May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)
SEASON: Pentecost 22
PROPER: 25A
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: October 24, 1999
TEXT: Matthew 22:34-46 - "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"
(See also Exodus 22:21-27)
ISSUE: The passage is an example of how Jesus and the Pharisees (and the Sadducees) spar with Jesus challenging one another's position and honor. In this case, Pharisees challenge Jesus in terms of what is the greatest law, and Jesus challenges them with the question about who do they think the Messiah is. What is also particularly important is that Jesus teaches that God commands that they love God and their neighbor. He challenges them on the point that Messiahship is not one who is the military successor of King David. Who is he, but one who follows the command to love God with profound devotion and the last, the lost, the least, the poor around him.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The sparring and challenging of Jesus with the Pharisees, and the Sadducees continues. Recall that in last Sunday's gospel reading Jesus was severely challenged by the Pharisees and the Herodians who asked him whether is was lawful according to the Jewish Torah to pay taxes to Caesar or not. It was a vicious challenge to entrap him. Jesus did escape the entrapment by telling them to pay Caesar what belonged to Caesar, but that they should pay to God what they owed God. Paying God the allegiance that was owed to God was often the great failing of the Herodians, the Pharisees, and even ourselves today. Jesus won the challenge, and maintained his honorable position as a prophet in their midst.
That kind of challenging continues in the passage from Matthew this morning. First, the Pharisees challenge Jesus on what is the most important law is the greatest. Again, this is a "testing" question. Jesus provides a very satisfactory answer. Actually a very conservative answer that is quite acceptable. But then notice that Jesus comes back at them, the Pharisees and challenges them with the question: "What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?" They return the popular response of what they believed the Messiah to be, "Son of David," that is, someone in the lineage, ancestry of King David, and someone of a militant type. Then Jesus, trapping them, quotes Psalm 110:1. (It was believed at that time that David had written all of the Psalms, which is not the case.) The Psalm reads: "The Lord said to my lord, the king, 'Sit here at my right side until I put your enemies under your feet.'" If the Messiah is addressing David, how can the Messiah be a Son of David? This challenge stumps the Pharisees, so they go away no longer asking him any questions. Matthew is stressing here the wit and the victory, the honorableness, of Jesus over the leadership of his time.
It seems that the point of the passage is that what is basic to human existence is loving God, - i.e. paying to God what belongs to God - and loving your neighbor. The essence of the Messiah, the leader and deliverer of God's people is not one who is militant, but one who conveys and lives into the law of love.
Let's take a closer look at Jesus response to the question: "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" Which was the greatest law, or the most important one in the law was an ongoing question for the people of Jesus' time. In the torah, or first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures there were considered to be 613 laws. How your remembered all of these was an issue. Some were of more imporantance than others. Obviously the Ten Commandments were of great importance. The command (Dt. 22:6-7) that if you found a nest, you could take eggs or young, but not the mother bird, was a less importance. Rabbi's and prophets tried to summarize the law for their people. King David in Psalm 15 declared 11 important rules. The prophet Micah (6:8) declared only three: Do justice, show constant love, and live in humble fellowship with God. The prophet Amos (5:4) had only one: "The Lord says to the people of Israel, 'Come to me and you will live.'"
Jesus summarization of the God's law is the Hebrew 'Shema' from Deut. 6:5; it is not anything particularly original, and so Jesus could not be condemned for it. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and will all your soul, and with all you mind." This is how you paid God back what you owed, with your love. Jesus added also a quotation from the Hebrew Scripture, Lev. 19:18: "Do not take revenge on anyone or continue to hate him, but love your neighbor as you love yourself." Popular belief at the time was that neighbors were often thought of as merely your kinsmen. Although the reading from Exodus 22:21-27, for today, calls for a respect and compassion for resident aliens, remembering that the nation Israel was herself once a resident alien in Egypt. Jesus parable of the Good Samaritan also expanded the notion of who a neighbor was. Even the hated Samaritans could be good neighbors. So Jesus summarizes the 613 commandments of the Hebrew Scriptures into two memorable laws: Love God and love your neighbor in the widest sense of that word as you love yourself.
