Poolesville Presbyterian Church
10.16.11; Rev. David Williams
Money is power.
This, to be quite frank, is a difficult thing for many Jesus people to choke out of their voicebox. We’re not comfortable with either of these things on their own, and when you put them together, the discomfort gets magnified. Money and power go together like peanut butter and chocolate, or like bacon and pretty much any other edible object, and many inedible objects.
So they tell me, anyway.
Christians fumble around when we talk about money, I think, because we know deep down how closely it is interwoven with power. What is power?
It’s the ability to assert your will in the world to make something happen. It’s a physical thing. If I want to bench press 250 pounds, I apply force with my pectorals and triceps, and lo and behold, absolutely nothing happens. Other than my turning beet red and grunting out some unpastorly words, that is. The message from the engine room is clear: “We just don’t have the power, Captain.”
Within human societies, power takes on other forms. It’s the ability to not just do what you can physically do, but to get other human beings to do things that you want them to. If your car breaks down, and you don’t have 10 strong guys riding the car with you, you can always hand some bills over to a tow truck driver, and lo and behold, that car moves. Currency helps us get things done. It buys us gas. It gets us lunch.
Money is power.
Money can get things done because underlying it is the raw coercive power of the state. Human beings together have agreed that the way we’ll measure power between one another is by a means of exchange, be that greenbacks or conch shells, and we’ll enforce that exchange by the state. Anyone who decides they’ll step outside of that system will get stomped on by that system.
That peculiar, inescapable fusion between wealth and power is the reason for the stirrings and hummings at the heart of many American cities this Fall. As the tents of the Occupy movement sprout up, in New York, and in DC, but for some reason not yet here in Poolesville, it can be hard to tell exactly what the folks there are demonstrating. The drum circles and dances and handmade cardboards signs do say it, though it can be hard to parse out from the chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, something something has got to go.” In essence, these...um...slightly chaotic protests are saying:
Power is out of balance.
So how do folks who have committed to following Jesus of Nazareth deal with this strange form of power?
For an answer to that, let’s turn to today’s interesting little story from the Gospel of Matthew. This is one of those stories that we get from three out of four Gospels, in pretty much identical form. It also appears in Luke 20:20-26, and in what was likely its earliest form in Mark 12:13-17, what many scholars believe was the first Gospel to take written form.
No matter what the Gospel, Jesus is having another run-in with the Pharisees, who have determined that he posed a threat to their belief system, and are trying to get him into trouble with the law. They start by flattering him a little bit. “We know that you teach the way of God in accordance with truth,” they coo. “You do not regard people with partiality.” That’s a baseline for being just in Torah, one we see in Deuteronomy 1:16-17. According to the covenant law, a truly just judge doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor. It’s a genuine compliment.
Then again, when people you know have an axe to grind with you show up and start buttering you up, it’s a sure sign they’re hoping to eat you alive. Particularly if it’s butter flavored with bacon, although given that these were Pharisees, that wasn’t really a very kosher option.
They ask him a question that they think can have no correct answer. That question is simply this: Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar?
It was a very well conceived trap.
On the one hand, if Jesus answered yes, it meant that he was willing to use Roman money on which was inscribed assertions of the emperor’s divinity. For many devout Jews at the time, this meant that you were assenting to the emperor as a god, and betraying the God of Israel. It also meant you were supporting the hated occupiers of the Holy Land, accepting the power of Roman society as legitimate. So you couldn’t answer yes, or you were a traitor to the Jewish people.
On the other hand, if you answered no, it meant that you were a dangerous revolutionary, a threat to the Empire. The Roman authorities didn’t look kindly on people who refused to pay their taxes. So you couldn’t answer no, or you were a threat to Rome.
Jesus was not so easily taken in. Given the choice of saying yes or now, he didn’t say either. He just told everyone to look at the coin, and see who was on it. It was the emperor, of course. So give him what belongs to him, and give God what belongs to God. It was a perfect answer, both yes and no, neither yes nor no. I’m not sure any modern day politicians could have done better. The trap his enemies had set for him snapped closed on empty air, and they were stunned. Jesus had evaded them.
That evasion is the primary purpose of this little snippet of scripture, but there are implications within it for our relationship with that odd form of power that comes from wealth.
First, the power of money is social. It is not real, not in the way that the sun is real or you or I are real. It has no objective reality. It belongs, instead, to Caesar, to the structures of culture and nation, which we totally make up as we go along. It’s like a game, or a dance. In this passage, Jesus founds his response to the question of taxation in the distinction between what belongs to society, what belongs to the rules of the game we’ve made up, and what belongs to God.
The power of God is not like the power conferred by money. It’s the power of existence, of life, of being, of everything that is and everything that we are. It is not mediated by anything. It is direct. In that, we need to understand that our relationship to our Maker is nothing like that relationship we have with wealth. It is far deeper, more central, and more defining.
Second, and related to number one, the power that comes from wealth has no relationship to your value as a human being, or as a child of God. It may speak to your social standing, or the material success of your endeavors within the social sphere. But when it comes to you, your heart, your soul, and your integrity as a person, wealth means nothing.
We’d like to think it does, particularly if we’re doing well for ourselves. There are entire branches of popular theology that would tell us that we’re somehow superior spiritually if we’re materially well off. This is simply not so. In our relationship with God, what matters is our commitment to integrity and grace and kindness. We are not to be partial, after all. Letting social power color our value of another being..or of ourselves...is a sign that we don’t understand God’s covenant justice.
Third, money is not inherently evil. Jesus does not say, “EEEEEW! Money! Don’t touch it! Don’t touch it!” Within the sphere of our social interactions, it can be useful, just as any expression of human power can be useful. It can help us care for others. It can feed the hungry, and clothe the naked. It can be a tool for justice, just as our lives can be such a tool. It can rebuild and restore. But it can also be harmful.
It becomes harmful when it creates division between us, when it becomes the thing that allows us to value one person more than another, or feel either inferior or superior to others around us. It can become harmful when it becomes a means of control, or a source of resentment, throwing everything out of balance. Then, it can tear apart relationships, shatter communities, and destroy societies.
To tame that power, we have to to recognize the limitations of wealth. Its power is something we create. We have to recognize the limitations of wealth. It does not define our integrity as human beings, and cannot be allowed to define our relationships with one another, and our relationship with God.
And as we assert our wills into the world, as we turn our whole hearts and minds and souls to loving God, and to loving neighbor as ourselves, we have to be sure that we’ve not forgotten that everything...even the things we’ve made up...needs to be a part of that. That demands our all.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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