The coin of God's realm
Commentary
Consider the humble dollar bill, which despite the assault on it by the Susan B. Anthony dollar and the more-recent Sacagawea dollar, has held its own in the tills of shops and the pockets of Americans. When was the last time you looked at it carefully? It is full of images and words and symbolism. It has the picture of George Washington, the Father of the country. "The United States of America" is emblazoned on both sides. The Great Seal of the United States is reproduced on the reverse, with its eagle and its strange eye-topped pyramid. In the all-seeing eye and in the words, "In God We Trust," the dollar pays brief lip service to the Creator.
Where does it belong; what is its proper realm? Well, there is little doubt. It is the national currency of one particular nation on earth. No question there.
Look a little closer. Note the words, "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." Not only is the dollar's sphere public commerce and public exchange, it is also the private transactions between people. Money is an integral part of much of what we do in our life in the world. It represents food and shelter and clothing. It represents health. In the taxes that we pay, it represents the claim that the nation has on us and our obligation to the state. It is a token of the work we have done to get it. It is a token of value. The coin of the realm has a claim on a large part of our lives.
In Jerusalem, Jesus used a coin of the Roman realm to point out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and to raise the question of what claims our lives and our allegiance.
The coin of the American realm has a claim on us who use it, just as the coin of the Roman realm in Judea had a claim on any who carried it. Is there a coin of God's realm? And what claim does it have on us?
Exodus 33:12-23
The Exodus account of Israel at Mount Sinai runs from chapter 19 to the end of the book, and it includes the giving of the law, the breaking of the covenant by Israel, and the renewal of the covenant. This reading falls in the last section, the renewal of the covenant.
Israel was at the foot of Mount Sinai, and Yahweh was angry. The Israelites whom he had so carefully shepherded out of Egypt and through the desert to the foot of Sinai had broken the covenant when it was still newly inscribed on the tablets of stone. Moses interceded on behalf of the people, pleading with Yahweh to remember the promise to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, pleading that God not destroy them. Yahweh relented and changed his mind about destroying Israel.
But Yahweh's anger is not gone. In Exodus 33:1-3, Yahweh sends the Israelites on their way to the land of Canaan, along with the promises to send an angel to clear the way and to drive out the inhabitants of the land. But Yahweh will not go with them, because they are a "stiff-necked people." The implication is that it would be entirely too dangerous to have an angry God in the midst of Israel. God's anger might boil to the surface, and there's no telling what might happen then.
That is the build up, then, to this lection, in which Moses again intercedes on behalf of the people, wanting Yahweh to travel with Israel. And what is Moses' argument? That "this nation is your people" (v. 13); that the nations won't know that fact and the fact of Yahweh's grace unless Yahweh goes with Israel (v. 16a); and that that is the way Israel's distinctiveness shall be shown (v. 16b). It is an appeal not to the inherent worthiness of Israel, but to God's own being and to God's own grace, out of which God had chosen Israel originally. And God grants, in verse 17, the thing Moses asked for.
Moses has yet another request: to see God's glory. God pledges to show it to him, but only God's glory, nothing more. No one can see the face of God and live, so Moses is set in the cleft of a rock, where God will cover him with his hand. And all Moses will see is a glimpse of God's back. The anthropomorphizing about God's body parts may grate against our modern theological ears, but we certainly get a vivid picture of what is allowed and what isn't.
So what's going on in this strange story? In his three requests Moses is asking for closeness, for continued relationship, and the renewal of a relationship that had been broken when the Israelites had made the golden calf. Psalm 42 comes to mind here: "As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?" In fact, that is Moses' final request, to see God's glory, actually to lay eyes on the Creator.
And yet what comes back is one incontrovertible fact -- that God is never fully revealed to us. God is always hidden, and the most we can ever hope for is a glimpse of God's back, or hand, or a perhaps brief glimmer of light.
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
With this reading, the lectionary embarks on the continuous reading of 1 Thessalonians for the next five Sundays. There is general agreement that this is the earliest of Paul's writings, which would make it the earliest writing in the New Testament, perhaps as early as the 50s. Acts 17:1-8 describes Paul's founding of the church shortly after he began the church at Philippi. Paul is writing the letter as early as a few months after the founding of the church.
The letter is addressed to Gentile Christians, even though Acts reports that Paul's first contact in Thessalo-nica was at the synagogue. In some ways it makes a significant theological point that the earliest writing in the New Testament was addressed to Gentiles.
This reading follows the standard structure for the opening of Paul's letters, beginning with a salutation in verse 1, and then offering a prayer of thanksgiving to God for the church and for the faith and witness of the Thessalonians, and even though it sounds like praise for them, the praise, Paul would certainly say, is only to God. Except in the loosest way, in the barest of outlines, the introductory material in this reading really doesn't touch on the themes of the letter. Instead, it recounts and rehearses the spiritual journey of the Thessalonians thus far in their short existence as a church.
Consider the ways that Paul describes this young church, the things he gives thanks to God for: she has been steadfast in her work and in her hope; she has been chosen by God; she is filled with the Spirit; they have been imitators of Paul, but, more, of Jesus Christ; despite persecutions she has been joyful; she has been an example to believers elsewhere in Macedonia; she has preached the word of God, not just in Macedonia, but elsewhere by her reputation; she has been welcoming; and she has turned from idols to God.
