October
18, 2020 “A Simple Test to Define
Our Faith” Matthew 22: 15-22
Rev. Peter
Hofstra
It is a simple setup. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Or so they thought. Over the last few weeks, we have read how
Jesus and the leadership went head to head.
The leaders have a specific motive, get Jesus arrested and executed by the
court of public opinion. Jesus also has
an agenda. It is to preach it like there
is no tomorrow. Because come Maundy
Thursday, there will be-for 3 days.
The setup is this. Either Jesus will have to commit sedition
against the Romans or he will have to commit treason against his own
people. The question is a simple one. Do we pay taxes to the emperor, or not? To protest these taxes is to protest the
emperor, sedition against the man proclaimed a god by the Romans, speech that
is designed to incite people against their overlords-punished very quickly by
death. However, if Jesus tells them that
they should pay their taxes, he is picking the emperor-god over God the Father,
treason against his own people and the God he claims to speak for. See how they couch their question, do we pay
taxes to the emperor, one who is seen as a deity by the Romans, a deity that is
in competition with God the Father of the Jews.
This should be the no win situation.
But Jesus sees right through it,
asks for a denarius, the coin that represents the day’s wages for the typical
working man. Whose image is on it? Whose title?
The emperor’s. So render to the
emperor what is the emperor’s and render to God what is God’s. The bible says they were amazed. I prefer the translation dumbfounded.
This is one of those passages that
may have lost its punch because it has been read so often. It is Jesus at his argumentative best. He is given two terrible choices, and he charges
right up the middle, destroying yet another of the arguments that the leaders
have prepared to try and entrap him. And
Jesus knows full well that this is going to have to happen, but its going to be
on his terms and not on theirs.
So Jesus has given us the gift of
eternal life through his own death and resurrection. This is the centerpiece of our faith, the
lynchpin of God’s plan. But lets take
what Jesus has done for us and return to this story. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, pay your
taxes essentially, do what is demanded by the government authorities. Render unto God what is God’s. What are we to render unto God?
At the time of Jesus, there were
certainly taxes beyond those to support the Emperor. There were taxes that supported the temple as
well, rendering monetary support to God.
But rendering unto God is far more than the temple tax or what we ought
to support the church in our tithes and offerings. It defines the whole life movement that is
Christianity. What we do as Christians
is what we render unto God.
We have spent the last four weeks
talking about the Kingdom of Heaven. I
hope we have decided it is where we should be as Christians. How should then we act in that Kingdom? To get down to it, how shall we then be made
holy in the Kingdom of Heaven? The
theological term for this is sanctification, to be made holy. How are we sanctified? How are we to do properly by what we have
received from Jesus? And the phrasing of
that question is so important.
We have received the gift of
salvation through our Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is irrelevant to what we did in this
life. It cannot be earned, only
received. Which redefines our
motivations. In rendering unto God, it
means no tit for tat, no you scratch my back and I will scratch yours, no doing
something nice in expectation of something nice in return. We do something out of love for love’s sake.
How does the church respond to this
question? There are two big ideas about
how to accomplish this rendering and a third smaller one, but still powerful. The first two ideas correspond broadly to the
liberal or mainstream and the conservative or evangelical sides of the
faith. We have received some very
interesting election material at church that highlights the distinctives. Now, be forewarned, this is not going to turn
into a political tirade. This week’s
text helped create a greater perspective.
On the one side, I received
resources from the PCUSA. In broad
strokes, it is about the big movements for changing things for the better in
this nation. There is the Peacemaking
ministry of the church, which covers a wide spectrum of programs that support
making things better in communities around the nation. This includes issues of poverty, of social
equality, of justice. We have an office
at the United Nations tasked with considering these sorts of issues on a
worldwide scale, we have a presence in Washington DC. We have PDA, Presbyterian Disaster
Assistance, that assists locally and around the world. Go to the Beatitudes at the beginning of the
Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 and there is an agenda laid out. By the grace and love of God, they seek to
change the world on a big scale.
On the other side, I received a
voting guide, defining issues and the stances of candidates on those issues,
sponsored by a national evangelical Christian organization. The mindset is different. Instead of moving God’s love at the scale of
the big problems of the world, God’s love is focused on the souls of the
individual, the call for a personal relationship with Jesus as Lord and Savior. The issues are drawn from Scriptural interpretation
as those affecting people giving their lives to Christ, how being a Christian
changes our lives, and how the politics of the nation follows that.
Unfortunately, there are two huge
consequences to seeking political support for the expression of our faith in
what we render unto God. The first is
that all the worst excesses of political campaigning, negative ads,
mudslinging, dirty tricks, the hallmarks of an electoral system in place since
our nation’s founding, these spill over onto the efforts of liberal,
evangelical, whatever faith-based group that seeks to get into the political
arena. Politics is a dirty, sinful
business.
