he would be guilty of treason.  An agitator.  The Herodians would not let someone who openly protested their rule live.  Rome does not like rebels.  If Jesus says not to pay the tax, the Herodians could have him killed, and the Pharisees still win.

Pretty brilliant, right? 

Politics as usual in occupied territories.

Jesus throws them a curve ball by asking for the coin. The coin was a denarius.  And it looked a lot like coins we would see today, but with a major difference.  Our quarter doesn’t name George Washington as God; the denarius did name the emperor as God.

For a Jew to be carrying a coin that called anyone but the God of Israel divine—in the temple of all places!— should have been embarrassing.  That the Pharisees and Herodians could produce the coin probably made them a bit sheepish.

Jesus then asks who is on the coin. 

They answer ‘the emperor,’ and Jesus famously replies “Give to the emperor that which belongs to the emperor, and to God what belongs to God.”

With this response the Pharisees and the Herodians are humiliated.  They walk away amazed; surprised that they did not see that response coming.  Jesus managed to take their yes or no question about taxes and turn even that to God.

I want to suggest that the gospel reading for today is

more than Matthew bragging on Jesus’ rhetorical skills,

more than a tale showing Jesus’ political prowess,

more than a scriptural permission for Christians to pay taxes,

and more than a handy reading to pull out and read for church pledge drives. 

The gospel reading today is a challenge to us because we are  all called to ask a few questions:

What bears the image of God?

What is the currency of the Kingdom of God?

Does this have bearing on

Our politics today?

In asking these questions we are then called to a process of formation; a process of sifting through our lives to find out what bears the image of what would want to rule over us in this world; and what bears the image of God. It is a matter of discerning what is from the kingdoms of this world, and what is part of the Kingdom of God. 

This is an act of discernment that we engage on our own and in community.

What makes this task difficult is that we are not just in the world or just in sync with God. 

We are both of God and in the world. 

We look at both the best and the worst of what we carry within us, and like coins in our pockets, we examine these things closely to see whose image we find on them.

Perhaps we begin with the work of exchanging

Within ourselves and with God’s help

Hate for Love

despair for hope

darkness for light

injury for pardon

doubt for faith.

In doing this work inside us, we learn something about God and God’s desire for the world we see before us.

Then we begin to see God’s economy and that every person bears the inscription of God.  The image that God created, the image shared by Christ when he walked the earth as God incarnate, and the image which the Spirit enlivens daily. 

But sometimes that image of God in other people is hard to see. The world and other people try to stamp other inscriptions on us all. 

Inscriptions of

race,

gender,

nationality,

ability,

wealth,

even religion.

How do these inscriptions influence us to act? 

To take a look around our country: 

Race can determine your level of care in the hospital, when you watch a staff that is helpful to one patient become cold to another.

Gender can determine what positions you can hold in business, government, the Church—if not on paper at least in practice.

Nationality can determine whether or not you can be treated as a person by the government-- Whether or not you are known as an ‘illegal’ or subject to enhanced interrogation techniques, otherwise known as torture.

Ability can determine if you are seen as a child of God or a cross to bear for family and friends.

Wealth can determine whether or not you are respected, or considered a human being of worth.

These inscriptions are powerful.  They still have a hold on me.  It takes a daily effort not to see the person in front of us as the sum of what marks society inscribes on them, but as Children of God, bearing God’s image, and of precious worth. 

Then we are called to act on our discernment.  To act as though our recognition of what is God’s and what is the world’s has meaning that is more than a theological proposition, but a compass to guide our actions in life. This may have political consequences.

The effort is to see what God sees; to acknowledge the different set of standards of God’s Economy— an economy based on life, and flesh, and blood, and warmth, and love—instead of an economy of metal, and paper, and scarcity, and neglect.

Then we give to God what is God’s by recognizing the image of Christ

in the stranger,

the friend,

the sick,

the hungry,

the thirsty

the imprisoned,

and the poor.

And ultimately, we may find that recognizing what belongs to God is more rewarding than to bow to the inscriptions the world fosters or bow in homage to economic systems that betray or deny the inherent worth of others.  In so doing, we give back to God— and give to neighbor— that which bears God’s inscription:  love, hope, light, pardon, faith, and help.

To recognize the dignity of others in spite of what the world has set as important is a step toward acknowledging a part of the reign of God; and acting on that reality.

…and that has political consequences. 

May your discernment of what bears God’s image in your life be fruitful.

Amen.