The Sauntering Pilgrim

According to some very old and popular wisdom, there are three things you should never talk about at the dinner table or elsewhere in polite company: politics, religion, and money. And two of them, politics and money, are never to be discussed from the pulpit.

So today we have a story about all three: some powerful religious leaders, the Pharisees, and some powerful political leaders, the Herodians, conspiring to entrap Jesus with a question about money, specifically the legality of citizens of a theocratic nation paying taxes to a secular foreign government (Matt. 22:15-22). It comes at a time when we, like most congregations, begin our annual financial stewardship campaign. And I’m expected to say something that avoids offending you and getting me excommunicated. I feel a little like Pastor Jeff will feel when the Bills play the Cowboys.

So I’ll start by saying that, while the story manages to hit all three hot-button issues, it’s not about any of those things. It’s a story about integrity. When he is challenged about the use of money, will Jesus allow himself to be caught in the trap of thinking and responding dualistically – either-or, legal or illegal, secular or religious. If he says it’s legal to pay taxes to the emperor, the Pharisees can charge him with blasphemy and have him stoned. If he says it’s illegal to pay taxes to the emperor, the Herodians will have him for treason and insurrection and can have him executed.

If Jesus answers from the perspective of divided loyalties represented by the Pharisees and Herodians, he will offend someone and place himself in grave danger. Instead, he deftly takes a larger perspective, changing the “or” to an “and.” Give to the emperor what belongs to the emperor, he says, and to God what belongs to God (v. 21). And those who came to entrap him can only walk away in silence.

We have responsibilities to God and to government. Religious life is not separate from life in community; life in the spirit is not separate from life in the flesh; both are dimensions of the one life we have here and now. That’s what the Incarnation is about: recognizing God does not exist in another dimension and that our eternal home with God is not a place to be entered when we finally cross over Jordan. God is as near as our breath, the Spirit of God is our very breath. And heaven, the kingdom of God, our eternal habitation, is spread all around us here and now (Gosp.Thomas, 113; Luke 14:15-24).

To live our faith, to live the Incarnation, is to live with integrity, oneness, wholeness. It’s to live in the body of Christ, through whom, according to St. Paul, God created everything in heaven and earth, things visible and invisible, all rulers and authorities, and in whom all things hold together in perfect unity, in perfect integrity (Col. 1:15-17).

When we live in Christ, Paul says, there is no longer any Jew or non-Jew, slave or free, male or female. The reconciliation of all the broken fragments of creation is accomplished and integrity restored in a way no brokenness of ours can prevent (2 Cor. 5:19). Nor is there any gay or straight, black or brown or white, neighbor or stranger, Israeli or Palestinian, red or blue, conservative or progressive. Those differences still exist, of course, but not the divisions, for all are one in Christ. So give to the state all the state requires, and give to God all God requires, recognizing that service to our neighbor in community cannot be separated from service to God. Live with integrity.

Of course, living with integrity isn’t easy. It often requires us to choose the more difficult path, in the short run, so we grow into a greater wholeness in the long run. Living with integrity often requires us to make difficult choices, not between good and bad options but between good and better, or between better and best. And there will be plenty of opportunities to compromise, to choose an easier way that seems almost as good.

That’s when we need to remember the Titanic, the opulent cruise ship that sank after colliding with an iceberg on its maiden voyage in the worst maritime disaster of its time. The most widely held theory was that the iceberg opened a huge gash in the side of the ship. But divers and scientists have discovered the damage was surprisingly small. Instead of a huge gash, they found six relatively narrow slits across the watertight holds.

Small damage can sink the greatest ship afloat, and small compromises can destroy the person of greatest integrity. It’s not the great betrayals of our faith that are to be most feared. We can see them coming and almost always avoid or resist them. What ought to concern us are the small, daily compromises we make that we believe are inconsequential – the slight, willful, or unthinking breaks in our integrity.

Every time we find ourselves in an us-or-them situation, every time we find ourselves believing our own welfare is to any degree separate from the welfare of others, every time we believe our own relationship with God can be healed apart from the healing of our relationship with others, God’s gospel of reconciliation in Christ is compromised, and there is a small slit in our hull that has the potential to sink us.

Along with the story of Jesus’ integrity in the face of division, we ought to hear again the poem by English priest and poet John Donne, “No Man Is an Island,” on the integrity of the human family.

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Like the Pharisees and Herodians in Jesus’ day, there are social and political forces at work among us today that thrive on reactivity and division, that stoke flames of prejudice and hatred, that promote partisan politics over public good. Our integrity as Christians, and our integrity together as the body of Christ, requires that we play not by their rules but by God’s. ▪