The Coinage of the Kingdom

Well, it must be church stewardship time and election season! Without fail, every three years at this touchy time in our communal lives, our Lectionary hands us Matthew’s Jesus, dealing with controversy about money, taxes, and the government. 

  I imagine that many of you have heard lots of sermons about today’s Gospel. Many preachers make this text all about the importance of giving your money to the church. Other preachers line Jesus up behind a political agenda of unquestioning obedience to ruling authorities. Still others might portray Jesus as a rebel who urges us to withdraw entirely from worldly matters.

 I’m not going to do any of those things today, though. I’m persuaded that Jesus’ response to the Jewish leaders goes beyond our neat boxes—whether they’re boxes around church finances or around the separation of church and state. Jesus’ response is meant to do more than just make the preacher squirm today. It’s meant to make us all squirm, think, and reconsider-- just as he discombobulated those clever Pharisees and Herodians who put him to the test.

To understand what’s at stake here, let’s start with some historical context:  In Jesus’ day, the Jewish people lived in an occupied land and paid a heavy tax burden to the Roman Empire, to a regime that they both feared and despised. Some Jews, like the Herodians who supported Roman rule, were OK with paying a head-tax to Rome to keep the peace. Many others, though, had reactions to the tax that ranged from distaste, like the Pharisees, to violent insurrection, like the Zealots.

The denarius was the Roman coin equivalent to the daily wage for a laborer. These coins that Jews were forced to used daily to buy the necessities of life under Roman rule, constantly brought them face to face with the symbol of hated Roman power: On one side of the coin, you see, they saw the face of Tiberius Caesar, with the shocking inscription, “son of the divine Augustus.” On the other side, they saw his mother Livia, the divine “high priestess” of Rome.[1] These coins were therefore blasphemous objects for the Jews, examples of the kind idolatry that God specifically forbids in the commandments.

So here we have two opposing groups trying to trap Jesus into either showing himself as a radical who could foment political upheaval by refusing to pay the Roman tax—or as a smooth-talking, love-spouting fake who really advocates colluding with the hated Empire. Jesus’ response to this trap is amazingly clever. Before responding, in asking to see one of the coins, Jesus traps one of his questioners into pulling out one of these Roman coins from his own pocket. Right there in God’s Holy Temple, everyone can see that this good Jewish leader is the one carrying around an idolatrous Roman coin! The owner of the coin’s the one who’s enmeshed in the Roman system. Jesus’ questioners—not Jesus-- are the ones carrying around Caesar’s money, after all!

And then, instead of answering the men in the direction that they intended, Jesus cleverly moves the question elsewhere. In his response, he refuses to take sides. “To whom do you and your lives belong?” he pushes the crowd to ask themselves, “to the emperor, or to God?” God doesn’t trade in Caesar’s currency. Jesus’ Kingdom of Love is not Caesar’s Empire of power. While people do owe both Caesar and God, they owe for different reasons, to different extents, and they pay with different currency.[2] 

Imagine a Republican candidate and a Democratic candidate cornering Jesus today in front of the capital, surrounded by an intensely divided crowd of fellow citizens. I can imagine us waiting with baited breath to see which side Jesus is on, waiting to see whose platform Jesus will support, waiting to condemn both Jesus and the other side if he says something we deem incorrect. But Jesus’ response for us today remains the same one that he gave to the Pharisees and Herodians. He asks us: To whom do you and your lives belong? What does it mean to belong, heart and soul, to God? What is the coinage of God’s Kingdom, of God’s dream for this world?

To answer these questions, all we have is the example of Jesus himself, the only human who does belong heart and soul to God, the One in whom God’s Kingdom is being revealed. In the Gospels, Jesus shows us both total commitment to God and total commitment to justice and mercy and love in this world. Over and over again, Jesus shows us love in real, tangible acts—in touching lepers, in forgiving enemies, in making friends of the outcast and sinner, in healing those in pain, in reaching out to those rejected by society, in making blind eyes see again, in washing feet, in dying so that we might live. The coinage of Jesus’ Kingdom is Love, Love to be spent lavishly and without restraint. Jesus Christ reveals the paradoxical power of living a life of divine, self-giving love. What are a few coins for the emperor, compared with a lifetime of love for God and neighbor?

