…Show me the coin used for the tax….

I own a copy of a big book entitled  The Forbes Book of Business Quotations: 14,173 Thoughts on the Business of Life.  Its headings run from A-Ability to Z-Zeal, and include under G- God and under T-Taxes. There are, in fact, 94 quotations about God and 70 quotations about taxes. The numerical superiority of the headings under God is reassuring and we can rest easy knowing that in the book God is ahead of taxes.  

The Forbes Book is meant to be Chamber of Commerce staple so  there is a lot of humor and light heartedness in the quotations.  For example, here’s one of the quotations on taxes, from G.K. Chesterton: “A citizen can hardly distinguish  between a tax and a fine, except that a fine is generally much lighter.” And here’s a quotation on God from Anonymous: “ God will provide the victuals, but He will not cook the dinner.  There are other equally light-hearted  and delightful quotations . For the most part, this massive collection of “business quotations” is an easy going book for an easy going audience. It is not a book with much hint of “gloom and doom” nor does it offer much of a reality check on every-day life as it really is.

The Forbes Book is not the kind of book Jesus and his disciples would pick up, much less read through, but we can imagine the Pharisees and Herodians might take some delight in it.  This may be because our book has nothing to offer by way of explanation and understanding of hard facts, for example, that our city, Philadelphia, “the birthplace of American democracy,” is the poorest big city in the United States  with 27% of its population including more than a third of its children, living below the poverty line. [46.2 million nationally] Nor will our treasury of delightful sayings help us explain and understand the appalling disparity between the rich and the poor in our country and the fact that, year- by-year, proportionally fewer people control  more and more of the country’s  wealth. 

So we come to this morning’s Gospel, and the tension between giving to God what is God’s and giving to the emperor what is the emperor’s.  We know the story here:  the Pharisees and Herodians are determined to trick Jesus, who is proving to be quite a nuisance, into incriminating himself so that they can get him arrested and out of the way . After their two-faced flattery of Him, the Pharisees and Herodians ask Jesus whether it is lawful to pay taxes to the emperor. For us, this is a silly question: of course it is lawful—and required and right—to support the emperor—our government—because this is a legitimate way to care for each other and to support the welfare and social good of the entire community.  But for people under Mosaic Law, the question was a serious—and tricky—one.  

Jesus responds by acknowledging the trickery at hand and calls the Pharisees and Herodians hypocrites. To be called hypocrites by Jesus is not something anyone would wish for because, for Jesus, hypocrisy may be one of the worst transgressions. Hypocrisy is distortion and denial and dishonesty, all of which the Pharisees and Herodians are guilty of, as are we if we are not mindful of our Christian covenant.  The difference between us and the Pharisees and Herodians is that we truly know Jesus and that is why we are Christians and why we practice the Faith.  To be who and what we say we are means that we practice obedience as much as we practice generosity, compassion, justice, and fairness in everything that we do. Unlike those people trying to trick Jesus in order to destroy Him, we proclaim Jesus and practice His ways. Thus, we have chosen to resist poverty, hunger, and  injustice in the inequitable distribution of wealth. As mixed-up as some of the Occupy Wall Street protesters all over the country might seem, they could be seen as  expressing some of our own Christian sensibilities.

As Christians, we know there is something terribly wrong in our country, as the facts about Philadelphia as the poorest big city in America affirm.   We all have our own stories of adversity and crisis, yes. But we know from the Gospel, Jesus’s own story, that this is what is means to be alive and human.  Yet, as Jesus reminds us in today’s Gospel , we ARE in fact responsible for one another through what we give to the Emperor and that not to pay the emperor can be to turn our backs on what we give to God.  

Unlike the Pharisees and Herodians, we don’t need to say how amazed we are at Jesus’s presence, justice,  compassion, wisdom  and goodness. We know all this and it is the Good News of the Gospel. But what is the Good News is often the Hard News of the Gospel. How do we manage this tension? Let’s try this:  what if each of us wanted  to add a new quotation to The Forbes Book of Business Quotations, one that included God, taxes, generosity, compassion, justice, and Faith?  Here’s my suggestion and it comes from a “comedian,” of all people, Stephen Colbert. It’s a zinger so get ready:  

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition, and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Amen.   

