Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God, what is God’s.
Our reading from Matthew’s Gospel containing this very famous line of Jesus’, always falls right around the time churches are starting to fundraise for the upcoming year. We won’t start that here for another two weeks, but most of my peers are already getting underway and I’m sure making the most of this Scripture passage.
No less than Martin Luther King Jr. used it to help raise money at Dexter Avenue Baptist church in a sermon preached in 1957. Even he had to do the gruelling annual work of begging his parishioners to lend their financial support for yet another year. He began that sermon by questioning whether any of us really render enough to God, and challenged his parishioners--as we still do some years here--to set their giving to their church next to their other expenses to see where each ranks.
His examples were the money spent annually on cosmetics, on movies, cigars, alcoholic beverages, gambling (I don’t know what he thought of his parishioners...!)
I prefer not to think of you all doing any of that :) So my list is a little less exciting. What do we spend on our stops at Starbucks, on all our digital devices and subscriptions, on clothes, on vacations, on our cars. And where does our church giving rank in that list? Almost always lower than what we mean for it to.
Of course King also knew this saying was (or has been used to talk) about much more than what we give to our church financially. Because even though Jesus made this nice distinction, which was mainly just a verbal maneuver to keep him from getting in trouble with the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Romans, [even though Jesus made this distinction] King (and we) all know that it isn’t as simple as setting Caesar’s things over here for Caesar, and God’s things, over here, for God.
Last weekend, a few of us were up at the Canadian border, nine adults and nine kids from St. James plus a couple people from Hitchcock Church nearby. We were there with Rural and Migrant Ministries, a group that works closely with the Episcopal Church and helps migrant workers and also immigrant families with resources, programming, and (more and more) protection and finding safe spaces. Their director, the Rev. Richard Witt, has preached a number of times over the years here and Rural and Migrant Ministries counts among the organizations we support financially at St. James.
We met migrant workers, immigrants, asylum seekers, people who’ve entered our country for various reasons and with different protections. We also met a lot of the youth, the kids, of these people. RMM’s record for sending the kids of immigrant families not only to college but to good schools, is incredible. Many go on to work in government, or as teachers and professors, community organizers.
We learned a lot about the challenges these kids and families face: working under labor laws and conditions--these are farm laborers [essential to bringing in the harvest]--that no one else would tolerate (though that’s improved in recent years thanks to RMM’s advocacy). Being picked up by ICE or living in fear of that. Having to have (you hope) a volunteer bring groceries to your home because you can’t risk a run to the grocery store.
For Sunday worship last weekend, even though their main headquarters is a beautiful Episcopal church that closed a few years ago, we had to all get in our cars and drive forty minutes outside town to a barn in the middle of nowhere because worshiping in the church draws police and ICE agents, whom you see everywhere there. The woman who made our tortillas for the Sunday worship celebration had just gotten out of detention, turned right around, and cooked up a hundred tortillas for this group of privileged people from Scarsdale. That one really gave us pause.
I bring all this up here because, when we render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, I don’t think any of us want to think that that includes masked ICE agents seizing a mother just trying to go to her asylum hearing, only to be taken from her children and whisked off to a detention center in a state far away.
When we render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, I don’t think any of us want to think that that includes keeping people indefinitely detained in places with names like Alligator Alcatraz and with no way to contact their families and no access to legal services.
Broadening this out, When we render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, I don’t think any of us want to think that that includes the implementation of impossible forms and paperwork deliberately designed to keep families of disabled kids from getting the services that they need and deserve (and here’s my library book for this week, b/c as you’ll recall I’m putting a new book in our church lending library for every sermon preached. It’s Annie Lowery’s The Time Tax about the way our government--and this isn’t necessarily specific to one party--uses paperwork to reduce access to services for the disabled, the vulnerable, and medically fragile).
When we render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, I don’t think any of us want to think that that includes dropping bombs on innocent men, women, and children in Gaza--or anywhere.
Whatever regime is in power in whatever era this is preached, there are things happening in our names with our money that go right against our baptismal vows to love our neighbor as ourselves and to strive for the dignity of every human being. It’s not Caesar’s realm over here, and God’s over there. The world is way more complicated than that.
Of course King knew, and lived, all this. He understood the limits of this passage, and that our obligations to Caesar can directly contradict our obligations to God. In the Jim Crow south he must have sometimes hated having to support with his scant and hard-earned preacher’s salary the very men in power that were insulting, excluding and harming his people.
His conclusion was not to stop rendering to Caesar--no preacher is going to say that and besides there’s much good that comes of our financial obligations to the state--but to protest peacefully but forcefully so that what we give to Caesar becomes less and less a moral stain on our Christian conscience.
So today, may we stop to think about how our “renderings to Caesar” might be in conflict with our “renderings to God.” And may we ask ourselves, what can I do to make this as Just, as fair, a world as is possible. Protesting, voting, speaking up, going on pilgrimage (like those who did last weekend) to see what we don’t want to see or think about.
Let’s render to God as much as we possibly can, and make this world a fairer, more just, and more loving place. Amen.