Sermons

A Campaign Debate

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
October 19, 2008	Matthew 22:15-22

Apparently, there is an election soon. I don’t know about you, but I am ready to exercise my franchise. So let me dispense with this now; “I am John Wilkinson and I approve this message.

Nearly every preacher I know is making some kind of effort to connect our faith with the dynamics of this political season, and I will be no exception.

Last week, we sought to assert that while our religious values should shape the political decisions we make, no particular version of the faith holds an exclusive understanding of what that looks like. We are all values voters, with God alone being the lord of our conscience.

Next week, Reformation Sunday, we will look at models of faithful leadership, biblical, religious, political. Again, no political endorsement from the pulpit, a really bad idea on almost every level.

Today we encounter one of the most iconic episodes in Jesus’ life, which has provided interpretive fodder across the centuries, often with little clarity and often with considerable controversy.

Jesus has been teaching. The crowds have been growing, threatening the religious and political status quo. He seems bent on upsetting every apple cart of conventional practice, turning the political system inside out and exposing the religious system for what it is, mainly an institution committed more to maintenance than transformation.
Hovering at the periphery of all this are the religious authorities – the bishops or presbytery executives of the day. They are worried, because they see the power vested in their offices threatened as Jesus repeatedly reminds the people of the direct connection they have been given to the power of their faith.

They realize what is at stake, so Matthew tells us they are plotting to entrap him, catch him in a statement so theologically preposterous, so biblically controversial, that even the people won’t stand for it. They are looking for the perfect “gotcha” question. They cook something up they are pretty proud of, and send their minions off to lure Jesus into saying the wrong thing.

“Teacher,” they say, “we know you are sincere, and teach God’s word with truth.” They ooze with insincerity even as they praise Jesus’ sincerity. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”

We’ve got him, they think to themselves. If he says yes, it is lawful to pay taxes, then his loyalties to his faith are in doubt and his authority vanishes as he bows to the Roman occupiers. If he says no, it is not lawful to pay taxes, then he is a political traitor and the civic authorities can pursue him. Either way, they think, we’ve got him.
But Jesus sees through false flattery and like any good debater, turns the question back on itself, and back on the inquisitors. Someone gives him a coin. Whose picture is on it, he asks. The emperor’s, they reply.

And there must have been some kind of pregnant pause, as the crowd, those with him, those against him, hang on the silence and wait for what he has to say. Give to the emperor, he says, give to Caesar, the things that are his. And give to God the things that are God’s. They are stunned and silent and amazed, we are told. And then they disappear back into the scenery. The “gotcha” attempt backfires and exposes the empty power of the authorities, sending them off with their collective tail between their legs.

We know they will not stop their plotting, and we know where their plotting will lead, when we will learn the price of true leadership, the absolute political implication of the gospel.

But what Jesus says rocks our world. One way is immediate and timely, and has to do with the topic of the question -- faith and money. Money talks, as they say, and it seems no accident that the tricksters used the power of money as the vehicle through which they would seek to entrap Jesus.

A deeper conversation will happen in a few weeks – Stewardship Sunday – as we will spend a little time connecting the current financial situation with matters of faith. In the meantime, though, it is always right to ask the question. What does faith have to say to all this?

Religious thinker Martin Marty writes that there is no theological joy in the current crisis, because we are all in this together. In fact, our own Joint Budget and Finance Committee and Investment Committee are working diligently to provide the best stewardship they can of our financial resources.

At the same time, Marty writes, the crisis gives opportunity for theological reflection. Whatever we thought of, or think of, free-market capitalism, have we ceded to it too much power, devotion, even, turned it into a god, in Harvey Cox’s phrase. We have been presented with a “clarifying moment,” Marty writes, “…And in clarifying moments people of good will and skill have a chance to contribute to critical reconstruction in society and personal life.” (“Sightings,” October 13, 2008)

But as Jesus stares intently at a coin, a piece of currency, and into the eyes of all who are staring intently at him, that financial question – faith and money – leads to a deeper question. Charles Cousar writes that this gospel encounter is a favorite when discussing matters of church and state, faith and politics. The trouble, Cousar writes, is that the text “does not answer very many questions.” (Texts for Preaching, Year A, page 531-533) “(Jesus) successfully escapes the trap laid for him…(and) throws the issue back on the audience, who will have to decide for themselves where to draw the line between the emperor’s jurisdiction and God’s jurisdiction.”

But on another level, Cousar says, more than outwitting is happening. “The passage does not make God and Caesar to be equals, nor are they symbolic names for separate realms…Humans bear God’s image, and wherever they live and operate…they belong to God.”

