Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.
In 2017, when preaching on this Sunday’s passage in another church in another part of the country, I made the mistake of cavalierly naming the president. I wasn’t making a political statement in this case (though sometimes that’s appropriate and needed). It was a mistake because it wasn’t really necessary to the gist of the sermon. It was nothing more than a comment to help set the stage for a point I was making.
It was a mistake because, in this case, it quickly became a distraction from the Gospel.
I’d say this congregation was roughly 2/3 progressive and 1/3 conservative, though most were close to what we might think of as the center. That Sunday, I learned very quickly who was in which camp! Some gave me atta-boys for naming who I did. Others were scandalized, thought I’d been out of line, and went into defensive mode for the rest of the sermon.
But neither side seemed to remember the Gospel arc of the homily, because the name in the sermon had taken up all the oxygen in the room.
Political and cultural figures often have symbolic power that can overwhelm the Gospel itself, especially today. That does not mean we ought not to raise our voices in protest or dissent, sometimes even from the pulpit. Yet we must also handle symbols that are not ours with care, because they are often more powerful than we realize. They can produce strong feelings that, conditioned by outside narratives we cannot control, might actually keep us from being present to the Holy One, who yearns to make the world, through us, a place of justice and peace.
When we let cultural and political symbols take over the life-giving message of the Gospel rather than letting the Gospel shape how we engage the world, and when we choose nationalism over neighborliness or tribe over beloved community, we fall short of Jesus’s commandment to us. We owe our hearts not to the symbols and kings of this world, but to God alone.
Give to God the things that are God’s. We are called to give our whole hearts to the message of the Gospel and to be bearers of it to a world that hungers for righteousness, equity, and compassion.
Faithfully,
