This is the second Sunday of our Stewardship season, and it’s interesting that we have heard today this passage of the Gospel where Jesus famously says: “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s”. I think it’s interesting because so often this passage has been used to talk about the separation of Church and State, to say that there would be one realm, that belongs to humans and their politics, and another realm that belongs to God and religion, but the thing is we often forget that all of the Bible proclaims that heaven and earth are God’s possession, and we also often forget that when Jesus says this, he is answering a specific question about the lawfulness of taxes, and he is holding a denarius in his hand, so he is likely referring to something specific, something very concrete that he is showing to all those who are listening to him: a coin, money.
I quickly would like to clear what the question is about. You might be surprised that the Pharisees and the Herodians, a political faction supporting the Roman authority, ask Jesus if it is “lawful” to pay taxes, as if it paying taxes was something people did for fun but they were not sure it was authorized! Of course, we would respond today: Not only it is lawful to pay taxes, it is the Law! But they are talking about God’s Law, a law that forbade to worship idol and images, when the head of Augustus was engraved on the coin and it declared him to be both “Son of God” and “High Priest”, and then of course this tax was paid to support the Roman occupation – all things that surely displeased the God of Israel. But Jesus recenters the debate: It’s about money isn’t it? And to me, this is how I hear his response: Why do you care so much? Look at that, it is the Emperor’s face on this coin, he can have his thing if he wants. As for you, focus on God and re-dedicating yourself to God – and I am saying that because we know that in these chapters of Matthew, Jesus is still in this long debate about the holiness of the Temple. We may also have in mind this lesser known and yet wonderful passage a little earlier in Matthew (17:27) where Simon Peter reminds Jesus they have to pay their taxes to the Temple, and Jesus asks Peter to go catch a fish in which mouth he will find two coins to pay the taxes for both of them!
These episodes reflect quite well the casual attitude and even the disdain Jesus had for money. Many commentators have noticed that in our passage today Jesus asks someone to produce a denarius because he himself carried no money, which is also the case when he had this earlier conversation with Peter. We know Jesus didn’t have a place of his own and relied on people’s charity for most of his needs. He said: “Foxes have dens. Birds have nests. But the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” (Matthew 8:20). And yet, that does not mean that Jesus had nothing to teach about money. Actually when we start digging, the part of Jesus’s teaching consecrated to money in the Gospels is quite overwhelming.
Let me give you a few numbers concerning what we actually find:
– 12 Times: Explicit warnings about wealth and possessions
– 9 times: Money, giving, and economic obligations
– 8 times: Economic images
And this is quite interesting again because in our churches we don’t teach so much about money, do we? Actually rather than preaching the separation of church and state, it’s more like we have declared a separation between what we do with our money and our faith in God. What do you think about when you think about sin? Most people think about bad behavior and sexual sins, but in fact Jesus had little to say about that, except you know, Be faithful. The two sins he keeps on denouncing are hypocrisy and greed, and the latter is the one we’re talking about.
Now today I think it’s hard to ignore that greed and our sinful or even anxious attachment to money and possessions is running and ruining the world: Global warming, pollution, AI threats and many wars are direct results of our addiction to having always more. The thing is, we don’t always name greed as it is. We call it progress, we call it security, we call it investment that will ultimately benefit others. And in fact, this is the reason why we have to be very careful when we talk about stewardship, which is generally the only way we talk about money in our churches, because stewardship always insists on making “good use” of our money, but Jesus’s teachings were much more radical: Jesus taught poverty, not “wealth well used”, and he taught detachment, not just “detachment in spirit”, but actual detachment in dispossession. In fact, more overwhelming than discovering how often Jesus actually taught about money, is to discover how his teaching on poverty has be transformed, reinterpreted, or “spiritualized” as if it was only an image for a higher reality.
To understand that, we have to take a little detour in Church History. It is a well known fact that the first Christian communities were poor, a lot of people were poor to start with, and many also became poor willingly by sharing their resources and putting everything in common. There are many, many examples of that in the Book of Acts. But then what happened a few centuries later, especially after Constantine’s conversion and after the Empire became Christian, is that many very wealthy people joined the church and the problem was to not upset them by teaching poverty. So we started teaching that Jesus only taught “spiritual” poverty, and the message became sort of what we still hear today: You may continue to make a lot of money as long as you use your wealth well which generally meant: Make generous gifts to the Church.
