“Being Faithful While Living with Chaos”

Sermon Delivered By Rev. Dick Stetler – October 18, 2020

Centenary United Methodist Church

Psalm 52:1-9; Matthew 22:15-22

 

    This morning we are going to eavesdrop on a conversation between the Pharisees and Jesus.  Their conversation pits the great practitioners of the Hebrew faith against the values of a self-taught carpenter.  Notice how the Pharisees decided to approach Jesus:

Teacher, we know that you tell the truth.  You teach the truth about God's will for people, without worrying about what others think about you or your teachings because you pay no attention to anyone's status.  Please tell us then, is it against our Law to pay taxes to Caesar?  (Matthew 22:17)

    Jesus realized immediately that this was a question designed to entrap him.  If Jesus answered "Yes" he would be breaking one of the Ten Commandments.  By answering "No," he would be engaging in treason against Rome.

    For centuries the Jews paid their Temple tax by using a coin that did not bear the engraved image of a person.  This was in obedience to the Hebrew Law forbidding Jews to give authority to any engraved image.  In 211 BC, the standard Roman silver coin called a denarius was introduced.  That coin replaced all existing coinage circulating in the territories controlled by the Roman Empire.

    Jesus asked to see one of the coins. He asked the Pharisees whose likeness was engraved on the coin.  They answered, "Caesar's image."  Jesus said, "Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God." (Matthew 22:21) This may have been the first verbal statement of the separation of church and state.

    Having failed, the Pharisees departed.  Jesus' clever answer enabled him to rise above any self-incriminating answer. Jesus demonstrated his ability to navigate safely in the physical world without violating his spiritual values.

    The question we are going to consider this morning is the challenge of living faithfully in the midst of a very challenging world without violating our values.  For instance, can we be faithful to our spiritual-values while being a police officer who took an oath to keep all of us safe?  Can we live with the death penalty, with divorce from an abusive spouse, with forgiving a driver impaired by alcohol who killed our teenage son, or with remaining kind and compassionate when there is little social justice in Western societies? 

    Most of us have been exposed to Jesus' teachings since we were children without really understanding what was going on in his world.  Jesus lived in an environment where taxes were oppressively high, where Hebrew women were frequently looked upon by Roman soldiers as being available to them, where the Jews were only tolerated by their Roman overlords, and where the Jews bitterly hated the Roman occupation.

    Was practicing the Golden Rule easy to do when few others based their lives on such a rule for governing their attitudes?  Does there come a time when people of faith have to stand up and come to the aid of the oppressed?  Historically, the saints have often been seduced into becoming like the very people they most resisted.

    In 167 BC, Judas Maccabaeus had had enough of their Greek overlords that were occupying Jerusalem.  His tolerance and patience snapped.  He rose up with a make-shift army and defeated Antiochus IV Epiphanes, thus preventing this Greek ruler from replacing Judaism with his religion called Hellenism.  Judas was hailed as the new King David.  After his victory, he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, just as Jesus did much later on Palm Sunday.   Today, Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, celebrates Judas' victory.

    Martin Luther lost his patience during the Peasants' Revolt and he wrote a savage tract in 1525, Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants.  In his tract, he advised people to kill the peasants: "Whosoever can, should smite, strangle, and stab them as you would a mad dog!  If you do not destroy them, they most assuredly will destroy you." 

    In modern societies, there have been countless insurrections instigated by priests who coordinated efforts against their governments in the hopes of achieving a regime-change.  They called their movement a theology of liberation.  Because of their pleas for help, parishes in the United States sent money to help the economically oppressed people in numerous Latin American countries.  Instead of buying food for their starving people, the priests were buying weapons to arm the peasants.  All of this activity was denounced by the Pope as he gave strict orders to stay out of politics.

    Somewhere in this chaos, the teaching of forgiving seventy times seven and love your enemies got lost.  Somewhere in this chaos, people had forgotten to remember that Jesus was the subject of gross social injustice and he was crucified with love on his lips.  He did not protest or resist.  He remembered to give to Caesar what belonged to Caesar and to God what belonged to God.

    One of the greatest challenges of our lives is to give loyalty to Caesar while at the same time displaying the spirit of God so that we can remain undisturbed as a light in darkness that we have the potential to be. The pull of Caesar can motivate us to become as ugly in our attitudes and behavior as the very people we hope to educate with our values.  

    Bitterness and anger never led anyone correctly.  The social stability gained by Judas Maccabaeus' defeat of the Greeks only lasted 20 years.  The chaos resumed as it always does. Our world has been this way since the beginning of recorded history. Feeling righteous by doing the right thing invites the invasion of fear and hate to enter our spirits.