This is a sketch, a beviary, as it were, of what it means to be the church. Could any modern congregation do as well? Could a 21st-century American congregation bear such a witness while living in a time of persecution? Perhaps it takes persecution for the church to truly be the church of Jesus Christ that Paul describes. Is the church of Jesus Christ a victim church that thrives only under persecution? We may not want to go that far, but it's clear that Paul's joy in the Thessalonian church came as she was able to face hard times and steadfastly keep her faith and hope in God.
Matthew 22:15-22
Jesus' ongoing controversy with the Pharisees is well established in Matthew by the time Jesus comes to Jerusalem, so now their schemes become even more brazen. As a reminder, the Pharisees were a politico-religious party in later Judaism, that came into existence as a class about the third century B.C. They became the most rigid defenders of Jewish religion and traditions. By the time of Jesus, according to The Catholic Encyclopedia, "Pharisaism developed a proud and arrogant orthodoxy and an exaggerated formalism, which insisted on ceremonial details at the expense of the more important precepts of the law."
In this encounter, which is found with little variation in all three synoptic Gospels, the Pharisees begin with flattery, but their intent is utterly transparent. It was certainly clear to Jesus, who saw their "malice" (NRSV). It is a strong word that is used here, which can even be translated "evil."
The trap that they laid for Jesus was this: If he were to say, "No," he could be accused of sedition against Rome. If he were to say, "Yes," then he would find himself on the wrong side of the people, who resent the Roman occupation with its taxes. There is, at first glance, no way for Jesus to come out clean in this exchange.
But he asked them for a coin, which they had at hand. Much like modern British coinage, it bore the sovereign's visage and name, "Tiberius Caesar." Jesus asked whose image was on the coin. And at that point Jesus had turned their trap against them.
On the one hand, Jesus' statement, which in the memories of many comes out in the King James version, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's ..." really doesn't solve the problem. In fact, Jesus comes down on the side of paying taxes to the emperor, but only because the coins are issued by the emperor. But that's not what quieted and amazed the Pharisees. Jesus redefined the question, or perhaps made the question more significant, more weighty, and in doing so shot a pointed charge back at the Pharisees. Because the new question is about allegiance: Where do your loyalties lie? What has a claim on your life? It was, after all, the Pharisees who brought out the coin. We can't imagine Jesus carrying money. The Pharisees, despite all their traditionalism and their hyper-orthodox understanding of the law, were themselves suspect and hypocritical.
And to carry it even deeper, there is the question that remains unstated. We know what is the emperor's: the coin was issued by the emperor and his picture and name are on it. But there is no equivalent for God, no token that bears God's image. Of course, that would have been forbidden. But if the coin is properly the emperor's, then what is properly God's?
And on what coin do we see God's image?
Application
The words on American currency, "In God We Trust," may have been intended as a genuine statement of the American character. But the irony in them is hard to ignore. Preachers may preach against it, and psychologists may advise against it, but there is no doubt that people put their faith in money. The American dollar has become the thing in which so many people put their trust and their commitment.
It raises the question about allegiance and loyalty. There are so many things demanding our loyalty these days, and it seems like the number is growing.
It spans the whole range of things, from such fun and relatively unimportant things as whether you follow the Boston Red Sox or the New York Yankees -- what team do you use the word "we" about, as in, "We won!"? Manufacturers rely on "brand loyalty," the fact that consumers tend to find a brand of dish soap they like and stick with it.
In this age of explosive immigration, one's national culture demands loyalty, particularly for those who live in other countries. Political parties want loyalty, schools demand loyalty, our state and our city demand loyalty, our nation demands loyalty.
The thing that has so outraged people about John Walker Lindt, the so-called American Taliban, is probably not the actual acts he has engaged in, even if they are crimes, but the question of his loyalty. How could a young American have given his allegiance to such a repressive regime as Afghanistan's Taliban? Where do we put our loyalty when there are so many things demanding it?
In first-century Jerusalem the Pharisees seemed loyal to the law and to the traditions of Judaism. But Jesus raised the loyalty question with them and they couldn't answer. "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's," he said to them. What is properly owed to the state? And what things do we acknowledge to be God's?
First we might point out that when it comes right down to it, everything belongs to God, quoting Psalm 24, "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." And of course that would be right. But there is another realm of God and the coin of that realm shows God's image. And that is to be found in the other two readings for the day.
In Exodus, Moses sought to see God's glory, but was only granted a fleeting glimpse of God's back. Yet Moses himself, along with later generations of Israel, came to understand that God was present with Israel in the wilderness, and in all of the historical circumstances of the emerging nation of Israel, all of the difficulties through which Israel walked, all of the triumphs that she enjoyed. It is in that history that God's image is seen. God's image was not available to be seen on a coin, but in the nation of Israel.
Paul writes to the Thessalonians and gives thanks for their steadfast faith in the face of persecution, their hope, the witness that she bears to Christ, the Spirit that is within her. In other words, Paul looks and sees God's image in the infant Thessalonian church.
God's realm is human history and the coins of that realm, the places where we behold God's image and God's glory, are human lives and human communities and human relationships. In the love of person for person, in the growth of communities of faith, in any act of reconciliation between nations and enemies, in a nomadic people seeking a land of their own, in a fledgling congregation struggling against persecution in Thessalonica, in all of those God's image can be seen.
