Giving to the Empire

Proper 24 A RCL

Isaiah45:1-7; Psalm 96; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22

                                                           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.  

(This sermon draws on ideas contained in To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World by James Davison Hunter and The Desire of Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology by Oliver O'Donovan)

Care for People Sermon Series -- Part 4

Care for People Sermon Series – Part 4

Adam Trambley

St.John’s Episcopal Church, Sharon, October 15, 2017

Over the past few weeks, we have been looking at the second part of our purpose statement, “Care for People.  Today, I want to talk about some best practices for organizations and ministries to make a difference in people’s lives, and then share recommendations from the vestry about part of what we have been discussing.

We are addressing these issues now because we facing challenges that stem from our ministries’ success.  I am proud of the work we are doing here at St. John’s. I also don’t have the answers – I’m not even sure there is a single right answer.  We can find the best way forward, however, by gathering information and making intentional, prayerful decisions together.

Six best practices in caring for people come from the book, Forces for Good: Six Practices of High-Impact Non-Profits,by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant.  Many of their findings are directly relevant to our individual ministries, as well as for our church as a whole.

Their first practice is to engage individuals.  Make participating and volunteering a great experience, and allow people to develop their passion.  Engaging individuals well means that people are excited to be there and that they tell their friends.  They become evangelists, to coin a phrase, for the ministry or organization.  In many ways, St. John’s does this effectively.  We see people from outside the congregation volunteer for our ministries and participate in our events, and sometimes bring their friends.

Their second practice is to collaborate with other non-profits.  Instead of competing, find complementary agencies to work with.  Our ministries do this by having multiple churches cooking at our Saturday lunch, or getting young people from Keystone to serve, or having another church help with bags at the food pantry.  As a congregation, we collaborate by joining with First Methodist for Vacation Bible School and working with West Hill Ministries. 

A third best practice is to work with businesses so that markets and people’s altruism can fund necessary work.  ECS picks up bread from local grocery stores, but we aren’t working with very many businesses in creative ways.

A fourth best practice is to advocate to government.  Sometimes policy changes need to be made or government funding can be available.  At St. John’s, we do get food from the Food Warehouse via government programs, and the Food Warehouse goes to Harrisburg to advocate for the needy in our area.  Otherwise we don’t do much of this.

A fifth best practice is to adapt to changing circumstances.  This practice may seem obvious, but churches aren’t always good at it.  We should always ask what in our environment might be changing that will require us to change to remain effective.

The sixth best practice is to share leadership.  Successful organizations and ministries develop as many leaders in as many areas as possible.  I think St. John’s generally does a pretty good job of this, but again, this principle is worth keeping in mind. 

These best practices go well with an overall asset-based approach to caring for people.  We might think about this approach spiritual-gifts based, since it recognizes that everyone is made in the image of God and has gifts, strengths and passions.  Instead of just “doing for” people who we think need our help, we want to “do with” them.  Some examples of this approach are the clients from ECS who also volunteer and the guests at the lunches that have found ways to contribute to that work.

At the same time, “doing with” is always a struggle for church ministries.  To begin with, this process really takes time.  We have to develop relationships that are deep enough to find out what people can contribute instead of only what we can provide for them.  I know I am guilty of asking “What do you need?” or “How can I help?” a lot more often than “What is your passion?” or “How can you help us help others?”  Once we know what people can do, we have to actually create space for them to do it.   Usually we have to restructure our plans if we are going to include other people’s gifts.  Such change is not always easy for us.

Of course, sometimes when we make time and space for others, they don’t show up or it doesn’t go well, or they don’t seem to care.  It always seems easier to do things ourselves, but doing everything ourselves is never the right answer.  Asking why others may not step forward to work with us can be helpful, even if we won’t like the answers.  Maybe nobody wants what we offer enough to contribute.  Maybe we aren’t offering what is needed in a helpful way, or maybe something in how we operate makes people feel like we think we are better than they are.  Maybe we need to change something to foster “doing with” instead of just “doing for.”  Yet we can also recognize that some people may need certain things “done for” them, and in certain instances that can be OK.   

As folks do engage us, we have to give them real ownership.  We have to all be in this together, not being one group from inside the church helping and another group from outside the church being helped.  We want to be one group offering everyone’s gifts to meet everyone’s need, recognizing that those gifts and needs are likely to be very different.  Such community is both the best practice for community development and the Christian vision of the kingdom of God.

