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"IDOLIZING CAESAR" Psalm 135:13-21; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22 #297 10/16/2005
The last time I was over at the Armory after Hurricane Katrina, I got to sit down and have a conversation with Don. I'd met Don before, but the first time he was gruff and a little surly with me. When I asked him casually how he was that day, he said, "How am I supposed to be?" After that little education, I moved on. But the last time I was there, Don was the first person I ran into. I said hello to him while he was outside getting some fresh air, and the next thing I knew, an hour had gone by.
Don is a Renaissance man. He was a gourmet cook in who says that he trained under Barron Hilton. He is a He loves jazz and blues, and has photographed some of the best musicians in He plays the guitar himself. And he quoted Voltaire to me - correctly! He was also a landlord, and survived the Superdome and got to Bonham along with Barbara, who used to rent from him.
We had a pretty free-range conversation in that hour. At one point, though, he changed courses rather abruptly and said, "Your life is what frustrates you." Your life is what frustrates you? He said, yes, think about it. "If a rabbit runs in front of you on the road, you say, ?Oh, there goes a rabbit,' and you don't give it a second thought. The rabbit wasn't frustrating to you. But if you stub your toe on the furniture, your toe becomes your life. It frustrates you!"
He told me about where he used to live in When he left his apartment, he took most of the things that mattered to him and put them up on the top shelf of a closet on the second floor. He had some camera equipment, and some musical instruments. But he also had some pictures and negatives of those jazz musicians, and he had intended to make prints and sell them after he retired. "Now," he said, "my life is on the top shelf of that closet in It's all I can think about."
I was taken with Don's story. And if I hadn't been so taken, I might have argued with him that when "life is what frustrates you," "life" has become something else that we worship. Or I might have told him that he was paraphrasing someone else we know: Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. ------------------------------------------ So, going on Don's premise, if life is what frustrates you, what was it that was frustrating the Pharisees and the Herodians that day?
On any given day in Pharisees and Herodians would have been strange bedfellows. The Herodians were part of the Roman occupying government, who were never exactly popular for that very reason. The Pharisees were a group of Jewish laymen who saw their purpose in life as obeying the law of Moses and making sure that everyone else did as carefully as they. The Jewish Pharisees thought the Roman Herodians were pagans, and ordinarily, to compromise with them would have been out of the question. What became common ground for them, however, was their mutual distaste for Jesus.
The question they teamed up to raise with Jesus was the hot potato of the day, somewhat along the lines of how the separation of church and state is a hot potato for us today. Was it legal to pay taxes to the Roman emperor? The Jews had been forced to pay taxes to the Romans for about twenty-five years at that point. And then, as if taxes weren't popular enough, every time they paid them they had to do so with a denarius with Caesar's image on it. Every time there was a new emperor, all of the money got re-minted in his name. So they paid their taxes using coins that bore the image of Caesar Tiberius and said" "Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus and high priest." Every time the Pharisees paid the taxes they resented paying, they did so with a coin that looked just like the one they resented and said that he was a god. And so for them to raise the question of paying taxes was like stubbing their toe on the furniture. They were asking about what frustrated them. And they were asking it of the one who frustrated all of them enough that they were willing to band together with enemies to try and trap him.
Well, we know that Jesus was a very inclusive kind of guy. The answer he gave made them all universally mad! On the surface, his answer seems very matter-of-fact and logical. "Give to the emperor that which belongs to the emperor, and give to God that which belongs to God." What we can't see from our distance and what we don't read between the lines is this: Jesus was saying that not everything belonged to Caesar. There was something and someone Other than Caesar which deserves our devotion. That made the Herodians mad. And the fact that Jesus didn't call the tax bogus made the Pharisees mad. Jesus was nothing if not an equal-opportunity offender. But that was the point at which he became their life: he was frustrating them. ----------------------------------- So what is it that frustrates us? I suspect most of us have a list as long as my arm! But our money and our possessions would probably be right up there at the top.
You and I as human beings have this tendency to compartmentalize things. We think that there must be a clear line between what belongs to us and what belongs to God.
I want you to try something with me for a minute. Clasp your hands together like this, and then hold your arms where they make a straight line out. Now, think of one elbow as that which belongs to Caesar, and the other one as that which belongs to God. This is how we see it. There's a clear stop and start to where our things end and God's things start. They're connected, but they're held together in tension with each other, aren't they? In order to keep that balance, you have to keep pulling in the middle, don't you? If you lessen the pressure from one arm, it will go flying to the other side. On our good days, we think that here in the middle is the place to be. On our less than good days, we'd find somewhere more along the range over here where more of our stuff belongs to us, even if it's Caesar AND us, and less of it belongs to God.
But when we do that, we're missing the point. The point is not for us to decide how much of what we have belongs to Caesar and how much belongs to God. The point is that it's all over here (with elbows): it ALL belongs to God, Even Caesar, even that which we idolize, whether Caesar knows it or not. The tension between the two doesn't go away. It's still there. But it's all over on this side.
Friends, there can be no artificial divisions in our lives. God gave us good things to use and enjoy. Government is for our benefit, as are technically the taxes we pay to help government run. Money enables a lot of thing to happen in our lives. Our schools, our clothes, our careers, our Ipods and computers and cell phones, they're all meant to enhance the quality of our lives and not to become the center of our lives. Everything in our life is going to inevitably reach its "use-by" date. But if we cling to them beyond that, they get left on this elbow. And anything which does not end up on this side over here (elbows) has become an idol. And as the Psalmist tells us, those who make them are like them. If we insist on holding on to anything in this life, we will become as lifeless as the object to which we hold. ----------------------------- Confessing and living into the truth - the truth that it all belongs to God - feels weird at first. It's not popular and it's not easy. Nothing in our society encourages us to live this way. At first it feels like someone has taken your head off and set it back on at an angle different from the rest of your body. Everything looks and feels different. But it is absolutely freeing to do so. And it's important to know that we don't try to do it alone. Paul says it this way to the Thessalonians: "in spite of persecution, you received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit."
I predict that for most of us, the persecution we face will be quite different from those experienced by Christians in the first century. Most of us will never look a lion in the mouth unless it's behind bars. Neither will most of us experience anything like the magnitude of that experienced by heroes like Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa. Our persecutions won't likely be dramatic or prominent, but in the words of the great theologian Roseanna Rosannadanna, "It's always something." Something else is always going to vie for our attention and our allegiance. To paraphrase our friend Don, something is always going to frustrate us. But we don't have to move our elbow. You and I may have to live under this Caesar or that, and we may have to pay this tax or that. But you and I are never Caesar's. In our Book of Confessions, the Heidelberg Catechism teaches us that our only hope in life and in death is this: "That I belong - body and soul, in life and in death, not to myself but to my faithful savior Jesus Christ, who?protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head." There's nothing that can ultimately frustrate us. Our job, according to Jesus, is to render to God that which belongs to God. And that, my friends, is everything.
Amen. |
