If you got your hands on one of the oldest prayer books, put together in the sixteenth century, you would find a service of baptism with these instructions: “The pastors … should oft admonish the people, that they defer not the baptism of infants any longer than the Sunday, or other holy day, next after the child be born ….” (Gibson, The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI, 242). In other words, for many, many years in our church when you had a baby you were expected to bring him or her to the font the very next time that the congregation gathered publicly – no more than 6 or 7 days later. Now there were practical reasons for this in Elizabethan England: infant mortality was such that people were encouraged to baptize their children swiftly. And also, parish registers, the big books where we still keep track of all of your baptisms, were the primary way of recording any birth in a given town. But … in the hearts and minds of those people, and in our imaginations as we read those old instructions years and years since, there’s a spiritual reason far surpassing the practical. It’s put best by a new mother I know who said, “I wish we could go straight from the hospital to the church to baptize my son – I just want to give him back to God.”
As the parent of a toddler, I now think about that mother’s moving words in an entirely disillusioned way – I would actually like God to do some babysitting for me every day around 5:00 PM. But what she was trying to express – and I think you all know this and have felt it in some way about some person or thing in your life – was a deep sense of thankfulness. More than that, though. What this new parent felt, what somebody newly in love feels, even what somebody who experiences a loss, tragedy, or has to adapt to any kind of “new normal” might feel, is a life-altering sense of gratuity. That everything we have right now, right this minute, is an astounding, shocking gift. That we don’t merit anything: we can’t earn the right to be loved just as we don’t deserve to be unloved; we can’t earn the right to do work that suits us just as we don’t deserve to be jobless or without a calling in life; we can’t earn the right to health just as we don’t deserve to be sick or injured. We can’t earn the right to be alive, and we certainly don’t deserve to have our lives diminished by the powers of sin. All of this is kind of a mind-bender, I realize, but the point, again, is gratuity. Grace. We are creatures surrounded on all sides by beautiful and terrifying gifts that come our way whether we want them or not. There is nothing we can do to change that; what we can change is whether we know it and what we do about it. And that’s what Jesus and his opponents are talking about today.
There’s no friendly conversation between these two parties. You hear it right there in Matthew’s telling of the story: the legal experts and the teachers who hate the empire get together with this other group of people who have befriended it in order to trap Jesus in the perfect riddle – a riddle we still don’t know what to do with today. One of them poses the question: is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not? If Jesus says ‘no’ he offends the Herodians, the friends of the empire. If he says ‘yes’ he offends the Pharisees, its critics. Both groups can make his life miserable. Being divine and all, Jesus knows what’s going on, so he gives the perfect response to the perfect riddle. “Show me the money,” he says. And then he looks to the mark on the coin, the imprint that the money bears. “That’s Caesar’s face on this coin. So I guess it’s his. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”
So the takeaway here could be that Jesus is too clever by half. He effortlessly avoids the trap, making these people look silly in the process. And in doing so, he gives anyone who wants to dismiss this story the answer that they need: Jesus is dealing shrewdly with troublemakers and is not trying to tell us what to do with our money. End of story – let’s move on to the next parable.
If that’s your take on it you would be sort of right. Jesus isn’t telling us what to do with our money here … because he’s telling us what to do with our entire lives. His response to his opponents operates on a couple of levels. One level is a statement that is smart and gets him out of a bind. The other level is a challenge that can inspire attraction, repulsion, or curiosity in those who hear it: give to the emperor what belongs to the emperor. Give to God what belongs to God. And whose, by the way, are you?
We could spend an entire morning talking about what it does or doesn’t mean to belong to an empire, or what an empire looks like in our time. But a more important question for at this moment is do we belong to God, and what does that mean for us? This is where the knowing and doing enter the picture, because the definite answer is, Yes. You belong to God. And there are two ways we can talk about that. First, you exist. Everything that lives, everything that has breath is part of God’s ongoing creative process that has never, ever ended. The seven days of creation aren’t finite – they’re eternal, and we are as fresh and as surprising to God as Adam and Eve when they were brand new. You are one of God’s things in the same, immediate sort of way that they were. You belong to God.
Second, some of you were given back to God – when you were too young to take vows or make promises for yourself, the people entrusted with your care acknowledged in a public ceremony who the author of your life really is. A few of you out there did this on your own – you came to the waters of baptism as an adult and spoke for yourself, publicly, stating, in effect, “I am not my own.” And what happens to us in baptism? What do we do to drive that point home? We name you, we wash you, but we also seal you: we mark you as Christ’s own forever, making a sign on your forehead that represents the permanent, indelible mark on your soul that can never, ever be taken away. Just as Jesus asked to see the coin, if he were to ask to see you – if you stepped forward and he asked whose mark was on you, he would see his own cross shining back at him. You belong to God.
So it’s not up to you to decide that – it’s up to you to know it. Then it’s up to you to live like it. And what does that entail? Again, there are two ways to talk about this. Knowing that you belong to God and living like it entails both a loosing and a binding. It is freeing and it is obligating. Think about all of the things that want to claim us: work is often the first thing that comes to mind. Right behind work is money, and hunkering over money is empire – not nation states, per se, but the coalescence of all of the forces in the world that seem irresistible, and all-determining, and trap people in ways of life that are unsustainable. And on a micro-level, each of us has some other Caesar vying for us: unhealthy relationships, addiction, perfectionism, anxiety, or indifference. Those things are real, and your experience of them is real, but their claim on you is a lie. It’s an illusion. You belong to God, with no option for lease or mortgage. You are marked as Christ’s own. He sets you free to walk through this world not as a captive, but as a child of God.
Yet freedom isn’t the same thing as independence. You belong to God and so you do God’s work, which is to take care of all of these amazing gifts. Again, it’s as though we never left the garden, and God is showing us this new world, every day, entrusting it to our care. All of this hit home for me in a big way this past summer, when my son and I visited parishioners high up on the top of a nearby apartment building. Joshua was supposed to be swimming, but was running laps around the roof, and as I chased him around the corner of the poolhouse for the first time, I stopped dead in my tracks: all around us I could suddenly see the city shooting up toward heaven, so solid; so magic; so crawling with life, stretching out one side as far as a person could see while on the other side this magnificent lake, this primeval body of water that used to cover the very earth beneath our feet right now spread itself out to unseen shores with more cities where more human lives were moving and changing and beginning and ending, and then in the middle of all of it was this one little child, and I realized, “Oh my God. None of this is ours. These buildings, the very work of our hands – none of it belongs to us. These beaches, these planes, these cars and churches and hospitals. These trees and fish and people. All of this is such a gift. All of this is pure gratuity. Even this little boy, this little person who consumes my life – even he doesn’t belong to me. I am just somebody God is using to hold him right now. It all belongs to God.”
When you know that you are God’s – when you can really feel it - the only response is to care. To care for God’s gifts, to steward God’s city, to hold God’s people. And that is what living like you belong to God entails. You treat everything that surrounds you – this place, this earth, the people you’ve been given, and your own body – as though you were holding it all lightly, like you hold a newborn baby, tending to it all for God. Confident but gentle, seeking only the good, recognizing in all else a fellow creature, or a fellow creation, undeniably aware that you and all that you behold are God’s things.
Let us pray: O God, whose gifts surround us and whose grace is the very breath in our lungs: open our eyes to the truth about our lives and to the depth of our calling in you so that the good things you have made might be yours and yours alone, for all the world to know. In God’s holy name we pray, Amen.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Sunday, Oct. 16, 2011.
