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“Give therefore . . . to God those things that are God’s.” Matthew 22:21
For maybe fifteen years, my husband Chris and I made our decisions about our annual giving on Thanksgiving Day. We’d get the turkey in the oven, settle in on the couch, and reflect about the year that had passed and the year ahead, talking about the people and communities we were grateful for; naming the issues in our lives and in the world that were weighing on us.
We began this practice for practical reasons, but over time, I came to see this conversation as a deeply spiritual practice. It grounded our financial giving literally in thanks-giving, helping us make our decisions from a place of gratitude, awareness, and hope: gratitude for those who had enriched our lives that year, awareness of the needs around us, and the hope that comes from taking a step to address those needs – the step of offering some bit of help from our own resources, lives, and very beings. The conversation became less about transactions, and more about relationship and calling and trying to live out our values in a very tangible way.
In this morning’s Gospel story Jesus reminds us that conversations and decisions about tangible things are – at their core – spiritual decisions, and that spiritual decisions are not clear-cut, but require on-going discernment.
The story tells us Jesus was approached by a group of Pharisees and Herodeans asking him about the morality of paying taxes. It was a trick question, loaded with questions of power, duty, and priorities, pitting the Roman Emperor’s professed divinity against our God’s true divinity. Given how contentious all those issues were – and are – the question was a trap, designed to undercut Jesus no matter his answer.
But Jesus didn’t fall for it. Rather than answering the specific question directly, he responded with general guidance for each of us to follow in answering such questions for ourselves.
“Give therefore to Caesar those things that are Caesar’s” he said “and to God those things that are God’s” With this answer, Jesus acknowledges that we have multiple demands on our time and resources. He doesn’t ask us to leave the demands of the temporal world behind or to neglect them, but, rather, to give them their right due. Some things are meant for Caesar he says; and they are: taxes do pay for our schools, roads, and fire trucks. They are a necessary part of a functioning society. And yet, they are not our only obligation. We are, Jesus reminds us, also to give God what is God’s. We are to find the balance among those many demands.
It’s perfect that the tricky question posed to Jesus is a question about money. Money is tricky. How we make money, who has how much money, what we do with our money, what we think others should do with their money... What power does money imply? What freedom might it allow? Or what perceived freedom might it tempt with? Conversations about money are often loaded conversations, just as they were in this morning’s Gospel.
Importantly, Jesus doesn’t walk away from that complexity. He engaged with it. Jesus also doesn’t let his followers off the hook. He turns the complex question back to those listening – and to us. Jesus doesn’t offer a formula or give specifics about how to determine what is Caesar’s and what is God’s. He leaves us to grapple with that ourselves, to come to the answer that is right for each of us because the answer is, of course, different for each of us.
None of us have identical demands on our resources. Our duties and obligations are different and what we have to offer is different. The open nature of Jesus’s guidance gives each of us the room to determine for ourselves and our own circumstances what we are to do with our literal and figurative coins. And that is the work we are called to during Stewardship season. As Episcopalians, we, the people of any given community, provide the tangible resources to sustain that community. We offer our coins, and slots in our calendars, and gifts as varied as wood-working, singing, sewing, and accounting to God’s work in a very tangible way.
Our decisions about these tangible offerings are, at their core, spiritual decisions, that flow from our relationship with God and with each other as the body of Christ. They require us to identify our values and priorities, to look at all the things to which we might give our tangibles and determine which of them are Caesar’s and which are God’s so we might better know what to offer God and God’s work in the world.
I asked Chris recently about what he misses from our Thanksgiving Day conversations. “Setting aside the time,” he said, “for the two of us to think about what’s important to us as a couple, what we value and then doing something to support those things.” Setting aside time – itself one of our most precious resources – to think about what’s important to us . . . To sift through all the demands and asks to figure out which are Caesar’s and which are God’s and then to make some decisions based on that clarity. That is the work at the heart of this morning’s Gospel. That is the work of this season. There is no right way to do this work; but engaging it is, as the Gospel reminds us, itself holy work indeed. Amen.
In preparing this sermon I consulted the following homiletical texts:
New Interpreters’ Bible Vol. VIII (Matthew)
Feasting on the Word, Year A Vol 4
Amy-Jill Levine’s New Jewish Annotated Bible
As always, my thinking is shaped by conversations with my family, friends, and colleagues.