O Lord, we pray, speak in the calming of our minds and in the longings of our hearts, by the words of my lips and in the thoughts that we form. Speak, O Lord, for your servants listen. Amen.
It is a sign of poverty to conceive of everything in terms of what you already know or think you know; a sign of destitution to evaluate everything and everybody according to categories that will admit nothing new because those categories are already fixed in the concrete of what you believe to be true.
The Pharisees were some of the best church people of their day, but some of them were very poor. Their understanding of the world and of God was boxed in and confined by what they had learned and what they expected to be true.
Because they were like this, as so many people are, when they looked at Jesus and listened to him they were alarmed by what they saw and heard.
Jesus taught many things about the Kingdom of God that they could agree with - things like God will judge evil doers and condemn them, while rewarding the righteous with good things, yet Jesus associated with people who were obvious doers of evil: prostitutes, tax collectors, adulterers and the like - and spoke of God's forgiveness of them and of God's desire to give them new life.
The Pharisees could not understand that.
They were also uncertain about how to classify Jesus because He taught that obedience to God and his law was necessary - that in fact they needed to obey it from their hearts and souls, yet he healed people, and allowed his disciples to pick corn on the Sabbath day, and he touched and blessed those persons their faith told them should not be touched nor blessed.
Jesus disturbed many of the Pharisees and the religious authorities of his day. He upset the world they had created by their beliefs. And because what he said and did would not fit into their neat little boxes, those boxes which defined for them what was from God and what was not, they ended up rejecting Him.
2000 years ago a philosopher by the name of Epictetus said,
"Men are disturbed not by things that happen but by their opinion of the things that happen."
This is the problem of some of the Pharisees.
Their understanding of events tell us more about who they are than it does about who Jesus is.
One day, after having decided that Jesus was a danger to the true faith of Israel, the Pharisees, who were Jewish Nationalists, combined forces with the Herodians, who were a group that counselled collaboration with the Roman Government, to trap Jesus in his own words - so that either the people would reject him or the Roman authorities would arrest him.
They decide to ask Jesus if paying taxes to Caesar is lawful, knowing full well that if he said NO - then the Roman authorities would arrest him, and that if he says YES - then the common people would reject him.
Their question was exceptionally clever. It was the kind of question that gets a person no matter how they answer it, a question like the old chestnut that asks: "have you stopped beating your wife yet"?
The scriptures say that Jesus knew their evil intent and said to them;
You hypocrites - why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin that is used for paying the tax.
Hypocrisy is defined in dictionaries as claiming a virtue one does not have. It comes from the root word in the Greek - to play a part or to act on the stage.
The part, or role, that the Pharisees were playing was the role of being learners of God. They, with the Herodians, pretended to be in interested in what Jesus had to teach, but in reality they were more interested in finding him at fault than they were in learning from Him, they were more interested in protecting their own understanding of what God was like, and making sure that everybody else fell into line with their views, than they were in seeing if, in fact God was doing a new thing through this prophet.
Jesus, by calling them hypocrites, suggests that they are not really people who want to know God and understand his law. That they would rather live out what they already think they know about the living God and God's will and purpose - than to actually encounter that God and do what that God wants them to do in the here and now - in the reality of what is happening around them - in the place where God is - in the time when God can be found.
Are we a people who believe in a living God and a living word?
Do we have a relationship with God - a relationship with the Christ - that is current, that is up to date?
Or are we a people who believe certain things about God - and try to impose those beliefs on others - without thinking about how God might be doing something new - how God might even now be in our midst healing and helping, teaching and commanding, warning and leading, much as he did in the past as he did through those whose teachings we quite rightly value so highly.
Are we willing to see God where we don't think God will go?
Are we able to hear God in the voices of those we think are misguided?
Are we able to know the presence of God even in those whom we know to be sinners?
There is a story in the Old Testament about how God spoke to a prophet through his donkey - well, that isn't the actual word that is used - but you understand - and that the prophet, though he was in the hire of the enemies of the people of Israel, was able to hear the word of God from this dumb animal and did what that word asked of him.
Do we shut out the voices of the donkeys around us because - as everybody knows - donkeys can't speak, and thus miss the message that God wants us to hear - the message we need to hear?
One the major problems that we have in this life is that we tend to value comfort over truth, that we prefer the world to work according to the formula that our experience has provided us, rather than to have to adjust our expectations and our ways of doing things according to what is happening.
We tend to live out our expectations and impose them upon others so that the things will work as they we think they should work - rather than allowing the world - allowing God - to shape us and to work for us.
What tremendous gifts we miss out on because of this side of our human nature.
Jesus once said to the religious teachers who gathered around him and who were criticizing him for breaking the law of God as they understood it by healing on the Sabbath Day - and by daring to say that God was his Father.
"You diligently study the scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. And it is the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life"
As it was then - so it is now.
Our knowledge of God - our understanding of the scriptures - our traditions - our formuli for what makes for life all has great value to it - but the risk is that we will not look up from what we already know to actually see God working around us - the risk is that we will immerse ourselves so deeply in those things that are meant to help us encounter God - that we will miss God even when he walks up to us and calls us by name and seeks to gift us with his presence.
We sing here each week before the scriptures are read a verse from the hymn "Open My Eyes That I May See".
We ask God to open our ears that we may hear voices of truth that he sendest clear.
We ask God to illumine us - to show us His will - to set us free. Free from our preconceptions. Free from our judgements. Free to see what is really real - and to live by it - and adapt to it - and to share it rather to simply hear and see and do the same old thng.
Our traditions - our teachings - our understandings - they have great value, like a road map has great value. They help to guide us - they tell us where we are.
But they should not be allowed blind us to the beauty of countryside around us; or to the actual conditions of the roads upon which we are called to travel - or to who is travelling with us.
They should not become a substitute for the actual experience of loving God and entering into a relationship with the living Christ and loving one another as he loves us.
Jesus responded to the question put to him by the Pharisees and the Herodians by giving them an answer that was not an answer that could be turned into a formula - though many have tried ever since.
Just as the words "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's" did not allow the Herodians and the Pharisees to rouse the crowd or the Romans against Jesus - so those words do not tell us exactly what we should do when the demands of the country we are living in seem to contradict the demands of our God.
What they do tell us is that we need to struggle with and pray about every situation in which our civic duties seem to be leading us into activities where our duty to our brothers and sisters is imperiled.
Each person here is made in the image of God. Each one of you "belongs to God".
And God - if you allow it - belongs to you.
Not as a fixed possession that you can box up and use as you see fit when you see fit, but as a partner - a friend - a lover - a companion - who fits you perfectly - one who challenges you to change your ways when you are going astray and who loves you and seeks you out when you have wandered away - one who encourages you when you are down and lifts you up when you fall, - one who works with you - not against you - even when they are rightly angry with you - one who forgives you before you even ask - and who expects and hopes and prays that you will love them in return.
God is here in our world.
God is here in our church.
Christ is in our midst.
In our hearts - if we allow him and in the person next to you - if you will see him.
May you see God where God is to be found and give Him what is due to him.
Blessed be the Lord our God, and Christ Jesus His Only Begotten, And the Spirit that works to make us one. Amen.
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