Grace and peace to you, from God our Father, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
When I was reading the text for this sermon, my first thought (as Im sure many of you will have in a moment) was, oh goody, another sermon on money and tax.
The verse that is the basis for the sermon is from Matthew Chapter 22, verses 15-22, and in particular the second part of verse 21: “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”.
There are two things that are certain in life: Death, and Taxes. And as we will see, both of these certainties are implied in this reading.
In todays reading, the Pharisees sent their disciples along with the Roman authorities to test Jesus. To try and trap him in his own words. They buttered him up with empty words of flattery. They said that his teachings were good and that he taught in truth about the kingdom of heaven. And then, they sprung their question, Should we be paying taxes to Caesar?
What could Jesus answer??? If he said not to pay taxes he would be arrested for treason against the Roman Empire as many had been not 20 years earlier. And if he said that they must pay taxes he would lose many of his followers and be charged by the Jewish authorities for blasphemy, as he would have been elevating the position of Caesar to an almost god like status (which was in fact the reason for the Roman tax).
But instead of answering in the way both the Romans and the Pharisees expected, he made them think about their motives and who they served. Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. The face and the inscription of the Caesar was on the tax coin, and you could only pay the tax with the Roman coin. But to give to God what is God’s was the emphasis Jesus was getting at.
So what belongs to God?
In the Psalms, in the prophets, in the 10 Commandments and in the whole Christian Faith, we see that Everything belongs to the Lord. Why? Because He created everything. Everything that we have, is a gift from God. Our life is the Lord’s, our health, our sickness, our wealth, and our poverty, our joy and our sorrow, our time and even our death. All belong to the Lord.
So what should we render the Lord?... Everything, both the good and the bad belongs to God. Pretty heavy? Yep! But this is what God was showing the pharisees in these verses. He even called them hypocrites because they had forgotten this simple truth, they had forgotten who they were called to be and who they were to serve. Instead of following their calling and serving the Lord, they chased after their own cause, and their worldly agenda.
How messed up were these Pharisees? They had Jesus right there in front of them, to teach them the truth of the kingdom of God so that they could come to praise and worship Him in spirit and in truth. They had God’s Son right there in their midst and still they didn’t listen.
And yet; how very much like the pharisees are we? And how much more guilty are we than they? We don’t have Jesus sitting next to us, teaching us the way they did... We have Jesus in us! We have the Holy Spirit with us! And we have God our Father for us!... God shows us daily that He is the one true God, that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is because He has given it to us... And yet; still we ask: “what shall we render the Lord”.
We are to render to God everything that is God’s. Our lives, our time and our possessions. There is nothing we should not give the Lord. For all is His, because He created everything.
This is how we truly fear, love and trust in God above all things.
But still we have Jesus command to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s...
Having heard all that it is to serve God and that we are to give everything to Him. What have we got left to render to Caesar?
We have already answered the question: What is God’s? And we have learnt that everything is His for He created it all. We also learnt that their is nothing in our lives that God does not deserve. So doesn’t this also include our government?
God has placed governments in our land, to be good stewards of his creation, and to create laws to help and assist us within God’s creation. So, if God has asked us to render to Him all that is His; doesn’t this mean that to serve God we are to serve the government that He has placed in a position of authority over us? It only makes sense then, that paying taxes to Caesar, or to our government is a way that we render to God what is God’s. This is not to say that the government is a god, but that God is ultimately the one who has placed these officials in our land.
And now we come to the most important question of this reading... We have heard that we are to render to to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. But we all know that we can’t do this, not on our own anyway. We constantly fall into the trap of grumbling about those whom God has chosen to lead and protect us. So how is it possible to truly serve the Lord our God, in spirit and in truth?
It is only possible because Christ our crucified saviour has given to himself to us. We can only render to God what is God’s because He has first rendered Himself to us.
At baptism, God gives himself to us with His name and with water. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit we are rendered to God. And this is the exact point I wanted to make with my opening sentence. There are only two things in life that are certain, death and taxes.
In Baptism, sin is put to death, God drowns the curse of death and makes us truly alive.
Tax as we know is an annual event. Every July we lodge our tax forms and we pray that we have withheld enough tax during the year to prevent a huge tax bill. But unlike tax, we daily sin, and as a result our death needs to be made a daily event. In a way I guess we could call it a sin tax. We need to daily ask God to kill the old sinful self, and daily ask God, our Heavenly Father to forgive us our sins, because we can not pay this tax on our own.
Death my friends needs to be a daily event.
When we confess our sins to God and to one another we ask God to forgive us for all the wrong which we have done. We confess that we are born in sin and that we cannot free our selves. And We promise too, that with the help of the Holy Spirit we will live a holy life even as Christ has made us holy. THIS IS OUR DAILY DEATH.
Our daily rebirth, or, our daily tax return, are the words we hear after we confess our sins. We hear that our Father, has had mercy on us, that He gave his only Son to die for us, and for His sake forgives us our sins.
Both our daily death and our daily rebirth is only possible because of Christ death and resurrection. Through baptism into the Triune God, and through our daily death and rebirth, God renders himself to us. He makes us His children, and as such gives us the ability to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.
And the peace of God, which passes all human understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Amen
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