21st Sunday after Pentecost

Needless to say that we are just a few weeks away from election day. The yard signs have sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. You can’t open a mailbox, pick up your phone, or sit through a tv show without someone telling you that the world as we know it is at stake and that everything is up to you! Analysts project this election cycle will include $11.6 billion in political advertising, which is the most ever.

To put it plainly: we are being yelled at. And below the surface of all that yelling is another language that we know all too well. It uses words like salvation. Evil. Sacred. Redeem. The soul of the nation. Somewhere along the way, the church’s vocabulary got co-opted by our politics.

Today's readings walk straight into that mess. The first thing to notice in our readings is that nobody is neutral. Everybody has an angle. Let's start with the people who bring Jesus the coin. Matthew tells us that the question posed by the Pharisees’ proxies is not sincere. "The Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said." They send their own disciples, along with the Herodians. The Pharisees resented Rome's occupation while the Herodians profited from cooperating with it. But they share a problem, which is Jesus, and so they form a coalition of convenience.

First comes the flattery. "Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one." Which is true. It's the truest thing anyone says in the whole story. But it’s said by the people believe it the least.

Then comes the question: "Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?" It's a perfect trap, because there are only two answers, and each one will cost Jesus. Say yes, and you've sided with the occupier and you lose the crowd. Say no, and you've committed sedition, and the Herodians will be more than happy to report you to Rome. Yes or no. Left or right. Us or them. Honestly, nothing has changed. How much of public life today is built upon exactly that structure?

In response, Jesus does something wonderful. He refuses to play their game. They try and hang him on the horns of a dilemma and instead he jumps right through them. And he does so with a question of his own. "Show me the coin used for the tax." Jesus doesn't have one himself. But they do. Right there, in the midst of the temple, his opponents produce a denarius from their own pockets. This coin carried the emperor's image and a title declaring him to be the son of god. For an observant Jew it was offensive, and yet they're carrying it around anyway.

Jesus closes the trap on the very people who set it. "Whose head is this, and whose title?" "Caesar's." "Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."

Before I took my faith seriously and really started studying scripture, I probably would have chalked this up as a tidy division of labor. Caesar gets the money, God gets the church, and ne’er the twain shall meet. But that’s not what Jesus is after. Remember the question he just asked: whose image is this? Any Jewish listener would hear that and immediately turn to scripture. Where else do we hear about an image? In the first chapter of Genesis, where God creates humankind in the God’s own image. The coin bears Caesar's face. Whose face do you bear?

When we talk about what belongs to God, we’re not talking about some small corner of life left over after Caesar takes his cut. Psalm 24 tells us, "The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it". Caesar can have his coins. They're stamped with his face; fine, let him have them. But the people holding the coins are stamped with another face entirely.

That is why this story ends the way it does: "they were amazed, and they left him and went away." Jesus has answered a question about taxes, and in doing so asks everyone listening a question about who they really belong to.

In the reading from Isaiah, the prophet is speaking to an Israel that’s in exile. They’ve lost everything: their land, their temple, and their king. God announces that the instrument of their deliverance will be Cyrus, the king of Persia. He’s a foreign emperor, he’s a pagan, and he’s a man who will never worship the God of Israel. And God calls him anointed, the word that in Hebrew means messiah, a title otherwise reserved for Israel's own kings. "I call you by your name; I give you a title, though you do not know me." God is not confined to any one tribe, party, or nation. God is willing to use a foreign king to accomplish a divine purpose.

There are two cautions built into the passage. The first is a caution to Cyrus, and to every other powerful person or nation since. "I arm you, though you do not know me." In other words, whatever Cyrus accomplishes, it’s not because of him. He is an instrument of a greater power. Empires and governments always want to believe that history is about them. Isaiah says no: "I am the Lord, and there is no other." Whoever holds power has it only on loan.

The second caution is to us. Cyrus is God's instrument in this moment, but it’s not forever. Isaiah doesn't give Israel a permanent endorsement of Cyrus. A government can do something good, and we can be grateful for it, without confusing it with the Kingdom of Heaven. And a government can do something troubling, and we can name it, without concluding that God has abandoned the world.

"I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things." That is a staggering claim. And what it means is that no human power, whether it's one we love or one we fear, gets the final word.

If we put Isaiah and Jesus side by side, we see that they’re saying essentially the same thing. God is not captive to any empire, and no empire can fully contain God’s people. We belong to something bigger than any people or nation.

