October 18, 2026

I want to start with a brief commentary about where we are in the gospel of Matthew this week, last week, where we'll be for a little bit yet, and to make a comment about that in the context of where we are as a society and a moment in time in our own lived experience. Being just a few mere weeks away from our midterm election cycle, I suspect that this encounter between Jesus and these Jerusalemite elders, these Herodians, those in the know and kind of people of influence in Jerusalem, is not an unfamiliar scene to us if we understand what is happening. Just last chapter, in chapter 21, Jesus has had his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and now, over the course of chapter 22, going into chapter 23, we have these series of dialogues and confrontations and experiences of kind of complicated nuance between Jesus and these different leaders, but overarchingly, theme and the kind of takeaway here is that they're constantly playing these gotcha games with Jesus. Not dissimilar to what we're probably hearing if any of you have the energy or capacity to kind of follow the political situation right now. I certainly am struggling to have that level of engagement. But you will find more and more frequently today this kind of framing, very similar to what we have in this gospel, where questions are posed or asked of politicians with this intentional entrapment. There's not a clear right answer. The idea is, I can ask you something, and no matter how you reply to it, I can spin it in some sort of negative way. And that's precisely what's happening here.

If Jesus, on the one hand, had said, well, of course you should pay taxes to the emperor without any kind of ambiguity, that would have set him in opposition to the majority of the Jewish community in Jerusalem who felt the burden and the oppression of this tax structure. And they knew that. They knew, ah, if you reply this way, we'll be able to pit you against all of these people who seemingly have some kind of regard and respect for you.

But on the other hand, if he had said, well, clearly you should oppose this tax structure. It's oppressive. It's causing us harm. It's not liberating us to live our lives in peaceable ways. They could say, ah, see, you're opposing the state. You are in opposition to the emperor. You're a rabble rouser, and we can get you in trouble with the authorities. They thought they had him perfectly positioned in order to spend this negatively. But as so often is the case, Jesus replies in a way that completely throws them off guard and disorients them where they're left essentially speechless and in wonder of his adeptness.

But I want to back up for a moment and really start in a different location, that little preface aside. I speak a lot about my family from Texas, my dad's side of the family, and how meaningful and kind of influential their experience has been on my life. But I was equally shaped and formed by my mom's family, and especially thinking about my maternal grandfather. He was born on a mountaintop called Petit Jean Mountain. If you read it, it's actually pronounced, or it's spelled more like Petit Jean in the French, but in the patois of Arkansans, it's Petit Jean.

He grew up in a tiny little town called Saugahatchee, Arkansas. It almost looks Welsh with all the weird combinations of consonants and vowels in it. But he told me one time, the year that I was studying abroad in China, the year actually that Julie and I met in Shanghai, we were talking over Skype, the kind of predecessor to Zoom. And he said, when I was growing up, Little Rock, just a mere 50, 60 miles from Saugahatchee, Little Rock was the other side of the world. We could not even conceive of what big city life looked like for those in Little Rock. That was just so far beyond our reach, so far beyond our scope of life, that it was a completely different planet, a completely different world. And now here you, my grandson, are 70 years later, 75 years later, literally living on the other side of the world.

That parochialism, that sort of closed system of awareness was radically expanded for him in the course of his life. That he had so much more robust and bigger of a picture of what the world looks like in its fullness. And I was thinking about that this week. Because in my own life experience, in my own Christian background, so often, teachings like this one today, which I suspect some of us have some familiarity with, it's a very famous passage, a very famous interaction Jesus has with the pharisaical and Herodian authorities here. It has often a provincialism for us. We think about it in the limited scope of our own U.S. American experience. You know, I remember in the tradition I grew up in these kind of snide remarks about the oppressiveness of the tax system that we live in in the United States. How we are forced to pay for things that are diametrically opposed to our Christian faith. How we live lives of oppression as Christians in this country, that we are not free to exercise our faith in a fullness and robustness.

And to some degree, I see that even in our current discourse. Sometimes folks kind of on the opposite end of the political spectrum today talk about the fascism of this administration, how we are experiencing this oppressive and constraining reality at the top of our country that do not let us exercise with freedom the principles that we have of caring for our refugee neighbors, caring for the marginalized. And friends, on both ends of that reality, the kind of conservative experience of that that I grew up with, this more progressive lens that you hear maybe some more prominently today, I want to really push back on that for a moment because for all of our warts and faults as a country, we are far more secure, far more safe, far more better off than so many of our brothers and sisters in so many other parts of the world.

To truly understand the fulsome reality of this challenge that Jesus is confronting today, we have to get beyond our provincialism, beyond our own little sort of fascinations with U.S. tax systems, and think about what it really means to be within a political social system that is truly oppressive, that is truly resistant to the life and flourishing of Christians, of Christian communities, of people of good faith and honesty.