  If living in Love seems impossible, or daunting, perhaps this illustration from famous preacher Fred Craddock might be helpful: When we think about giving our lives to God, says Craddock, we tend to imagine a grand gesture, like pulling out a thousand dollar bill and laying it on God’s table. “Here you go, God, here is my generous offering. Now I belong to you—See! Take my life and let it be, consecrated Lord to thee.”  But Craddock points out that’s not really the way it works. Instead of a one-time dramatic gesture, giving our lives to God is like taking that thousand-dollar bill to the bank and cashing it in for loads of quarters. We then give those bits of change away faithfully throughout our lifetime, one small act at a time, every day, every hour, without ceasing.[3] We give them away when no one is watching. We give them away when no one else seems to care. We give them away when it would be easier not to do anything at all. There are so many ways to live and so many choices to make, every day, every hour. What I share, what I eat, what I wear, whom I welcome, where I sit, when I stand up, they are all opportunities to love, to spend God’s coinage of the Kingdom.

With all of the controversies and polemics, the violence and hatred, the disrespect and dehumanization going on around us right now, it’s more important than ever that we remember in whose image we are all made, to whom we belong, and what coinage we need to be using every day. Each of us is made in God’s image—friend and foe alike—and we belong to a God of Love, a God who acts in Love and who requires us to act in Love. We don’t belong to Empire, to greed, to hatred, to guns, to oppression. As those things rage around us, we extend a hand to someone in need, we lift others up when they fall, we share what we have, one small, mundane act of Love at a time.

 

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[1] Doug Bratt, https://cep.calvinseminary.edu/sermon-starters/proper-24a-2/?type=lectionary_epistle.

[2] Raj Nadella, Working Preacher, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-29/commentary-on-matthew-2215-22-7

[3] Fred Craddock, excerpt found at Sermon Stories: 25 Cents at a Time

Living in Gratitude

 

When we think about the blessings of Creation, we often think of the beauty of our majestic mountain peaks or of the soothing trickle of a forest stream. We think of getting away from the cares of our daily lives, away from civilization with all of its troubles. We think of a brief respite, a dip into a world filled with beauty, filled with our Creator. It’s easy to be grateful for God’s Creation in those moments.

But perhaps, our Creator means for that gratitude, that world of beauty, to reside inside of our communities, too? Perhaps God longs for our ordinary lives to be filled with such right relationship?

Our society sure doesn’t form us for gratitude. I identify with the confessions in an old David Brooks column.[1] He admits that his high expectations for life are what deprives him of the gift of gratitude for what he’s given. The better off we are, the more we expect from life. He points out correctly that our American culture teaches us that we’re masters of our own fate. We expect life, God, and other people, to give us the benefits that we earn by our good works. When that doesn’t happen, disappointment leads to dissatisfaction and resentment. When I work hard, I expect a reward: a vacation, a nice dinner out, a new dress. I tend to see these things as something due to me, rather than as a blessing bestowed on me by my loving God.

In our world today, where so much seems to be going awry, it’s hard to feel honest gratitude in our daily lives. I might be working hard and doing the right things, but I’m not getting what I feel I have earned. It’s hard to see a way out of this consumer mindset that tries to control our actions and ruin our earth. I certainly recognize myself these days in the dissatisfied complaints of the people of Israel in today’s first reading. I’m the first one to want what I think I had back in the “good old days.” And I’m the first one to want my blueberries in December and the easy clean clothes that our detergents and washing machines provide.

Did you know that “manna” is a play on the Hebrew word for “What’s this?” Or, given the context, “what is THIS?!” I can picture the people of Israel looking at God’s gift of manna with the same wrinkled noses and worried tone that young children use when presented with some mushy vegetable casserole. Given a gift that requires us to try something strange, our honest human response is indeed, “What is THIS ....?” Take away our comforts, take away our sense of privilege and reward, who doesn’t cry out to God, “What is THIS?” When we’re afraid of change, transformation sure is difficult.

For the people of Israel, their forty-year wanderings in the desert are an opportunity for such transformation, a time where the ways of Egypt can fade away and the ways of God can enter in. Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis clearly shows how the manna story contrasts the world of Egypt from the new world that God desires for God’s people.

