Day 1777 - You've Got To Serve Sombody

An edited version of a sermon on a hard reading shared with First Presbyterian Church, Spring City, TN Oct. 22, 2017

1 Thessalonians 1: 1-10
Matthew 22: 15-22

See also Philippians 2:14-18

“Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”… What do you think that means?

One commentary, p 634, on Matthew I often read in my preparation for sermons says this about this passage: “Jesus was no Zealot or revolutionary who advocated the overthrow of the Roman government. But neither did he put priority upon loyalty to secular government. If one rendered to the state its restricted due, all the more was one to render to God his unrestricted due (that is), the totality of one’s being and substance, one’s existence, was to be rendered to God and nothing less. Loyalty to Caesar must always be set in the larger context and be relativized by the full submission of the self to God.”

Notice he says, “Render the state its restricted due,” and continues, “All the more (i)s one to render to God his unrestricted due - the totality of one’s being and substance, one’s existence and nothing less.”

I don’t know your reaction, but this statement is a contradiction. How can one give even restricted loyalty to secular government and at the same time, “Render to God the totality of one’s being and substance, one’s existence?”

Perhaps this contradiction is exactly what Jesus intended for us. Certainly, if we search the earlier comments by Jesus in Matthew and in the other gospels, we find a continuing thread that God demands a single-minded loyalty from us. After all, Jesus said, “No man can serve two masters.” This passage isn’t justifying a “two-state solution.”

The evidence is everywhere that a more absolute loyalty is expected. Satan tempted Jesus in Matthew 4: 8-10 with the offer, “Worship me and I’ll give you all the kingdoms of the world.” Jesus replied by quoting Deuteronomy 6:13, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him alone.” In Matthew 12:18-21 Jesus says that he comes to proclaim justice to the nations, implying his higher authority.

Every time Jesus is questioned about his authority his reply points to a demand for loyalty and faith that exceeds anything we give to worldly rulers. It culminated in the questions posed to him before his crucifixion. First the religious leaders ask, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of God?”, and then Pilate asked, “Are you the King of the Jews (implying not Herod).” The answer is “Yes” (or “you say so”) to both questions.

The Christian congregations in the first 200-300 years took these scriptures strictly to heart.  When Jesus says, “Render to God what is due God,” to them it meant everything.

The earliest Christians thought the question by the Herodians about paying the emperor’s tax was heresy. The Herodians were Jews who gave primary loyalty to the Jewish puppet King Herod installed by Rome, not to God. Herodians were the heretics. The early believers took loyalty to God so seriously that they would risk death before wearing the uniform of a Roman soldier (Tertulian, Of The Crown, chapter 11) because service to the state challenged absolute loyalty to God. This is a disturbing position today, but for them, the reason was obvious.

This is what I think is going on with our difficulty with this passage. If you are familiar with the beginnings of the Reformation, particularly the writings of Martin Luther, one of the main objections by Martin Luther to the pope’s authority deals with interpretation of scripture. No person has authority to interpret scripture for another. He based this objection on his translation of  1 Corinthians 14:30 : “If something better is revealed to anyone who is already sitting and listening to another person explaining God’s word, then the one who is speaking shall hold his peace and listen to the other.” 
This is called personal revelation. The problem with personal revelation is that it is personal. (In modern times we say that the grounding of personal revelation is based on prayer and discernment and discussion with others and especially with biblically educated persons. The problem still remains that the majority may well embrace something later perceived as unrighteous, e.g., slavery. But as I will show, this is the inescapable challenge facing Reformed thought!)

Influential religious leaders and their followers in towns and states read scripture with eyes colored by the ideas and cultural values of their particular city or state. All reformed denominations, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopal, and so on, came into existence in this manner.  A city or country embraced the interpretation of one or more of its religious leaders and it became their view of the gospel. (The irony is they didn’t necessarily decide for themselves but let a leader decide!) Each city or state took its interpretation so seriously that if you were an adherent of one of the other denominations and wandered into the city, you risked your life.

This kind of interpretive bias existed also in the earliest congregations up until the Catholic Church came into existence (before 400 CE). There were large followings that claimed only the NT was valid and the entire OT should be rejected. Others (ebionites)  argued that if Jesus was God, then he could not really be present as a man or be killed (Greek influence). The person who was crucified must have been a man who was a stand-in for God. There were many other ideas we know very little about because often the ones who lost the argument often were killed.