This past week, that was really brought to mind for me, because from Thursday evening until yesterday, I had the opportunity to spend a significant amount of time with Archbishop Hossam Naom, our Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem. As I've shared before, I serve on the board of an organization called the American Friends of the Diocese of Jerusalem. And we had our biannual board meeting in D.C. these last several days. And Archbishop Hossam is an Israeli-Palestinian. You might hear that as a contradiction in terms, but it is not. He is Palestinian by ethnicity, Israeli by citizenship. And he knows intimately the reality of living in the in-betweenness of today's parable. What it means to participate in a political structure that is oppressive, that often subjugates his people, his family, his community in second-class citizenship statuses, if not even worse.

And yet, what does it mean to render to Caesar what is Caesar's? To nevertheless participate in the structures of governance, to be a part of a larger society seeking and desiring to make it better, transform it to something more compassionate, more holistic, more embracing of all. And to do that while simultaneously seeking the things of the kingdom, living in these transformed lives and transformed ways, even now in the midst of such great oppression.

When we turn on our nightly news every day, all we are confronted with is the depth of the struggle, the complexity and the tragedy and the challenge of life in that region. And yet in the midst of that, with an almost supernatural grace, he is able to offer a vision for not rejecting and outrightly opposing the fullness of the state, while simultaneously recognizing the places where it needs to be transformed and made anew. To render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.

And that is but one example. I think back to ten years ago during my time at Virginia Seminary in Alexandria. My classmate Vijayathan Daniel from Sri Lanka. My classmate Saw Nikamwe from Myanmar, Burma, depending on how you name it, what side of certain political realities you exist on. The great struggle and challenge that both of them faced and lived being Christians in inhospitable environments with the challenges and travails that that brings forth. And yet, nevertheless, to be a part of a larger political system, to find ways of being agents of change towards the good in those systems, rendering within those systems the things that belong to them, and holding fast to the things of God, to the things of true and lasting permanence in the kingdom.

It really begins to put into perspective the realities of our own context, the limited and incomplete ways that we so often try to maximize our own perspective, that we think we are the end-all be-all of these realities. And yet, when we really take seriously the fulsomeness of our human experience, we have a much grander, much more expansive vision for what God in Christ is calling out of us and calling us into.

But then again, provincialism is not all bad. And there is a question before us. What does it mean for us in our context to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's? What is the call to us in our experience that Jesus is pointing to in today's gospel passage?

We too have these same struggles, maybe in less dramatic, less intense ways, but we are not dissimilar from our first century friends in Jerusalem falling into these bifurcations, where we see either this issue of taxation and estate being a challenge, or in another regard, this lack of robustness in the church, that we don't feel like the church is doing what it should do, that there's an opposition there. We so often find ourselves concretely stepping in one camp or the other, and so very rarely living into the reality of these kind of ambiguous in-between spaces that seem so often the heart of Jesus's ministry and his own life, bringing together folks across all of these myriad places of division and boundary setting. Living into a reality that transforms and transcends those divisions and barriers of separation.

Here in Montgomery County, we can spend unlimited amounts of time grousing about our own taxation, grousing about the things that our local governance does or does not do. And then we just layer that on: the complaints we have about the way the state is handling things or the national system of governance is handling things. We get really excised about where our tax dollars are being spent and how we think things should be done in better and different ways.

And yet, if we come back to Jesus' point here, we are to look beyond those realities, to not break the bifurcation in a way of siding with one camp or the other, but instead to seek transformation beyond the noise, to break down the bifurcation, break down the division, offer the way of the kingdom in place of the way of the world, and to render to the world the things that are of the world, to participate in the things of this place, of this time, of this material circumstance that we find ourselves in as citizens of this country, of this state, of this community. And yet, even in the midst of that, to live ever more transformationally into the things of the kingdom that are not the impermanence of this place, but are the things of lasting substance and truth.

And we will be surprised when we do that, because the reality is the judgments, the places of limited view that we often live our lives with, that is an unavoidable reality for us, get upended, dislocated and transformed. And we see that. For those of you who have been participating in the Bible study, this won't come as a surprise. But we see that in our Old Testament lesson. Because Cyrus, named here at the very beginning of this passage from Isaiah, is a king on the outside. He is not of the people of the book. He is in many ways diametrically opposed to the Israelites and their lived experience.

And yet what does it say of God? The Lord has anointed him. Cyrus is the anointed of the Lord. This one who is the outsider, this one who is the opposer, is the anointed. And again and again, what does it say of Cyrus? But that he will be utilized to bring forth the kingdom. Even, as God says over and over again, you do not know me.

And so very often, when we see realities like that for us, it is very easy for us to simply write off and reject the one who we see as the other, the one who does not fit our expectation for what an anointed of the Lord looks like. And yet again and again when we seek the things of the kingdom, we are surprised by the places and ways in which the kingdom shows up.

And so as we move forward, practically, in the fraught and fitful ways that we do, seeking the kingdom but rendering to the world the things of the world, I pray that we will have ever greater clarity about how to thread that needle, but also that we will be surprised and enlivened by the places where God shows up and in the people God shows up within, showing us a path forward, navigating the complexities and challenges we always and forever confront, but in a way that brings us to the things of the kingdom while we still participate and work through the things of this world.

And in a final sense, may that journey bring us ever more fully in every moment of every age of our life into the greater completeness, joy, and fullness of the kingdom of God.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.