The Hebrew Scriptures call Egypt the “Iron Furnace.” It represents industrial society, a society built on slave labor, exploitation, social hierarchy, and a consumer mentality.[2] All land and produce ultimately belong to Pharoah. Pharoah is allowed to take the gifts of the earth for his own profit and for that of his cronies.[3] The gifts of earth are stored up in silos, leaving the farmers themselves hungry and in need, burdened with taxes. Indeed, it’s a world that sounds a lot like our own industrial, consumer society, and it’s a world that has been ground into the consciousness of the Israelites, like it has been ground into ours.

In giving the Israelites manna and quail each day, God is showing them a different way of understanding themselves and their world, a new way of living. God wants them ready to live differently in the land of Canaan, the Promised Land that God is giving them. Did you catch God’s loving response to their anxious complaints? “Draw near to the Lord,” offers Moses. God will act. God will provide what you need. God’s food comes as “daily bread.” It can’t be hoarded or stored up in granaries for pharaoh. God will feed you with meat and manna, so that you may know that he’s your loving God--your God who will always provide for you, who will always care for you, no matter how much you rebel and complain, no matter how little you notice—not because you deserve it, but because God is a God of abundant love. God’s miraculous food, with all of its rules for gathering, teaches us dependence on God; it makes us a part of God’s free and abundant Creation; it allows for Sabbath rest for all.

While God shows the Israelites a new way of living as they wander in the desert, Jesus, too, shows us in his teaching a way of life without fear and scarcity, reward and punishment, tit for tat, debt and debtor. Jesus shows us the opposite of our American “merit economy” that’s based on an abundance of possessions. Jesus offers us life abundant, rather than an abundance of things; he puts the first at the end of the line; he puts forgiveness above rule-following; he tells stories like today’s Gospel, in which all of the workers receive the same wage, no matter how long they work. Jesus spends his time surprising us, reversing the hierarchies and judgements that we build into our lives. He wants to shake us out of our old ways and into the ways of God’s Kingdom.

I was interested to learn that the landowner’s question to the complaining workers in our Gospel parable, “Are you envious because I am generous?” really asks in Greek, “Do you have an ‘evil eye’ because I am generous?” For Matthew, an “evil eye” is an unhealthy eye; it’s an eye that doesn’t see rightly. As the “lamp of the body,” the eye determines whether we’re filled with light or filled with darkness. The complaining workers fail to see the truth of God’s Kingdom. Where they could see a “We,” they see an “Us vs. Them.” Where they could feel partnership, they feel contempt. Where they could see and celebrate a vineyard of God’s grace, they see an arena of competition, and a cause for resentment. Their whole way of seeing the world is distorted and obscured.[4] Jesus is trying to teach us to see with the light of grace and compassion.

Both the manna economy and Jesus’ upside-down economy of light sound much like the kind of life that people like the late Wendell Berry see in a life lived close to the earth, a life in harmony with Creation. Berry calls the economy of creation the “Great Economy.” It’s an interconnected whole that includes all creatures. [5] Berry’s poem, “Manifesto” urges us: “Ask the questions that have no answers./ Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias./ Say that your main crop is the forest/ that you did not plant,/ that you will not live to harvest./ Say that the leaves are harvested/ when they have rotted into the mold./ Call that profit. Prophesy such returns./  Put your faith in the two inches of humus/ that will build under the trees/ every thousand years... Be joyful/ though you have considered all the facts.”[6]

          I wonder, can we find in our Scripture lessons—and in the writings of people like Wendell Berry and Bishop Charleston—a way back to ourselves, to the selves that God created us to be? Can we bring our brief moments of mountaintop wonder and gratitude for Creation back with us into our troubled world, our troubled lives? Perhaps this is our time in the wilderness, the years when God will work lovingly and persistently to free us from the evils of “Egypt” that have worked their way into our bones. Perhaps this is our time to let Jesus’ new logic of love and gratitude turn us upside down and inside out, so that we, too, can see rightly? Such is my deepest prayer.