What is important for us to understand is what love meant when Jesus gave this commandment. We think of love today as a good feeling. We think of love as a romantic inclination. Love is thought of in terms of giving our old left over clothes to the poor. Love of God is giving to the church what's left over after everything else has been paid. Love in modern American Culture is making oneself feel good, or being nice, or polite. Love is a bumper sticker with a heart on it: I (RED HEART) SAILING. Whatever. . . . We have a very psychological and emotional concept of love. We might even say that you can't command people to love. You have to feel love.
The emotional concept of love creates problems for us in a religious sense, because people don't understand what it means to love God whom they cannot see. It's hard to love even Jesus. He was a great persons, no doubt, but how do I love him? He's remote a figure in Scripture, who love 2,000 years ago. People in Jesus' time did not see love as an emotion. Love was an attachment, a belonging. People of this time were very group oriented. The most important thing in your life was your family group. You may not have had a lot of real fuzzy feelings about some people in that group, but you live and died for your family. It was you own security and well being, you survival. Love was attachment and belonging and you did what was expected and commanded by the family.
To love God was not a matter of having a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings about God, but it was a matter of attachment to God with enduring faithfulness. Israel as a nation was expected and commanded to stay attached to God and God's way. They were bound to God in a Covenant relationship. God was your protection and survival. You honored God with obedience and faithfulness. Israel was to be a light to the nations of the world in her faithful attachment to Yahweh God.
When Jesus says love your neighbor, it is again not a matter of warm fuzzy feelings, but to be attached to them as if they were your own family. You were to respect them, honor them, and enable them to participate fully in the community with honor and justice. We are often startled by Jesus command to hate you mother and father; "Whoever loves his father or mother more than me is not fit to be my disciple; whoever loves his son or daughter more than me is not fit to be my disciple." (Matt.10:37; Lk 14:26) This does not mean an emotional abandonment of you family. It means that you need to be attached to Jesus Christ, you need to be in his group and live in accordance with his way and command. In the community of Christ, you belong to one who died for humanity. Therefore the members of the group are willing to die for one another as that's what it means to love or to be attached. You may not be "crazy about" one another, but you respect the dignity of every human being, because that is what Jesus Christ did, and that's what it means to be in his family.
Remember what it was like when you got married, those of you that are. It was all very romantic, and emotional. Lots of good feelings. But to stay married requires so much more than just warm fuzzy feelings. It is an all out devotion in sickness and health, when we grow older. When we enter the demand, tiring and wearing struggle with raising children. When we have to take care of one another's aging and dying parents. When hit high points and low points. Yet still keeping the attachment. Is this not what it means to love God, to be attached and caring on with patience and compassion and caring. The Gospel of John (15:13) expresses it best of all when Jesus says: "My commandment is this: love one another just as I love you. the greates love a person can have for his friends is to give his life for them. And you are my friends if you do what I command you."
It was once so hard for me to imagine that people who came to church Sunday after Sunday, year after year, walked out on one another when we changed the Prayer Book. In American culture attachments are often so weak as people serve only themselves and what feels good for themselves. How can fathers walk out on their children so that they can, so called find "find themselves"? How can wives and husband walk out on one another so incredibly easy? This issue is one we must face as Christians in the community of Christ.
We will say that we cannot be commanded to love. You can't make me have good fuzzy feelings for another person when they just aren't there. Yet unmistakeably, God commands us to love one another. Christ Jesus picked up on that very point to reinforce it. You are commanded to stay attached to God. You are commanded to be attached to one another as you are attached to yourself. We belong to God, and God revealed in Jesus Christ how he was willing to die for us. We are called upon to be attached to and belong to one another. The two commands so far as Jesus was concerned were inseparably linked. If you want a world that is at peace, if you want a world that expresses the Kingdom of God, then you must be attached to the way of God, and you must be attached to one another as the family of God.
When then is the Messiah, the deliverer, the savior? What do you say about him? Is he the militant leader, the Son of David. Is the Messianic hope to be found in devotions to our American rugged individualism? Is the Messiah a devotion to good feelings, niceties and politeness? Is the Messiah a devotion to "finding myself"? Is the Messianic hope is warm and fuzzy feelings? The Messianic hope is in Christ I do believe who calls us to accept the command to love, to be attached firmly to the Creator, and to be attached to a caring compassionate way of life in which we serve one another, and live for one another, in which we will die for one another, as Christ Jesus has done for us.`
Sunday, October 24, 1999
Sunday, October 17, 1999
Pentecost 21
May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)
SEASON: Pentecost 21
PROPER: 24A
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: October 17, 1999
TEXT: Matthew 22:15-22 -The Great Effort at Entrapment
Then the Phariusees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said . . . . "Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?" . . . . Then he said to them, "Give therefor to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are god's."