Preached by Dr. Peter Kountz

For 9:00am High Mass

Sunday, October 16, 2011 – Pentecost  18/Proper 24

What's in your wallet?

Imagine, just for a moment, that you’re a Pharisee. You probably don’t want to imagine that you’re a Pharisee; you’d probably rather imagine that you’re St. Peter or the Centurion or Spartacus – but humor me for a moment.  You’re a Pharisee.  You are a lay leader in your religious community. You love the Torah and the beautiful logic of the law that it lays down for you.  You live a simple life; you tithe, faithfully observe the Sabbath, try to keep your body and soul pure and holy.  You hold yourself apart from the temple priests and the Sadducees, partially because you disagree with them on practices and doctrine, but mostly because you like to hold yourself apart.  You see it as your task, your calling, to lead your community into a new understanding of themselves as faithful, practicing, holy Jews. You teach and preach and live a life of righteousness under the law.

Into your life comes a man named Jesus. You first heard about him from John the Baptist, that desert zealot who kept calling you and your friends a brood of vipers. At first, you liked Jesus a lot – certainly more than his hairy, locust-eating cousin. Jesus said some good things, and he at least he wasn’t calling you names. He spoke about fulfilling the law, about ushering in the kingdom of God; he taught and healed and preached just like you wanted to. But then you began to notice that he didn’t always act just like you wanted to. He and his disciples didn’t follow every single letter of the law, especially about Sabbath practices. He liked to hang out with a rather unseemly crowd and let scandalous women weep all over his feet. You yourself asked Jesus for a sign, and he refused you.  And just this past week, after he rode into Jerusalem with fanatics screaming Hosanna and strewing palm fronds at his feet, he stormed into the temple and made a royal mess of the money changing tables and told parable after parable about how you and your Pharisee friends – fellow reformers, mind you – are about to have the kingdom taken away from you because he thinks you wear the false masks of hypocrites. He’s even started calling you – guess what? – a brood of vipers.

And so one day you look at your own reflection in the waters of the mikvah and you say enough is enough; no more following him around asking stupid questions and hoping that he’ll say what you want him to. It’s time to take action, time to out this Jesus as the heretic he is, to show the people that he is not their Messiah. It’s time to get him in some serious trouble. But you can’t really do this on your own. After all, you’ve a righteous, law-abiding guy; you need help from some tougher players. So you look over your shoulder, cross the tracks, and knock on the door of the local Herodian gang. Now the Herodians are not fans of yours – they’re establishment guys, fans of Rome, power players in the political scene. They may not particularly like you, but they really don’t like Jesus, and they’re happy to help you set him up.

And so you all put your heads together and whip up the perfect impossible situation. You’re going to ask Jesus whether or not you should pay the census tax, a tax mercilessly imposed by Rome, a tax that the Israelites absolutely hate. If he says yes, the Israelites will hate him too; if he says no, he sets himself up directly as a dangerous enemy of the Roman state. Either way, you win. And just to add to the pressure, you’re going to ask him this question together – you, the Pharisee, who despises the census tax, and your new allies, the Herodians, who want nothing more than to continue to placate the Roman authorities who are the primary source of their power. And you’re going to pose this question right in the temple, right in front of God and everybody. Your plan is to flatter him a bit, soften him up, and then spring the trap and watch him squirm.

And so imagine that you, the Pharisee, meet up with Jesus on the temple mount. “O great and powerful Rabbi, answer a simple question for us – do you think we should pay this tax to Caesar, or not?” And you sit back and wait for the squirming to begin. You wait for Jesus to start shuffling his feet and writing in the dirt and avoiding your eye like a bad student who didn’t memorize his Torah portion for the day. You begin to imagine his disgrace, his downfall, you can almost see his disciples turning and walking away, his followers turning to you, giving themselves over to following the law as you see it, worshipping God as you think they should, listening to you.