But here’s the problem. We hear that and we nod our heads and we say, “Sure.” Most of us assume that faith is our first language. We believe certain things about God and our neighbor, and those beliefs shape our politics. But that’s not always the direction in which the arrow points. We see it in how quickly we can tell which news source a person trusts by the way they talk about any number of hot-button issues. I see it in how we can quote a headline from memory and stumble over the Beatitudes. Sometimes politics becomes our first language, and faith is the second one. Rather than faith informing our politics, our politics informs our faith.

Kate Bowler, who comes from a Mennonite tradition that has been wary of church and state for five hundred years, says the question can’t be avoided: when should faith shape our politics, and when should we beware that politics is shaping our faith? I’d like us to sit with that, because it’s a question for both sides. It’s a question for every one of us.

Let’s make that a little more concrete. Take the word “Christian.” It has become so politically coded that some believers hesitate to use it in public, because of what the listener might assume. There have been times when that has been my own experience.

So, how do we figure out where we are? Here’s a little test. When you hear a headline that raises your blood pressure, what do you reach for first: the categories of your party, or the categories of Jesus? When you describe a neighbor who votes differently than you, whose words are in your mouth? Where did you learn what Christianity sounds like in public?

Augustine asked a version of this question sixteen centuries ago, as Rome crumbled around him. He wrote that you can understand a people by what they love. Not by their borders or their flag, but by what they love in common. And then he asked the harder question: are those things worth loving? I love that question, because it isn’t “which side are you on?” It isn’t the Pharisees’ trap. It asks what we love, and whether it deserves our love.

This doesn’t mean we withdraw. In fact, it means just the opposite. No human power has the final say, because our faith frees us to take part in public life without fear and without having to worship somebody. Jeremiah wrote to exiles in Babylon, who had every reason to disengage from a hostile empire: "But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare" (Jeremiah 29:7). Seek the welfare of the city. Pray for it. Work for it. Even this one.

A Christian is never only a citizen. As Christians we know where our ultimate loyalty lies. And that knowledge frees us to participate more honestly, not less.

So, here’s what we render to Caesar. We pay our taxes. We obey laws that are just. We vote if we're able, and we do so prayerfully. We take our responsibilities as neighbors and citizens seriously. These are real obligations, and we should do them without contempt or complaint.

And here is what we do not render to Caesar: our ultimate trust, and our neighbor. We do not hand over our hope. We do not let any candidate or party decide who counts as a neighbor. And we do not let the machinery of politics, the ads and the algorithms and the urgent fundraising emails, train us in contempt. Because remember, somebody else literally profits when we despise one another.

God asks something different of us. What does faithfulness look like when we disagree? When contempt is so much easier than curiosity? When we’re estranged, or just quietly distant, from people who vote differently than we do? I know that, like me, some of you carry that as well. I know there are tables at Thanksgiving that feel like they’re being set with land mines. I know there are people you haven’t spoken to in a long time, and I know it hurts. I won’t tell you that every estrangement can or should be repaired. Some can’t. Honestly, some shouldn’t. Loving your neighbor has never meant staying where you’re being harmed.

But listen to what comes right after our Gospel reading for today. In the very next story, a lawyer asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest. Jesus has just spent an entire conversation refusing to be sorted into a team. And what does he say in response to the lawyer? “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love of God. Love of neighbor. And we saw earlier whose image the neighbor bears. That includes the neighbor who voted the other way. It doesn’t mean you agree with them. It doesn’t mean you stay quiet about what you believe is right. It means you don’t get to stop seeing the image they bear.

So, what does that look like? Honestly, it’s small stuff. It’s asking a question you actually want the answer to. It’s listening to the end of the sentence, and listening to learn. It’s not forwarding the latest outrage. And it’s like this: the group text is lighting up, someone you love has posted something that really raises your dander, and you have the perfect, devastating reply already typed. And you put the phone down. That’s not weakness. That’s someone who knows whose title is on them, and on the person who posted.

Jesus asks, "Whose head is this, and whose title?" And everyone knows the answer. Caesar's. But the deeper question is, “Whose title is on you?” In a few moments we'll come to a table where nobody checks your voter registration. This is the place where we are reminded whose image we bear. We were claimed before we ever registered with a party. We were named before anyone ever polled us or targeted us with an ad.

"I call you by your name," says the Lord. "I give you a title." That doesn’t make the election unimportant. It puts the election in its proper place. Whoever wins, and whoever loses, we will still belong to the One who calls us by name.

So go and vote. Pay what you owe. Seek the welfare of the city. Speak kindly of people you disagree with. And let faith be, again, your first language. Because the coin in your pocket will wear down and be replaced. The image you bear will not. AMEN