Proper 24
A RCL
Rev.
Adam T. Trambley
October
22, 2017, St. John’s Sharon
Today, we get to talk about empire. Not “The Empire” – no blessing of light
sabers today – but empire, which means large multi-national states that operate
beyond the scale of a local community or with what we think of as ethical
constraints. Empires are generally about
power stemming from violence, which would put them at odds with God’s people,
whose understanding of power stems from the Sermon on the Mount. Yet we hear today that even the most powerful
empires are powerless before the power of God, and that perhaps our
relationship to power and empire is more complicated than we might expect.
Isaiah talks about Cyrus. Cyrus was king of the Medes and the Persians,
and, eventually, almost everything else in ancient near east. He grew his empire to cover all of present
day Turkey, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and parts of what is now
Jordan, Armenia, Pakistan, and some of the Central Asian Republics. His influence as a soldier and statesman set
up an administrative system that ensured that his Persian legacy continued to
shape that part of the world for a millennium.
Modern day Iranians, two-thousand-five-hundred years later still trace
their heritage back to Cyrus the Great, as Americans look back to George
Washington. Cyrus has been considered a
personal hero to people from Thomas Jefferson to Alexander the Great, and I
have a clergy colleague who consistently refers to him as “dreamy”.
The reason we care about Cyrus here in church
this morning is because this Persian ruler is an Old Testament hero. After the Jewish people were taken to exile
in Babylon, Cyrus and his Persian armies conquered Babylon. Cyrus had a different view on religion that
the Babylonians did. He was supportive
of the various local religions among his people. After he captured Babylon, he wrote an edict
allowing the Jewish people to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem and to return
home. Actually getting home and
rebuilding the temple and the city of Jerusalem took longer than Cyrus’s own
reign lasted. Yet the Jewish scriptures,
which are arranged differently than the Christian Old Testament, ends with the
following verse from 2 Chronicles: “Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord, the
God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged
me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you
of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him! Let him go up.”
Isaiah goes so far as to call Cyrus “the Lord’s
anointed”, and the Hebrew word for anointed is Messiah. Again, from our reading this morning, with
God speaking to Cyrus, “I call you by name.
I surname you, though you do not know me.” We have a foreign, pagan king, who does not
know God as one of the major heroes of the Old Testament. Or, to use current place names, Iran
conquered Iraq to free Israel and the Iranian King let them rebuild their
temple in Jerusalem.
Jumping ahead 500 years or so, we have a
different world empire headquartered in Rome.
This empire does not engender the same warm, fuzzy feelings from the
Jewish leadership in Jesus day that Cyrus did.
Caesar and his representatives rule Palestine in ways that seem
problematic, especially for the Jewish political and religious leadership that
really would like to rule the area themselves.
When Jesus comes, with his message of liberation and the Kingdom of God,
they try to trap him by sticking him between popular resentment and the current
reality. They send some people to ask
him whether to pay Roman taxes or not?
If he says “yes”, they assume that his followers will leave him. No politician increases their popularity by
promoting taxes. But, if Jesus says
“no”, they can tell the Roman officials that he is telling people not to pay
their taxes. Such teaching would have
other unpleasant consequences for Jesus.
Of course, before they ask Jesus, they lay on a whole sycophantic shtick
about how honest he is that is just sickening.
Jesus, of course, is smarter than they
are. He asks to see the coin that would
pay the tax. Someone gives it to
him. Technically none of the Jewish
people should have the coin because it has Caesar’s image on it, and Caesar
claims to be divine, so the coin is both a graven image and an idol. Jesus points to the image and asks who it
is. They say, “The emperor’s.” Jesus
says, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.” Then he drops the mic.
The first implication of this passage, which is
fairly straightforward, is don’t try to trap Jesus. Jesus wins.
That’s an important statement of faith assuring us that we can rely on
him. The second implication is more
difficult, however, because figuring out what belongs to the emperor and what
belongs to God is not always easy. Part
of why the stories of Cyrus and of Jesus’ tax debate are so important is that
they keep us from easy self-righteous decisions about what it means to be part
of God’s people in a complicated world.
In looking at what belongs to Caesar and what
belongs to God, the short answer, of course, is that everything belongs to
God. God created it. God owns it.
God gets to dispose of it as he pleases.
The humbling thing for us, however, is that how God wants to use it is
not always the way we would choose. We
want him to let us be in charge of everything, or at least to put our people in
charge. But sometimes God decides to
give his money and power and authority to people we don’t think should have
it. Cyrus may have seemed OK, but, let’s
face it, he was no King David, and all these Italian legions with their
un-kosher veal parmesan were another problem entirely. Jeremiah even told the people that God was
using Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and they should just go into exile with him. Looking at the Biblical stories and trying to
directly apply them to the current geopolitical environment is fraught with
difficulty, but we can say that God is often doing things we might not agree
with for reasons we don’t understand.
Nevertheless, as we hear at the end of our
Isaiah reading today, we shouldn’t think that whatever is going on means that
these pagan rulers or anybody else are really in control. God says, “I am the LORD, and there is no
other…I arm you, though you do not know me so that they may know, from the
rising of the sun and from the west that there is no one beside me…I form light
and create darkness; I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these
things.” Whatever happens, whether it
seems good or bad, God is in charge.
