Empire in the Temple, "Me Too" in the Church

Sermon 10-22-17

Grace to you and peace from God our creator and our lord and savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

A few years ago, NPR ran a program from the BBC that was called "The history of the world in 100 objects." One of the episode featured a gold coin from India from 1500 years ago. This coin does what coins have done for thousands of years - tell all who handle them that their ruler enjoys the special favor of heaven, or even that he himself was a god. Every day, with every transaction, you would get that constant reminder of who was REALLY in charge of your life. Which, by the way was NOT YOU.

Isn’t it funny, though, that 2000 years later, we are still put faces of men on our money – they may not be kings, but they are men still loom large, and are revered as almost god-like in our American consciousness - George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ben Franklin, and the newly remembered and made re-famous Alexander Hamilton…. the Scottish immigrant that American forgot until the recent smash hit hip-hop musical bearing his name came along.

And hopefully one of these years we will be able to add the face of a woman on one of these bills, and we too can join the ranks of other countries with women on currency, such as the likes of Syria, Mexico, The Philippians, Cameroon, among many others. I pray someday the plans to put the face of Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill will come to fruition. Not only did she free hundreds of slaves through the Underground Railroad, but she planned and lead a raid to free slaves against plantation owners along the Combahee River. This was the first military operation executed by an American woman, who was both black and a former slave, who could not read or write, who was only 5 feet tall. Is there any doubt that we need to get this woman on the twenty-dollar bill, STAT?

The face on currency clearly reflect the values of those in power. At the time of Jesus, Israel was a nation under the thumb of the oppressive and expansive Roman Empire… and trust me, it was a REALLY BIG THUMB. So, it was a matter of course that the Romans used their currency to remind the Jewish people who was boss.

In response, Jewish leaders found themselves in one of a few different factions with varying degrees of complicity and resistance to the Roman Empire. Two are named in our text today, one is familiar to us - the Pharisees – the religious leaders with no love for Rome but tended to keep their heads down to keep their positions. We don’t know a lot about the Herodians, except that they obviously supported Herod, the ruler appointed by far-away Rome. Different groups with different perspectives, brought together by their mutual dislike of Jesus. As the saying goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

This encounter happens almost immediately after Jesus told that really difficult parable last week, the one about the king hosting a banquet, murdering the invited guest who blew him off, and then throwing out the guy caught without a wedding robe…. The Pharisees were quickly catching on that Jesus was talking about them, and saying things that would upset the delicate balance of survival. So Jesus had to go.

Together, these two groups devised a question with NO RIGHT ANSWER. “Is it lawful to pay taxes?” If Jesus says yes, then he would be validating the Roman oppression, which would probably anger his supporters and go against his message. But if he says NOT to pay, he could be in deep trouble with the Romans.

But Jesus was on to them. He had them bring in a coin, and they give him one with the emperor’s face imprinted on it… which is hilarious because they are currently having this little chat IN THE TEMPLE…. And Roman currency of any kind was banned from being used IN THE TEMPLE. That’s why they are MONEY CHANGERS that Jesus throws out of the temple another time.

“You hypocrites,” Jesus says, seeing straight through their load of baloney. “Give to the empire what belongs to the empire….” Yes, go Jesus, really stick it to those snakes in the grass!

Then Jesus follows that zinger with - “And give to God what is God’s” …… yeah…. That one kinda deflates our balloon a little bit, doesn’t it?

If you remember the Sesame Street song from when you were a kid, or your kids were little, “One of these things is not like the other…” This is not a one-to-one ratio here, kiddos. Jesus’ fuzzy math here bring us up short. Just what does belong to the empire? And what does belong to God?

The second question is both incredibly easy and incredibly hard. What belongs to God? A better question to ask might be, what DOES NOT belong to God? Everything we have and everything we are belongs to God. As a fellow pastor quipped, “If you give God what is God’s, then Caesar is one broke joker.”

But we live in a world where we cannot seem to escape the Empire and all that comes with it. By empire here I am not referring to the Roman empire, but from the forces in the world that govern our lives and our time, the machinations that trap us in systems of oppression and oppressing one another. We too are the ones caught with coins of the empire in the temple of the Lord. Wherever we go, we can’t escape being part of the system, or being on some level complicit in the empire and all that it represents.

Every time I hand over a bill with George Washington or Andrew Jackson on it, I am participating in this system. The coffee I love some much at Starbucks was probably harvested by people not being paid a living wage. The inexpensive dress I want to buy was almost certainly made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh or Honduras.

What I do with my money matters, and it sends a signal to the rest of the world what my values are. It is my hope that at least most of the time I am using this money – God’s money – for things that align with God’s Kingdom rather than the Empire of the world.

There sure are a lot of little things we can do so that God’s money can do some good through our hands. We can buy fair trade coffee and chocolate, especially with the big holiday Reforma-ahem-Halloween coming up. We can purchase clothes second hand from local thrift stores that benefit others. We can hold back on self-centered purchases and instead donate to good causes. We can even learn to balance our budgets and so that we are able to be generous tithers to this congregation and all its missions. We can give the Empire back all the bad stuff it has given us, and instead give back to God what belongs to God.

WE bear the IMAGE of GOD, and bear the title of “beloved child of God,” when we were marked on our foreheads with the cross of Christ when we were baptized. I bear the image of God, and you bear the image of God, and both you and are worthy of love and respect, and deserve being treated as such.

You may have notices something happening during this last week around the internet, a phrase that has caught the attention of the nation – “Me Too.” The hashtag conversation was created by Tarana Burke, program director for Brooklyn-based Girls for Gender Equity, empower young women of color. “Me Too” began to share with the world the stories of countless women worldwide. Nearly every female friend and colleagues shared a variation of this on the Facebook status: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”

The sad truth is that even the church isnot exempt from needing to have this conversation. A little bit or a lot of Empire is in the Temple. But the Gospel truth is that God chooses to stand with the victims and the survivors and the justice warriors, in the ultimate act of “Me Too,” by sending his son Jesus into the world of Empire. Completely divested of his power, Jesus showed us God wants nothing to do with the kind of power we seek. Instead, God is about finding the lost, giving hope to the hopeless, claiming each and every one of us as loved Children of God, members of the Family of God across time and space.

When we forget that we bear the image of God, we forget our humanity. We forget that all of us belong to God, and we must treat one another – AND OURSELVES – accordingly. We are reminded every time we see a baptism or take communion. We are reminded every time we look in the mirror. And we will be reminded today - as we welcome new mission partners as part of this community, we will all have the opportunity to come forward to be blessed, to be re-marked, and to re-member “God’s endless mercy and love for you.”

And, taking our cue from Harriet Tubman, today we remember that when one of us who bears the image of God is not free, none of us, are. THAT is our work, as the image bearers of God - to free the oppressed, to believe the stories of the harassed, and to work for justice for ALL of God’s family….until every voice CAN be lifted up in song, making heaven and earth ring with the harmonies of liberty, freedom, and peace. Amen.

Our hymn of the day was "Lift Every Voice and Sing"