Returning What Was Stolen

Sermon for Sunday, November 15

Luke 20:20-26

Americans have a lot of feelings about taxes. Our colonial forefathers decided to rise up against British rule in large part around the rallying cry, “no taxation without representation.” Because of taxes, they threw imported tea into Boston Harbor rather than pay what they saw as an oppressive tax. More recently, the cry has gone up in libertarian quarters, “Taxation is theft.” Around 2010, the Tea Party started to protest taxation, taking up the mantle of the American Revolution, but I guess their slogan was “No taxation even if we have representation.” This kerfuffle about taxes doesn’t just occupy right-leaning folks though.

It was popular among certain segments of radicals and disaffected taxpayers at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to withhold a certain amount of their taxes due at the end of each year. Basically, they figured out how much of the annual budget went toward supporting the wars they didn’t support and they would pay their taxes minus that percent. The theory that they held was that they would only pay for the parts of the budget they approved of. Unfortunately for them, the government takes a different tack, and they got audited and had to pay in full. If they hadn’t, I would imagine the government still would have put the same amount into the wars.

This uneasiness about taxes is understandable. Along with voting, paying taxes is probably the main relationship most of us have with our government. Once a year, we have to pay our share to keep up the roads, the postal service, schools, the military, police, and the many other functions of government that make living in our society possible. But we don’t like paying taxes. Nobody has fun paying their taxes.

In Jesus’s time, there was a particular tax that people in Judea really didn’t like. It was called the tributum, or “head tax,” and it was the price a region had to pay in order to have the privilege of being part of the Roman Empire. The price was one denarius per adult male, which was about the value of a day’s wages for an unskilled worker. But having to pay to be a part of an empire they didn’t particularly want to be a part of, unsurprisingly, didn’t sit well with some of the folks. When you add in their religious concerns, the situation got all the more difficult.

Revolutionaries saw the tax as idolatry, the accommodating religious leaders saw it as the price of their relative freedom, and knew the empire would prop them up as long as they didn’t rock the boat. So when the priests’ spies ask Jesus bluntly, “is it lawful for us to pay taxes to the emperor or not?” They expected him to pick a side by either saying “yes” or “no.” Instead, he upends the question just like he overturned the tables in the last chapter.

When we participate in the system, we have to pay our dues. The denarius that Jesus’s questioners showed to him had an engraving of the emperor on it. The emperor backed the denarius and made sure that it retained its value. The only reason that little silver disc was worth anything was because of the idea invested in it. If you pull out a dollar bill from your pocket, it bears the name of the US Department of Treasury. Having that dollar mean something is one of the most basic underpinnings of our government. We participate as citizens and beneficiaries of the strongest military in human history, we have good roads (well they get you where you need to go), and we do have certain freedoms protected by our government. But we have to be careful not to let our participation and our pride become idolatry.

Jesus tells his audience and he tells us, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” What is Caesar’s? What that we have belongs to America? To the American government? Whatever bears its image and its imprint. Our money ultimately represents the way our country values our worth. Jesus makes it incredibly clear that we shouldn’t place our value there. Jesus’s teachings on money are simultaneously some of his clearest teachings and also some of the teachings that we are the quickest to ignore. At the very least, a Christian attitude toward money would make it emotionally easier to pay our taxes, because we should hold onto these things loosely.

The way we hold on tightly to our money reveals that we have let the mark of this country begin to settle on us a bit more than it should. Money represents security to us. It represents our independence. It represents our self sufficiency. In Luke’s gospel, money functions as an idol that Jesus calls Mammon. Our view of money as a source security and sufficiency ought to get us to ask if Mammon isn’t alive and well in our hearts and minds today. Our idols, our gods, are molds into which we pour ourselves, and over time, we begin to bear their image.

In the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, the children come into the chocolate factory having received a golden ticket and a chance to win ownership of the factory itself. One by one the children are revealed to be who they are, as they sometimes literally take the shape of their obsessions. Food obsessed Augustus Gloop falls into a river of chocolate and gets sucked into a pipe. Violet Beuregard turns into a blueberry because she has to be the first to try an experimental new candy. Veruca Salt’s desire for more, more, more winds up with her being judged a bad-egg as she’s trying to get a gold-laying goose for herself. The things we desire and the things we demand shape our downfall, just to the extent that they shape us.

What we need to do, then, is desire the right things. Jesus judges what is Caesar’s by what bears the emperor’s image. When he says, “Give to God the things that are God’s.” We have to ask, so what belongs to God? What bears God’s image. The answer takes us back to the beginning, to Genesis. “And God created mankind in His image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). We bear God’s image, and so by rights we belong to God. Sin and idolatry have corrupted that, but restoration is happening!

We who follow Christ are called Christians. We are meant to be little Christs, returning our stolen selves to our rightful owner. The apostle Paul says, “those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family” (Romans 8:29). Now theologians read that verse and we get into arguments about what foreknowledge means and what predestination means, but the important thing is what we are made for: to be conformed to the image of the Son of God! The image that sin broke is restored in us... in Christ. In Christ we can be offered back to God!

Too often we let the world’s demands on us take first priority and we give God what’s left. Jesus’s invitation is for us to give everything to God. Our home life, our career, our relationships, our souls, and our bodies. Whatever is left, Caesar/the world can have. If we as Christians have qualms about where our tax dollars go, that would keep us from paying them, then the response should be to live our lives in such a way that the state has no claim on us. There are Christians who intentionally live with income below taxable levels. What isn’t an option is cheating on our taxes or failing to report income because we “answer to a higher authority.” Give everything over to God; be conformed to the image of Christ, and there won’t be much left for Caesar.

Living this way has final consequences. In the book of Revelation, chapter 7, there is an unexpected moment of peace. In the midst of destruction and woe, an angel calls for silence and says, “Do not damage the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have marked the servants of our God with a seal on their foreheads” (v. 3). Usually in our fretting over Revelation and the end times, people worry about avoiding the “Mark of the Beast.” But you don’t need to worry about that if you subject yourself to the Mark of Christ. In committing ourselves to Him, in accepting his Baptism, in proclaiming and making Him Lord of our lives, we accept his Mark on our foreheads! Made in God’s image, conformed to the image of Christ, and marked with the seal of Christ against any other claim— we belong to God. Let’s give ourselves to God and leave nothing for any other master!