The challenge is to know what coin of what realm to look at to behold God's image. And just as the American dollar has such a claim on us, the challenge is to let the coin of God's realm have a claim on us.
Alternative Applications
1) Exodus: Because of Who God Is ... Moses asked God for God's presence with Israel. And what was his justification for the request? For that matter, what is our justification for the petitions we make? Well, in the midst of our private prayers, our little bargains with God, we probably promise to be good in the future, or perhaps to give something to the poor. Or maybe we think, down deep, that we really deserve what we're asking for. But those were not the basis for Moses' requests. Moses didn't appeal to God on the basis of Israel's goodness, but on the basis of God's goodness. God answers prayer not because of who we are, but because of who God is.
2) Thessalonians: The Strength of the Struggling Church. In this, Paul's first writing, and therefore the earliest writing of the New Testament, perhaps as little as 20 years after the crucifixion, we hear a description of the strengths of one early church: their faith and the perseverance, their hope and their witness. And many of those strengths come about as the church dealt with and struggled in a hostile world. Have we in the modern church been too comfortable to have those same strengths?
First Lesson Focus
Exodus 33:12-23
The people of Israel, whom the Lord redeemed out of slavery, are not very different from us redeemed Christians. According to Exodus 24, they freely entered into covenant with their Savior God and they promised that "all the words that the Lord has spoken we shall do." God then gave them his commandments as the guides for their new life as his chosen people. We find in Exodus 20-31 the collection of those commandments. But having entered into covenant with their Lord and having sworn their allegiance to him alone, what do they do? They make a golden calf as a substitute for God, bowing down to it and worshiping it (Exodus 32).
And we are like that, aren't we? We renew our covenant with the Lord at his communion table and then almost immediately, sometimes even before we are out of the church door, we fall again into sin. Surely, Exodus has it right. We, along with Israel, are a "stiff-necked people" (33:5). The question, therefore, is, will the Lord continue to go with us? And will he continue to go with his errant Israelites? Will he continue to lead Israel toward the Promised Land, or us toward his good kingdom?
The answer is: "Not without a mediator." Because the Lord, you see, cannot put up with sin, and if for a moment he should go with us in all of his holiness and glory, his pure presence would consume us (33:5; cf. Isaiah 6:5).
Moses is the mediator for Israel there in the desert at the foot of Mount Sinai. Exodus 32:32 tells us that when God threatened to destroy the Israelites because of their worship of the golden calf, Moses offered to die in the people's place. And it is clear that Moses has an intimate relation with the Lord. In 33:11, we are told that "the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend." Consequently, in verse 12 of our text, when Moses asks who will accompany the people on their journey toward the Promised Land, the Lord promises that his presence (literally, his "face") will accompany them, for Moses' sake. God continues, in his incredible patience and mercy, to lead sinful Israel on toward the land of promise, because of the mediation of Moses.
I wonder if that is not the reason God continues to lead us on toward his kingdom too -- because we have a mediator whose name is Jesus Christ. Christ not only offered to die in our place. He actually did it. He died for our sinfulness. And the holy God therefore does not abandon or consume us, but leads us steadily onward.
That's what distinguishes us as a people, isn't it? Moses says that it is in God's going with them that they are different from all other people that are on the face of the earth (33:16). And that's what marks us out as different too, that Christ is with us on our journey toward the kingdom, even if only two or three are gathered together in his name. Israel was a God-accompanied people, and so are we, precisely because we have a mediator.
The intimacy of Moses with the Lord is shown in the verses that follow in our text. Moses asks to see God's glory. He wants to see the very being of God, God in all of his full majesty. But even Moses was not equal to that overwhelming sight. No one can see God and live (v. 20). We never have a description in the Bible of what God looks like in all of his glory. We find only the phenomena that accompany his person (cf. Exodus 24:9-11; Isaiah 6:1-3; Ezekiel 1; Habakkuk 3). Nevertheless, Moses is allowed to catch a glimpse of the Lord's back.
But we could not stand even that little glimpse. God in all of his glorious majesty is beyond any vision of which we could dream, and what one of us could bear the sight of God's pure light, pure love, pure holiness, pure power? None of us, unless God lowered himself to our infirmities and weakness, and took on our flesh and blood, and walked among us as a fellow human being. And that is the wonder of the Incarnation, isn't it, that we have actually beheld God's glory in the person of Jesus Christ, glory as of the only Son from the Father (John 1:14)? "He who has seen me has seen the Father," Jesus said (John 14:9). You and I now have been given even more than Moses received, and we have been sent a mediator far greater than Moses ever was.
Lutheran Option -- Isaiah 45:1-7
We 21st-century Christians rarely view international relations the way the prophets of the Old Testament viewed them. Most of the time we think that human beings, in the form of the military or the politicians or the multinational corporations, are in charge of world affairs. God has very little hand in them, according to our understandings.
The prophets of the Old Testament knew that God is the Lord over all nations, however, and that sometimes he plucks them up and breaks them down, or builds them and plants them (Jeremiah 1:10). As Second Isaiah proclaims in 40:23-24, the Lord of history "brings princes to nought, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing." Scarcely are they planted when the Lord "blows upon them and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble."
