after Pentecost
| Old Testament | Exodus 33:12–23 |
| Psalm | Psalm 99 |
| Epistle | 1 Thessalonians 1:1–10 |
| Gospel | Matthew 22:15–22 |
Almighty and everlasting God, in Christ you have revealed your glory among the nations: Preserve the works of your mercy, that your Church throughout the world may persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Here I am, lost in this desert, waiting for your arrival. I find no answers, no clear direction. You were in the wilderness too. You know what this feels like. Walk with me. I require confirmation that you are present with me. I require confirmation that I am speaking to you, addressing reality rather than nothingness. I need to feel your presence even within this dry and isolated place. Help me hold on. Amen.
▶ | Hear These Lessons Preached Calvary Episcopal Church, Richmond · on Matthew 22:15–22 |
“Therefore the Lord demanded that the money should be shown Him, and inquired about the image, whose it was; and when He had heard it was Caesar’s, said, Render to Caesar what are Caesar’s, and what are God’s to God; that is, the image of Caesar, which is on the coin, to Caesar, and the image of God, which is on man, to God; so as to render to Caesar indeed money, to God yourself. Otherwise, what will be God’s, if all things are Caesar’s?”
“For when, on being asked, Whose is the image? they said, Caesar’s; He says, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. For this is not to give but to render, and this He shows both by the image, and by the superscription.” And the limit on Caesar’s claim: “But you, when you hear, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, know that He is speaking only of those things which are no detriment to godliness; since if it be any such thing as this, such a thing is no longer Caesar’s tribute, but the devil’s.”
“Q. What are we by nature? A. We are part of God’s creation, made in the image of God. Q. What does it mean to be created in the image of God? A. It means that we are free to make choices: to love, to create, to reason, and to live in harmony with creation and with God.” And on the next page: “It means that all people are worthy of respect and honor, because all are created in the image of God, and all can respond to the love of God.”
“It is God who claims us, who made us in his own image. We do not belong to anything or to anyone else.”
“How can a Jew be faithful and observant and also stay alive under Roman rule? … But it is precisely this position of being caught in a bind of irreconcilable, conflicting obligations and duties that makes real life so interesting. The desire to make the tension go away, to solve it, is the enemy of true faithfulness.”
As we have noted, we are in the midst of a confrontation between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day. This week’s passage is on giving to God what is God’s. The leaders in the story are trying to get Jesus to make a seditious, revolutionary statement so they can accuse him and dismantle his ministry.
This is a masterful moment of play and humor. It is a masterful moment of debate in which Jesus is seen outclassing his verbal opponents. The reality is that all things are God’s. So Caesar can think that the coin is his, and we should indeed give it to him. But the message is clear: all things are God’s.
This is not an argument for a division between church and state. Surely Christians over the years have understood that they have a virtuous citizen role to play in the world of government and politics. But this text is far from being a text that offers a view of the nature of our current debate between religion and the public square.
In this passage Jesus is clear: all things are God’s. Even in the subtext, as we see the plotting and the future revelation that Jesus is surely to die for his teaching and for his eating with undesirables, we are sure that God will prevail. Even the personhood of Jesus is God’s own possession. The workings of the state may indeed crucify and torture, but the kingdom will belong to God and to his Son Jesus.
So this Sunday, situated in the midst of the fall, is located right in the middle of many a stewardship campaign. And I think the message Jesus offers his detractors and the people around him is just as applicable today.
Every week we proclaim through the Nicene Creed a particular kind of God. We proclaim and give voice to a God whom we have faith in, the very one who has created all things and for whom all things were made. The whole of creation was ordered and breathed into so that it might reflect the glory of God. Our Gospel today reminds us that, in fact, all things are God’s.
This flies in the face of our modern conception of stewardship. We teach and preach that God gave us all things, so we are to give back to God. That is not the same thing, though. When we teach that, we change the meaning of the whole text and the whole of Scripture.
The reality is that all things are created by God and are God’s. So the question isn’t what am I supposed to do with my five percent, or how do I get to my tithe goal.
“If all things are God’s, how does God want me to use everything?”
That is a radical notion. Yet it fits with the understanding of creation. It fits with the understanding of Christian stewardship in the New Testament. It is very uncomfortable, and it is so culturally foreign to Americans that most people will not preach it — and when it is preached, most people won’t be able to hear it.
You see, when we get this confused, and we then adapt the stewardship notion — the idea that all things are God’s and we are God’s stewards — we get the idea that the owner has actually given over the property to the steward. That, really, the steward is the owner. When the steward becomes the owner, then there is a new owner, and that owner is not God.