But you see, there are two problems with that: It’s great to use money to help people, but the problem poor people have generally starts with people making their wealth by exploiting them, like it was the case in Rome with slavery, so it’s like the rich gave cancer before offering the cure for cancer, and then giving to the church is great as well, but what happens when the church became rich? Well, the church became extremely corrupted, and this is the reason why we ended up having the Reformation.
So we have to go back to the source and the thing is that Jesus never taught that it was okay to be rich as long as you use well your money or give it to the church. What Jesus consistently taught is that money isn’t neutral, something we could use for good or bad. Quite the opposite, Jesus consistently taught that money is a power. He famously said: No one can serve two masters (…) You cannot serve both God and money. (Matthew 6:24). Money makes claims on us, money wants us to serve money, money is a false god and an idol (Mammon). Now we may think that we don’t have enough money to be in danger. But it may not be so easy. I am always astonished to realize that we are rarely openly greedy, but what we hear constantly is that we always could “use a little more”, and we could use a little more again not because we love money, but because we care for our safety, we worry about our future, we think about the welfare of our families or we want to be “independent” – and it ends up conditioning a lot of the choices we make, and it’s like money is guiding our lives rather than God. And what is true for us individually is also true for our churches. Because money is rather scarce in most congregations, we focus on survival and security, rather than on God’s mission.
So what are we to do?
Well again, we may want to go back to how Jesus considered money himself. I said he had disdain for money, he didn’t carry money and we see he was completely unimpressed by wealth, you may have in mind the way he reacts when the disciples point to him the beauties of the Temple (Matthew 24:2). I don’t know if we can be like him, but his example is teaching us something important: He is teaching us detachment. And I think it’s not a detachment meant to hurt us, but it is supposed to bring freedom in our lives, as well as joy and generosity. You know our theme for Stewardship this year is “Plenty Good Room”, and the first time I heard this it reminded me of my Grand Mother who always said there was always room at the table for an extra guest. She said: If we have food for four people, we have food for five. And I like it because it turns on his head the principle that often rules our relationship with money, when we always need a little more. My Grand Mother’s principle was that we could always do with a little less, especially for the sake of sharing with someone in need.
And so yes, we have to give to the Emperor what belongs to the Emperor’s, to pay for what this world asks us to pay for, our taxes, but also a roof over our heads, food, bills and maybe a bit of entertainment as well, and yet the most important is to remember to give to God the things that are God’s. We need constantly to remember that we live on everything God has given us because all belong to God ultimately, for the nourishment and enjoyment of all. A priest notices that when we start realizing that what we have is borrowed from God rather than ours, the question “What should I give?” becomes “What do I really need to earn?” and also “What do I really need to keep?” and the answer could be indeed “Maybe I can still make do with a little less”, and as we do that we learn to trust God and we learn to care for others. Jesus taught poverty because we cannot be “spiritually detached” without being “concretely detached”. There aren’t two realms because our faith is incarnated. Poverty can become a spiritual practice because we’re going to practice being poor, and it all could start with a “Maybe I can do with a little less” rather than only giving only what we don’t need.
I think it’s very telling when we look at our bank statements what it says about what we really care about. When I looked at mine, I had to ask myself: What does my bank statement say about the way I care for others and the way I care for the church? If someone was to look at my bank statement, would they know I am a Christian? Isn’t it true that if we love Jesus and follow his teaching, a big part of our expenses should be related to that? We all say we want our churches to thrive, but do our offerings reflect that? We know that the Episcopal Church asks us to give 10% of our income, as a minimum. Now 10% can be very different if we have a comfortable pension or if we’re on social security. For some 10% is part of their abundance, for others it’s what they could use to cover their basic needs. So this is why stewardship season is also a time of discernment for each one of us. But then it’s also a time of discernment for our church as a whole. As we put together our church budget, how do we want to use our donations, what are we going to prioritize? Will we be generous? Will we be focused on the poor and the church’s mission or will we be only focused on security and survival? What is the Emperor’s? And what is God’s?