That fact is confirmed by our text. In 539 B.C., Cyrus II of Persia conquered Media, followed by his defeat of Lydia in 546 and of the Babylonian Empire in 539 B.C. But our text is quite sure that Cyrus' victories were not the result of his own power. Rather, it was the Lord God who subdued nations before Cyrus (45:1), who stirred him up from the East (41:2) and enabled him to establish the largest empire of the time (cf. 41:3, 25; 46:11; 48:14-15). Note the repeated "I" in our text. "I will go before you," God says to Cyrus. "I will break," "I will give," "I call you," "I surname you," "I gird you." Cyrus was an instrument in the hand of God, even though Cyrus knew nothing of the Lord (45:4-5; cf. God's use of Assyria in Isaiah 10:5-6).
God had a purpose in calling Cyrus, however. He used him as the tool by which to free his people Israel from their Babylonian exile.
In 538 B.C., Cyrus issued a decree, allowing the exiles to return to their homeland and even financing their subsequent rebuilding of the temple that had been destroyed by the Babylonians (cf. Ezra 1:1-4; 2 Chronicles 36:22-23). In other words, God used Cyrus to fulfill his promises to his people Israel. The prophets of the exile had proclaimed that God would return his people to their land. God intervened in history to accomplish that purpose through the Persian ruler.
It is this fact, moreover, of God's lordship over all of human history that testifies to his sole divinity. The Lord can tell what is to come hereafter, because he will bring it to pass. But no other deity can do that (cf. Isaiah 41:21-29). No other god or goddess encompasses all of time in his hand and brings to pass events in fulfillment of his word. Thus, God declares in our text, "I am the Lord, and there is no other" (vv. 5, 6). God can make weal or woe for the nations of the earth, and bring light upon them or darkness.
Perhaps when we worry about events in our time and wonder what the world is coming to, we should remember the words of our prophet and know that God is Lord over all. We are never out of his sight, dear friends, and the world of nations is never left to its own devices. All rest under the power and in the hand of a loving Lord of might and goodness. To be sure, as our Lord Jesus told us once, in the world we may have tribulation (John 16:33). But we can be of very good cheer and undimmed hope, because our God, our Christ, our sole Lord, has overcome the world.
The Political Pulpit
Matthew 22:15-22
Jesus' words of rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's have led to much controversy among Christians. Some have used the passage to justify total disengagement of the church from the political realm. Indeed, readers inclined to use the insights of this column from time to time, to preach politics, may need to preach on this text to justify what they have been and will be doing. Besides, with election day on the horizon, a word about Jesus' expectations concerning citizenship has value.
Among New Testament scholars, a consensus is that the Pharisees were trying to trap Jesus into identifying himself with the Zealot Party, which refused to pay a recently instituted Roman poll tax. Be that as it may, Jesus' politically sensitive remarks indicate that he did not believe that faith in him implied release from one's responsibilities as a citizen. And yet Jesus also clearly did not identify Roman citizenship with the ways of God. When we recognize this context for Jesus' remarks, it becomes evident that classical Western interpretations of this passage have a point.
Saint Augustine, the most influential Western interpreter of the biblical witness, has had abiding influence on Western political thought. His interpretation of the state seems most consistent with Jesus' warning that we not confuse God's kingdom with the realm of political power. Political power has its origins in motivations very different from those of the Gospel. While Jesus' way is agapé, total renunciation of all that is beneficial to oneself for the sake of the neighbor, politics in Augustine's view originates in the quest for power. This is why we should never sacralize earthly institutions (Jean Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, 94-95). But precisely because we are of the world, and the sinful ways of politics must be monitored, Christians need to get their hands dirty in politics.
That is happening less and less in contemporary America. We are abdicating our responsibilities as citizens. Witness voter turnout statistics. While from 1880 through 1900 about 85 percent of the American electorate voted in Presidential elections, barely 50 percent have voted in the 2000 elections and those of the 1990s. This sermon gives you a chance to address this unhappy trend, to urge voter turnout in the upcoming election for the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate. Not to vote is to contradict Jesus' insistence that faith does not remove us from political responsibilities.
In making these points about the importance of voting, you might wish to elaborate on informed voting by touching on the key issues emerging in the midterm elections. By press time for this column, the national parties were projecting that ecology, health care, further welfare reform and the budget in general would be the hot-button issues. My column for October 6 in this issue of Emphasis as well as the May 26 column of the May-June issue can provide you with some relevant information. Of course others are likely to emerge, especially international questions of war and peace given our war on terrorism and the Middle East conflicts. I will address some of the pressing election themes in the November 3 column for the November-December issue of our journal, and that issue should be in your hands in time for planning this October 20 sermon too. Help your people to see that it was not Jesus' intention to make bad citizens out of his followers.
Love for the land God gives us is implied in the Propers for next week, October 27. See Deuteronomy 34:1-12, for a possible sermon on that theme if you think waiting another week for a get-out-the-vote sermon might be more appropriate. And if you prefer to commemorate Reformation Sunday on that date, do not fail to note the theme of freedom in the assigned Gospel (John 8:31-36) or that an agenda for Martin Luther in his rejection of aberrant Catholic practices and teachings in his Ninety-Five Theses was the protection of the poor (Luther's Works, Vol. 31, 29, 31, 3). To vote as a Protestant Christian, in the heritage of the Reformation and in accord with Jesus' admonition not to abandon our responsibilities as citizens, is to exercise one's franchise on behalf of the poor.
