October 19, 2008 Exodus 33:12-23, Matthew 22:15-22 If I had to boil down all the difficulties of faith and life into one thing, it is this: God is too quiet. Maybe quiet is not a strong enough word, because it s not like a whisper, it s more like complete and total silence. Theologians use the word ineffable, which is basically to say that God does not color in the lines, God does not fit in our frames of reference, God isn t really meant to be understood. Most of us just experience this as eerie emptiness. Think about how much easier it would be if God had a website, or sent out a newsletter, or at the very least texted every once in awhile. Or how about those of you who can suddenly see the end of these college years? What once was a nice distant fuzzy horizon gets painfully more detailed everyday, and looks a lot like a cliff. If only God could come around with one of those AAA trip-tiks like you get before a vacation, with just the pieces of the map you need, none of these confusing extra choices. But no word ever comes. No clear direction, no explicit hints. Just silence. And that can frustrate a lot of people. As a result, there are plenty of preachers and politicians who will tell you exactly what God is saying, and interpret it for you. Maybe not surprisingly, it usually coincides with support for whatever they re involved in. God begins to take sides. God is for family values. God is for gun control. The saddest part about all this is that God becomes like a paper doll that can be dressed for any occasion. When it is time to go to war, God is a vengeful flag-wielding patriot. When it is time to vote, suddenly all the candidates are paraded in front of a church, as if to show God is running their campaign. And whenever someone wins, they are the first to thank God for providing them with victory. Strange how you rarely hear the loser cite God as a reason for their failure. The point is, in the absence of some word from God, we fill up the silence with our own thoughts and opinions, and if God won t speak, if God refuses to show up like the rest of us, well, we are more than happy to stand in. Moses has spent forty or so years of his life wandering around in a big circle with a bunch of whining, irreverent busybodies, and so when it comes here to the end, and they are about to pass into the promised land, he wants to know that God is going with them. Even after God makes it clear that his presence will be with them, Moses asks to see God. 1
This is not a terribly inappropriate request. After all, Moses has been following his every command for a huge chunk of his life and he probably deserves a little face-to-face time with God. You get the feeling that Moses wants a scene like at the end of Wizard of Oz, when the wizard is unmasked and the curtains and the smoke turn out to be just curtains and smoke. That if he could just see God face to face this would all make sense and he would know what to expect from here on out. But it turns out to be quite the opposite. God hides Moses face with his hand, passes by him, then lets Moses see his back. The literal translation from the Hebrew says that Moses gets to see God s hindquarters, which is funny and telling at the same time. We see God in hindsight. It would be nice if we could pencil God in for coffee on Tuesday afternoon, or even church on Sunday morning, but the truth is that we never see God coming. It is in reflection, in memory, that we know God was there. And that means that we should be very careful about claiming God to be on the side of this or that. Today s Gospel reading is yet another passage from the last days of Jesus where he angers the religious leadership of the day. Today he manages not only to get mixed up in a religious discussion, but also a political and financial one. Clearly he was not raised in the church I was, where they taught you to keep certain discussions to yourself. There are things that are simply not talked about in casual conversation. No doubt many of you have engaged in awkward political conversations of late with people who either don t seem to care about the coming election or seem to care way too much. A woman on campus approached me last week wanting to have a public debate sponsored by the Chapel on abortion, days before the election. Imagining what a calm and civil discourse that discussion might produce, I suggested that maybe we could just hand aluminum bats out to people and let them swing at each other. The coming holiday season means a host of difficult financial issues for lots of families. For my wife and me, the most difficult part of the holidays is talking finances with our relatives, who sometimes have a very different notion of what is appropriate to spend on a Christmas gift. What should be the most wonderful time of the year easily turns into a competition in a lot of families, to see who can spend the most. 2