ISSUE: The signficicant issue of this passage is that the Pharisees and the Herodians are attempting to entrap, dishonor, and essential eliminate the influence of Jesus. In response Jesus challenges their genuine allegiance to doing the will of God, and making every genuine effort to please God. The passage often mistakenly used as a text for keeping church and state separate was never an issue at Jesus' time. Yet whether or not we truly, genuinely, live our lives in an effort to please God is still the concern of the scripture for us today. Adoration and praise of God along with giving and thanksgiving are part of our calling. Living godly lives of caring with sensitivity to human need is an important ingredient of human life. But the world does tend to "squeeze out" our attentativeness to God with many worldly and selfish distractions.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The gospel passage from Matthew's account regarding the paying of taxes to Caesar was a very sensitive and hot issue at the time Matthew records this story. It was also a very important story of the early church as it is recorded all of the synoptic gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. To fully appreciate the passage requires us to keep in mind what was essentially going on in the story account. We can get very caught up in whether it was appropriate to pay taxes to Caesar, and people equate this with the modern issue of separation of church and state. That's an interesting debate, but not what this passage itself was concerned about. The main issue of this story is that there was a very definite movement to entrap Jesus and to discredit him among the people. To publicly raise the issue of the appropriateness of paying taxes to Caesar and putting Jesus on the spot as this question does put him in a very dangerous position in this attempt to answer it.
Lets consider some of the background, and the issues in Jesus time that are a part of this event. The pharisees and some Herodians come to Jesus to put the question to him. The first thing that they do is to set him up with all kinds of flattery. They address his sincerity. He is indeed an honest man, in what was a very dishonest world. He shows deference to no one, and he cares nothing about what people think. (That was not really true. Jesus raised the issue "Who do the people say that I am?") The pharisees and the Herodians place him high on a pedestal, and then pose a question to him that they are sure will bring him down with a great fall: "Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?" The question implies is it in accord with the Torah (the Law) of God's people to pay tax to a foreign pagan government.
Keep in mind that taxes in this period were exhorbitant, and the head tax in question in this passage was a full day's wage for poor peasants. The day they pay the tax, their families don't eat that day, not to mention many other taxes and tolls that were levied. It is also significant that the pharisees, religious leaders team up with the Herodians when they ask this question. The Herodians were the opposing part of the pharisees. Pharisees resented and hated foreign rule and domination. The Herodians were people supported King Herod who was a puppet king of the Romans. Thus, two opposing parties team up to entrap Jesus and to challenge his honor among the people. If Jesus says "Yes" to paying the tax, he will alienate himself from the masses of peasants. The pharisees will challenge him, because the Torah and the commandments called for a total allegiance to God alone. If Jesus says "No, it is not appropriate to pay taxes to Caesar," then the Herodians would report him, and he would be arrested and condemned for sedition, rebellion, insurrection. This question was really loaded. It might be seen as one of the most vicious attacks by the authorities up to this point. It was a really challenge to Jesus and a significant threat to his honor in that community.
(Let me also insert here that when Matthew is writing this passage, it was after the Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed, and there was great hate of the Romans, so this whole issue of submission and allegiance to Rome was still a very hot issue for the early Christian church community. How were they to deal with the hated enemy? St. Paul too struggled with this issue, and wrote in romans 13 that world authorities had to be respected. But in Col 2:10, Paul writes that Christ is superior over all authority.)
Jesus was an artist at meeting the challenges of the pharisees and ususally ended up humiliating and insulting them. The only except to that, remember, was when the Caananite woman asked him to heal her daughter, and Jesus had said that he came only for the house of Israel, and it was not appropriate to give the childrens' bread to the dogs. She replied stumping Jesus with the challenge: Don't the dogs get to eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table. Other than that one incidence, Jesus has always come out ahead in his riposte against the pharisees. So in this case what does he do?
