Render Unto Caesar – A Meditation on Politics and Proper Authority

Biblical Text: Matthew 22:15-22

Here in Arizona election month has started. That’s where the introduction starts. The text is Jesus’ famous dodge, “Render Unto Caesar What is Caesar’s and to God What is God’s.” I’m using dodge a bit tongue in cheek, but it was a bit of a dodge because his questioners were trying to trap him in an answer. And Jesus’ answer sidestepped that trap.

And I think he sidestepped the trap in a way that the Bible as a whole addresses human politics. They way we talk and think about politics is about power. And in a fallen world that is often what it is about. Who has it, who gets its, can I secure more of it, and what are the various means of doing that? And Jesus is almost cynical about that. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Whatever dodge you think you have to avoid politics, it won’t work. Politics is the natural state of fallen man. Even Jesus submits to Pilate. But Jesus places that cynicism within a much larger sphere of authority and the proper use of authority. “Render unto God what is God’s.”

Caesar does have some legitimate authority, that being temporal authority. Including the authority to tax, sorry libertarians. But that temporal authority is always under the eternal authority. Those things stamped with Caesar’s image – like coins – pale in comparison to those stamped with the image of God – like you yourself. You owe yourself to God. You owe your worship, which is also a holy fear to God. But even more you owe your love. Because God has loved you in Christ.

The prayer of the day is the perfect prayer for political season. “May we so pass through things temporal that we lose not the things eternal.” Because this is what Satan and Caesar and even our own gut so desire. That we trade the eternal for the temporal. That we trade ourselves, our worship and our love, for things that rust and decay.

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Render to Caesar

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Biblical Text: Matthew 22:15-22

“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s” is one of the most quoted saying of Jesus. But I’m convinced that 99.9% of the time it is quoted, we quote it terribly wrong. We use it to let ourselves off the hook on our duty. That is the essence of the trap they were laying for Jesus. Which side of this divide are you on Jesus? And whichever side he is “on” he’d lose the crowd from the other side. They marveled at his answer. Not because it was simply a rhetorical masterpiece of weaving between two poles. We hear politicians daily attempt that, maybe monthly do it successfully. But those are always like the apocryphal saying of Barack Obama – “my superpower is that people hear what they want to in my words.” When Jesus said this what they marveled at was how it convicted everyone. Jesus isn’t on any of their sides. He’s the King of the Reign of Heaven. This sermon attempts to restore some of the marvel of that saying.

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Handing Over the Things of God

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Biblical Text: Matthew 22: 15-22

I always laugh when I hear someone say the church is so political, although I think I understand what they mean. I laugh because it really isn’t. The lessons from this Sunday’s lectionary are the only ones that I think call for explicit political preaching. And to be honest, in my entire time pew sitting, I probably heard less than one handful of explicit politics from the pulpit. Most ministers would avoid it completely. But what I think they are expressing is not so much “vote for x” from the pulpit as the complete subordination of “things temporal” to “things eternal”. (Don’t miss the collective prayer I left in the recording.)

Jesus’ “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” saying is not an invitation to some type of church state separation. One can have a purely secular politics. Just stop at the first part. And that makes sense. That is the way of the principalities and the powers. But if you want to follow Jesus the call is to give to God what is God’s, which includes the things of Caesar.

Neither Jesus nor I get explicit about the answers to this. Honestly in Jesus’ day it might have been easier, or at least the average person would bear no responsibility for the actions of the gov’t because they were subjects, not citizens. But when you vote, when you are a citizen, you bear responsibility. This sermon attempts to lay out what discharging that duty in a Christian way looks like.