Where does it belong; what is its proper realm? Well, there is little doubt. It is the national currency of one particular nation on earth. No question there.
Look a little closer. Note the words, "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." Not only is the dollar's sphere public commerce and public exchange, it is also the private transactions between people. Money is an integral part of much of what we do in our life in the world. It represents food and shelter and clothing. It represents health. In the taxes that we pay, it represents the claim that the nation has on us and our obligation to the state. It is a token of the work we have done to get it. It is a token of value. The coin of the realm has a claim on a large part of our lives.
In Jerusalem, Jesus used a coin of the Roman realm to point out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and to raise the question of what claims our lives and our allegiance.
The coin of the American realm has a claim on us who use it, just as the coin of the Roman realm in Judea had a claim on any who carried it. Is there a coin of God's realm? And what claim does it have on us?
Exodus 33:12-23
The Exodus account of Israel at Mount Sinai runs from chapter 19 to the end of the book, and it includes the giving of the law, the breaking of the covenant by Israel, and the renewal of the covenant. This reading falls in the last section, the renewal of the covenant.
Israel was at the foot of Mount Sinai, and Yahweh was angry. The Israelites whom he had so carefully shepherded out of Egypt and through the desert to the foot of Sinai had broken the covenant when it was still newly inscribed on the tablets of stone. Moses interceded on behalf of the people, pleading with Yahweh to remember the promise to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, pleading that God not destroy them. Yahweh relented and changed his mind about destroying Israel.
But Yahweh's anger is not gone. In Exodus 33:1-3, Yahweh sends the Israelites on their way to the land of Canaan, along with the promises to send an angel to clear the way and to drive out the inhabitants of the land. But Yahweh will not go with them, because they are a "stiff-necked people." The implication is that it would be entirely too dangerous to have an angry God in the midst of Israel. God's anger might boil to the surface, and there's no telling what might happen then.
That is the build up, then, to this lection, in which Moses again intercedes on behalf of the people, wanting Yahweh to travel with Israel. And what is Moses' argument? That "this nation is your people" (v. 13); that the nations won't know that fact and the fact of Yahweh's grace unless Yahweh goes with Israel (v. 16a); and that that is the way Israel's distinctiveness shall be shown (v. 16b). It is an appeal not to the inherent worthiness of Israel, but to God's own being and to God's own grace, out of which God had chosen Israel originally. And God grants, in verse 17, the thing Moses asked for.
Moses has yet another request: to see God's glory. God pledges to show it to him, but only God's glory, nothing more. No one can see the face of God and live, so Moses is set in the cleft of a rock, where God will cover him with his hand. And all Moses will see is a glimpse of God's back. The anthropomorphizing about God's body parts may grate against our modern theological ears, but we certainly get a vivid picture of what is allowed and what isn't.
So what's going on in this strange story? In his three requests Moses is asking for closeness, for continued relationship, and the renewal of a relationship that had been broken when the Israelites had made the golden calf. Psalm 42 comes to mind here: "As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?" In fact, that is Moses' final request, to see God's glory, actually to lay eyes on the Creator.
And yet what comes back is one incontrovertible fact -- that God is never fully revealed to us. God is always hidden, and the most we can ever hope for is a glimpse of God's back, or hand, or a perhaps brief glimmer of light.
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
With this reading, the lectionary embarks on the continuous reading of 1 Thessalonians for the next five Sundays. There is general agreement that this is the earliest of Paul's writings, which would make it the earliest writing in the New Testament, perhaps as early as the 50s. Acts 17:1-8 describes Paul's founding of the church shortly after he began the church at Philippi. Paul is writing the letter as early as a few months after the founding of the church.
The letter is addressed to Gentile Christians, even though Acts reports that Paul's first contact in Thessalo-nica was at the synagogue. In some ways it makes a significant theological point that the earliest writing in the New Testament was addressed to Gentiles.
This reading follows the standard structure for the opening of Paul's letters, beginning with a salutation in verse 1, and then offering a prayer of thanksgiving to God for the church and for the faith and witness of the Thessalonians, and even though it sounds like praise for them, the praise, Paul would certainly say, is only to God. Except in the loosest way, in the barest of outlines, the introductory material in this reading really doesn't touch on the themes of the letter. Instead, it recounts and rehearses the spiritual journey of the Thessalonians thus far in their short existence as a church.
Consider the ways that Paul describes this young church, the things he gives thanks to God for: she has been steadfast in her work and in her hope; she has been chosen by God; she is filled with the Spirit; they have been imitators of Paul, but, more, of Jesus Christ; despite persecutions she has been joyful; she has been an example to believers elsewhere in Macedonia; she has preached the word of God, not just in Macedonia, but elsewhere by her reputation; she has been welcoming; and she has turned from idols to God.