Jesus calls for the pharisees who've asked the question about paying the head tax, to produce the coin used for paying the tax. They do. It is a big mistake on their part, and it is their first humiliation. For them to possess the coin is their first humiliation. The coin had the image of Tiberius Caesar on it with the inscription: Tiberius Caesar, Augustus, son of the divine Augustus, high priest. What were the pharisees doing with a coin that bore the image of a Caesar who was considered to be a god? They may have gotten it from the Herodians, but why were the pharisees associating with the unclean Herodians and their Roman coinage? Obviously they are hypocrites. Jesus sort of rubs their noses in that point. Some of them are not so pure as they try to pretend to be. He has humiliated them in fron of the the crowd.
Jesus second point of humiliation is when he says: "Render or pay back to Caesar (the emperor) the things that are Caesars, and pay back to God the thing that are God's." The clear and insulting implication is that the Herodians and the pharisees are not giving to God, the honor they should be giving God. They are all, all of those people gathered there, utterly amazed at his triumph in this very tricky situation. It was a very serious charge that Jesus lays on the Herodians and the pharisees, those religious leaders, that they are not pleasing God. The issue is to be pleasing to God, and they are according to Jesus not doing that very thing. Here is where they are lacking.
What is it that Matthew is trying to tell us in this story when he relates it to the early church? The world is trying to entrap Jesus and to squeeze him out. What was it that Jesus was trying to tell the world? Jesus was certainly trying to reveal the wonder of God, the grace, the love, the healing, the forgiveness of God. Incorporating the loveliness of God into themselves was to be their way of life. Jesus was raising the issue of whether or not people were honoring God in their lives. Do they really love the Lord God with all their heart and with all their mind, and with all their strength . . . . or are they allowing themselves to become distracted by all of the other distractions and things of the world. Give to the world what you owe the world, but the bigger and greater issue is to Give to God what you owe God. How do you respond to the grace of God.
Last weeks parable of the Wedding Feast was concerned with the fact that the King is throwing a grand party and feast, but many in those invited did not appropriately respond. they are busy with other worldly things. One man who gets invited doesn't dress up in an appropriate response to the great invitation. They don't put on the new garment that says God is first and foremost in my life. What does anyone owe God? More, of course, than we could ever repay. But the passage asks us to consider how do we respond to God, and how important is the way of God in our lives.
God gives to us the gift of life. We live and breathe and are consciously aware of all that is around us. We have skills, the ability to reason, talents in varying degrees. We are given challenges which adds dimension and vitality to life. We have a freedom of response to what is given to us. We are assured through our faith of the love, the forgiveness, the mercy and compassion of God. That's all spelled out in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. How then do we respond in such away that we expresses thanksgiving to God that has some vitality to it? Life and saving grace are given. How do we respond to the gift in away that extends, that continues to convey, that exhuberates the joy or the gifts of God? I can't quite find a word that express how you accept God's love, and then live a life that responds appropriately or that is resonant with, or that is a song of God's praise and adoration.
One response is to just give up and to live in the world. Just paying homage to Caesar, to the world. Another response to God's gifts to us is bound up in just trying to be righteous in a way that becomes pharisaical. It's like raising the question: Is it lawful to be a homosexual, or to ordain a homosexual? The church gets itself all involved in this one issue focused on one group in society. Yet, righteous heterosexuals fail to acknowledge their own terrible problems with marriage, the outrageous promiscuity that permeates in real life and on TV, and adultery that abounds around us. We focus on other people without seeing our own faults. Mercy, understanding, compassion get squeezed out, in the way that pharisees and Herodians tried to squeeze out Jesus, and how the priority of a compassionate and merciful God gets squeezed out. Jesus was so desperately saying, I think, that we have to live in the world and we do pay Caesar, but we are also God's, and we have to learn how to live into the fullness of God as well.
We live in a world where there are expectations being place on us all the time. We do have to pay our taxes. We are expected, at least we have been in the past, to serve in the military. We have the demands of family, work, children, social responsibilities. But how do we set God into all that. Do we pray enough, study, enough, worship enough" Do we keep focused on God and the Christ so that our judgments and our moral stance, coupled with God' mercy and compassion keep appropriately in balance. The life of Christ was a life closely associated with God, the Abba, the intimate Father. His life was a giving sacrificing, compassionate life. It touched and touches the world in a profound and significant way. May God help us to keep our priorities appropriately arranged so that we are both enveloped in and extentions of God's redeeming grace.
