How to get away with Insurrection

Have you been watching the news lately?  It’s hard to escape the constant stream of debate on the referendum in Alberta.  Whether you are for or against separation, you are probably thinking that there is a lot at stake in tomorrow’s vote.  Many have already voted in the advanced polls or with mail in ballots.  It is good to see so much engagement in the political system that has been plagued in the past by low voter turnout.

This is a delicate topic that has ethical impacts for Alberta residents.  Catholic and Anglican Bishops have weighed in, as well as the Moderator of the United Church of Canada.  But surely churches should stay out of politics, right?  Religious leaders shouldn’t have opinions on the referendum?

This idea of the separation of church and state is important.  And that is the question that the scribes and Pharisees are asking Jesus.  It’s a clever philosophical trap; would he side with the Roman Empire and enrage the folks who were struggling with high food prices, low wages, poor jobs and physical abuse from Roman soldiers?  Or would he speak treason against the Emperor, a crime punished by execution?  The temple leaders must have smiled at the clever problem they had dumped in his lap.

Jesus, as usual, turned the question back at them.  What did they have in their pockets? Temple coins or Roman coins? A Roman coin, with a graven image of a man, in the most holy of holies, threw into question the real loyalties of the leaders.  Let’s not forget that both they and Jesus wanted to be freed of the occupying army and having to worship the Emperor, who had declared that he was a God. They wanted to be able to worship YHWH as commanded in the first of the 10 commandments.  “You shall have no other God before me”.

So, the question of paying taxes had political implications.  But Jesus turned it on its head.  “Pay to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and pay to God that which is God’s.”  In other words, pay your taxes.  But also remember your first loyalty is always to God.  This is not about taxes; it’s about dealing with oppressive government. Which is at the heart of the referendum question.  Some see the Federal Government as the heart of all oppression, others see the Provincial Government as the source of all problems.  Chances are that we will never fully agree.  But Jesus reminds us of our core loyalty.  That we are to focus on loving God, loving neighbor and loving self.  Or as the United Church says, live with deep spirituality, bold discipleship and daring justice.

The Roman Empire was not toppled by withholding taxes.  Nor was it stopped by violence.  In fact, about 40 years after Jesus was executed, Roman forces ransacked Jerusalem, killed citizens and destroyed the Temple for the last time.  Much of the New Testament was written after that event. Christ followers and Jewish faithful alike were thrown into confusion and conflict in the aftermath.

Wait a second, if it was so strong and resilient, why don’t we speak Roman or even Italian around the world?  Was there a successful tax revolt?

Taxes have often triggered revolutions.  Robin Hood is a story of oppressive taxation.  The start of the Protestant split from the Catholic Church was over indulgences, a form of excessive taxation.  Taxes are at the heart of the referendum too.  The government of Canada transfers equalization payments to help provinces provide, and I quote, “reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation” end quote so that people of Canada from sea to sea to sea have similar services.  The provinces do not give the federal government transfer payments; the federal budget comes from taxation based on income.  So, people making $40,000 in Newfoundland pay the same level of federal income tax as their Alberta counterparts.

Boycotting taxes seems like an easy way to take power, but Jesus knew it wouldn’t work.  What would work was to focus on what they did have power over, their relationship with God and each other.  Our reading from 1 Thessalonians shows the result of ‘giving to God what is God’s’.  Staying focused on God grew the church of Thessalonica to the point that it was getting talked about in the rest of the country.  It was the first church outside of the Middle East, and the first church in Europe.  It was small, no more than one or two dozen people.  Yet its reputation was spreading, and the letter Paul wrote is the oldest one in the New Testament, the first to be written.  It even predated the gospels by 20 years, because there was no need to write about Jesus when they could learn from eyewitnesses like Peter and the disciples.

Growing their reputation and influence by living out the teachings of Jesus, to care for the weak, the hungry, the sick and the lonely, was why the Thessalonians were lifted up as shining examples of a Christian community.  They put into practice the command to love God, love neighbor, love self.  Deep spirituality, bold discipleship and daring justice.  How might we, like the Thessalonians, be so filled with these three things that our reputation also goes out through the land as people of God filled with the hunger to be the Message?  To be an example to an angry world that feels like there’s not enough?  To send a counter message that God’s love overwhelms and undermines all oppressive systems?  I invite you today and in the days ahead, to dive deeply into prayer for our neighbors, our province and our country, regardless of how you voted, that our witness to love and compassion be inspiring to all who know us.  And may we know the love God had for all creation, the courage Jesus showed in the temple, and the encouragement of the Holy Spirit to give us hope in these contentious times.