This is a sketch, a beviary, as it were, of what it means to be the church. Could any modern congregation do as well? Could a 21st-century American congregation bear such a witness while living in a time of persecution? Perhaps it takes persecution for the church to truly be the church of Jesus Christ that Paul describes. Is the church of Jesus Christ a victim church that thrives only under persecution? We may not want to go that far, but it's clear that Paul's joy in the Thessalonian church came as she was able to face hard times and steadfastly keep her faith and hope in God.
Matthew 22:15-22
Jesus' ongoing controversy with the Pharisees is well established in Matthew by the time Jesus comes to Jerusalem, so now their schemes become even more brazen. As a reminder, the Pharisees were a politico-religious party in later Judaism, that came into existence as a class about the third century B.C. They became the most rigid defenders of Jewish religion and traditions. By the time of Jesus, according to The Catholic Encyclopedia, "Pharisaism developed a proud and arrogant orthodoxy and an exaggerated formalism, which insisted on ceremonial details at the expense of the more important precepts of the law."
In this encounter, which is found with little variation in all three synoptic Gospels, the Pharisees begin with flattery, but their intent is utterly transparent. It was certainly clear to Jesus, who saw their "malice" (NRSV). It is a strong word that is used here, which can even be translated "evil."
The trap that they laid for Jesus was this: If he were to say, "No," he could be accused of sedition against Rome. If he were to say, "Yes," then he would find himself on the wrong side of the people, who resent the Roman occupation with its taxes. There is, at first glance, no way for Jesus to come out clean in this exchange.
But he asked them for a coin, which they had at hand. Much like modern British coinage, it bore the sovereign's visage and name, "Tiberius Caesar." Jesus asked whose image was on the coin. And at that point Jesus had turned their trap against them.
On the one hand, Jesus' statement, which in the memories of many comes out in the King James version, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's ..." really doesn't solve the problem. In fact, Jesus comes down on the side of paying taxes to the emperor, but only because the coins are issued by the emperor. But that's not what quieted and amazed the Pharisees. Jesus redefined the question, or perhaps made the question more significant, more weighty, and in doing so shot a pointed charge back at the Pharisees. Because the new question is about allegiance: Where do your loyalties lie? What has a claim on your life? It was, after all, the Pharisees who brought out the coin. We can't imagine Jesus carrying money. The Pharisees, despite all their traditionalism and their hyper-orthodox understanding of the law, were themselves suspect and hypocritical.
And to carry it even deeper, there is the question that remains unstated. We know what is the emperor's: the coin was issued by the emperor and his picture and name are on it. But there is no equivalent for God, no token that bears God's image. Of course, that would have been forbidden. But if the coin is properly the emperor's, then what is properly God's?
And on what coin do we see God's image?
Application
The words on American currency, "In God We Trust," may have been intended as a genuine statement of the American character. But the irony in them is hard to ignore. Preachers may preach against it, and psychologists may advise against it, but there is no doubt that people put their faith in money. The American dollar has become the thing in which so many people put their trust and their commitment.
It raises the question about allegiance and loyalty. There are so many things demanding our loyalty these days, and it seems like the number is growing.
It spans the whole range of things, from such fun and relatively unimportant things as whether you follow the Boston Red Sox or the New York Yankees -- what team do you use the word "we" about, as in, "We won!"? Manufacturers rely on "brand loyalty," the fact that consumers tend to find a brand of dish soap they like and stick with it.
In this age of explosive immigration, one's national culture demands loyalty, particularly for those who live in other countries. Political parties want loyalty, schools demand loyalty, our state and our city demand loyalty, our nation demands loyalty.
The thing that has so outraged people about John Walker Lindt, the so-called American Taliban, is probably not the actual acts he has engaged in, even if they are crimes, but the question of his loyalty. How could a young American have given his allegiance to such a repressive regime as Afghanistan's Taliban? Where do we put our loyalty when there are so many things demanding it?
In first-century Jerusalem the Pharisees seemed loyal to the law and to the traditions of Judaism. But Jesus raised the loyalty question with them and they couldn't answer. "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's," he said to them. What is properly owed to the state? And what things do we acknowledge to be God's?
First we might point out that when it comes right down to it, everything belongs to God, quoting Psalm 24, "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." And of course that would be right. But there is another realm of God and the coin of that realm shows God's image. And that is to be found in the other two readings for the day.
In Exodus, Moses sought to see God's glory, but was only granted a fleeting glimpse of God's back. Yet Moses himself, along with later generations of Israel, came to understand that God was present with Israel in the wilderness, and in all of the historical circumstances of the emerging nation of Israel, all of the difficulties through which Israel walked, all of the triumphs that she enjoyed. It is in that history that God's image is seen. God's image was not available to be seen on a coin, but in the nation of Israel.
Paul writes to the Thessalonians and gives thanks for their steadfast faith in the face of persecution, their hope, the witness that she bears to Christ, the Spirit that is within her. In other words, Paul looks and sees God's image in the infant Thessalonian church.
God's realm is human history and the coins of that realm, the places where we behold God's image and God's glory, are human lives and human communities and human relationships. In the love of person for person, in the growth of communities of faith, in any act of reconciliation between nations and enemies, in a nomadic people seeking a land of their own, in a fledgling congregation struggling against persecution in Thessalonica, in all of those God's image can be seen.
The challenge is to know what coin of what realm to look at to behold God's image. And just as the American dollar has such a claim on us, the challenge is to let the coin of God's realm have a claim on us.