It is a very subtle concept. Perhaps it is so subtle that our authorities challenging Jesus don’t even get his joke. You see, we can pretend all we want. Yet as we are reminded on Ash Wednesday and at every funeral: dust we are, and to dust we shall return. All things are God’s. They are God’s now, and they will be God’s when we are finished using them.
The very heart of stewardship is understanding that all that we have and all that we are is God’s, and is purposed for God’s use. The only stewardship question is: how does God want me to use all this stuff?
There is another, more sinister stumbling block in this text, and that is the one sneakily portrayed by the emperor’s image. You see, we — not wholly unlike the emperor — believe most days that we deserve what we have. We deserve what we have; in fact, we deserve more than what we have. Remember, the one with the most toys wins. That’s right. The reality is that most of us Americans are still firmly rooted in the false notion that if we work hard, God will bless us; if we believe rightly, God will bless us; if we do the right things, God will bless us. Therefore all the stuff we have is because God blessed us. No matter how you look at it, the second most human way of life — behind “it is all mine” — is the notion that the more I have, the better I am.
In varying degrees, all humans are hoarders. We believe that if we can have, possess, keep, hide, and collect it, then we are good, safe, whole, and holy.
I love the wake-up call that Charles Lane gives in his book Ask, Thank, Tell: Improving Stewardship Ministry in Your Congregation. He writes:
Our American culture has trumpeted the “self-made man” at least since the time of Horatio Alger. The rags-to-riches story of a person who has pulled himself or herself up by the bootstraps and made something out of nothing has a long-standing place in our nation’s mythology. We tend to take a very individualistic view of “success,” ignoring the multitude of complicated factors that have caused one person to achieve wealth and power, while others have not. … Countless forces over which we have no control have helped make us what we are. The brains and the hard work for which we want to take credit are God’s, and God entrusts them to us.
What we have should not focus our attention on how kingly, wealthy, or blessed we are; it should make us ponder and think about how God would have us help others with what we have been given. How do I, as a steward of God’s stuff, understand and enact the kingdom of God?
We are not unlike the Roman legions occupying the Holy Land who produced that coin Jesus held many years ago. We occupy our fortresses and think only of the small offerings we should make to the Lord our God, who has created all things, gives them life, and has brought them into being by his hand.
We are invited into a sacred relationship with the gardener, the vineyard owner, and the one who is God above all gods, Lord of lords, and King of kings. And we are given the privilege of serving as stewards — for all things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee (1 Chronicles 29:14). All things are God’s, and we have the honor as stewards to ask how God wishes us to use all things.
Only when we begin here, by opening our eyes to our faithful claim of a creator God and our role as stewards, may we begin the journey of discernment about how to use God’s stuff.
“It can be tempting, when we receive the “word,” to think that we have received a special revelation, understood only by God and ourselves, and we allow this to become a justification for all we do and think. But the Holy Spirit moves in others as well as ourselves.”
“The content of the Gospel is grounded in faith and action — faith insofar as one must accept the message of the return of Jesus, and action insofar as one must turn away from the practices of idolatry. The presentation of the Gospel is found in words and action.”
This week we shift to the first letter of Paul to the community in Thessalonica. Typical of most letters, we have an introduction which was routine at the time of Paul’s writing. It is possible this introduction was done by a scribe in preparation for the rest of the text; this would also be true for the ending of the letter. This is in part why so many of the Pauline texts begin and end in a similar manner.
After the greeting, Paul tells them that despite their adversity they have continued in faith. They have undertaken a labor of love and a work of faith. They are responding to God and God’s love for them, and have endured their sufferings.
And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for in spite of persecution you received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia.
They have done all this not because of their own faith, but because of the faith of Christ that is in them. They have been chosen by God. Yes, they are faithful; but Paul is clear it is God working his purposes out in them. In this combined way — God’s faithfulness and their own — they are successfully imitating Christ for the community around them to see.
The families connected together in this gathering (which is really the meaning of the word church here) were known as people who worshipped the Roman gods. They probably had altars and idols in their homes. Yet they have come to know that Christ was resurrected and is a living God — he is not dead, nor a useless idol. Moreover, it is this living God who will save them, regardless of what their end may be. Their witness is spreading from Thessalonica across the region, and it is having a great effect.
In every place your faith in God has become known, so that we have no need to speak about it. For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.
What kind of witness are we making to the world around us? How are we letting God’s faithfulness be revealed in our actions and in our daily lives? What false gods do we continue to manifest in our lives, and what altars do we have set up in our homes? Paul challenges us today to figure out how we are living like Paul, Silvanus, and this gathering of faithful people — or how we are not. I don’t think this is a moment for shame, but rather an honest question: do we really believe the altars and statues we erect in our lives will save us? And are our actions in the world revealing the kind of God we believe in?
