1. The Pharisees try to trap Jesus by asking if Jews should pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus responds that they should give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God. 2. The story illustrates that our lives involve both worldly and spiritual matters. We must reconcile our attraction to worldly things with God's call to be more like Christ. 3. God uses all parts of our lives, even the sinful parts, to bring us closer to Him. We are called to follow Jesus' example of leading with love, forgiveness and mercy.

1. 1 Deacon Jim Knipper
22 October 2020 29th
Sunday in Ordinary Time Princeton, NJ
For the past few weeks, we have been listening to Jesus who is back in Jerusalem and teaching
in the temple – making the Chief Priests and Pharisees very uncomfortable…leading them to
ask him, ‘who gave him his authority to teach as he does.’ And instead of a direct answer, Jesus
tells them a series of parables, all focused on “choices made.” For Jesus is attempting to get
their attention to think differently, choose differently and to open their eyes to his teachings of
the Kingdom of God. And the point that Jesus is making in these parables is that it is not God
who is doing the choosing – it is all of us.
But it is the Pharisees who are the ones insisting that they are God's gatekeepers and will
determine who gets into the Kingdom and who doesn't. And they have no interest in listening to
Jesus’s teachings about love and compassion, much less inclusion.
So after the parable we heard last week where the Pharisees are being likened to the King who
is driven by anger and vengeance and exclusion versus the teaching of Jesus’s peaceable
kingdom which operates on the foundational principle of mercy – the Pharisees move off to plot
how they may be able to entrap Jesus. Which brings us to today’s well-known Gospel regarding
the payment of taxes.
For the Pharisees, trying to corner Jesus into committing a crime of sedition against the Roman
Government and thus be crucified, come to him with the infamous question we heard this
morning, about whether taxes should be paid to Caesar. It is interesting to note that this story
appears in all three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) suggesting that this gospel is
not about paying taxes, but rather carries a deeper and more significant message.
In the Gospel, the Pharisees present to Christ an ‘either or’ proposition: loyalty to God or to
Caesar. Jews owed their allegiance to God alone… as we heard in the first reading today from
Isaiah: “I am the Lord and there is no other – there is no God besides me.” But their land was
occupied by the Romans who also demanded complete allegiance along with mandatory poll
taxes. So is it God or Caesar?
Perhaps a more modern way to phrase this question in the present time would be: is our
allegiance with the spiritual or the worldly. Where is our focus today? There is little doubt that
we live in a culture where we are measured by what we have and therefore push to have
more….whether we can afford it or not. Our society, fueled by a barrage of advertising and so
called “conventional wisdom” reinforces the message every day for our need to have and want
more… So we burn more hours each day, doing what we do to fill ourselves with “more”….but,
eventually, we find it is never enough.
So, besides the times we gather here each week, when and where else do we give our time and
talents to God? How can we reconcile both of these – the worldly and the spiritual? How do we
deal with this liminal space – as we stand in this threshold of worldly and spiritual… looking at all
of the changes around us and the challenges that we face each day?... Perhaps we need to
take some time and reexamine where we place our allegiance – Is it Caesar or God?

2. 2 Deacon Jim Knipper
The coin in the Gospel story was a denarius imprinted with the image and likeness of Caesar
and inscribed: Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus, the High Priest.” Today we mint
our coins with images of president’s past and imprint each coin, somewhat ironically, with the
words: “In God We Trust” – but do we? But more over – metaphorically, what personal coins do
we mint? What are the images you have imprinted? What are the coins that we tie ourselves
to? What are the coins that jingle in our pocket? What earthly distractions pull us from our
heavenly Creator – from our spiritual life? Whatever they may be….whatever you may call
them, they are most certainly summarized by the three things Christ warns us against
throughout the Gospels: power, prestige, and possessions.
So where our Gospel today tells us the story of the Pharisees trying to trap Christ…we too can
feel torn, we too can be confused, we too can feel trapped between worldly desires versus
God’s call to empty ourselves so we can be open to his presence. And so we place ourselves
before God, with our own personal baggage, filled with coins that we have minted, with a
mindset similar to the Pharisees – with this ‘either or’, ‘black or white’ nondual thinking – trying
to reconcile our attraction to fill ourselves with earthly things…and the call to be more like Christ.
But listen to the answer that Jesus gives in today’s Gospel. In the Pharisees’ attempt to trap the
Lord with an either or scenario – Jesus’ answer is: give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God
what is God. He takes the either or and says it is both and.
And why? Because as the spiritual writer Paula D’Arcy, writes, “God comes to us disguised as
our life.” And that is the good news of today’s Gospel – Our lives are filled with contradictions of
worldly versus spiritual, of God’s call versus wading through the river of life weighed down by
our personal baggage…and the reason why this story appears in all three Gospels (has nothing
to do with paying taxes)…it is to stress the message that God will use all of our material, all of
our coins, every part of our life and our experiences, even the negative and sinful part – to bring
us closer to him. It is the very framework inside of which God makes the God-Self known and
calls us into union.
Just as Caesar minted his image on the denarius, just as our government has minted
Washington and Lincoln on our currency – so too, God has cast each and everyone of us in
God’s own image and takes our worldly coins, our baggage, our sins and uses it all, holds us all,
forgives us all, loves us all.
We come to the table this morning broken and divided…we come to Eucharist as a people
caught in the middle…caught between allegiance to God and to the gods of our time…and all
we are called to do is to follow the lead of Jesus when he was placed in the middle…and to lead
with love, forgiveness and mercy…and to empty ourselves so that we can be filled with the
graces of our one true God.