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[1] David Brooks, “The Structure of Gratitude” found at http://nytimes.com/2015/07/28/opinion/david-brooks-the-structure-of-gratitude.

[2] Ellen Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 69.

[3] Davis, 72.

[4] Found at Us vs. Them: SALT's Commentary for Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost.

[5] Davis, 77.

[6] Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” found at Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry.

Pulling Weeds in a Drought

 

     

I’m not a good gardener, much less a farmer. And caring for plants out here in our “high desert” is sure different from what I was used to in humid Houston and in the rolling bluegrass of Kentucky. Now, when I look out my window at the lawn, I see dirt patches and wisps of grass burned brown, interspersed with areas of unwanted weeds and tall, stinging thistles. It definitely looks like some evil force has come in and laid waste to it while I was sleeping, just like the field in Matthew’s parable.

My lawn reminds me of our world these days: nature’s beauty all mixed up with so many weeds: weeds of hatred; weeds of injustice; weeds of shortsightedness; weeds of war and killing; a drought of love; a drought of compassion; and so, so many withered blossoms. Is Jesus really telling us in today’s Gospel that we should just let these evils be? That we should shrug off all that destruction until the End Times? That we should watch and wait from the sidelines? Shouldn’t we be pulling up the weeds, no matter the consequence?

Scholars are pretty sure that the word translated “weeds” in our Gospel is really a plant called “darnel.”[1] Darnel is a wheat look-alike, common in the Middle East. The trouble is that darnel usually carries a poisonous fungus along with it. This fungus will sicken all who mistakenly gather it up with their wheat and eat it in their bread. Good farmers in Israel and Palestine know that they need to recognize this noxious weed. They certainly wouldn’t leave it in their fields; they would root it out early, before it gets mixed in with the wheat at harvest time.

Imagine that you’re a worker going out into the wheat fields one hot, sunny morning. You find that the field where your master himself had sown good wheat, is suddenly full of poisonous weeds. You’d be afraid of his reaction. You’d wonder if you’re going to be blamed for the disaster. At the very least, you’d sigh in despair over all of the delicate work that’s going to be expected of you in weeding the bad plants from the field. What would you think when the Master says, “Nope, this time we’re going to leave the wheat and the weeds alone. You won’t even have to do the reaping. I’ll bring someone else in at harvest time, and they’ll take care of it.” You’d probably shake your head in confusion at the change in practices, at the master’s new generosity toward you, and at his new slovenly way of farming. Instead of feeling grateful, you’d probably grumble, “If I had my own land, I’d put up a big fence around it, with guard dogs to keep the enemies out. I’d make my workers root out those weeds before some of that fungus got mixed in with my wheat!” You’d think that your master had lost his mind.

          Jesus loves to make us think that God has lost God’s mind, because Jesus is trying to transform our minds. We react to evil in our hearts and in our world just like the workers react to the darnel in the wheat field, don’t we? The parable makes me think again about my own backyard, my own reactions. You see, my lawn is under the care of our Homeowners’ Association. They’re in charge of watering it, fertilizing it, keeping the weeds out. At the same time, we also have a three-foot-perimeter of garden all around our house that is our responsibility. We have to water and care for that small area. And you know what I’ve noticed about myself? I look out at my dying lawn, littered with pinecones and weeds, and I pout stubbornly to myself, “Oh well, it’s a mess, but it’s not my responsibility.” It makes me very grouchy that the people I pay to take care of it aren’t doing their jobs, and I certainly gripe to my neighbors about it. Sometimes I send a curt note to the HOA manager. But I myself don’t lift a finger, even though I could take some steps on my own to make it better.

On the other hand, that 3-foot band around my house? I obsessively pull bits of stray grass out of there, as if they were poison. I’ve burned myself dumping boiling water on the clover growing in my rocks. I half-killed a bush once putting vinegar on some nearby weeds. I even got so carried away in my uninformed weeding that I once pulled out some nice perennials that the previous owner had planted. But I want order in what is mine. I want to control my garden ... and all that is mine.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? How I either seem to renounce responsibility or decide that I alone am judge and in control. When we wake up to find harmful bits in the goodness of our soul, it’s easy to despair. To blame God or another human being for its presence. To punish ourselves with self-judgment as caustic as vinegar. And when we wake up and look out at the injustice seeded in our community? It’s easy to give up, shrug our shoulders, and let the powers-that-be deal with it. It’s also easy to start blaming those who disagree with us, judging that the community would be a better place if the poisonous people could be rooted out. We attempt to gather those who agree with our position into neat bundles of wheat. We start ripping at the soil until the whole field lies dead and barren.

