Owing What to God and Nation?

Epiphany UCC

Context: Before today’s text, Jesus has shared the parable of the wedding banquet, in which many get invited, but few make the party. Afterwards, Jesus continues to answer questions from the Pharisees who continue to try to trip him up with difficult questions.

Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answered, “The emperor’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

THE MODERN LESSON Rita Nakishima Brock

Context: Brock is a well-known feminist theologian, and these words come from a sermon in a book entitled And Blessed is She: Sermons by Women.

An ordinary woman [once] lived in a small town near Modesto, California. She was not famous, powerful or influential…I was told this true story about her. She was the kind of person we’d call a good neighbor. She was friendly, liked by her neighbors, and was good to her family. When the United States entered the Second World War, she supported our government – until California Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren signed an order requiring all US citizens of Japanese ancestry to be interned in relocation camps.

Many of this woman’s neighbors were Japanese Americans. She knew them and loved as her friends. She went to Sacramento and lobbied the legislators. She wrote the president to try and stop the camps and the government confiscation of Japanese property. She could not move the powerful and famous. She was a lone nobody….The (denomination) Disciples of Christ was the only official church body to protest the order to intern Japanese American citizens. So this lone woman…bought all the Japanese farms and homes in her town for a dollar each and watched her friends be taken away. When the camps were closed, when the Japanese who survived had no homes left, when their lands were stolen by our government, this woman’s neighbors were lucky. She gave her friends back their homes and land so they might live.

This past month or so we’ve seen a contentious debate about the nature of patriotism and how it should be manifested, how we should show loyalty to our country, and whether one should kneel or not kneel during the national anthem. I do think that the President has effectively distracted us from the reason why some NFL players have chosen to kneel during the national anthem, which was to protest racial injustice, to bring attention to the police disparity that often happens when some police officers interact with people of color. As I’ve shared with some of you, I had an early experience of that reality in the small town I lived in Texas for my first three years of high school, where an African-American man was stopped, jail for drinking while driving, and hours later he was found dead in prison cell, beaten to death by the police officers who had arrested him. They tried to cover their crime by washing his clothes to get the blood off, and then putting those wet clothes back on him, before they called the only doctor in town. Dr. Winslow clearly saw through this ruse, and contacted people above the local police office, probably the Texas Rangers, and the two officers were eventually arrested. Their punishment for killing a human being: 5 years in jail, and I think they got to keep their pensions. Of course, of course, this kind of behavior is not done by all police officers, it is not even the majority of them that do this kind of thing, but it is a reality for many people of color, and other minorities, including the one I am a part of: amongst my gay college friends in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, we would have thought twice about calling the cops for anything, since they would be just as likely to harass us and make trouble for us as the homophobe who was harassing us, and who we were trying to escape from. Now, of course, this is not all officers, and not even the majority, but it is a problem, something we’ve seen more clearly now because of cell phone camera videos, and police body cameras. There a lot of good cops and a lot of good pastors and a lot of good teachers, but there are always some that will sully their profession by their actions, and because police officers have the power of life and death over people, this issue has become of incredible importance to our country and especially to people of color. Some have even argued that to question what our government does, or what the police do, or what the military does, or what our current President does, is an act of disloyalty, an almost treasonous act, on our part.

But underneath that issue of the NFL protests is how sometimes the people who protect us can in fact harm us, is the issue of what kind of respect, what kind of loyalty to do we owe the government of whom they are an instrument, a powerful instrument. I think the story we heard about from Rita Nakismima Brock, the feminist theologian, about the woman who was loyal to her government, until that government began to do the wrong thing, in this case, rounding up loyal Japanese citizens, confiscating their property, and putting them into camps. We did not do that to the many people of German descendants, or Italian descendants in the US, whose countries we were at war with, but only the Japanese. The woman in her story saw the injustice of such a thing, and did everything possible to stop it – and when she couldn’t stop this madness, she bought the property from her Japanese neighbors for $1 and sold it right back to them for the same price after the war. She loved her country, but sometimes countries, nations, they can do the wrong thing, and God knows we Americans are not immune to that reality. In the end, her ultimate loyalty was not to her nation, but to justice, to doing the right thing, when her own nation was doing the wrong thing. As Christians, as people who follow after the way of the Christ, what do we ultimately owe to our country, and to the instruments of that country, like the military, the police, the apparatus of the state, and what do we owe to God? That question has vexed and troubled Christians for 2000 years, almost from the beginning, as Rome began to persecute Christians in some places for acts that were seen as disloyal to the state, acts as such not worshipping the Emperor alongside God.