The
second consequence is that the church gets caught up in the polarization of the
politics of the day. It is one thing
when we are in a time of bipartisanship and cooperation. Those are the hallmarks of a Christian way of
doing things, we help one another in love and respect. But when the politics of the land are
polarized, defined as “us or them”, to a point where for me to be right means I
am on the side of good, and you have to be wrong, and therefore on the side of
evil, such attitudes infect the Church as well. That is where we are right now. It is almost inevitable that it will affect
one’s point of view.
In
reality, when it comes to rendering unto God what is God’s, both the mainstream
and the evangelical “sides” of the church are a lot closer in their
attitudes. The desire is to reach out
into the community and into the nation with the love of God to change things
for the better. Jesus preached on the
ills of a sin-sick society and Jesus preached on the ills of the sin-sick soul,
both of which find relief in the gift of salvation. The commonality of the church in that it
leads both points of view out into the political arena-and in the politics,
there is division.
This is not the usual way of church
in the world. In most places, the
Christian faith is far more private.
Rendering unto God what is God’s focuses on the building up and understanding
of the members of the community. This is
the heritage of the Presbyterian Church.
We ask questions like “what is my only comfort in life and in death?”
and “what is the chief end of humanity?”
These are confessional questions, because we are a confessional church,
these two in particular from the Heidelberg and the Westminster Catechisms, two
of several documents assembled from Christian history that mark the deep
thinkers of the faith in different times and different circumstances.
Right worship, knowing our faith,
raising our children to know this faith, it is neither about the grand
conversion experience in one’s life nor the battle against the culture level
sins that exist around us. It is about developing
our faith, knowing that we are sinners, and rendering unto God our best efforts
to live lives worthy of our God. It is
not about involving the church, as an organization, in the cultural and
political affairs of the day. It is not
that such churches do not care about people coming to Jesus or care about the
big issues of the world, but what is rendered unto God has a different
focus. What are the important things in
our relationship with God? Worship,
understanding our faith and its implications, living in covenant with the Lord,
understanding rightly what the Bible teaches and how our history and heritage
inform that understanding.
It is from there that Christians
then enter into the public sphere, enter into politics, living out their faith
and their convictions. The rendering
unto God is in the practice of faith within, not in its projection
outside. And the question that is most
important is not “which on is better”, but rather, “which one is us?” Sanctification is the process by which we, as
Christians, are made holy. It is done by
what we render unto God. It finds
different expressions in different churches and different church traditions.
We live in a time where there are so
many resources, so many experts, so many plans, so many books to help the
church figure out “who they are”, in order to be successful. We hear ‘churchy’ sounding words like ‘vision
statement’ and ‘mission statement’, things we ‘need’ in order to be
successful. As a business, developing
and committing to such statements can lead to success by focusing the business
on what it is supposed to be doing. But
too often, a mission study and the development of such statements in the church
are to answer the question “What should we be doing?” when the question should
be “What do we render unto God?” How do
we sanctify? How are we made holy?
Sharing Jesus to bring people out of
their sinful lives, tackling the cultural level sins of this day and age,
building up the members of the community faith to know and to worship and to
work to give ourselves ever more to God’s love, these are all worthy answers to
the question of what we shall render unto God.
The problem is when we have answers, but we have forgotten the
question. Politics these days is about
winning, so faith in politics inevitably gets shaped by the means and ends of
the political process. It is the pitfall
of seeking to render unto God in the public arena. On the other, hand, building a community of
faith, focusing on right worship, right theology, on the personal and community
efforts against sin in our lives, it can quickly lead to the creation of a
fortress. It becomes so much about us
that it fails to consider ‘them’ in any meaningful way. See, sin enters into everything, even the
best decisions a church seeks to make about what we render unto God.
But be reminded, Jesus died for us
so that, through Him, we have been given the grace of God to be forgiven our
sins that we may inherit eternal life.
And our Christian walk is NOT about what we have to do to deserve this
gift. The gift is offered to all. What we render unto God is then the process
that God works in our hearts as individuals and as a community to make us more
holy in God’s sight, to sanctify us, to prepare us for when the Kingdom of
Heaven is made permanent in a renewed creation.
We
have to save people from hell? God
saves, not us. We have to save the poor? God saves, not us. What we have to do is submit ourselves to
God’s cleansing love and surrender ourselves to God’s gracious salvation so
that God will be the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of what we render unto God. We must live out love and justice and mercy,
but all as we walk humbly with our God.
These
are the big ticket items of faith. God
justified us-God redefined justice for us in the mercy of Jesus’ death and
resurrection. Jesus died for his
friends. God glorifies us. There is the promise that we will become
children of God, not servants, and Jesus is the first-born of this family. God sanctifies us. God makes us holy. “What then shall we render unto God?” Let us live our lives into the understanding
of God’s grace and love that we may know and discern what God has in store to
sanctify us, to make us more holy, in and by and through God’s love. Amen.
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