Jesus knows how we human beings can react. It’s not that Jesus is telling us to sit back and let the weeds harm us. Notice that the weeds in our parable don’t actually harm the growing wheat. There is still a harvest, and God’s justice will be done. But Jesus wants to help us avoid judging parts of ourselves or parts of our community as dispensable. Our parable wants to free us from games of blaming and judgment, fear and control. It wants to transform our minds to live in the hope and freedom that Paul describes to the Romans in today’s Epistle.

          I was strongly marked fifteen years ago by the book, Amish Grace, about the Pennsylvania Amish community who reacted with grace and forgiveness when their farming community was shattered by a mass shooting at their little country schoolhouse in 2006.[2] I went back and looked at that story this week, and I’m still struck by the reaction of this community. The shooter was a non-Amish community member who, angry with God over the death of his own infant daughter, decided to sow evil in God’s wheat fields by killing other innocent children.

Despite their pain and the loss of 6 innocent children, the Amish community didn’t choose vengeance, hatred, or despair in response to this evil. They didn’t withdraw into themselves, either. The Amish have a strong belief in God’s loving Providence and in our call to follow Jesus in the way of forgiveness. Strengthened by their faith, they were able to reach out right away to the family of the deceased shooter. They visited his family to offer sympathy and forgiveness for his deed, hugging them and drawing them close. They shared donated funds that they as victims had received with his widow and children. “They need help as much as we do,” the Amish said. The larger Amish community, including the families of the victims, attended the gunman’s funeral. “This is a community tragedy,” the Amish victims proclaimed. They left all the judging to God, and moved forward as one humanity.

          Right after the horror of September 11, then-archbishop Rowan Williams published a little book called, “Writing in the Dust.” Williams wrote to encourage us Americans, the victims, not to turn toward violence, vengeance, and retribution as we responded to the horror of that evil—not to pull out the wheat with the weeds. Had we as a country only listened to him. He encouraged us to act, “so that something might possibly change [in the world], as opposed to acting so as to persuade ourselves that we’re not powerless.”[3] Williams refers to the story in John 8 of Jesus writing silently in the dust with his finger before responding to the woman caught in adultery. Williams says, “[Jesus] does not draw a line .... tell the woman who she is and what her fate should be. He allows a .... longish moment, in which people are given time to see themselves differently precisely because he refuses to make the sense they want. When he lifts his head, there is both judgement and release.”[4]

Perhaps we can all spend some time writing in the dust among the wheat and weeds of our world? Not jumping to judgement, and yet not shrugging off responsibility. Taking the time to see the whole differently, to remember that we are a whole.

 

 

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[1] Ulrich Luz, Matthew, 254.

 

[2]  Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt, and David L. Weaver-Zercher, Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2010).

[3] Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 24.

[4] Williams, 78.

"It is Finished:" A Good Friday Meditation on One of the "Last Words" of Jesus

 

It is finished. It is complete. It is whole. It is accomplished. Its purpose is fulfilled. It is perfect.

Oh, how I yearn to say those words myself … but my perfectionist soul is never fulfilled. It’s always on the lookout for improvement. My work must always be better; my list is never complete; my actions are always lacking in some way. It’s an exhausting way to live. On my own deathbed, I’ll likely cry out in frustration, “Wait, I’m not finished yet! Just one more time, God, and I’ll get it right.”

So I marvel at Jesus’ last cry in John’s Gospel, “It is finished!”  And I wonder, just what “it” is? Jesus doesn’t say, “I am finished.” Or even “My suffering is over.” He doesn’t say, “My earthly life has come to an end.” Or “My life goals have all come to fruition.” Just before he takes his last breath, Jesus pronounces a much broader and more mysterious completion.