Even the idea of the early Church to hold the government at arm’s length inspired by this passage in Matthew gave way in the time of Constantine, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (~300 CE) to the idea that the Empire should protect the Church.

In the Reformation, this church-Roman Empire collaboration became a local government-denomination collaboration. Each denomination relied upon the local government to protect it from other denominations and control general unrighteousness in the community. As an example, John Calvin in Geneva created a session-like body called a consistory. If someone had been sleeping through a sermon, Calvin might have the local sheriff arrest the guy and bring him to the consistory meeting where he would be questioned, “What was the title of my sermon last Sunday?” If the person could not answer satisfactorily, or gave the wrong answer, Calvin had the sheriff sentence the person on bread and water for a time as punishment.

This state-denomination collaboration denied religious liberty to others and led to the founding of the United States and the French Revolution that shattered this state-denomination collaboration. The foundation of freedom and liberty in the United States originally gave all denominations equal protection under the law from persecution, at least in theory (those fleeing persecution found it easy to exercise religious discrimination), so most of us give little thought to this passage in Matthew that says total loyalty to God is demanded of us.

The old idea in the early church that it is wrong to serve in the military is mostly a relic of that church lost in modern times, except in America we offer allowances to some such as the Quakers who take the principle of non-violence symbolized by the life of Christ quite seriously. We give them and others whose conscience does not allow violence forbearance in the demand for military service.

For the most part, we American Christians exercise our patriotism because we shine as an example compared to most governments of the world. We are the source of so much good for the world that we often neglect the evil our leaders do in our name or the name of religion for political reasons. But Christians have an obligation not to overlook the bad things that have been done, and persist, in the name of country such as slavery, lynching, imprisoning people who opened their business on Sunday, imprisoned people who had a different sexual orientation, sending boats arriving in American ports carrying Jews fleeing the death camps to America back to Germany rather than admitting them, condoning the government assassinating leaders and supporting dictators to ensure the flow of oil or other essential resources.

We can argue rightfully the military of Rome was antithetical to Christianity  (Caesar used identical words to Jesus claiming the role of savior) and not comparable to military in democratic countries. But nevertheless, one uncomfortable problem remains - It was pointed out by Reinhold Niebuhr in the years leading up to the United States entering WWII war against Germany. 

The problem is that government and institutions are motivated by self-preservation. Decisions are made at a lower ethical and moral standard in order to ensure that self-preservation than expected of Christians who face eternal life no matter what happens. Jesus says (Luke 12:4,5) “I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!”

Jesus (God) does not let us off easy. This contradiction between what we think is moral and what we think scripture tells us is moral is possible because we live in a world of relative plenty and freedom seldom being required to think about the difference.

There was a great comic in Friday’s Chattanooga Times Free Press, Non Sequitur. It is a single frame with a caption, “The Road Much Less Traveled.” There is a man standing on a path that forks. One fork leads up a steep hill and has a sign beside it that points up the path on the hill. The other fork continues forward on flat ground. Many footprints mark and follow the flat path. There are a few footprints showing some people have stopped, turned and looked up the hill thinking about following that path, but there are no footprints going up the hill. The sign at the fork pointing up the hill says, “The Moral High Ground.” A warning below the arrow says, “Practicing what you preach is required.”

The ultimate problem with the coin holding the image of the emperor’s face is that even today we face that same question and demand for an answer, “Exactly what does it mean to give God what loyalty is due God so that we practice what we believe?”

As a pastor supposedly schooled in good Reformed thought, I can’t stand and tell you what to believe or the right thing to do as a Christian except in the most obvious situations. I can tell you we are in a sail boat on a storm-tossed sea of moral choices, where the storm forces this question constantly, ”What is the right thing to do?” What we can do together is talk and pray as we explore what scripture says and what we think it means to be a loyal Christian so we both do a good job of practicing what we preach.  

       I can assure you from my own personal experience, it is not always comfortable to take loyalty to God seriously but it is the price we pay for believing we must understand and make good decisions and choices in life guided by scripture.  Everybody has to serve somebody. Who do you serve?