    Jeremiah instructed the Jews that were taken into Babylonia as slaves to render unto Caesar. (Jeremiah 29:4-9) The Apostle Paul advised people to render unto Caesar.  (Romans 13:1-7) Jesus answered the Pharisees with this expression by remaining faithful to the spirit by which people of old and people today could live, thus being faithful to the Golden Rule.

    The faithful always cry out to God to save them from whatever oppressive circumstances appear in their lives.  We can easily think:

If God is our loving Creator as we have been taught, how can God sit on the sidelines and watch our suffering and not get involved? Where is God who intervened in the lives of his chosen people?

    Think of the number of times we have longed for God to give us a miracle by saving us from struggling.  Even Jesus pleaded for God to intervene, but God did not come to save even his own Son. (Luke 22:42) Still, we remember when God did such things:

Then the Lord said to Moses, 'I have seen how cruelly my people are being treated in Egypt; I have heard them cry out to be rescued from their slave masters. I know all about what they have been suffering and so I have come down to rescue them from the Egyptians in order to bring them out of Egypt to a spacious land that I will show them which is rich and fertile.' (Exodus 3:7f)

    We have every right to cry out and wonder where God is when our lives find us in a rough patch.  We want to believe what the Scriptures tell us and yet it appears that God has suddenly become uninvolved and distant in our modern times.  However, we no longer understand and interpret our history as the Jews once did.  They understood the nature of God as controlling every aspect of their history.

    Jesus was responsible for this shift away from such a controlling divine presence. Jesus taught that God does not get involved with our personal struggles. Jesus taught that the responsibility for the quality of our thoughts, feelings, and problem-solving belongs to us. Instead of wanting God to remove our burdens, we need to understand the spirit with which we carry them.

    God does not do our homework for us.  No wise parent does this for their children. The children would never learn to problem-solve and develop self-confidence if dad or mom always had their hand on the seat of the bicycle on which they were learning to ride.  Instead Jesus taught:

I assure you, that if you have faith the size of a tiny mustard seed, you can say to this mountain 'be gone from here' and it will go. You can do anything when you face your life-struggles that appear as barriers. (Matthew 17:20)

    What frequently happens to us is that we allow barriers to define us as being weak, fragile, and failing in our struggles.  The great metaphor for our struggles is that a butterfly would never fly and escape being a caterpillar were it not for struggling to free itself from its cocoon.

    God also does not get involved in solving our problems for us because God knows that we are infinite-spirit beings that will always remain invulnerable. God knows that nothing can destroy us. What weakens us is the fear that we might get hurt, or even worse, die. Really?  Where is that faith the size of a mustard seed that enables us to understand there is no death.  We are not our bodies.  

    All of us leave our cocoons behind. We leave intact. Jesus said:

There are many rooms in my Father's house, and I am going to prepare a place for you.  I would not tell you this if it were not true. (John 14:2)

    Do we have the faith that can render unto Caesar (the material world) what belongs to Caesar and unto God what belongs to God?  Jesus did and he came back for a brief time to show others that what he left was only his cocoon. All of us will do the same thing whether we believe it or not.  Belief is not a requirement for the sun to rise each morning. Likewise, belief is not necessary in order to experience that death is never the final word.  Death does not exist.

     

CONGREGATIONAL PRAYER

We recognize, O God, that each of us comes from a world of contrasts.  We experience both well-loved and lonely people.  We experience people who are needy and those who are generous.  We see those who exude confidence and those who communicate insecurity.  We live among those who wear masks and those who are authentic.  As we seek to grow in such a world, lead us away from what could slow our growth.  Inspire us to trust the unseen wings of spirit, so that our lives will soar even in circumstances that try our patience.  As we follow Jesus, may we do so with peace knowing that we do not need to fear what we do not understand.  Amen.

      

PASTORAL PRAYER

How wonderful it is, O God, to be a participant in so many unpredictable dramas.  While we sometimes want to stop and smell the roses, we realize that we would never be content if we were not busy making a difference in someone's life, making a contribution in our workplace, or having an impact on the future that our children will one day inherit.

We are thankful that you called us to faithfulness rather than worry about the meaning of life's events.  We are grateful that you endowed us with the ability to love others even though we may never understand the path that brought them into our lives.

Enable us to be accommodating and generous of spirit.  Enable us to become the shoulders upon which another may stand to see more clearly their life choices.  Help us to resist the temptation to create others in the image we want for them.  May we develop the courage to allow people to be just as you created them.  Give us the patience to trust that you are working your perfect will in their lives in spite of the judgments we make.

We ask today for healing to come to troubled hearts.  May worried minds find peace in letting go.  May we all remember Jesus' words, "Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world."  We pray these thoughts through the spirit of Jesus who taught us to say when we pray . . .