Alternative Applications
1) Exodus: Because of Who God Is ... Moses asked God for God's presence with Israel. And what was his justification for the request? For that matter, what is our justification for the petitions we make? Well, in the midst of our private prayers, our little bargains with God, we probably promise to be good in the future, or perhaps to give something to the poor. Or maybe we think, down deep, that we really deserve what we're asking for. But those were not the basis for Moses' requests. Moses didn't appeal to God on the basis of Israel's goodness, but on the basis of God's goodness. God answers prayer not because of who we are, but because of who God is.
2) Thessalonians: The Strength of the Struggling Church. In this, Paul's first writing, and therefore the earliest writing of the New Testament, perhaps as little as 20 years after the crucifixion, we hear a description of the strengths of one early church: their faith and the perseverance, their hope and their witness. And many of those strengths come about as the church dealt with and struggled in a hostile world. Have we in the modern church been too comfortable to have those same strengths?
First Lesson Focus
Exodus 33:12-23
The people of Israel, whom the Lord redeemed out of slavery, are not very different from us redeemed Christians. According to Exodus 24, they freely entered into covenant with their Savior God and they promised that "all the words that the Lord has spoken we shall do." God then gave them his commandments as the guides for their new life as his chosen people. We find in Exodus 20-31 the collection of those commandments. But having entered into covenant with their Lord and having sworn their allegiance to him alone, what do they do? They make a golden calf as a substitute for God, bowing down to it and worshiping it (Exodus 32).
And we are like that, aren't we? We renew our covenant with the Lord at his communion table and then almost immediately, sometimes even before we are out of the church door, we fall again into sin. Surely, Exodus has it right. We, along with Israel, are a "stiff-necked people" (33:5). The question, therefore, is, will the Lord continue to go with us? And will he continue to go with his errant Israelites? Will he continue to lead Israel toward the Promised Land, or us toward his good kingdom?
The answer is: "Not without a mediator." Because the Lord, you see, cannot put up with sin, and if for a moment he should go with us in all of his holiness and glory, his pure presence would consume us (33:5; cf. Isaiah 6:5).
Moses is the mediator for Israel there in the desert at the foot of Mount Sinai. Exodus 32:32 tells us that when God threatened to destroy the Israelites because of their worship of the golden calf, Moses offered to die in the people's place. And it is clear that Moses has an intimate relation with the Lord. In 33:11, we are told that "the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend." Consequently, in verse 12 of our text, when Moses asks who will accompany the people on their journey toward the Promised Land, the Lord promises that his presence (literally, his "face") will accompany them, for Moses' sake. God continues, in his incredible patience and mercy, to lead sinful Israel on toward the land of promise, because of the mediation of Moses.
I wonder if that is not the reason God continues to lead us on toward his kingdom too -- because we have a mediator whose name is Jesus Christ. Christ not only offered to die in our place. He actually did it. He died for our sinfulness. And the holy God therefore does not abandon or consume us, but leads us steadily onward.
That's what distinguishes us as a people, isn't it? Moses says that it is in God's going with them that they are different from all other people that are on the face of the earth (33:16). And that's what marks us out as different too, that Christ is with us on our journey toward the kingdom, even if only two or three are gathered together in his name. Israel was a God-accompanied people, and so are we, precisely because we have a mediator.
The intimacy of Moses with the Lord is shown in the verses that follow in our text. Moses asks to see God's glory. He wants to see the very being of God, God in all of his full majesty. But even Moses was not equal to that overwhelming sight. No one can see God and live (v. 20). We never have a description in the Bible of what God looks like in all of his glory. We find only the phenomena that accompany his person (cf. Exodus 24:9-11; Isaiah 6:1-3; Ezekiel 1; Habakkuk 3). Nevertheless, Moses is allowed to catch a glimpse of the Lord's back.
But we could not stand even that little glimpse. God in all of his glorious majesty is beyond any vision of which we could dream, and what one of us could bear the sight of God's pure light, pure love, pure holiness, pure power? None of us, unless God lowered himself to our infirmities and weakness, and took on our flesh and blood, and walked among us as a fellow human being. And that is the wonder of the Incarnation, isn't it, that we have actually beheld God's glory in the person of Jesus Christ, glory as of the only Son from the Father (John 1:14)? "He who has seen me has seen the Father," Jesus said (John 14:9). You and I now have been given even more than Moses received, and we have been sent a mediator far greater than Moses ever was.
Lutheran Option -- Isaiah 45:1-7
We 21st-century Christians rarely view international relations the way the prophets of the Old Testament viewed them. Most of the time we think that human beings, in the form of the military or the politicians or the multinational corporations, are in charge of world affairs. God has very little hand in them, according to our understandings.
The prophets of the Old Testament knew that God is the Lord over all nations, however, and that sometimes he plucks them up and breaks them down, or builds them and plants them (Jeremiah 1:10). As Second Isaiah proclaims in 40:23-24, the Lord of history "brings princes to nought, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing." Scarcely are they planted when the Lord "blows upon them and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble."