The Things of God

Biblical Text: Matthew 22:15-22
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The text contains Jesus saying, “give to Caesar the things of Caesar, and to God the things of God”. It is possible simply take that answer as a simple dodge, but that is not what this sermon does. This sermon looks at Jesus’ saying in four ways. In the literal time frame it was a way to confront and avoid the politics of division. It encouraged the hearers to ponder both what was the state’s and what was God’s, and how they might or might not over lap. If we look through a lens of Christology one of the creedal confessions is that Christ sits as the right hand of God. He has defeated the powers and principalities and now does reign. What that rules out are the simple poles that the state’s things are always God’s things or that the state’s things are never God’s things. Caesar, like Cyrus and Pharaoh, is accountable to the God of Israel, the only God. In sorting out the things of Caesar, we can’t find ourselves at the extremes. If we look through a moral lens, Jesus encourages us to look at whose image or whose icon is on things. The coin bore the image of Caesar, but humans bear the image of God. Morally, when we see the least among us, we are to see the image of Christ, and act accordingly. Yes, that image is cracked due to sin, but it is that image that Christ repaired. It is that image that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is renewing in us. Finally, we are encouraged to take an eschatological view (a completion or end view). In how we dispose of the things entrusted to us, do we use them for temporal ends, or do we use them for eternal ends? Jesus invites us to put God in our debt. He’s good for it. If we give the things of God to him we will not lose our reward.

Worship Note: I moved our Hymn of the Day after the Sermon in the recording. LSB 851, Lord of Glory You Have Bought Us. I did this because the sermon was a little longer today. So if you just listen to that you can get to it quicker. I also moved it after because the words of that hymn I believe capture the Christological and Moral force of the message exactly. The eschatological is there as well, but not quite as direct, or not put in the same vocabulary. I use treasure in heaven as the vocab sticking with the monetary theme of the text. The hymn switches to theological virtue language: faith, hope and love.

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Things of Caesar…Things of God

Biblical Text: Matthew 22:15-22
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That title is a reference to the aphorism of Jesus, “give back to Caesar the things of Caesar, and to God the things of God”. That phrase is more than a slippery evasion of the question the Pharisees were asking him. It is a startlingly deep teaching on limits to the temporal state and the extent of the requests of the Gospel. There are of course book length treatises that examine this. This sermon attempts to focus on three things:
1) What the things of Caesar are by bringing in Romans 13
2) What Caesar should provide, and a simple description following Peter Leithart’s taxonomy: guardians, babels and beasts, of the limits of our giving back to Caesar.
3) What giving back to God means with a focus on three ideas: a) bearing the image of God through baptism, b) the summary of the law as our spiritual worship and b) the gospel tithe.

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Say you want a revolution…

Sermon Texts: Isaiah 45:1-7 and Matthew 22:15-22
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First, I love it when the Children’s Choir signs. You can hear them on the Podcast well directed and taught by Mrs. Kristin Bayer who is a wonderful sax player and teacher. (I hope she doesn’t mind the plug.) The simplicity of the songs they sing makes worship and sermon themes very easy to construct. Someone has already done the hard work of distilling a biblical message to a child’s level – I get to piggy back it. And this Sunday had the serendipity to have lectionary texts very easily meshed.

Second, the Lordship of Jesus is something that Reformed usually do better having a strong Sovereignty of God theology. But even they take it in a different direction normally than I think the New Testament does. When most theologians start talking Sovereignty of God it is usually about election or salvation. Everything gets bent to a salvation theology. Not wrong, just not the entire story. The old and new testaments teach that God is actively involved in the world for the benefit of his people. He is not some distant deity. He is not some pull in case of emergency God or a galactic vending machine. He (typically) operates through means – like Cyrus, King of Kings of the Persian empire, or Pilate, Prefect of Judea or you and me wherever we might be.

That gets to that radical nature of “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.” The authority is God’s duly appointed. She is there for a reason. The authority should also recognize they are not an authority grounded in themselves. There is a Sovereign, an active one. All authority is accountable in the Kingdom of Heaven. That is why when the Beatles sing “everything’s gonna be alright” we don’t just tune it out as Pollyanna drivel. Everything’s gonna be alright, because He’s go the whole world in his hands.

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