Preacher: Julia Baker

Date: October 22, 2023

Scripture: Matthew 22:15-22

Audio for this sermon can be found here: To be posted

I invite you to place yourself

on the street in Jerusalem just days after

Jesus rode over palm branches on a donkey.

There is tension in the air,

the authorities are on high-alert, wanting to trap

this man who proclaims he is the King of the Jews.

Maybe you are one of the Pharisees’ disciples sent to ask questions,

to prod, to fish for a “sound bite” a 140-character piece of news to pin Jesus as disloyal

to the Romans. You are thinking about how to ask the question in just the right way

to snare him.

Maybe you are just someone watching from the crowd or

maybe you hold questions yourself and are also suspicious.

Or maybe you are “all in” behind this Teacher, the Messiah.

Maybe you are one of Jesus’s disciples watching him, watching the crowds.

Whoever you are I think everyone is surprised by Jesus’s

answer/non-answer, almost riddle.

Jesus reads the crowds well.

He gives no sound bite for those waiting to entrap.

Jesus responds in a way that almost sounds dismissive

– whose face is on the coin?

“Okay, well, so I guess it’s the emperor’s since it belongs to him…

so give him the things that are his.”

I almost hear frustration in Jesus – “Oh, people: You are asking the wrong questions.”

Inviting through his answer

“Give to God the things that are God’s”

a stepping stone into a completely different way of understanding domain.

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Placing these things side-by-side

in an ironic comparison

seems to be not a prescription

but rather a diagnosis

of the Romans’ illegitimacy as occupiers against the promises of God.

I wonder if the question Jesus is longing to be asked,

is nudging towards is something like:

“Ask me not to whom the coin belongs but to whom YOU belong.”

Whose image is imprinted on you?

—

Last weekend I was in NYC. Staying just blocks away from Times Square.

It was an especially powerful moment to be in the city.

Along with ads on the giant mega-screens for Gucci and the Gap

one building-tall screen was devoted to a flag of Israel, as nearby, news-tickers

scrolled through the headlines of war. Hasidic Jews stood on street corners

with leaflets, we heard of pro-Palestine protests in other parts of the city.

I stopped and read a wanted poster tacked on a lamp-post

– pleading for information about a kidnapped Israeli Grandmother.

In Grand Central Station more police were out than normal accompanied by

soldiers as helicopters circled overhead. There was an undercurrent of tension.

If Jesus were on a NYC street, or a street of DC, or small-town Maine.

What questions would he be asked?

What questions would he be asked trying to pin him to a certain side?

What questions would you like to ask?

So Jesus, who are the good and bad guys here? Israel or Palestine? America?

The Woke or the Trump base? Who should be Canceled? Who is right?

What should our bumper-stickers read, where do we give our donations, our tax dollars?

Maybe these are also all the wrong questions.

Growing up in the Mennonite church I heard many sermons about this passage.

In my young mind it felt so clear how I heard it –

okay so the empire is bad and God is good. Simple, sweet.

But Jesus tells the questioners – pay the coin to whom the coin belongs.

He isn’t actually staying to step outside of it all like I thought in my young radical

Christian-Anarchist years. You are part of this system,

in lots of ways you benefit from it,

for the system to work as we have set it up might you have to pay the taxes.

And with this Jesus is saying the true question of loyalty will remain,

and is not connected to that coin at all.

Whose face is on the coin – the emperor.

Whose face is imprinted on you? On your neighbor? On everyone?

How do we live faithfully in this time of strong polarized loyalties,

of diving line camps of thought

whose edges are sharp and canyons are deep?

I recently read a great article in The Atlantic titled

How to Love People Who Love Conspiracies.

A point that shimmered to me was how many are drawn to these niche extreme views

from a place of isolation. They are drawn to the belonging, community and kinship

that being a part of a group brings.

Whether extreme or subtle and everyday, we all get seduced by the conspiracies of

empire, right?

How do we liberate ourselves, each other, our neighbors, our “enemies” from the

captors that hold us hostage to the toxic narratives of empire?

The narratives of the Principalities and Powers that encourage the violence of

Canceling, that bolster up the temptation to judge based on a MAGA hat or bumper

sticker, a social media post, a side taken. The narrative that demands scarcity, separation

and greed. That says that is the mark imprinted on us, not that we are covered in the

fingerprints of God.

The poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote…

we are each other’s

harvest:

we are each other’s

business:

we are each other’s

magnitude and bond.

Jesus was not shy in naming what was not okay. To call out what keeps us from the abundant harvest of interconnection. In this story and many others as he turns the tables and casts out demons he did so in a way that spoke to the sickness, the coin as the ill, not the person.

As Jesus wept from the agony of it all and we must weep out the grief, hate, anger and toxins trapped in us, detoxing to then be clear on what is the true capital “S” Story.

Just days after speaking “Give to God the things that are Gods”

Jesus went to the cross in the ultimate show of love.

The ultimate riddle, flipping the narrative –

He goes to his death without shame,

showing us we don’t need to fear death.

He stays through the utterly uncomfortable.

Not just the death of our hearts’ last beat,

but the greater invitation of dying to destructive patterns.

Jesus does this out of an unfathomable love.

Jesus’s transformative act of solidarity,

standing with, going into, dying with all our human pain.

to reveal that the way that Cancel culture, and the empire, doesn’t work.

Jesus died so that the whole may thrive.

In a deep trust that death is not the final word.

Jesus invites us into the grand Story of belonging and love.

—

So rooted in this belovedness how are you being called, with compassionate clarity,

to give yourself more fully to God and thus give others to God, invite them into this

liberation?

I will close with this poem from Steve Garnaas-Holmes

I invite you to  sink into all the layers of your being as we hold these:

And you, made in God’s image,

stamped with God’s fingerprints,

the likeness of God‘s love,

give yourself, who are God’s, to God.

Let God alone spend you.

Only God knows what you have been saved for.

But whatever it is, you will be well spent.

Release yourself into the hands of the Gracious One,

and trust.

You are worth much.