Death and Taxes (sermon)

>Do you like to be scared? Do you like to be “jump three feet off the ground and scream like a girl” scared? Do startling noises, people popping out from behind a tree, ghost stories, amusement park rides, skydiving—take your pick—do they get the old adrenaline flowing and make you feel alive? Do you like to be scared?

The youth group was having a discussion on Facebook this past week about the possibility of going to Nightmare New England—which I take is a scary place, right? The talk centered around the cost and the timing. Someone inferred that it was too pricey, and that money better be used for the New Orleans trip. That received little attention from the kids. Then someone suggested they go Sunday evening--tonight..

At which point I chimed in and reminded them about confirmation class that evening. (Major buzz kill.) To which a certain youth leader who shall remain nameless (Tall Guy), posted his response—a comment on the idea of saving the money which ended up with “Besides confirmation might just be scarier than Nightmare New England!”

Some scary things can also be fun. Like Nightmare New England, roller coasters, horror movies, and confirmation. But there are other scary things that aren’t any fun at all. They’re just scary. Things like cancer. Scary. I remember when I was diagnosed with cancer almost twenty years ago. I almost passed out. Horrifying. Parenthood—that’s scary stuff. To think that every decision you make has the potential of an adverse if not catastrophic effect on your child. Bone chilling! And how about waiting up for your teenager to get home with the car—those are scary thoughts that run through your head.

Since September 11^th we have a communal fear: terrorism—an always just below the surface anxiety that’s periodically summoned up by the media or politicians to scare us some more. The senselessness of it and it’s random cold-heartedness makes terrorism a frightening thing indeed.

But nothing—not the avian flu, nor triple E, nor tainted tomatoes, lead laden toys, or melamined milk—nothing puts fear in our good old American consumer hearts like the happenings on Wall Street these past two weeks. Talk about your roller coasters. The Dow was going up and down so sharply you could loose an eye just looking at the graph.

Couple that with a still-depressed housing market, a mortgage foreclosure meltdown, several of the world’s biggest and most trusted financial corporations failing and having to be bailed out by the fed—and couple all that with a rise in food and oil prices, plus a $700 billion stimulus package, dwarfed only by the 1 trillion $ national debt and the estimated $2 trillion loss in value of 401ks—Take into consideration all of that, squeeze all that into your head, then add a 24 hour a day news cycle that is constantly stirring the pot and adding any ingredient that will keep glassy-eyed viewers tuned in—no matter how outrageous or inflammatory, and you have a scary situation indeed. Monster in the closet scary, boogie man scary, flying monkeys scary!

And yet, no one—no one—not the Federal government, or the news media, or the political candidates, not even Joe Sixpack or Joe the Plumber—no one—no one dares use the dreaded “R” word. They’ll go right up to the line in their commentary and proposals, but they won’t say that R word. You know the word I’m talking about, right? What is it? (recession) Oh no, not that r word. This one: repentance.

Repentance. Literally it means turning around 180 degrees. Figuratively it means to change one’s mind, to forsake a direction you’ve headed in that has proved false or dangerous, to set your face in a new and sure direction. Repentance is most associated with sin and forgiveness—it being the cessation of sin and the catalyst that results in a spiritual reaction of forgiveness.

In the financial scenario previously described one could quite easily jump on the fundamentalist bandwagon and think that God is punishing us for something—greed, gluttony, usury, or right to life or gay marriage, or some equally non-tangential causality. And that if we only repented and returned to being a Godly nation like we were in the good old days, then everything would be coming up roses once again. The Dow would rise from the dead and AIG could go on that fancy retreat—heck we all could! There fixed—easy as apple pie. Ha! If only it were that clear cut, that black and white, that ultimately controllable by our actions.

Cause it’s not. It’s scarier because it’s not an easy fix. But neither is it God punishing us, despite what Yahweh seems to say in the first reading—“I am the Lord and there is no other, I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things.” True nothing happens in all of creation without God’s hand in it somehow. But the idea that God punishes us on such a grand scale is very scary indeed. For that would implicate God in the wanton destruction of innocent human life. That’s not the God personified in Jesus Christ. That’s not the God that we call Father. That’s not the God we have in our very being through the indwelling of the holy Spirit.

I prefer to believe that God lets us punish ourselves. With the consequences of our actions. We don’t share the bounty of the earth equitably, and so people starve to death. We spew pollutants into the air for a half a millennium, and so the global climate changes. Or…or, or we lose touch with reality when it comes to money, and so the house of cards collapses, and we are convulsed with fear and doom. What do I mean by losing touch with reality when it comes to money?