There are no clear answers to the question of how religion and politics should interact. What is clear is that should and that they do.

Different traditions approach the matter differently, and unlike countries which have either embraced a state religion or prohibited religious practice altogether, America offers 232 years of gray area on the matter.

It is true that we have a constitutionally defined separation of church and state, but it is also true that its original intent was to protect religion from government and not the other way around. Now things have changed. But not always clearly.

It is also true that the United States is still one of the most religious nations on earth, if the polls about what people believe and whether they worship are accurate. But we are also one of the most diverse religiously. Some think that this nation was formed as a Christian nation, but the evidence is simply not there, insofar as the founders' own words and religious practices would indicate. That it was founded primarily by Christians does not make it Christian. This will continue to evolve, and rightly so, as issues are adjudicated, as populations shift, as belief patterns ebb and flow.

But that doesn’t really answer the primary question, does it, as to how people of faith, we people of faith, should respond in the political world. That answer should be consistently true regardless of our national or historical reality – whether we are first century residents of an occupied Roman outpost or twenty-first century residents of a super-power where the free practice of religion is guaranteed.

Jesus does not answer that question head-on, but he certainly takes it on, by putting every political system in context and insisting always on a higher authority.
Our Calvinist/Presbyterian tradition, John McNeill writes, has always been wary of power – religious and political – so that a government is relatively more reflective of God’s will that places power in the hands of the people and removes it from an absolute few. “Most Calvinists,” McNeill reminds us, “have always associated with their faith in the sovereignty of God a feeling for the cause of human liberty and public justice.” (The History and Character of Calvinism, page 425)

That’s an approach rather than a party platform, which is frustrating and liberating at the same time, and certainly the point. A religious litmus test approach to politics has never worked. But this has never been about specific issues.

Jesus does not answer today’s question by offering a particular Christian response to taxation, a New Testament tax policy – whether it be for the upper class or middle class, whether trickle down or bubble up, whether Joe the Plumber should pay fewer taxes or more taxes. Rather, he sets the context, the basic premise, that God is our primary authority, and then invites us to work it out in this messy world, with every attendant consequence.

The late, great William Sloane Coffin wrote that “there is a real temptation to think that an issue is less spiritual for being more political, to believe that religion is above politics, that the sanctuary is too sacred a place for the grit and grime of political battle.” Not so, Coffin wrote. Coffin called for a “politics of compassion,” driven by justice, driven by truth, driven, at its heart, by a radical ethic of love. (“The Politics of Compassion,” in The Heart Is a Little to the Left, pages 9-25)

That’s what Jim Wallis calls for, a reconnection of our best moral values to a politics that is neither liberal nor conservative, a politics of a “renewed moral conscience,” a “prophetic spirituality.” (See among other works The Soul of Politics)
That will look different in different times and contexts, and with different actors. But the principles will remain constant, and the risk will always be present.

In apartheid South Africa, when our Reformed sisters and brothers composed the Confession of Belhar, which we have been sharing this month, it meant they were taking on both the religious and political establishment, stating in no uncertain terms that in a battle between faith and the government-sponsored, church-supported practice that divided black and white and persecuted black, this is where we stand.

A brief, less dramatic story. When I was a kid, and our family lived in a small town in southeastern Ohio, our schools were under-funded, and something needed to be done. A bond levy campaign was proposed, and my dad volunteered to chair it. He got flak for it. What’s a minister doing involving himself in that? The bond levy lost. I was just a kid and I don’t remember much, except a rally we went to where he kissed our school principal on the cheek which, at the time, was about the same as planting one on Attila the Hun.

But some nearly four decades later, if asked, I’ve prepared an answer to the question: “what’s a minister doing involving yourself in that?”

* I am involving myself in this because my faith demands it.

* I am involving myself in this because Jesus loved the little children and told us to do the same, and here is one way we can do it.

* I am involving myself in this because of a sense of prophetic spirituality, a politics of compassion.

* I am involving myself in this not because I feel one way or the other on school prayer, or teaching evolution, though I do, but rather as a citizen and a parent and a person of faith who only happens to be a minister.

* I am involving myself in this not to be political, but to be faithful, or as faithful as I can be in this broken and fearful world.

* I am involving myself in this to make a difference in the world that my sovereign God loves so much.

And then, I might take out a coin or a dollar bill, and I would look at it. Really look at it. You might do the same. What image is imprinted on it? Ponder that for a moment.
And then look at your heart, look at your spirit, look at your soul. Look at your values, your commitments. Look at your relationships. Look at your faith. What image is imprinted there? Amen.