“Render unto Caesar…Church and State Revisited”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
November 5, 2006
READINGS
The first reading is from the book of Matthew:
"Teacher," they said, "we know you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren't swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?"
...Jesus said, "Show me the coin used for paying the tax." They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, "Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?"
"Caesar's," they replied. Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."
When they heard this, they were amazed.
The second reading is the poem “Freedom” by Langston Hughes:
“With billowing sails the galleons came
Bring men and dreams, women and dreams.
In little bands together,
Heart reaching out to heart,
Hand reaching out to hand,
They began to build our land.
Some were free hands
Seeking a greater freedom,
Some were indentured hands
Hoping to find their freedom,
Some were slave hands
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom.
But the word was there always:
FREEDOM.”
SERMON
In his famous “Divinity School Address,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said that it is the task of every preacher to lift up the events of the day so that they might be seen through the perspective of religious value. This morning, I attempt to address his challenge.
“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
I still contend that Jesus was one of the greatest humanists of all times. In one very quick response to a question that was intended to set him up for an answer that would necessarily be a compromising one, Jesus was saying – to have integrity in this life and in this world, we must be accountable for all aspects of our lives. He held that at the same time, we are physical/social beings accountable for the integrity of our physical, social and political relationships, and that we are spiritual/soulful beings, accountable for the integrity of our deeper relationships within our larger understandings of life, and being, and the unity of all things.
Jesus didn’t say, “When you’re in church, do churchy things and when you’re in the world, do worldly things.” What he said was, to have integrity, do what you are responsible for doing. What he said was love God and love your neighbor. And since he defined neighbor in another passage as every man, woman and child, implicitly what he was saying was that to have social or civic integrity, one must be a responsible citizen. Today, that is about being a citizen of the world and here – in our American system of government – that amounts to being a participant in the political systems of democracy. Being political is a religious imperative. Religion ought not be intended to shield us from the world, but to help us be more intentional with our actions in it.
Clearly, that could be interpreted in many ways. I was working out at the YMCA the other morning. In the early part of my workout before I have to take off my glasses in order to wipe the sweat from my face before it starts running in to my eyes – usually something that happens about 10 minutes into the workout – I was watching the news on one of the monitors and reading the closed-captioning at the bottom of the screen. Sen. Joe Lieberman was on and he said, “I agree with President Bush on this. This is not just a war on Iraq. This is a war of religious extremism.” That about sums it up, I thought to myself. At that point, I took off my glasses, which left me virtually blind for the remainder of my time on the machine.
First, I think Sen. Lieberman summarized the President’s position very well. Second, it’s interesting, and I’m afraid frighteningly accurate and not a very helpful choice of words to say that we are waging a war on Iraq. I thought the war had originally been against Saddam Hussein and then, when he was out of the way, it became a war against all terrorism and terrorists. Third and finally, I think no truer words about the war have been spoken than to say that it is a war of religious extremism.
I suspect that its truth though, is even larger than what Sen. Lieberman and President Bush might have meant for it to be. There are Muslim extremists, to be sure. There are Jewish extremists, too. They are both quite dangerous to the wellbeing and the stability of the region and to the world. But I would suggest that the biggest threat to the American people is neither of those. The larger threat to us and perhaps to the world, is the Christian extremists, the post-Millenialists in this country, some of whom are staff leaders in the President’s administration. Post Millenialists feel it is their duty to God to prepare for the Second Coming by ridding the world of the vermin that produces the vile immorality that they feel surrounds them. They don’t just want a constitutional ban on Gay Marriage; they want to rid the world of gays, lesbians and bi and transgender people, as well as a host of others that they feel are postponing the return of Jesus. I have to imagine this would sicken Jesus! I have to imagine too, that while some evangelical and fundamentalist Christians might be sympathetic to the post-Millenialists view, most Christians in this country are likewise dismayed by this extremist Christian agenda.
The avowed purpose of the post-Millenialists is to create, of the United States, a Christian theocracy based on their idea of Christianity. I would refer you to the sermon on separation of Church and State that I gave last March or encourage you to read anything you can find on the post-Milennialist Christians.
This is a very scary situation and one we need to take quite seriously. Our very democracy is under attack, not unlike it was during the McCarthy Era. The issue then was political purity and communism was viewed as the devil hiding behind every tree. This time our democracy is being threatened by those who boldly proclaim, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s. And, oh by the way, we are Caesar, so give us what you have. And more, we are God, or at least God’s spokespersons here on earth, so give it all here. President Bush has claimed on several occasions that he is in direct communication with God.
This kind of warped theology is based on grandiose, self-indulgent ego inflation, which is a hallmark of any religious extremism. It provides an ill-imagined sense of moral imperative, which not only excuses such actions as the theft of elections and the wholesale misrepresentation of geo-political facts in order to make a case for war, it encourages them. Render unto God, after all, the things that are God’s.
The bad news is that things are indeed grim. It seems that in the midst of a world-culture of religious extremism, Jesus’ exhortation – to be accountable on all levels, both spiritually and worldly – has fallen upon ears that are already over-filled with exhortations of self-proclaimed godliness. I know that I’m stating all of this quite strongly, but religious extremists have a very long record of leaving behind an incredible wake of destruction. Technology has made it possible for the extent of that destruction to be nearly unimaginable. We need to figure out a way to strongly respond to it, and the time for that response is now.