The Pharisees tried to entrap Jesus by asking him if it was lawful to pay tax to the Emperor. If he answered “no” they’d have him arrested as a tax evader and general rabble rouser. If “yes” than he’d be about as popular with the crowds as a guy wearing a Rays shirt in Fanneuil Hall.

But Jesus isn’t falling for their con game. He asks for a coin of the realm. And they instantly produce one (even though foreign currency is not allowed in the temple, not to mention the graven image of a false god, Caesar, stamped on it!) He asks them, “Whose picture is on it.” “The emperor’s,” they answer. And then Jesus zings them. “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” OOOO!

But wait a minute here—wait just a second here. Did Jesus just say the emperor and God are two mutually exclusive entities in this equation? That there are some things that belong just to Caesar, and the rest is God’s?/ Isn’t everything God’s? “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” as it says in the Psalms. How could anything be Caesar’s? Aren’t Caesar’s coins actually God’s? Isn’t the majesty of Caesar’s palace in Rome really God’s? And by the way—isn’t even Caesar himself God’s own creation?

So what gives? Is Jesus saying that we should obey the government, and not mix that up with obeying him? Kind of. Let’s return to where this excursus began, and that is with the statement “we have lost touch with the reality of money.”

The reality of money is that money is not God. It is a false God. A very potent one. And quite often, we unwittingly worship that false god. For all the things we believe it does for us. We think it makes us happy, when in reality it makes us restless for more. We think it is our security, when in reality it leaves us open to calamities like we have experienced in the global economy. We think money buys power, prestige and admiration, when in reality it only leases those commodities.

The big problem for us is that we can get carried away by money, and then it begins to rule us—which it does not through excess, but by scarcity. How many of you usually know day by day what the Dow Jones has done by the closing bell. Not many. Now, how many of you kept watch over it last week like a mother hen with her chicks? We get real interested when the stocks go down and down and down. Scarcity – the news is far more scary when the blue chips are down. When they’re up, the news that hundreds of families were being forced from their homes is oh so ho-hum. And I doubt any of us got out of our Mutual Funds, so as not to share in big oil’s windfall. Scarcity grabs our attention by hitting us right where we live.

Scarcity even effects the way we talk here in church. Lately there’s been lots of talk about money—mostly concerning a lack of it. We voted in a deficit budget. And we’re about to run that deficit. And in presenting that information to you, we may have scared you—perhaps it’s fairer to say we wanted to scare you. Because we were scared.

But that all is scarcity mentality. And it can take over if left to its own devices. It can even replace God as our ultimate concern (to borrow Tillich’s definition), the thing that matters most to us. When what our eyes, ears, hands and mouths should be attending to is the abundance God has given us. An abundance of talent, of resources, of kindheartedness, of compassion, or work to be doing. We’ve looked away from God’s abundance and fixed our gaze on this seeming shortfall. Well, I’m here to tell you: that’s Caesar’s attitude, and we should give Caesar what is Caesar’s

We should repent. Stop what we’re doing. Turn away from seeing a half empty cup, and turn towards the God whose love is an ever flowing font. For you see, the key to the gospel passage for today is not in the question that the Pharisees ask Jesus. It in his answer—which has little to do with taxes, coins, or emperors. Jesus’ answer to those Pharisees is both a promise and a challenge.

A promise of the steadfastness of God’s love for all creation and his true dominion over all. We say, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Jesus says, “God’s love is stronger than death and you don’t need to fill out a lot of forms to get it.” God’s love is certain, and it is abundant. And spreading that good news to anyone on the highways and byways of Hillsborough county is where we have focused our ministry historically, and it will continue to be—if we approach our mission not from a deficit position, but from a surplus waiting to be tapped. If we approach the upcoming Mission Freedom debt reduction campaign not from an attitude of paying our debts, but of giving to God from the abundance that is God’s.. The Mission Focus process that we have just entered into will help us discern how to do that—but for now, I can think of no better way to begin than to repent.

So—do you repent of an attitude of scarcity? (I repent!)

Do you repent of putting money before mission, budget before blessings?

Do you repent of trying to blame our anxieties about money on others?

Do you repent of staying silent in church when it comes to talking about money?

And finally, do you offer your repentance freely? (I do!)

Now that wasn’t so scary was it? And a whole lot more fun than paying your taxes. And now that we’re facing God and his abundance, we can move forward. Amen