I don’t know if we ever quite worked out the balance that is needed, the balance between being a Christian and being an American, between being citizens of the kingdom of God, and being citizens of Rome or America, or wherever. The point is that there are times when these dual loyalties stretch us, when our citizenships in both worlds clash with each other, despite our loyalties to both kingdoms, the kingdom of God and the country which claims our heart-felt loyalty. But the tension between being Christian and being American, or whatever citizenship we claim, that too has been often unquestioned and unexplored, except in rare circumstances in this country. There were Christians who were pacifists for faith reasons, whose faith in Christ led them to eschew participation in the first and second world wars, and whose patriotism was questioned by others in this country—but that pacifism was a fairly rare phenomenon, and thus it was never the kind of issue that pushed us to test the limits of this dual citizenship. Most of the time we never thought twice about it, about where the distinction between being a Christian and being American lies—and some have so conflated the two that to be an American is to be Christian, and sometimes vice versa. To love America is to become Christian, maybe Jewish, but nothing else, no other religion is truly an American religion, other than those two faiths, in the eyes of some misguided American Christians. Yet, the reality is that there is a distinction, that we are both of these things, American and Christian, Christian and American, and we ought to think about what that means, and we ought to think about where our ultimate loyalties lay, even as we embraced that dual citizenship, that citizenship in two different kingdoms.

Jesus himself had to deal with this question in the text we just heard a few minutes ago, when forces around him were trying to trap him into declaring where his ultimate loyalties lay. Will Jesus declare, with the Herodians, followers of the puppet king of the Romans, Herod, that the right thing to do is to pay the 1 denarii tax to a pagan emperor, whose face is on the coin, as you can see on the cover of your bulletin today, an act which will condemn Jesus to the super patriot Jews around him who would say that such an act was treasonous, including a few of which were likely his disciples? Or will he side with the Pharisees, whose loyalty to God above all else was well known, will he tell his questioners not to pay the one denarii tax required of all Roman subjects, getting him in trouble with the Romans, who would have understand such a position as tantamount to treason? It’s a really clever little trap that his enemies have laid for him—and it’s even cleverer if one keeps in mind some of the back story around this particular question. You see, in the year 6-7 of the Common Era, a few years after Jesus’ birth, there was another man who many Jews believed to be the Messiah, a man by the name of Judas (Acts 5:37) who pushed for the worship of God alone, and who argued that it was wrong for Jews to pay the 1 denarii tax to the Romans. Unsurprisingly, he was eliminated, taken out, and so you can now understand the dilemma here for Jesus—will he align himself with those who admired the Judas of 25 years earlier? Or will he take the safer road by telling them to pay the tax, and thus keep the Romans happy and off his neck, but then in doing so alienating even some of his own disciples, who likely numbered themselves among those religious and national zealots of first century Palestine?

In fact, what Jesus gives them in his response is, frankly, not much, actually, despite the cleverness of the answer. We know what he says: “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” and it is brilliant answer to a beguiling dilemma, but the issue is never really quite settled, because we’re never told what part of our actual lived lives belong to the emperor and what part of our life belongs to God. Sure, it threads the needle, and keeps him out of hot water, at least for a while, but it also confounds us, we who hear these words thousands of years later, and we don’t quite know what he wants from those who follow him. Clearly, Jesus is not trying to divide up our lives between the sacred and profane, the religious and political, the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world, because he most certainly took stands that would have embroiled him trouble in both arenas, in both kingdoms. We aren’t given an easy and clear answer about what parts of our lives belong to those dual citizenships that we inhabit—and that is where actual discernment process comes in, where we have to figure out for ourselves what actually belongs to Caesar, and what ultimately, always belongs to God.