But here’s the thing: Jesus doesn’t squirm at all. He looks you right in the eye and calls you out. “Why are you trying to set me up? I see that mask you have on, you know. Show me the coin, and I’ll tell you what to do with it.” And without thinking you reach deep into your pocket, and pull out a small silver denarius – and you look at this coin, with its image of Caesar’s arrogant, self-righteous head, with its inscription that celebrates his power and even his divinity – and you suddenly realize where you are. You’re standing on the temple mount, holding an idolatrous, sacrilegious piece of mammon in your sweaty hands. You hear Jesus’ voice like it’s coming from very far away, “Let Caesar have his own stupid coin; but give God, whose most holy place you are standing in right now, all of the things that are His.” And you, the righteous Pharisee, can’t quite believe what it is that you’re doing. You’re standing there aligned with people you don’t like, hearing words that you already know are true, words that you should be telling the people yourself. And you’re stuck holding this stupid coin, trapped and squirming.

And the moral of the story is…? It could be: don’t try to set up Jesus. This is never a particularly good idea. But it could also be this: you can tell a lot about a person by what she carries around in her pockets. These Pharisees had gotten themselves so tied up in knots by their own fear and condemnation, so disconnected from the holiness of their calling, that they were walking around with the desolating sacrilege in their pockets without even realizing it. They were carrying around an image of worldly concerns, of mortal power, the very power that they were seeking for themselves even as they condemned it with their words and overly-scrupulous actions. They had somehow bought Rome’s argument – that you needed this coin to be safe and successful in the world – and so they had actually answered their own question. Should we pay taxes to Rome? I guess so, if you can’t even leave the house without Rome right there in your pocket.

A wise man once said that you can tell what kind of discipleship a person is living by looking at his checkbook. But since no one uses checks anymore, I think we could update that saying to this: you can tell a lot about a person by what he carries around in his wallet.  And yes, I do mean literally. What you have in your pocket right now says something about you. Your keys – how many, and to what? Your smartphone, your wallet, with how many credit cards? Membership cards, pictures of your family. Cash. Bus tokens. A clip of your beloved’s hair. A hand-written prayer. A cross. An icon. A pledge card. A mint. Some of the stuff in our pockets might be just fine – good and meet and right so to have. But some of it might be like that damning denarius. Some of the things that we carry around with us in our pockets – literal or metaphorical – might just cause us to shuffle around a bit if we had to pull them out here in this holiest of houses, in front of God and everybody.

Now as squirmy as all of this might make us, there is some good news here.  We aren’t alone in all of this. It seems to be a part of the human condition to collect junk in our pockets like so many bad apps on our iPhones. And Jesus doesn’t condemn us for it – he didn’t condemn the Pharisee for it, and he doesn’t condemn us. He just asks us to figure out what to do with all of it. He asks us to take it out, look at it, evaluate it, and decide if it’s something that belongs to the world or something that belongs to God.  Is it something we offer as a grateful gift to God, or is it something that we just need to get out of our pockets because it probably isn’t very good for us anyway? The trouble is that Jesus didn’t really say how to do that, how to categorize these things, our stuff. And whether you are a part of the richest of the rich 1% or the rest of us 99%, figuring this out is a real challenge. Which things are Caesar’s? Which things are God’s? The truth is that Jesus isn’t willing to give us a hard and fast rule about how we decide which is which. He is, after all, not a Pharisee. He is Jesus, the Christ, the fulfillment of the living law, and he is not willing to be trapped by our own anxieties and insecurities. But he is willing to stand with us, to look at each and every thing that we pull out of our pocket, to help us decide where it belongs – what we are to do with it, how it fits into our lives as disciples. So go ahead, take a look. What’s in your wallet? And what does that say about you? And, more importantly, what are you going to say about it?

Preached by Mtr. Erika Takacs

16 October 2011

St. Mark's, Philadelphia

Within the Ribbons

How refreshing it is to peruse Emily Post’s 1922 guide to proper Etiquette.  Here we learn that:

‘Invitations to a private ball, no matter whether the ball is to be given in a private house, or whether the hostess has engaged an entire floor of the biggest hotel in the world, announce merely that Mr. and Mrs. Somebody will be “At Home,” and the word “dancing” is added almost as though it were an afterthought in the lower left corner, the words “At Home” being slightly larger than those of the rest of the invitation.’

Oh, how delicious!