We need a similar approach of “doing with” in our one-on-one relationships with people who may ask us for help.  If relationships aren’t two way, they aren’t real relationships.  Relationships built on need often require more need for the relationship to continue.  Relationships where one person is the “giver” and another person “the receiver” tend to end with either the “receiver” disappearing or the “giver” building up a significant resentment.  Healthy relationships recognize the dignity in each person as a child of God and require both people to be givers and receivers, even if what is given and what is received may be very different.

After thinking about a variety of these issues earlier this year the vestry made some recommendations.  Most of them deal with helping individuals who come to the church seeking direct aid.  The vestry didn’t look at any specific ministries outside of the parish Alms Fund.  However, I hope that our discussion over the past few weeks is helpful to those working in our outreach ministries and facing the challenges of caring for people in our community.  Here are the recommendations:

1.     We encourage individuals in need to utilize our food pantry and come to our weekly lunches.  We recognize that our parish’s primary assistance at this time is food, and we do what we can to ensure that hungry people can obtain the food they need, even in emergencies.

The vestry has assumed that our primary vocation as a parish at this time to people in need is to provide direct aid to people through food assistance.  We might feel in the future that we need to change this focus, but this is where our ministries currently focus.

2.     We encourage individual parishioners to make contributions to the parish alms fund, and to direct anyone asking them personally for assistance to talk with the rector or other clergy.  In many cases, our clergy have ongoing relationships with people seeking assistance.

We want to help people in the most effective ways possible, and that generally means allowing our clergy to develop a relationship with them and meet their needs as seems best.  Having one person coordinate what we do for someone seems better than having a half dozen people trying to do pieces here or there.  Right now, that one person is usually me, but that could be changed depending on the gifts and interests of others in the parish.

3.     We encourage the rector to partner with other agencies to provide needed assistance for rent, utilities and other emergency services, including making contributions to those agencies and referring people to them instead of trying to manage everything in-house.

We know that best practices involve collaboration and we want to work with other agencies that are better equipped to do case management and comprehensive assistance than we are.  We want some funding available for those in the parish that have needs or for those we have longer standing relationships with, but we don’t want to “compete” with the Salvation Army or Prince of Peace.

4.     We discourage the rector or anyone else from giving direct cash assistance, since in many cases this has proven to be ineffective or even harmful.  Gift cards, direct payment of bills, or other types of assistance are to be preferred, even while we recognize that any type of assistance can be problematic at times. 

Given the addiction issues that we are increasingly seeing, the vestry is discouraging gifts of cash, especially without the case management work done by Prince of Peace or the Salvation Army who are often better able to assess true needs and situations.

5.     We do not want any parishioner, visitor, guest, or ministry volunteer to be put in the awkward position of feeling like they need to provide money to someone out of their own pocket.  If this situation occurs, we encourage people to send those requesting assistance to the rector or clergy.

We want to create relationships of mutuality and community, where everyone sees others as having dignity and being made in the image of God.  We don’t want to simply create a place where those in need come to look for donors or, for that matter, where potential donors look for people in need.  Solicitation of individuals makes direct relationships very difficult, so we want to discourage any asking or giving directly by individuals.  At the same time, the parish alms fund is able to meet many legitimate needs, and those who wish to help can contribute to that. 

6.     We hope that these recommendations support the rector and clergy in working with those in need on behalf of our parish.  We affirm the importance of the rector and clergy using their discretion to meet people’s needs as they believe to be best.  

Finally, the vestry just wants to note how complicated these situations are.  I said at the beginning that I don’t have all the answers, and the vestry is saying that they don’t either.

In conclusion, I would just reiterate the importance of caring for people, especially in this neighborhood at a time when our community is facing so many challenges.  As we heard a couple of weeks ago, scripture is full of mandates to help those in need and we are called to respect the dignity of every child of God.  We also want to care for people as effectively as possible, which is not always easy.  This sermon series is on my sermon blog, adamssermons.blogspot.com, if you want to think more about these issues, and there are links there to the books I’ve mentioned, as well. 

This parish does very good work, even as we find that we have more to do and may need to come up with new ways of doing it.  We are committed to living out fully our God-given purpose – to worship God, to grow as Christians, and to care for people.