Searching and knowing

There is a t-shirt that used to be in bible stores with a caption of “Moses was a murderer, Noah was a drunk, Jacob was a con man, Isaiah preached in his birthday suit, Job went bankrupt, Rahab was a prostitute, Martha was bossy, Mary Magdalene was mentally ill and Mary, Jesus’ mom was an unwed pregnant teen who became a refugee.  If God called them, how do we know that God isn’t calling us?

It's a great t-shirt.  We often may struggle with the idea that God is calling us.  How can God call me when I am not whatever I think God really needs?  Surely someone else, anyone else is better than me.  And we put off answering that still small voice, that nagging sense of being lured into a bigger vision, a bolder idea, a stronger stance.  “No, not me! I’m not called to run for town council, join the library board, speak up about racism, knit mitts for homeless people, buy Tylenol for Ukrainians, attend a rally in support of school boards, fill out a survey about pensions, put solar paneling on my roof, drive an alcoholic home, sit next to a hurting person, sign a petition about the environment or get out and vote on a contentious bylaw.  Somebody else is being called to do that.  Not me.  And yet every day people here in this space do exactly this.  They buy that cup of soup on a cold day for some stranger they just met, they buy granola bars for folks who have no homes to go to, they jumpstart stalled cars or push them out of snowbanks.  Ordinary people called to do what seems like something insignificant, yet what may be insignificant to us may be huge to those who see it or experience it.

How do we know we are called?  How do we know what we are called to?  Knowing is complicated, and when we hear the claim that God knows us can be both a gift and a challenge. 

If you have ever tried to study a foreign language, the word “to know” can be tricky. In French, they have two different words for knowing, connais and sais – connais is more about relationships with people and places, and sais is more about facts and skills, knowledge.  Hebrew is the same way, there is “Yada” which is know, and “Bantah” which is understand. So if you hear someone saying "yada, yada, yada", it means, "I know, I know, I know".

It’s one thing to know someone or something, it’s another thing to understand them. When we read Psalm 139, it is both yada and bantah.  God knows of me and God knows me.  In detail.  In depth.  Right down to the dna level and right up to how I will respond to anything that happens.  The thought of God knowing me both Yada and Bantah is, well, quite honestly, more than a little unnerving.  There’s a limit to how much I want anyone to know me.  Even spouses don’t know each other at that level.  Parents find their children to be mysteries, and siblings who have known each other all their lives can be surprised by choices and thoughts.  No one we know are in our lives from sunup to sun down.  No one we know have been in our lives since we were conceived.  It’s an extraordinary claim for an extraordinary faith in an extraordinary God.

That much transparency is uncomfortable.  We humans have been hiding from being known like that as long as we’ve been telling stories.  Some rabbis say that the day God wandered into Eden looking for Adam and Eve and realized that they were hiding from him, trying to cover their nakedness from him and each other, that’s the day God cried.  We even hide from ourselves.  M. Scott Peck wrote a book about people who lied so much they started to believe themselves!  He said that those kinds of people are really hard to help because they are so committed to their own lies.

That’s very different than Nathanael, the one Jesus praised for his honesty and transparency.  Nathanael had no guile in him, which means he was not sneaky or underhanded or manipulative.  He was honest to the point of rudeness when he said, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  Nathanael was described by Jesus as a model citizen, the kind of person we would think deserved to be called to some kind of holy ministry.  He’s special, he’s honest, he’s transparent.  And yet, he’s not mentioned again other than that he was in a group that saw the resurrected Jesus.  He didn’t write any books, he didn’t found any churches, he didn’t go on any missions, he didn’t have any hymns written by him or about him.  This perfect paragon of an Israeli disappeared from the bible completely.

Instead, Peter with his wishy washy faith, the big stinky fisherman who denied Jesus before he died, and Paul who hunted Jesus followers down in order to lock them up and torture them, these are the people that were called to turn the world upside down with.  Once again, the perfect people, the beautiful people, the people who had in their yearbook “most likely to succeed” were not the ones God turned to.  God called the ones who didn’t know their own potential, ones with self-doubt and insecurity.

God called, in other words, people like you and me.  Flawed, imperfect, impatient humans.  God still calls us because God knows us and wants to be in relation with us just as God once had a relationship with Adam and Eve.  God sees us just as we are, as beautiful creatures that can share love and hope and joy to everyone we meet.  God calls us to share our light of hope in daily acts of random kindness, to stranger and family alike.  God calls us to tiny acts and large acts alike.  May we have the courage and the faith to trust that God calls us because God sees us as we really are!