In the section on wedding invitations, this marvelous guide also provides instructions for what is called “The Train Card,” which, we are instructed, is to be used “if the wedding is in the country.”  It reads:

“A special train will leave Grand Central Station at 12:45 pm, arriving at Ridgefield at 2:45, pm,” etc.

Oh, how scrumptious!

Not only does Mrs. Post provide the proper form for wedding invitations of many variants, she also informs her readers of the proper form of acceptance and regret, with the interesting note that “an invitation to the church only requires no answer whatever.”  After all, who cares if you come to the church, when it’s the reception that costs all the money!

Long ago I fell afoul of Emily Post’s guidelines for wedding invitations and all manner of other things.  And I have recently earned a reputation for the serial committal of a new kind of faux pas: when in receipt of an e-vite invitation, I have more than once clicked the response that says, “Maybe,” and I have been mocked and derided by my friends for this weak and uncomplimentary response to invitations.

It turns out that the whole notion of allowing a “Maybe” response to an e-vite invitation is under attack by the Internet mavens.  Here’s what one blogger wrote:

‘As data, “maybe” is… useless…

‘Maybe is a magnet for neuroses. It salves guilt complexes and incites passive-aggressive avoidance behaviors.

‘“Maybe” sometimes means maybe, but it can also mean, “I’m not coming but I don’t want to hurt your feelings.” Or even, “I plan to come but I reserve the right to change my mind at the last minute if something better comes along.” Some people even use maybe to mean, “I won’t make dinner but I’ll come for dessert.”

‘When you invite twelve people to a restaurant dinner via a web service, at least four will say maybe. Do you reserve a table for twelve? When eight show up and range themselves at opposite ends of the table (“because other people might be joining us”) you have an awkward table filled with gaps. The empty seats haunt the meal, suggesting social failure.

‘But if you call the restaurant at the last minute to change the reservation to eight, two of the maybes will show up, like ants at a picnic. They’ll have nowhere to sit, and they’ll blame you. (“I told you I might come.”)

‘How can you know what “maybe” means?  … you can’t. All you can do is phone people and ask whether they’re leaning toward coming or not….  If they’re the passive-aggressive type, they will continue to evade the snare of commitment. “I’m probably coming,” they’ll say.’·

It is this failure to commit that makes the “Maybe” response so infuriating.  And if it’s infuriating to respond “Maybe” to an invitation to a friend’s dinner, what does it say to God if our response to his invitation to be a part of the kingdom of heaven is a tepid “Maybe”?

If Jesus had had a blog he might have posted on it today’s parable of the king who gave a wedding banquet that none of those invited decided to come to.  He might even have linked to the blogger I just mentioned, finding resonance with his rant against the “Maybe.”

“I have swung open the gates of the kingdom of heaven to you,” Jesus might say, “and your answer to me is that you plan to come but you reserve the right to change your mind at the last minute if something better comes along?!?!

“I have paved the way of righteousness for you and you want me to know that you can’t make it to dinner, but you might be there for dessert?!?!”

“I have prepared a table for you, I have anointed your heads with oil, your cups overflow, and still you are not coming, but you don’t want to hurt my feelings.”

Imagine what it would have been like if Jesus had given his disciples instructions to prepare an upper room for the Passover and reminded them to be there well before sundown, and they’d said to him, “Maybe we’ll come.”

Imagine that later in this Mass, after we have prepared the sacred vessels, chanted the sacred chants, we have invoked the Holy Spirit to come down, repeated Jesus’ own holy words, offered the Bread and the Wine… imagine that I hold up the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood for all to see.   “Behold,” I say, “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world.  Happy are we who are called to his supper.”

And you look lazily up from you pews, and reply, “Maybe.”

The sad truth is that the world and the church are full of Maybes and probably always have been.

Maybes hear the invitation to God’s kingdom and do not take it seriously.

Maybes hear the call to work in God’s vineyard, and look for something else to do.

Maybes hear the promise of God’s love and suspect that there is something better to be had in the world.

Maybes see the shadow of Christ’s cross and think that it doesn’t mean very much.

Maybes can recognize a hymn tune but can’t, or simply won’t, sing the words.