If we look at the other places in John’s writings where Jesus uses this verb or its related noun--accomplishment, wholeness, perfect end--we can see clearly that the “it” that Jesus’ death brings to fulfillment is the powerful, self-giving Love of God.

John writes, “Having loved his own who were in the world, Jesus loved them to the end.”

John’s first letter says, “If we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

It is love. In his human dying, in his presence with us into the depths, Jesus brings to fulfillment the life-giving, ever-generative Love of God.

This is the kind of finish that my breathless, perfectionist soul needs. At its worst, religion can encourage my perfectionism, my need to do more, to do better. But not here. Not here, face to face with the vulnerability of Love poured out on the Cross. The fulfillment of love isn’t a striving. It isn’t a duty to cross off of a universal to-do list. It is an outpouring of love, from Jesus to us, then from me to you, from you to me, from us back to Jesus.

In Genesis, when God created the world, God too pronounced the work, “finished,” and “very good,” and God rested. But God wasn’t finished with the world. God wasn’t finished with loving the world, with creating and upholding it at every moment.[1]When Jesus cries out that God’s love has been fulfilled, this end is also only the beginning, only the beginning of God’s New Creation, a New Creation in which divine Love is victorious even over death, where it lives in and around and between us, Christ’s Body, making all things new, making all things—even the imperfect ones—whole.

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[1] Eugene Peterson, Tell It Slant (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s 2008), 258.

Writing What I See

 

As I try to write something about the present evil happening in our country, I have no wise or clever words. My page fills with half-sentences and scribbles and scratched out paragraphs.  Instead of words, there are only faces, the brown and black faces of the refugee families I knew in Kentucky.

I see the Palestinian/Iraqi family who fled into the desert, stateless, after the fall of Sadaam Hussein. I see the silent, stolid grandmother, the animated and wiry grandfather, the newborn American baby held in protecting arms, and the mother and aunt with their tortured eyes, eyes that had seen rape and atrocity. I see their small living room and the sofa where I sipped sugared tea, underneath the huge American flag that filled the wall behind me, as gunshots rang out in their crime-ridden neighborhood. They thought that America would be safer.

I see the exhausted face of the middle-aged Congolese mother, damp with sweat after long days of cleaning hotel rooms. I see the worry in her eyes about affording education for her teenage daughter, newly clad in short skirts and American make-up. The rest of their family died in the genocide, and our foreign church was their only support system in a strange land.

I see the beautiful Karen children—so many children—born in refugee camps after their parents fled Burma as a persecuted Christian minority. I hear the hope and joy in their songs; I smell the musty apartment complex where they all lived, their rooms filled with our worn, left-over furnishings. I hear the innocent, birdlike chatter of these children, as they quickly learned to translate for their silent parents.

I see the Somali mother—ahh, the Somali mother—lost in the depths of depression, with one child—her “American” child—born with life-threatening medical challenges, never to leave the Home of the Innocents, never to receive his mother’s care. I see her incomprehension, her longing. I see her eight other children, running and jostling around their small apartment like caged squirrels while she sits with a vacant, half-smile on her face. I see the eldest, twelve-year-old Mohammed, trying so hard to be a man while his father works long hours in a factory. I see their empty refrigerator, their empty living room, filled only by a beautiful, red-patterned carpet.

These faces all fade and blend with the faces of my German friends, the way they were in the 1980’s when I lived there, when I too was a foreigner. I see Katharina, kind and strong, who had fled her home as a young child, following her father to the United States, the home of the free, after he took a stance as a theologian in Germany’s anti-Nazi Confessing Church. I see my elderly neighbor Frau Einhauser, her face wrinkled with smiles as she threw chocolates down to my children from her upstairs window. She spent her childhood scrounging for root-vegetables in harvested fields and re-knitting the fibers of potato sacks into sweaters to protect herself and her siblings from the cold. I see my young seminarian friend, his brow creased with the weight of the world, who told me that I, as an American, would never understand the shame that he held in his very bones as a post-war German citizen. 

All of this is what I see when I look at the photos from Minneapolis: at five-year-old Liam, terrified under his cute little hat as he waits in front of the ICE transport … at the coat-wrapped bodies of Americans shot dead on the street … I see it all, and I weep. Don’t you see it, too?