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Our
scripture lessons this morning are all about religion and politics.
Religion and politics. Those are two topics which, according to an old
saying, one should never bring up in polite conversation. And especially
never bring up in polite conversation together. In our society
these days, in early 21st-century America, we often take the
“wall of separation between church and state” to be such a
fundamental rule of our social life that we treat religion and politics
as if they belonged to two separate realities, two different worlds:
religion is about what we do in our solitude, in our own personal and
private lives, in here; and politics is all about what we do in
our social and public and community life, out there; and never
the twain shall meet. We get so used to religion and politics being
different things that it feels vaguely uncomfortable—it feels
downright wrong—when we hear religion in a campaign speech, or
when we hear politics from the pulpit.
Religion
and politics are two things we would rather keep apart. But our
scripture lessons this morning will not let us keep them apart;
our scripture lessons this morning put religion and politics squarely
together, and they tell us that we must put them together as well.
God’s word for us today is that God cares about our political life,
God is involved in our political realities, politics is not in a
separate sphere from God but God’s world includes also the political
world—and God calls us to do our politics in a godly way.
God’s
work in the world of international politics is what our first lesson
today is all about. The prophet declares that God has called Cyrus, that
God has taken Cyrus by the hand, that God has anointed Cyrus to be
God’s instrument to bring justice and peace. That is a pretty bold
statement for Isaiah to make, especially inasmuch as Cyrus himself
doesn’t worship God, Cyrus doesn’t call upon the name of God, Cyrus
doesn’t even know God.
Cyrus,
you see, is the king of the Persians, the ruler of the Persian Empire.
At the time when Second Isaiah was written, the Persian armies were
defeating the Babylonian armies in battle, the Persians were taking over
Babylonian territories—the Persians were even beginning to close in on
Babylon itself. The Babylonians had
conquered the Jews years before, and the Jewish royal and upper
classes were living in Babylon in captivity, in exile. But the Persians
had a different policy toward conquered peoples: the Persians did not
deport conquered peoples and force them to live in exile, the Persians
allowed conquered peoples to remain in their homelands and manage their
own affairs unmolested—so long as they acknowledged Persian authority
and paid Persian taxes. Isaiah knew that if Cyrus conquered the
Babylonians, then the Jewish Exile would be over, the Jewish people
would be allowed to return home and rebuild Jerusalem, the Jews would
again be able to be God’s faithful people with their own Temple and
their own law and their own way of life. Isaiah knew all this—and he
had the boldness and the faith to look at the international politics of
his situation and to see God’s hand at work in it. Isaiah had the
faith to see God at work in Cyrus to bring an end to the oppression of
the Jewish people; Isaiah had the faith to see God at work in Cyrus to
open doors and break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron;
Isaiah had the faith to see God at work in Cyrus not just for politics
as usual, but for the working-out God’s own will for justice and
peace. Cyrus himself had no concept of himself being the agent of
God’s will; anyone else could have looked at the Persian-Babylonian
situation and seen in it nothing more than the power-politics of warring
empires; but Isaiah had the faith to look deeper and to see God’s
will; and Isaiah called his people to look deeper and to see God’s
will and to respond to God’s will with courage and hope. And
because of all that, Isaiah speaks across the centuries and calls us
to look at the international politics of our time, and to look past the
surface of warring empires, and to look deeper to see God’s will for
justice and peace in our world—and Isaiah calls us to respond to
God’s will by striving for justice and peace in our politics, too.
Our
Gospel lesson today takes that vision of God at work in the political
world and ratchets it up another notch or two. This story of Jesus and
the question about taxes is often taken today as a kind of biblical
warrant for our idea of the separation of church and state. “Give to
the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and give to God the
things that are God’s” sounds at first like Jesus is endorsing
the idea that religion and politics are two separate spheres, that they
each have their own proper “things,” and they shouldn’t have much
to do with each other. But the more I look at this saying of Jesus, the
more I am convinced that something deeper is happening here.
Jesus
says that you can tell the coin belongs to the emperor because it has
the emperor’s image and the emperor’s title stamped on it. Since the
image and the title means that the coin already belongs to the empire,
it’s not that big a deal to give it back to the empire in the form of
taxes. That’s it; question answered; case closed. But, if we
are supposed to give to the empire the things that are the empire’s,
and we give to God the things that are God’s—then how do we know
what belongs to God, so that we can give it to God? Well, if we take the
analogy of the coin, then we know what is God’s because it has God’s
image and God’s name stamped on it. But according to Genesis 1, the
thing that has God’s image stamped on it is us, humankind, made
in the image and likeness of God; and according to the prophet Jeremiah,
chapter 14, the thing that bears God’s name is us, the faithful
people—Jeremiah says, “you, O LORD, are in the midst of us, and we
are called by your name.” So if we give to God what belongs to God,
then we must give God ourselves, our entire selves, our souls and
bodies, everything we are—including the dimension of us that
has political relationships and makes political decisions and takes part
in political processes. Far from telling us to put a wall between
religion and politics, Jesus is telling us in this Gospel that our
devotion to God includes our politics, that we must give to the
political world what belongs to the political world, but we must give it
in a way that is consistent with the larger way we give ourselves to
God— Jesus is telling us in the Gospel today that we must act
politically in a way that shows forth God’s greater will for justice
and for peace.
So
for Jesus, too, like Isaiah, religion and politics are not two separate
spheres; for Jesus, the political world also belongs to God; and Jesus
calls us today to honor God in our political world, as well.
And
it seems to me that this word of God to us in these scriptures today is
especially important now, as we see the whole world around us getting
riled up over the possibility of a war between America and Iraq.
Everyone agrees that Saddam Hussein is not a leader of peace, and he
must be prevented from having and using weapons of mass destruction;
where so many disagree is on whether power or diplomacy, whether
international cooperation or unilateral invasion, is the best way to
secure the peace. Today there is bickering in the United Nations and the
Security Council about the wording of resolutions and the resolve to
take action. Today our Congress has voted to give our President and his
administration broad powers to decide when and how to wage war. Today
there are critics who say this is all about oil; there are cynics who
say this is all about diverting attention away from domestic problems in
time for the fall elections; there are partisans who say this is a war
of the West against Islam; there are Americans who say we have the right
to use whatever force we want and anyone who says otherwise is not a
patriot. In all the debate and all the noise, it is all too easy to get
confused about what seems right, and what seems good, and what we think
we ought to tell our elected government to do on our behalf.
But
our scriptures today call us to look at that whole situation, to look at
that whole machinery of international power-politics, and to look
deeper, to see where God is at work, to see what God is doing in the
midst of our politics, to see where God’s will for justice and peace
is being made manifest—and our scriptures today call us to decide how
we will give ourselves to God in this, how we will strive with God for
the justice and peace that God wills. As people of faith, as people of
conscience, and as citizens of this country, we can raise our voices to
proclaim, like Isaiah, where we see God in this—we can raise the
question, like Jesus, how we will give to God what belongs to God, even
in and through our political decisions and political actions—we can
let the word of the Lord sound forth from us, to bear witness for
justice and peace in our nation and in our world.
In
our collect today we pray in thanks that God in Christ has revealed his
glory among the nations. Let it be our prayer that we may reveal God’s
glory, God’s justice, God’s peace among the nations in Christ’s
name today.
In
the Name of God: the Holy One, the Holy Word, the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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