But there may be a clue to Jesus’ intentions in his use of that particular coin, one that was meant to trap him, the one with Caesar’s face on it, which is the on the front of your bulletin. When Jesus puts forth his mysterious solution to the issue, he’s simply saying that they can pay the emperor with this coin, because his name and his face appear on it and thus the state, the Empire and Emperor has a just claim on the coin. But what about giving to God the things that are God’s? What is God’s, what bears God’s imprint, and thus is claimed by God? Think about this for a second, think about the story of God’s creation of humankind, of God saying that we are created in God’s own image, that we bear the image, the very likeness of God in our very being, much like this denarii bears the image of Caesar, of the emperor. And, if following Jesus’ logic here, that the imprint on something denotes the ownership of it, if we bear the image of God, then we belong to God, all of us, every fiber of our being belongs to God, and we are what is owed to God, our whole lives, our whole selves. The Emperor can have his denarii, his coins, his money, and there is wisdom there, there is room for loyalty to our country, whatever country it is, but Jesus here is making a larger point that ultimately we ourselves, we who bear the image of the living God, the creator of the universe, we belong to something even greater than our country, our nation, even one we love deeply. In that vein, I’m reminded that we often forget how young our country is, how truly new to this planet it really is—two hundred and something years, but the church, in all of his many forms, has been around for 2000 years, and the people of Israel, for even longer than that. That doesn’t dismiss America, my country, for many of us, our country, or any patriotic loyalty, but it just puts things into perspective—that all countries begin and end, but the realm of God, what God was and is still doing in this world, the kingdom of God, it was here before the founding of this country, and it will be here after this country becomes a memory and discussed in history books by people and nations that do not yet exist. We are simply asked by God, and Jesus, I think, in this passage, to keep things in perspective, and to remember to whom we ultimately belong.

A few weeks ago, a saint in my former congregation in Michigan passed away, a lovely and kind woman by the name of Joyce. Her family asked me to share some remembrances to be read at the funeral, and so I wrote the following:

I don’t know if it is a good thing but often we pastors locate members of our congregation by where they sit every Sunday. We humans are creatures of habit, and Joyce was like most of us, and so while I was in Coloma, she sat to my left, a few pews from the front, underneath one of those beautiful clear windows that lets the light pour into that sanctuary on Sunday mornings. Of course, I had plenty of interactions with her elsewhere, including at her home, but in my mind, there she is even now, worshipping God with the rest of the good pilgrims of that place. She always looked her best for Sunday morning worship, ready to take in the music and the sermon and the prayers and immerse herself in wonder of worship.

Bryan shared with me that she appreciated my time in Coloma because she learned so much from me, which is humbling and surprising for me and other pastors, who often wonder if we’ve made any sort of impact in the world. But I have to say that I learned as much from Joyce as she perhaps she learned from me, and it was in that pew she homesteaded every Sunday that I learned one of the great lessons she taught me. We all know of Joyce’s deep patriotism, her love of this country and its best values, but what moved her the most was the sacrifice that so many young men and women paid for the sake of our freedom. She once told me a story from her childhood, when she would listen to the radio for news of the war, and it would cause her such grief, thinking of those young men dying in some far flung place without their families and loved ones. When we honored veterans and those died in defense of our country at the church, she would begin to softly cry in the pews, showing us that deep compassion she found for boys she never knew and we would never know, boys dying half way across the world alone and afraid, that compassion having never left her even then, decades and decades later.

Now, alongside the image of her in the pew every Sunday, I have another one of Joyce as well, listening to the radio as a child, imagining our American boys lost to the ravages and inhumanity of war, and the compassion that she practiced for veterans, and that compassion she had for all of us who knew her. Those tears she gently shed in that pew will never leave me, and she taught me so much about what real compassion can be, of how the heart can still break over and over again, even for strangers, and how we all still need that compassion for each other now, that capacity to care for each other, especially in these difficult days. She showed us God’s breaking heart on those Sunday mornings when the tears came from her for those she did not even know, but who she loved nonetheless. Thank you, Joyce, for teaching me more about compassion, and know you will be missed by Douglas and I, and you will be missed by all who know you, but we shall see you soon enough and that will surely be glad day for us.

Joyce taught me compassion, especially for the stranger, for those lost to war, and that is one of things I loved about her deep patriotism – her tears were not ones shed in blind allegiance to a country or a flag, but shed for those who died in war after war after war, in defense of this country and its ideals. It was not the easy and uncomplicated “blood and soil” kind of patriotism, but one born of understanding that doing the right thing, in defense of freedom, might cause you to lose something, it might cost us something. Granted, we Americans have not always been on the right side of history in all of our wars – think of the slaughter of Native Americans in this country - nor have police officers always done the right thing, nor have pastors always done the right thing. Sometimes doing the right thing is speaking up, and breaking the infamous blue wall found in police departments, or going against our country’s unjust treatment of its own citizens, as did that California woman did during World War 2, and trying to create justice for our neighbors. It’s moments like that remind us that in end our ultimate loyalty is to the One whose image we bear, that image, that likeness that bear so imperfectly, but whose presence in us remains nonetheless. Love of country is a good thing, but the love of God is an even better thing.