That fact is confirmed by our text. In 539 B.C., Cyrus II of Persia conquered Media, followed by his defeat of Lydia in 546 and of the Babylonian Empire in 539 B.C. But our text is quite sure that Cyrus' victories were not the result of his own power. Rather, it was the Lord God who subdued nations before Cyrus (45:1), who stirred him up from the East (41:2) and enabled him to establish the largest empire of the time (cf. 41:3, 25; 46:11; 48:14-15). Note the repeated "I" in our text. "I will go before you," God says to Cyrus. "I will break," "I will give," "I call you," "I surname you," "I gird you." Cyrus was an instrument in the hand of God, even though Cyrus knew nothing of the Lord (45:4-5; cf. God's use of Assyria in Isaiah 10:5-6).
God had a purpose in calling Cyrus, however. He used him as the tool by which to free his people Israel from their Babylonian exile.
In 538 B.C., Cyrus issued a decree, allowing the exiles to return to their homeland and even financing their subsequent rebuilding of the temple that had been destroyed by the Babylonians (cf. Ezra 1:1-4; 2 Chronicles 36:22-23). In other words, God used Cyrus to fulfill his promises to his people Israel. The prophets of the exile had proclaimed that God would return his people to their land. God intervened in history to accomplish that purpose through the Persian ruler.
It is this fact, moreover, of God's lordship over all of human history that testifies to his sole divinity. The Lord can tell what is to come hereafter, because he will bring it to pass. But no other deity can do that (cf. Isaiah 41:21-29). No other god or goddess encompasses all of time in his hand and brings to pass events in fulfillment of his word. Thus, God declares in our text, "I am the Lord, and there is no other" (vv. 5, 6). God can make weal or woe for the nations of the earth, and bring light upon them or darkness.
Perhaps when we worry about events in our time and wonder what the world is coming to, we should remember the words of our prophet and know that God is Lord over all. We are never out of his sight, dear friends, and the world of nations is never left to its own devices. All rest under the power and in the hand of a loving Lord of might and goodness. To be sure, as our Lord Jesus told us once, in the world we may have tribulation (John 16:33). But we can be of very good cheer and undimmed hope, because our God, our Christ, our sole Lord, has overcome the world.
The Political Pulpit
Matthew 22:15-22
Jesus' words of rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's have led to much controversy among Christians. Some have used the passage to justify total disengagement of the church from the political realm. Indeed, readers inclined to use the insights of this column from time to time, to preach politics, may need to preach on this text to justify what they have been and will be doing. Besides, with election day on the horizon, a word about Jesus' expectations concerning citizenship has value.
Among New Testament scholars, a consensus is that the Pharisees were trying to trap Jesus into identifying himself with the Zealot Party, which refused to pay a recently instituted Roman poll tax. Be that as it may, Jesus' politically sensitive remarks indicate that he did not believe that faith in him implied release from one's responsibilities as a citizen. And yet Jesus also clearly did not identify Roman citizenship with the ways of God. When we recognize this context for Jesus' remarks, it becomes evident that classical Western interpretations of this passage have a point.
Saint Augustine, the most influential Western interpreter of the biblical witness, has had abiding influence on Western political thought. His interpretation of the state seems most consistent with Jesus' warning that we not confuse God's kingdom with the realm of political power. Political power has its origins in motivations very different from those of the Gospel. While Jesus' way is agapé, total renunciation of all that is beneficial to oneself for the sake of the neighbor, politics in Augustine's view originates in the quest for power. This is why we should never sacralize earthly institutions (Jean Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics, 94-95). But precisely because we are of the world, and the sinful ways of politics must be monitored, Christians need to get their hands dirty in politics.
That is happening less and less in contemporary America. We are abdicating our responsibilities as citizens. Witness voter turnout statistics. While from 1880 through 1900 about 85 percent of the American electorate voted in Presidential elections, barely 50 percent have voted in the 2000 elections and those of the 1990s. This sermon gives you a chance to address this unhappy trend, to urge voter turnout in the upcoming election for the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate. Not to vote is to contradict Jesus' insistence that faith does not remove us from political responsibilities.
In making these points about the importance of voting, you might wish to elaborate on informed voting by touching on the key issues emerging in the midterm elections. By press time for this column, the national parties were projecting that ecology, health care, further welfare reform and the budget in general would be the hot-button issues. My column for October 6 in this issue of Emphasis as well as the May 26 column of the May-June issue can provide you with some relevant information. Of course others are likely to emerge, especially international questions of war and peace given our war on terrorism and the Middle East conflicts. I will address some of the pressing election themes in the November 3 column for the November-December issue of our journal, and that issue should be in your hands in time for planning this October 20 sermon too. Help your people to see that it was not Jesus' intention to make bad citizens out of his followers.
Love for the land God gives us is implied in the Propers for next week, October 27. See Deuteronomy 34:1-12, for a possible sermon on that theme if you think waiting another week for a get-out-the-vote sermon might be more appropriate. And if you prefer to commemorate Reformation Sunday on that date, do not fail to note the theme of freedom in the assigned Gospel (John 8:31-36) or that an agenda for Martin Luther in his rejection of aberrant Catholic practices and teachings in his Ninety-Five Theses was the protection of the poor (Luther's Works, Vol. 31, 29, 31, 3). To vote as a Protestant Christian, in the heritage of the Reformation and in accord with Jesus' admonition not to abandon our responsibilities as citizens, is to exercise one's franchise on behalf of the poor.