And maybe the most awkward discussion of all that you can have with another person is a religious one. I get to have a lot of them. Try being in an airplane sitting next to a stranger and they ask what you do for a living and you say I m a pastor. You should try it some time. What you ll find is that this statement initiates one of two reactions in the person sitting next to you. Half of the people who hear my vocation will respond with frightened and stunned silence, as if I just started speaking in Swahili or admitted to them that my dream is to be a mime. They don t know what to say, so they don t say anything. The other likely reaction is that they will unload all of their opinions on organized religion on me, be they positive or negative, because evidently I wanted to hear all of those. So these days, when I am asked, I say I work at a college or I teach, both of which are partial truths, but at least guarantee me a slightly less turbulent flight. Money and politics and religion are not issues we like to address. And so Jesus should know better than to even enter this conversation. It is a set-up of the worst kind. The Pharisees disciples begin by giving plenty of false praise, thinking the way to get Jesus to screw up is to compliment him. Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and totally understand God way better than we ever could, so can we just ask you a simple question? Their instincts are good. If Jesus thinks that they are on his side already, maybe he will be more likely to slip up and say something self-destructive. So here is their question: Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Roman Emperor? This doesn t seem like that controversial of a subject, but in reality, it is a very complicated issue in Jesus time. The Romans, you ll remember, have the Jewish people in a stranglehold of oppression. They are already poor, and yet are taxed to the eyeballs by the Roman government. You can imagine the anger this generates on the part of the Jewish people. In fact, during the years surrounding Jesus life, there are a number of Jewish revolts that end with the eventual destruction of the Jewish temple some years after Jesus death. The Pharisees want Jesus to say something that will either incite the anger of the Roman government or his Jewish followers. Jesus answer does neither. 3
He begins like he s going to do a magic trick. Show me the coin used to pay the tax. Evidently Jesus doesn t even have a coin for his own magic show. Without even looking, Jesus asks, Whose picture is there on the coin? Not knowing where he is going with this, they reply, The Emperor s. You see, there is another issue here given the Jewish scriptural prohibition against using false images, the Jews have their own coins without the image of the emperor. 1 But for some reason, here in the Temple, the Pharisees disciples aren t using the appropriate Jewish currency, their pockets are jingling with the regular Roman denarius. This has Caesar s picture on it. It must belong to Caesar. Give Caesar what belongs to him, give to God what belongs to God. Which is an easy enough answer until you think about it. If we are to ask ourselves what belongs to God, we will find ourselves in a frightening place of realizing that Christ asks us to give everything. Our hopes. Our fears. Our doubts. Our money. Our talents. Our questions. If you are one of those folks who believes we are stamped with the image of God, then Christ calls us to give ourselves back to God. There is a lot of uncomfortable talk these days about who deserves what, who is rich and who is poor, tax rates and spreading the wealth around. If Jesus were running for President, I m not sure he would choose either side. Because for Jesus, the question is not how much we should each pay, or what we deserve or don t deserve. For Jesus, the American dream is just that, a dream. The more fundamental question is what belongs to God. Search through your things this afternoon, everything you have, looking for God s name written on something. Next time you re at home, climb up in the attic among the dusty Christmas decorations and the third grade school pictures. Check the stuff under your bed and in the back of the closet. Check the tags on your clothes, look in your sock drawer. Look in the mirror at your own face. Think about your talents, your interests, your passions. Chances are you won t find God s name anywhere, but that doesn t mean it belongs to you. 1 Laurel Dykstra, Living the Word: Jerusalem, Jersusalem. www.sojo.net 4
We would all like to have God be more visible, more plannable. We would love to have a God who makes specific requests of us, Lord knows I would love to be able to look in each of your faces and tell you what God requires of you. I can make a guess, but like Moses, we have to trust that God is with us. Even when we cannot see it, God is with us. And that is why Jesus asks us to trust in that so much that we are willing to give all, to give everything. Not a tenth, not an hour, not a sacrificial fraction, but all. I wish there were a more complicated math formula we could use to compute what this silent God asks for. But Jesus says the math is simple: Render unto God what belongs to God. Yesterday we celebrated the dedication of the new student center, named for Bill Ridgway, the same gentleman who bought Harlaxton Manor several years ago and gave it to this university. Dr. Ridgway doesn t know any of you students. He is not an alum. He took one summer course in Physics here over half a century ago. Yesterday that place was packed with people, some of whom are here this morning, that continuously give on behalf of you. This Chapel we worship in was built by a man named Adam Neu who baked bread for a living, he never met you, but he left this for you. Why in the world would people do such a thing? Why give to something you can t even see, why be so generous to people you may never meet? The math is simple, says Jesus. Render unto God what belongs to God, and trust that, in the end, even when we can t see him, even when we can t sense him, God is with us indeed. 5