I was recently asked in a note from someone in the congregation, “What can I do not to feel like my country is headed in the most misguided spiritual direction? Especially [by] literalists?” My hope is that there is nothing we can do to insulate ourselves, or to prevent ourselves from feeling the truth. Martin Luther King, Jr. suggested that there are some things to which we should indeed be maladjusted. Racism, homophobia and other oppressions are among them, but today we need to add the tyranny of theocratic absolutism. Even still, I believe there is good news, there is good cause for hope, as long as we allow ourselves to be maladjusted to things that should not be. As long as we are willing to commit ourselves to being part of the process of transforming those things to which we are maladjusted!
Langston Hughes spoke of hope as the dream of freedom, its seeds having been planted in the hearts of all those who came to this country. If, in this shrinking world, there is to be continued hope to grow from those seeds of freedom, it will come from our ability to recognize, to promote and to defend the rights of freedom for all people, in our own country and throughout the world. We need to find a way to free the world from religious extremism – or at least to reduce its capacity to inflict such massive destruction.
The exercise of democracy may have been as important in times past as it is now, but I doubt if the future wellbeing of the planet has ever been more dependent on it than it is at this moment. There is going to be an election this Tuesday, and to a very large extent it will determine whether or not we “stay the course” of the hegemony of religious extremism. We can not control, we can not determine the outcome of this election. But that does not forgive or cancel our debt as religious and political beings in this world. And we can certainly influence the election’s outcome.
Caesar, in our day and age, is not a person but a way of government, or at least an ideal of government. If we are to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s today, it is not by just paying our taxes and minding or own business. It is by doing what we are capable of doing to promote the ideals of this nation and by reclaiming and preserving the principles of a democracy that is free of religious tyranny. Unitarianism and Universalism were the religious manifestation of the same impulse that gave birth to the political system of democracy. Both came out of an incredible faith in the human potential for the promotion of goodness.
How do we render unto Caesar this week? You tell me. The very least we can do is vote on Tuesday. But that’s hardly enough. Maybe before then we need to call Aunt Mary in Ohio or Uncle George in Florida to make sure they’re going to vote, and to make sure they know how we’re going to vote and why. Maybe we need to be in touch with individuals we might know in the most underrepresented group of voters in our country – young adults – and have similar conversations with them, too. Maybe today or tomorrow we should spend a few hours at one of the phone banks or get numbers from websites that have been organized to get out the vote. Maybe on Tuesday we need to be out knocking on doors. In my heart of hearts, I have to believe that, if America truly expresses its wishes hopes and aspirations two days from now, the largest common good will indeed be served and religious extremism will go down in defeat!
I know that many of us come to church on a Sunday morning to be comforted, and I pray that you will find some of that here with this good company and with our inspired music. I pray as much though, that we will recognize that as long anyone is oppressed –either at home or abroad, or as long as innocent blood is being shed, in our names, for ignoble causes, we have no right to feel terribly comfortable. We have every reason though to feel “maladjusted.” And we have every reason to feel called, by the causes of goodness, freedom and justice, and all those ideals that we hold dear, called to engage in the civic dialogue and process to promote the beloved community in our world.
We have been satisfied with the short end of the religious stick for far too long. It is time for us to take our religious principles to the public square and to offer them in place of those other, smaller religious values that are bankrupt of spiritual and moral value.
What’s at stake? We are living in an historic moment of transition. The patriarchal paradigm will either be re-empowered with a vengeance, which seems to be the direction we may be heading, or we will begin to reverse the recent actions and policies motivated by religious extremism, and give birth to a new world order, one based on the finest principles of all the world’s religious. There will be some kind of balance that emerges in the days to come. That balance will come into being through the world’s response to the greatest dominant influence. For the moment, I believe that dominant force continues to be the United States. We have such an enormous capacity to promote goodness in the world, a capacity that has been so squandered of late.
Our window of opportunity is a short one. What happens this Tuesday matters incredibly. It will matter because of the outcome of the election, yes. The state of world affairs will be very much impacted by its results. But more, the election will matter because of what each of us might have done toward its outcome. Our spiritual integrity depends upon what each of us will have done towards it. When evil is conducted in our names, we have a responsibility to take action to end that evil. Perhaps you do not agree with the summation that evil is occurring in our names. I can’t help but to think that the unnecessary deaths of 45 to 50 thousand Iraqi citizens and the unnecessary deaths of nearly 3, 000 US forces, including a record setting 105 deaths in the month just past, are a indication enough of the evil that is taking place.
The time has come to pay up, by rendering unto Caesar what it is that we owe the world for our vast privilege. And rendering unto God what it is that we owe to the Spirit of Life for this most magnificent gift it has bestowed upon us, and for the integrity of our ideas of goodness.
What happens Tuesday is critically important in getting our country back on track and out of the God-business. Its importance is significant in the short run. Matters of spirit and soul though, are about more than the short run. They are about things less transient and more permanent. Whatever things we can do to promote love and justice in our country and world in the next few days, it is urgent that we do them. But, whatever the outcome, we need to remember that we are in this process for the long haul, and we will need to do whatever it takes over and over again, for as long as it takes to create the world that we aspire for it to be. This is the task of our age, to help prepare the world for its future.
And so in closing and by way of perspective I offer you these words from Bishop Oscar Romero, assassinated in San Salvador on March 24, 1980. He knew something about facing a grim situation with hope.
This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need
further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way,
an opportunity for God's grace to enter
and do the rest.
We may never see the results, for
we are workers, not master builders
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
May we be faithful stewards, then, workers in the vineyards of peace and justice, doing our parts, paying our way in the creation of a future that more closely resembles the world we know we are capable of becoming. |