SEASON: Pentecost 21
PROPER: 24A
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: October 17, 1999
TEXT: Matthew 22:15-22 -The Great Effort at Entrapment
Then the Phariusees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said . . . . "Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?" . . . . Then he said to them, "Give therefor to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are god's."
ISSUE: The signficicant issue of this passage is that the Pharisees and the Herodians are attempting to entrap, dishonor, and essential eliminate the influence of Jesus. In response Jesus challenges their genuine allegiance to doing the will of God, and making every genuine effort to please God. The passage often mistakenly used as a text for keeping church and state separate was never an issue at Jesus' time. Yet whether or not we truly, genuinely, live our lives in an effort to please God is still the concern of the scripture for us today. Adoration and praise of God along with giving and thanksgiving are part of our calling. Living godly lives of caring with sensitivity to human need is an important ingredient of human life. But the world does tend to "squeeze out" our attentativeness to God with many worldly and selfish distractions.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The gospel passage from Matthew's account regarding the paying of taxes to Caesar was a very sensitive and hot issue at the time Matthew records this story. It was also a very important story of the early church as it is recorded all of the synoptic gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. To fully appreciate the passage requires us to keep in mind what was essentially going on in the story account. We can get very caught up in whether it was appropriate to pay taxes to Caesar, and people equate this with the modern issue of separation of church and state. That's an interesting debate, but not what this passage itself was concerned about. The main issue of this story is that there was a very definite movement to entrap Jesus and to discredit him among the people. To publicly raise the issue of the appropriateness of paying taxes to Caesar and putting Jesus on the spot as this question does put him in a very dangerous position in this attempt to answer it.
Lets consider some of the background, and the issues in Jesus time that are a part of this event. The pharisees and some Herodians come to Jesus to put the question to him. The first thing that they do is to set him up with all kinds of flattery. They address his sincerity. He is indeed an honest man, in what was a very dishonest world. He shows deference to no one, and he cares nothing about what people think. (That was not really true. Jesus raised the issue "Who do the people say that I am?") The pharisees and the Herodians place him high on a pedestal, and then pose a question to him that they are sure will bring him down with a great fall: "Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?" The question implies is it in accord with the Torah (the Law) of God's people to pay tax to a foreign pagan government.
Keep in mind that taxes in this period were exhorbitant, and the head tax in question in this passage was a full day's wage for poor peasants. The day they pay the tax, their families don't eat that day, not to mention many other taxes and tolls that were levied. It is also significant that the pharisees, religious leaders team up with the Herodians when they ask this question. The Herodians were the opposing part of the pharisees. Pharisees resented and hated foreign rule and domination. The Herodians were people supported King Herod who was a puppet king of the Romans. Thus, two opposing parties team up to entrap Jesus and to challenge his honor among the people. If Jesus says "Yes" to paying the tax, he will alienate himself from the masses of peasants. The pharisees will challenge him, because the Torah and the commandments called for a total allegiance to God alone. If Jesus says "No, it is not appropriate to pay taxes to Caesar," then the Herodians would report him, and he would be arrested and condemned for sedition, rebellion, insurrection. This question was really loaded. It might be seen as one of the most vicious attacks by the authorities up to this point. It was a really challenge to Jesus and a significant threat to his honor in that community.
(Let me also insert here that when Matthew is writing this passage, it was after the Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed, and there was great hate of the Romans, so this whole issue of submission and allegiance to Rome was still a very hot issue for the early Christian church community. How were they to deal with the hated enemy? St. Paul too struggled with this issue, and wrote in romans 13 that world authorities had to be respected. But in Col 2:10, Paul writes that Christ is superior over all authority.)
Jesus was an artist at meeting the challenges of the pharisees and ususally ended up humiliating and insulting them. The only except to that, remember, was when the Caananite woman asked him to heal her daughter, and Jesus had said that he came only for the house of Israel, and it was not appropriate to give the childrens' bread to the dogs. She replied stumping Jesus with the challenge: Don't the dogs get to eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table. Other than that one incidence, Jesus has always come out ahead in his riposte against the pharisees. So in this case what does he do?
