Whose image?

What happens when we come to church? What happens when we walk in through this front door and sit ourselves down in this place? What do we bring with us? What do we leave outside?

In the last couple of years we have had news headline after story after opinion piece after editorial about the global financial crisis. News of civil war and natural disasters and plagues have continued to happen – sometimes as front page news, and sometimes not.  Do we leave those things behind when we come in here? What about our own problems and issues? Work, family, health, our children, our future? Do we leave them all neatly stacked at the door in order to come here and focus on other things? God things? Holy things?

I ask these questions because there are some people who think that’s what you do when you come to church. For some, church is the place for things that don’t have much to do with the real world. For others, they come here in order to escape from what’s out there, to leave behind the uncomfortable realities of life, to avoid having to think about the burdens of their day and week.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to want to escape from time to time, and sometimes the church needs to be a place of sanctuary, a haven; but I do wonder how God feels about us trying to separate “out there” from “in here”.

Today’s gospel reading – this little story about Jesus taking the coin used for paying taxes and saying, “Give… to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's" – there are plenty who take this story and say, “See. Jesus says we are to separate the things of this world from the things that are God’s. It’s okay to come to church and not think about what’s out there.”

But is Jesus really asking us to forget the world and focus instead on heavenly things, spiritual things, holy things?

I don’t think so.

Did you know that:

Jesus Christ, taught more about money than any other subject[?] Twenty-seven of Jesus' 43 parables, that's 62%, have to do with money and possessions. One of every ten verses in the gospels deals with money. The Bible includes 500 verses on prayer, fewer than 500 on faith, but more than 2000 on money.

Why does Jesus spend so much time talking about money?

One commentator on today’s passage says:

Jesus does not divide the world into two equal realms, clearly defining [on the one hand] our obligations to Caesar and [on the other] our obligations to God. Rather, his answer acknowledges our obligation as citizens to the state, but affirms our larger obligation as human beings to God. Coins bearing Caesar's image may belong to Caesar, but all things (coins, Caesar, Rome, the planet earth, the universe) come from the mind of God and are under God's dominion. Caesar's realm is but a speck within God's realm.

Richard Donovan

Jesus does not separate the world into Caesar’s on one side and God’s on the other. Instead he says we have obligations; some are obligations to the state, but all are obligations to God.

How do we know what things belong to Caesar? They have his image on them! How do we know what things belong to God? They have God's image on them!

Stoffregen

And God’s image is everywhere: in the sunrise and the sunset, in the rainbow in the sky and the rainbow in the flowers; God’s image is in everything that is beautiful and good in creation.

It is not just inside a church that we see God: we see God in all things.

Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but give to God what is God’s. And what does that mean: give to God what is God’s?

It is not enough simply to recognise that God’s image is printed on everything around us. We have to do more than that. We have to respond in some way.

One writer puts it this way:

As long as there are starving children and refugees, sick people, poor people, uneducated people, plagues, AIDS, etc. our worship is not complete, we have not [given] to God what He wants us to [give].

Lindy

God wants us to love: to reach out in love in exactly the same way that Jesus did. It was not enough for Jesus to talk about money and justice and caring for others; it was his way of life. The Bible tells us that Jesus gave three quarters of his earthly ministry to the healing of bodies and to the feeding of multitudes.

George MacLeod 1962 The Iona Community

That is what it means to give God what is God’s.

And there is a separation that needs to happen. Let me explain.

I spent the first part of last week at the Presbytery’s School of Ministry. The National Director of UnitingJustice Australia, Rev’d Elenie Poulos, took us through the Assembly’s document “An economy of life” – a statement passed at the Twelfth Assembly in 2009. “An economy of life” is subtitled: re-imagining human progress for a flourishing world.

This is a great document. For a start it takes a real world view of the real world. Just what kind of a world are we living in? What kind of society have we created? What are the primary values of western civilisation? And then, how do we, the church, the body of Christ, sit with that?

Now all good theological documents start with good theology. I mean, we start with God. What is God like? What kind of a world did God create? Did God give us good things? And did God give us enough for all, for everyone?

And if the answer to those questions is, “Yes, God did give us good things and enough for all”, then we have to ask, “What went wrong?” Because we know that the world has problems. Our obsession with the GFC and the incessant news of famine and war are constant reminders that something has happened. And that something we might call Empire: the empire of western civilisation built upon the pursuit of wealth. The things of Caesar.

Now let me be very clear at this point: this has not all been bad. As a result of the system of capitalism we have unsurpassed stability and security and freedom. We have the longest life expectancies ever, the best education ever, and the most extraordinary technology.

But is that true for all? Or only true for some?

God has given us good things. And enough, enough for all.

The Twelfth Assembly passed some resolutions from this document, and I want to apologise to you. I want to apologise because this happened in 2009 and I’m only just telling you about it now. These resolutions are aimed at us and our discipleship. For example:

The Assembly resolved to commit itself and call on members, councils and agencies of the Uniting Church to examine their lives as Christian disciples and communities that they may first of all serve God in the world through the love, compassion and generosity extended to all our neighbours.

What does it mean to serve God rather than to serve Caesar? It means to love, to have compassion, to be generous with what we have for the benefit of others, for our neighbours. Think about that for a moment: serving God means serving our neighbours.

The Assembly also calls on us – the members, councils and agencies of the Uniting Church –

to identify, develop and implement alternative systems, structures and processes within the church that promote the practice of the economy of God and model a way of being in the world which promotes human wholeness, equity and ecological sustainability.

We are called to practise the economy of God, and we are called to do that to promote human wholeness, equity and ecological sustainability.

Sounds grand, doesn’t it? Sounds just the sort of thing that an Assembly would say, doesn’t it? Telling us how to live our lives.

Except it’s not the Assembly telling us what to do. Rather it is us, the body of Christ, reflecting together to remind us of something important, something that Jesus said, something that God says to us again and again and again:

“Give… to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's.”

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and love your neighbour as you love yourself.” Amen.