Maybes tread the ground near God’s Sacraments but never look up to see them.

Imagine that I asked the parents and godparents of the child who is to be baptized today the questions I will ask them in just a few minutes:

Do you renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?

Maybe.

Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?

Maybe.

Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?

Maybe.

Do you turn to Christ and accept him as your Savior?

Maybe.

Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t; it’s hard to say.  It’s hard to put my whole trust in God’s grace and love.  It’s hard to follow and obey him as my Lord.  So maybe I will, but maybe I won’t.

And what about the rest of us?  At every baptism, we are asked to give a clear answer to some important questions:

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?

Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you sin, repent and return to the Lord?

Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

Now, it may be that “Maybe” is, in fact, an honest answer to these questions.  But it is not the right answer.  And so the church gives us a better option, since merely saying “Yes, I will” is hard to believe.

“I will, with God’s help” is a lot more plausible.  It allows for the frank honesty that following through with these promises is hard to do, but that with God’s help it’s worth a try!

If you listened carefully to the Gospel this morning, you might be struggling with the details.  What is going on here?  A king gives a wedding banquet but no one comes?  And some of the invitees kill the slaves who bring the invitations?  So the king sends troops to avenge their deaths?  Then people are gathered up from the streets to come to the party, except that one guy, who can’t possibly have been planning on being at a ball, isn’t dressed properly and so is bound hand and foot and thrown into outer darkness?  What is going on here?!?!?

What we are seeing is the collision of two worlds.  It is as though the invitation to the wedding banquet was prepared with all the old world consideration of Emily Post.  The wording was just so, asking for the “honor of your presence,” not merely the “pleasure of your company,” and  “honour” was spelled the old-fashioned way, with a ‘u,’ as Mrs. Post instructs it must be.  The size of the invitation is 5 1/8 inches wide by 7 3/8 inches deep, precisely.  The invitations have been engraved.  Maybe even a special train has been arranged to leave 30^th Street Station.

And it is as though in the face of all this precision, all this effort, we have replied with an email that says with a shrug, “Maybe.”

Jesus is trying to convey the inadequacy of such a response to an invitation of this sort.  Jesus is trying to get past the maybes of our lives and to get us to Yes!  He is trying to show us how sad and boring it is to meet his invitation with a maybe, how much it misses the point to be constantly on the lookout for a better party.  And in his parable, he is asking us what he needs to do to convince us that the kingdom of heaven is worth it.  “Do I have to bind you hand and foot and threaten to toss you into outer darkness?!?”

Maybe….

Returning to Emily Post’s Etiquette; one of the more charming and antiquated bits of guidance in the weddings section of the book is the instruction about reserved seats in church.  The mothers of bride and groom are instructed how to write out cards if specific pews are reserved for specific people.  But, we are told, “a card for the reserved enclosure but no especial pew is often inscribed “Within the Ribbons.”

I think this is a marvelous turn of phrase: Within the Ribbons.  Who wouldn’t want to be within the ribbons, whatever that might mean.  It sounds lovely without being restrictive, special without being snooty, set apart without being inaccessible.  Within the Ribbons.

As I hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as I experience the call of Christ in my own life, and as I try to help you hear it in your lives, I believe that Jesus wants each and every one of his children – every breathing soul and every beating heart – to be “Within the Ribbons.”  He wants us all to be at the banquet of the kingdom of heaven.

And his teaching is the way he tries to get us there, past the maybes into the “Yes” that brings us within the ribbons.

It is as if a king had engaged an entire floor of the biggest hotel in the world, but the invitation, in that old-fashioned, maybe even snobby, way, simply reads “At Home”.

If I received such an invitation, it would be as if two worlds were colliding.  I’d have to look up Emily Post just to know I was being invited to a ball!

But God willing, I would finally understand the importance of the invitation, and I’d be eager to reply.

And of course, I’d be a fool to send a email reply that just said “Maybe.”  I’d be better advised to make sure my formal shoes are comfortable for dancing, which I see the invitation has included, almost as if it is an afterthought.  But dancing there will be, till late into the night.  And that, I trust, is what the kingdom of heaven is like.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

 9 October 2011

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia 

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