If God is in charge, even of pagan empires,
then we have two basic things to give to the empire we are a part of, whether
that empire is ruled by Caesar, Cyrus, Nebuchadnezzar, David, Solomon, the
Democrats, the Republicans, the Queen of England, some faceless bureaucracy,
the communists, radical Islam, the Jewish state, or a corrupt oligarchy that
could describe many current nations of the world.
The first things we have to give is that stuff
that is part of our this-worldly experience.
We pay our taxes with the money printed by our government. We drive our cars according to the laws of
the government that paved our roads. We
live in our houses according to the rules that the government which controls the
land we live in sets. Whatever the laws
require of us we do. Sometimes those
laws require sacrifices, but we cannot live in a society unless sacrifices are
made and part of being the government is determining how those sacrifices fall
on different people.
The second things we have to give the empire is
our Christian witness that the empire is not the Kingdom of God and that our
citizenship is ultimately someplace else.
This witness means that when we are forced to choose in our own behavior
between the empire and God, we always stand up for God and face the
consequences. This witness stems from
the power of the Sermon on the Mount, however, and not the power of empire.
Christian witness means that we make the choices we believe we must make for
our own integrity for the sake of the gospel, even if that means suffering and
death. Christian witness is trusting the
power of the cross, not the power of the empire. Christian witness is about living with
integrity ourselves and not about gaining an empire to control how others live
or don’t live.
One example of this kind of witness comes from
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the book of Daniel. Rather than bowing down to an idol, they are
willing to be thrown into the fiery furnace.
God rescues them, of course. They
were not witnessing to make other people stop worshiping the idol, or trying to
change the government, even though they were in important positions. They just bore witness to God and submitted
to the violence of the empire, knowing that God ultimately controlled even the
empire. Because of their witness, the
king recognized the power of their God, but that was not their goal. As they said to the king, “God may save us or
not, but either way he is God.” They
simply bore witness. We may prefer to
win our way rather than be martyrs, but we can only witness God’s way.
A second example of this kind of witness is the
civil rights movement. Christian leaders
refused to live according to the unjust laws of the United States. They chose to disobey those laws, just like
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and many of them paid dearly as a consequence. While their sacrifice did change laws, their
methods relied on the power of nonviolence and the Sermon on the Mount to
change hearts. Once hearts were changed,
laws followed.
The danger for us as American Christians at the
present time is that like the Pharisees and the Herodians confronting Jesus, we
over-identify with God. Instead of
giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s we decide we should get to keep it for
ourselves. We don’t want to make the
necessary sacrifices for the common good and we don’t want to bear the personal
risk of Christian witness. Instead, we
are tempted to fall into the traps of the current American Christian right and
Christian left.
Without going into a detailed critique, and at
the risk of offending just about everybody, I want to briefly mention the two
temptations that are always present for Christians when dealing with empire,
especially when Christians have some degree of power. When I talk about the Christian right and
Christian left, I am painting with a broad brush and describing extremes. Many in both camps would not be categorized
in these ways, but they would be more inclined one way or the other.
The danger of the current approach of the
Christian right is an attempt to retake control of the empire they believe they
once had. While some parts of their
agenda are controversial, they would prefer a country with fewer broken homes,
less drug use and violence, and more people in church on Sunday morning. Their concern, however, has not been with
being allowed to act in the ways that they believe to be important and offer
that witness to the state. Their concern
has been to make laws that use the power of the American empire to force others
to do what they believe to be the case.
While we do have a duty as American citizens to vote and participate in
our democracy, there is a difference between struggling to control of the
empire and witnessing to it. The
consequences of losing a political battle for a particular agenda, even one
that may seem Christian, is not persecution, and winning such a battle does not
mean people have aligned themselves with God.
This mistake was the same one the Jewish leaders disputing with Jesus
made. They were looking for ways to
control the empire not witness to it.
The danger of the Christian left is to bless
whatever the empire is doing in order to gain enough power to achieve certain
goals, like expanded civil rights, caring for the poor, the immigrants, and other
vulnerable populations. Again, some
parts of the agenda are controversial, but much is Christianity 101. The difficulty, again, is assuming that
controlling the empire is the Christian goal.
Instead of fighting to reclaim it like the right, the left is more
likely to be coopted into it. They give
to Caesar what is needed for a seat at the table. The question is whether or not once in power
they have the willingness, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, to still risk
Christian witness when necessary.
Again, I am not saying that Christians should
not participate in the political process, or that what the government does is
not important. But the way we do it
matters, and our goal matters. Christian
participation is always based on the Sermon on the Mount that includes praying
for our enemies, not vilifying them. We
love our enemies and hope we will all be converted and enter the Kingdom of God
together. Our world is desperate for
citizens and statesmen and stateswomen who live in the power of the Sermon of
the Mount instead of the power of the empire and look to be servants in the
Kingdom of God instead of rulers of the kingdoms of this age. We can trust that when we give to Caesar what
is Caesar’s, God will handle what belongs to God. God could make use of Cyrus, the ruler of the
largest empire in the world. We can
trust him to deal with any of the power of today’s empire, as well. We only need to bear witness and live our own
Christian lives with integrity.
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