Getting All Wet

Proper 24A: Matthew 22:15-22

There is a story that comes from the early days of the church, a story about the Gauls and the peculiar custom they adopted for baptisms. The Gauls, you see, were a warlike people who in ancient times inhabited what is now France and Belgium. They spoke a Celtic language and were druidic by religion. By the time of Jesus, they had been conquered by the Roman Empire and were supposedly under its control. The extent of this control was not consistent, however, for the Gauls never did take too well to being conquered, and there were numerous Gallic uprisings. As Christian missionaries ventured into Gallic territory, over time many of the Gauls became Christians. However, when a converted warrior was baptized in a river or stream, he would hold up one arm high in the air as the missionary dunked him under the water. This seemed a peculiar custom but the missionaries soon learned the reason for it. For, when the next battle or skirmish broke out, the warlike Gaul could proclaim "This arm is not baptized!,” and then grab his club or sword or ax, and ride off to destroy his enemy in a most unChristian manner. Now, this story may or may not be historically true. It’s probably the Medieval equivalent of an urban legend. But the image of a person holding one of their hands out of the water is a comical depiction of a behavior that we know only too well. Each one of us, I suspect, has something we aren’t willing to get wet, something we aren’t willing to surrender to God, something over which we want to keep control for ourselves. It might be our decisions at work, our marriages, our drinking habits, or something seemingly as small as what we watch on TV. Whatever it is, we try to segment this one area of our lives as “off limits” to spiritual introspection. “It’s nobody’s business how I vote or what I do in my bedroom or how I spend my money,” we say. And so while we may indeed be “committed Christians,” we still claim part of our lives for our exclusive control. Often it’s not a conscious decision; we just don’t think about it, but still there is often some part or parts of our lives we consider our exclusive possession, to do with as we see fit. The question of possession is at the center of today’s gospel lesson. At this point in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus has come to Jerusalem and is being repeatedly hassled by the Jewish religious leaders. Here the Pharisees, perhaps jealous of Jesus’ popularity, are trying to trap him with a question about taxes. Now, no one likes taxes, but the tax they are talking about is particularly offensive to the Jews. For not only would the money go into the coffers of the imperial occupiers, but they were also expected to pay it with the coins of the Empire, which were not just legal tender but also pieces of propaganda. You see, most of the coins were stamped with an image of the Emperor and an inscription proclaiming him to be divine or the son of a god. One common phrase on coins during the time of Jesus was: "Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest." For pious Jews, the coin was a sacrilege —not only was it a graven image; it proclaimed blasphemy. The tax was a painful reminder that the Jewish people were under the boot of a foreign power that served false gods. Knowing this background, we can appreciate how loaded was the question the Pharisees put to Jesus: “Is it lawful (that is, permitted by God) to pay the tax to the Emperor?” Now, the Pharisees’ aim, mind you, is not to learn from Jesus, but rather to trick him—for if he said yes, then he would be seen as theologically compromised, someone who accommodates bows to their pagan enemy. But if he said no, if he said they shouldn’t pay the tax, that was grounds for the Romans to arrest him. Jesus recognizes the trap and refuses to answer their question on their terms. He shifts the conversation from a political calculation to a question of worship and loyalty. Jesus asks to see the coin, which the Pharisees produce. They don’t realize it, but they have unwittingly incriminated themselves by having the blasphemous coin in their possession…in the very courts of the Lord’s Temple, no less! Jesus doesn’t call them on their hypocrisy, though. Instead, he asks them, “Whose head is on the coin?” They answer, “Caesar’s, obviously enough.” “Well,” he replies, “then give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar…and to God what belongs to God.” Tidy answer, isn’t it? It’s all right to pay the tax because Caesar has a legitimate claim on us, just as God has his claim. Taxes and military service to the state and our souls and our prayers to God, say. Only, I don’t think that was what Jesus meant here. It in fact misses the point, the punch of Jesus’ response. Jesus asks, whose head—literally, whose image—is this on the coin? That word, “image,” is in Greek ikon, the same word that is used to for the creation of humanity in Genesis, chapter 1: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image (ikon), and in our likeness.’” So, Jesus is saying, in the same way that, because the coin bears the image and likeness of Caesar, it therefore belongs to Caesar, then the fact that we bear the image of God means that we belong to God. It’s not that we owe some things to the government and other things to God; we owe God everything, all of who we are, “ourselves, our souls and bodies.” So, rather than offering a theological justification for the government and taxes, Jesus is in fact challenging us to greater faithfulness to God, to give God what God is due, which is everything. As Psalm 24 says, “The earth is the LORD'S, and all it contains, the world, and those who dwell in it.” God owns it all. Everything that we have, we have from God. God has