WHAT WE OWE CAESAR
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
Old First Church, Middletown, NJ
October 18, 2020
Texts: Isaiah 45:1–7; Matthew 22:15–22
Several years ago Newsweek magazine carried an article entitled “How Dumb Are We?” lamenting the fact that in a sample of 1,000 persons, 38 percent of native-born American citizens flunked the naturalization test given by USCIS to applicants for citizenship. Before the Covid pandemic, when I was asked to speak to groups of native-born Americans about immigration, I used to ask a question that is not on the exam but was a major cause of the American Revolution.
What is the Third Amendment to the Constitution? It’s in the Bill of Rights and, I admit, not one we normally think about. The really frightening thing is beyond the much touted Second Amendment, very few people in my audiences could even answer the simplest questions about our government or our history. And many in the audience would consider themselves so-called “real” Americans.
Seeking to trap Jesus into coming up with an answer that could have been construed to be disloyal, the Pharisees in this morning’s Gospel text ask Jesus whether it is lawful to pay taxes to the emperor. They couch their question, of course, in false praise: Teacher, we know you are sincere and teach the way of God, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth, they say choking all the while. Jesus, sensing the trap, simply asks for a coin. Whose face is on the coin? And Jesus’ answer is, of course, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's.
So what is Caesar's due? What do we owe our body politic and what do we owe God? For centuries, Christians have wrestled with this question. Well, I'd like to suggest that if we owe Caesar nothing else, we do owe the body politic the obligation to know our history, our origins, and some basic facts about our government. In this modern age of Google technology, knowledge and understanding of history has become, well, almost passé. Why have knowledge when anyone can just put the question to Google and get an answer from Wikipedia? But this approach to Caesar does not make for understanding, far more difficult than just popping out a fact or two. Understanding, or, appreciation of, our national framework involves more than that.
Most human understanding moves from the apparent relations between things to a comparison of remembered perceptions and gradually develops toward more general ideas. Understanding begins with the observation combined with a deeper degree of reasoning. For example, if we look at the horizon, we may perceive a round horizon; we understand that it is the circumference of the earth that we perceive. Understanding takes knowledge and perception.
Let me give you an example. Around 25 years ago I represented a young woman from Sudan. Her parents had been brutally murdered and her brother disappeared––because they were Christians and active ones in their local church. This was before South Sudan became an independent country. She had been smuggled out of Sudan into Kenya by her grandmother where she boarded a plane for Newark and where she ended up in the Elizabeth Detention Center.
When I met her, she spoke like a fifth- or sixth-grader and had about that level of reading in English. She did not have our modern understanding of the earth. In our initial conversation as she described the flight to Newark, she proceeded to tell me how surprised she was that she did not fall off. When I asked her, “Fall off what?” she replied that she did not realize that the plate––that is, the earth, was so large.
Now, how could I pass this up? At the next visit I brought her the volume of my son's Walt Disney Encyclopedia; it had the picture of the earth and the moon indicating that the moon circled the earth and the earth circled the sun. Her perception and the explanation gave her understanding, the kind that we have been raised with, namely that of globes circling in space. She worked her way through the explanation and responded, “How marvelous of God to have created it all like this!” In an instant, she understood what had eluded religious leaders for centuries. Understanding is everything.
In understanding we take our perceptions and worldview and try to make them mesh. If they don't we need a new framework of understanding and, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out, we change our paradigms. But there's another type of understanding that goes deeper than that. It's the understanding of the soul. This kind of understanding tells us that poverty kills not only the body but the spirit and that to support economic or political systems that eschew our responsibilities for our brothers and sisters also destroys us. It is the most difficult understanding of all.
Because we, as human beings, often do not understand what affects the soul, we tend to focus on what we can actually see, which is one of the reasons that the ancient Hebrews who came out of Egypt asked Aaron to build a golden calf. This story is more than just a recital of tradition. It tells us something fundamental about ourselves. We cannot see or touch God although in many ways the Holy touches us and our lives. We struggle in this world to have faith, a faith that goes deeper than something we can touch or see. The ancient Hebrews struggled with the same thing. We moderns scoff at the very idea of worshiping an idol, a golden calf. But do we not do so? Look at the very symbol of Wall Street––a golden calf of sorts. And do we not worship that animal?
Let's go back to the answer Jesus gave: render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. As human beings, all of us have our Caesars. We do have obligations to our national bodies politic and to our countries. But we also have a more fundamental obligation to God. They are not always the same; indeed, they are often different.
Our obligation to our body politic and to our Nation does not include blind obedience to governmental authority when it contravenes the fundamental obligations we owe each other as human beings. In spite of the casuistry of lawyers––and as a lawyer I can assure you lawyers are trained to argue out of both sides of our mouths––we cannot condone torture, murder, and the destruction of the very instruments of government established to hold a society together.
But also as a lawyer and, I would like to remind you that many of our founders who were lawyers also studied theology and moral philosophy because they saw the law as couched in our fundamental understanding of human nature and the unalienable––sorry, Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Adams was correct here––rights given us by our Creator. They cannot be surrendered or alienated even with our consent.
It is indeed tempting to worship the golden calf of state power, to surrender to the government our right to dissent, especially in an age of terror. But it is morally and theologically wrong. It is tempting to worship the golden calf of more and more money, thinking that it will solve our problems as a society but that, too, is an error, both morally and theologically.
This is not to say that we do not owe the government a great deal but we do not owe everything. One thing we do owe is the obligation to have a better understanding of government, how it works, who our candidates are, what they really do versus what they say they will do. We owe it to ourselves if we are to maintain a democracy, a better understanding of the fundamental principles that brought us together as a people and continue to hold us together in today's world as a people.
Those fundamental principles include the values of freedom, openness, the right to dissent even sometimes in socially impolite ways. No one ever said that a democracy was neat. Even dictatorships find they cannot be neat. They also include the obligation to understand the framework of our government and our history.
Now I will pose a question that invariably stumps us native-born Americans: What is the Third Amendment to the Constitution? It was one of the fundamental issues in bringing about the American Revolution: No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
And my young friend from Sudan won her claim to asylum, went to school, and acquired not only a high school diploma but a nursing degree and worked in a clinic serving the poor because, as she said, Jesus healed all and to be like Jesus, so should I. Suzanne died two years ago of a brain aneurysm but during her short life she served the One we seek to follow. She understood the importance of serving God and what was not to be rendered unto Caesar.
Let us pray: Creator of our minds and our souls, bring us into a deeper understanding of your call to us to do justice, love mercy, and care for all your children. In the name of him who is our model, even Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.