“The fact that Moses’ request is not granted reminds Moses, and us, that God is still God. For all his chutzpah, even Moses cannot presume too much. Even Moses cannot know or comprehend God completely.”
“Preaching on this passage could address the uncertainty that is a necessary part of faith, or it might emphasise the way in which worship and discipleship are themselves acknowledgements of the presence of God with us.”
“YHWH extends grace, mercy, and assures the promise of a holy presence and a communal presence. YHWH also sets up a tension that is at the heart of our own relationship with God. God gives of Godself, but in God’s infinite holiness, God also places limits on accessibility.”
In today’s passage Moses complains that God has not revealed who God is going to raise up to assist him; then he angles for a view of God, and God essentially responds by showing Moses his back.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that this passage falls between the golden calf story in chapter 32 and the “Thirteen Attributes of Mercy” in chapter 34, including the second set of tablets. And Sacks asks: what is Moses trying to accomplish here? (See Jonathan Sacks, “The Closeness of God,” Ki Tissa 5776.)
Let’s face it, the passage is strange. Leaning on Sacks here to ferret out the strands, we clearly see that (a) the people of Israel are lost in many ways, a “national crisis” is at hand, and Moses is seeking theological understanding and a look at God; (b) the actual sentences don’t make sense together — see verse 14 specifically, and the order of things; (c) there is some confusion about what the people’s sin actually was.
Not to mention that Moses has moved his tent outside the encampment. The whole story is a bundle of emotions and leadership anxiety. Sacks writes:
It was as if Moses was saying, “Until now, they have experienced You as a terrifying, elemental force, delivering plague after plague to the Egyptians, bringing the world’s greatest empire to its knees, dividing the sea, overturning the very order of nature itself. At Mount Sinai, merely hearing Your voice, they were so overwhelmed that they said, if we continue to hear the voice, we will die.” The people needed, said Moses, to experience not the greatness of God but the closeness of God — not God heard in thunder and lightning at the top of the mountain, but as a perpetual Presence in the valley below. … That is why Moses sought to understand the very nature of God Himself. Is it possible for God to be close to where people are? Can transcendence become immanence?
What is important here is the arc of the narrative, which gets somewhat lost in our choppy way of reading it. The story goes that Moses is essentially pleading with God to come close to God’s people — that God cannot always be the God of mighty acts and transcendent power.
To this, God replies to Moses much as God replies to Job: you people cannot and do not understand my ways. I imagine him saying to Moses, “Do you not know my story, and how I have been with you and your ancestors in every step, in your dreams, and upon your lips? Do you not know how I have walked with my people in the garden of their lives? I am a mighty God of mighty acts, but I am also the God who knows the intricacies of human life, the hairs on a head, and the sweat of your brow.” So it is that God does what Moses asks, and comes and fills the people with his presence.
Such inexplicable transcendence and immanence are alluded to in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 6, when Jesus walks on water. Here the Gospel taps into this very idea, alluding backwards to the story in Job 9:4–11 and to our passage from Exodus for today. He intended to pass them by. (Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 72.) Here in the Gospel, then, is the revelation of God in the person of Christ Jesus, through whom all things were made — the eternal incarnation revealed. It is the very Christ, the incarnation, who may be seen passing by Moses and Job. The great mystery that Moses and the people can’t seem to comprehend is that God is, and has always been, nearby in God’s incarnation. The question Sacks asks we see answered as a revealed and unequivocal Yes: God is transcendent and cannot be contained fully in any vessel, and yet is revealed in the person of Jesus, and in all of creation and its history, as immanently present.
There is always a quick move to keep God somehow contained in the vessels we make for God — whether that be a tent of meeting, the Mishkan, a church by the sea where Jesus walked on the water, or our hearts. This is merely religious thinking, though. The reality is that God is present, and always present. We may glimpse this God only for a second and from time to time, but God is present always, in all places, and with all people. Religion inserts a notion of dualism here that is essential to religious power. But God is the God who shaped the universe through Christ, and who floated down the Nile watching over a baby in a basket. God is both the mighty voice and presence upon a mountaintop, and the one we intimately call our relative: father, mother, brother, and sister. Like a mother hen, he gathers us; and with a mighty voice, she shatters a rock, and water comes forth, that we may drink deeply of the mystery of a God revealed.
Jesus asks whose image is on the coin. The question he does not ask aloud is whose image is on you. What in your life are you handing to Caesar that was never his?
Moses asks to see God’s glory and is shown God’s back. Where have you demanded a clearer view of God than you were given, and what would it mean to keep walking anyway?
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