entrusted a portion of his possessions to us. We are its caretakers, its trustees, not its owners, charged with taking care of what’s been entrusted to us, using it as the owner, that is, God, would. This is the fundamental principle behind Christian stewardship. When you hear the word stewardship, what is the first thing that you think of? Many people say, “Money.” For many Christians, stewardship is just a fancy word for "fund-raising." But stewardship is not fund raising. It is a way of life, a way of life born of the understanding that all that we have and all that we are belongs to God. This includes our money, yes, but, as many churches have sought to stress, stewardship is about more than money. It is about what we do with our time, talent and treasure. We might also speak of stewardship of our relationships, our families, stewardship of our bodies, stewardship of the earth, even stewardship of the Gospel, preserving the Good News of Jesus Christ and sharing it with others. Properly speaking, stewardship is about all of life, about recognizing our debt to God for everything we have and offering and using all that God has given us in grateful and appropriate ways. It’s about getting completely wet, holding nothing above the waters of baptism. Consider the part of our worship we call “the Offertory,” when we collect the offering and bring it up to the altar often in the context of a hymn. That may seem like an odd place to start a conversation about stewardship, but the presence of the Offertory in our worship, I’ll argue, tells us something important about how we relate to God. The Offertory is a rather peculiar act if you think about it. I mean, if the point is simply to collect moneys for the support of the church’s expenses, why do we need to make a show in worship of gathering up the offerings and processing them forward to the altar? It makes more sense to just send church members a bill each month and let them write checks and mail them in, as they would for a mortgage or gas bill. The fact that we don’t do that, that we include the Offertory as part of the service, suggests that the stewardship is something more than a fund-raising strategy. It is in fact an act of worship, in which we are invited to express our heartfelt devotion to God who is so good to us. It provides us with an opportunity for expressing our love for God in the purest way imaginable, by giving up something that we value, namely our money. I know I said that stewardship is about more than money. But if there is anything in today's world that many of us would most like to keep dry, it’s our money. It’s one area of our lives we try to rope off from spiritual scrutiny. We might picture modern Christians going under the water with that outstretched arm clutching not an ax or a war-hammer, but a purse or wallet. The fact that we make a practice each week of giving our money away, handing over “our hard-earned cash,” is not to be taken lightly. Indeed, if our tendency is to worship money, to make it an idol, then when we give it away, it is a sacrifice, as much as when the Israelites would make a sacrifice of grain or olive oil or livestock on the Temple altar. And like the Israelite sacrifices, our giving away money is an act of worship, a sign of our holding God above all other goods. This is the first, and perhaps the most important thing to learn about biblical stewardship: we give to God as an act of worship, as an act of devotion, as an act of love. A pastor tells a story of how when he was a child he lived in a small town, and on occasion his mother would send him to a florist to pick up flowers for the dinner table. He had to carry the flowers through town from the store to his home and he was mightily embarrassed to do this. He was afraid his friends would see him and call him a sissy for carrying flowers. But a few years later, he was in love with a young woman and he returned to that same florist’s shop, purchased a bouquet for the object of his affection, and carried the flowers through the same streets without shame. “I was no longer concerned with what anyone would think of me,” the pastor explained. “I was just thinking of her, and of how happy she would be to get flowers, and how happy I was to be the one to bring them to her.” As this story shows, there is a strong connection between love and giving. Most of us know what it’s like to love someone so much that we want to give them things. The motivation for such gifts is not primarily obligation, because we feel like we have to or because we should. Our primary motivation is desire, because it is something we want to do. Sure, there are times when we are expected to give gifts—on birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas—but we also give gifts when we are not obligated. And we take a certain excitement in giving gifts to those we love for no reason at all. That young pastor did not stop to ask if his sweetheart needed flowers; he gave them because he wanted to show his love for her. In the same way, giving to the church as an act of worship is not geared specifically to meeting budget needs, as important as they may be. We are called to support our church’s life and mission, but giving as an act of worship takes us beyond duty to delight. Sometimes you hear people say we should give until it hurts. Christianity teaches that we should give until it feels good, or better, because it feels good, because we want to show God how much we love Him. People give money for all sorts of reasons, some more virtuous than others. The good news of biblical stewardship is that we are encouraged to give not out of compulsion or guilt, but of glad and generous hearts, not just out of duty but out of delight, as giving becomes an act of worship, an act of love. Thanks be to God!