Jesus calls for the pharisees who've asked the question about paying the head tax, to produce the coin used for paying the tax. They do. It is a big mistake on their part, and it is their first humiliation. For them to possess the coin is their first humiliation. The coin had the image of Tiberius Caesar on it with the inscription: Tiberius Caesar, Augustus, son of the divine Augustus, high priest. What were the pharisees doing with a coin that bore the image of a Caesar who was considered to be a god? They may have gotten it from the Herodians, but why were the pharisees associating with the unclean Herodians and their Roman coinage? Obviously they are hypocrites. Jesus sort of rubs their noses in that point. Some of them are not so pure as they try to pretend to be. He has humiliated them in fron of the the crowd.
Jesus second point of humiliation is when he says: "Render or pay back to Caesar (the emperor) the things that are Caesars, and pay back to God the thing that are God's." The clear and insulting implication is that the Herodians and the pharisees are not giving to God, the honor they should be giving God. They are all, all of those people gathered there, utterly amazed at his triumph in this very tricky situation. It was a very serious charge that Jesus lays on the Herodians and the pharisees, those religious leaders, that they are not pleasing God. The issue is to be pleasing to God, and they are according to Jesus not doing that very thing. Here is where they are lacking.
What is it that Matthew is trying to tell us in this story when he relates it to the early church? The world is trying to entrap Jesus and to squeeze him out. What was it that Jesus was trying to tell the world? Jesus was certainly trying to reveal the wonder of God, the grace, the love, the healing, the forgiveness of God. Incorporating the loveliness of God into themselves was to be their way of life. Jesus was raising the issue of whether or not people were honoring God in their lives. Do they really love the Lord God with all their heart and with all their mind, and with all their strength . . . . or are they allowing themselves to become distracted by all of the other distractions and things of the world. Give to the world what you owe the world, but the bigger and greater issue is to Give to God what you owe God. How do you respond to the grace of God.
Last weeks parable of the Wedding Feast was concerned with the fact that the King is throwing a grand party and feast, but many in those invited did not appropriately respond. they are busy with other worldly things. One man who gets invited doesn't dress up in an appropriate response to the great invitation. They don't put on the new garment that says God is first and foremost in my life. What does anyone owe God? More, of course, than we could ever repay. But the passage asks us to consider how do we respond to God, and how important is the way of God in our lives.
God gives to us the gift of life. We live and breathe and are consciously aware of all that is around us. We have skills, the ability to reason, talents in varying degrees. We are given challenges which adds dimension and vitality to life. We have a freedom of response to what is given to us. We are assured through our faith of the love, the forgiveness, the mercy and compassion of God. That's all spelled out in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. How then do we respond in such away that we expresses thanksgiving to God that has some vitality to it? Life and saving grace are given. How do we respond to the gift in away that extends, that continues to convey, that exhuberates the joy or the gifts of God? I can't quite find a word that express how you accept God's love, and then live a life that responds appropriately or that is resonant with, or that is a song of God's praise and adoration.
One response is to just give up and to live in the world. Just paying homage to Caesar, to the world. Another response to God's gifts to us is bound up in just trying to be righteous in a way that becomes pharisaical. It's like raising the question: Is it lawful to be a homosexual, or to ordain a homosexual? The church gets itself all involved in this one issue focused on one group in society. Yet, righteous heterosexuals fail to acknowledge their own terrible problems with marriage, the outrageous promiscuity that permeates in real life and on TV, and adultery that abounds around us. We focus on other people without seeing our own faults. Mercy, understanding, compassion get squeezed out, in the way that pharisees and Herodians tried to squeeze out Jesus, and how the priority of a compassionate and merciful God gets squeezed out. Jesus was so desperately saying, I think, that we have to live in the world and we do pay Caesar, but we are also God's, and we have to learn how to live into the fullness of God as well.
We live in a world where there are expectations being place on us all the time. We do have to pay our taxes. We are expected, at least we have been in the past, to serve in the military. We have the demands of family, work, children, social responsibilities. But how do we set God into all that. Do we pray enough, study, enough, worship enough" Do we keep focused on God and the Christ so that our judgments and our moral stance, coupled with God' mercy and compassion keep appropriately in balance. The life of Christ was a life closely associated with God, the Abba, the intimate Father. His life was a giving sacrificing, compassionate life. It touched and touches the world in a profound and significant way. May God help us to keep our priorities appropriately arranged so that we are both enveloped in and extentions of God's redeeming grace.
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