Knowing to whom your heart belongs
Theme
The key to making wise choices is knowing to whom your heart belongs.
Prelude
Welcome
Call to Worship
Pastor: Mighty God, lover of justice, you establish equality among your people.
People: We praise your awesome name.
Pastor: Holy God, you spoke to your people in the pillar of cloud.
People: Speak to us now; shape our lives by your Spirit.
Pastor: You alone are Holy.
People: You alone are God. - based on Psalm 99
*Hymn of Praise #387 Search Me, O God
Invocation (the Lord’s Prayer) O God, as we turn to your written word, we pray as Moses did: “Show your glory.” Yet, unlike Moses, we see only partially. We know that you are always just beyond us. Yet, we trust in the Holy Spirit, who awakens our eyes and enlivens our ears to experience your Word in this place. Through your grace, let us see your glory and know your ways.
Gloria Patri
Children’s story Preparation: Soak pennies in 1/2 cup vinegar and 1 teaspoon of salt, then rinse and dry. Locate a few magnifying glasses.
(Give each child a penny.) Whose picture is on the front of the penny? (President Abraham Lincoln.) Why? (He was an important president and we want to honor him.) What words run across the top of the penny? (In God we trust.) Use one of these magnifying glasses to see the words more clearly. Why do you think we have “In God we trust” written on all of our coins? (Accept responses.)
In today’s Bible story some people showed Jesus a coin. The leaders tried to trick Jesus, but instead Jesus taught them about God.
God created everything and all things belong to God. One way we can give thanks to God is by giving offering money to the church. All of our coins work together to help other people in our neighborhood, in our country, and throughout the world.
Please take your penny back to your seats and put it in the offering later to thank God for making a beautiful world and loving people to care for you.
Prayer: It’s good to know, God, that all things belong to you, including us. Thank you for all of your good gifts. Amen.
Our Offering to God
Doxology
Prayer of Dedication Generous God, we have given to you what is yours. You entrust us with so much abundance; accept what we offer to you now as signs of our love for you and our desire to serve you. You alone are Lord of our lives. It is already so; make it so even more for us, day by day. Amen
Scripture Reading Psalm 51: 1-11
*Hymn of Prayer Change My Heart O God (Insert)
Pastoral Prayer We pray, God, for leaders – the decisions they face, the powers they hold. Shower them with your Spirit, that they might see with understanding, hear with compassion, decide with wisdom, and love with your passion and justice.
We pray, God, for followers – the decisions they face, the power they hold. Give to them comprehension, wisdom, courage to question, and conviction to hold onto their power to choose.
We pray, God, for those too apathetic to care. Awaken their hearts to the world around them, redirect their inward focus to life beyond their personal concerns, empower them to accept the decisions they face, and give them the power to act.
Bind us together, God of leaders, followers, the unwilling, and the too willing. Implant in our hearts a commitment to community – that each one’s choice may be for the greater good, that each power play be made from the honest desire to do your work and follow your way, in the spirit of Jesus. // God, almost every day we wrestle with overwhelming choices – Caesar or God, life or death, love or hate, possessions or freedom. Often we choose wisely, but then there are those other times. Our wants get confused with our needs. Our “must haves” overshadow our satisfaction with ourselves, our loved ones, and even life itself. Give to us the vision and wisdom to see your way clearly. Then empower us with your grace and courage, that we might take the higher path. In all things keep us faithful to your gift of love – for you, for our neighbors, and for ourselves. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.
*Hymn of Praise # 187 Breathe on Me Breath of God
Scripture Reading Matthew 22:15-22
The Pharisees have just been stung by Jesus' parable of the wedding feast. They are out for revenge. A question of allegiance is intended to trick Jesus into saying something that will get him in trouble with Roman authorities. Jesus, however, will not be caught in this net.
Message Knowing to whom your heart belongs For some of us the world is an either-or kind of place. Either you’re with me or you’re against me. During the Vietnam era the phrase, “America, love it or leave it” was a popular either-or response to anti-war activists. For some, faith is an either-or experience. God is either for us or against us. If God exists, there would not be suffering, disease, terrorism. But, these things exist, therefore God must not exist. I have discovered that doubt is not the opposite of faith but an element of faith. That helped me break free of some of my either-or thinking. For some, life is a gray experience, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. Some have that grayness about faith or God. We think, “God loves me, but maybe God doesn’t get involved in every little thing that happens in my life, or in the world. God is all-powerful, but maybe God lets people figure things out for themselves, even when they mess things up. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus is confronted by either-or thinking, but, it’s the gray area in which he leaves his challengers standing. “Teacher...tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” (v. 17). Our New Testament reading puts before us today the incident where some influential men who were opposed to Jesus tried to set him up for big public embarrassment and destroy his credibility.
In front of a crowd — perhaps equivalent to asking him on live TV — they asked him whether it was lawful to pay taxes to the emperor. Their devious idea was that if Jesus argued against the tax, they could accuse him to the Roman governor of urging rebellion against Rome. On the other hand, if he endorsed the tax, the common people who hated their Roman overlords would likely view him as sympathetic to Rome, and thus turn away from him. For Jesus, it was — they thought — a lose-lose situation. We don’t have to be biblical scholars to know a trick question. Those testing Jesus were from two groups, a lot like our political parties. The Pharisees were known for a strict legalism in interpreting Jewish laws and a respect for tradition. The other political party was the Herodians, Jews who were loyal to Herod and supportive of Rome’s presence in Israel. The Herodians probably supported paying taxes. The Pharisees probably would not have. In Torah law, which they held sacred, selling land to outsiders is forbidden because it belongs only to God (Lev 25:23). From their strict viewpoint, Caesar did not have a right to God’s land and was, therefore, not entitled to collect taxes from God’s people. Second, the coin held a graven image, a picture of Caesar, considered a god by the Romans. To touch it and use it was to acknowledge a god besides Yahweh. It’s easy to imagine the insult this coin represented to the Pharisees who were forced to handle it day after day. So consider Jesus in the midst of this group. If Jesus had said “pay the taxes,” the Pharisees would have had one more issue to hold against him. If he had said, “don’t pay the taxes,” Roman loyalists might have had him arrested. This either-or situation is exactly where his audience wanted him to be, and Jesus knew it. In fact, he turned the whole incident into a teachable moment in which he reminded them that they should be as attentive to their responsibilities toward God as they were to their obligations as subjects of the empire. “Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” (v. 17).// Jesus refused to participate. “You hypocrites,” he told his challengers. What is important, Jesus told them, is not paying taxes to Caesar, or the coin with which it is paid. Unfortunately for them, they had no plan when Jesus turned their question on its head, and that’s exactly what he did. Calling for his challengers to produce a coin of the realm, Jesus asked them whose head was imprinted on it. After the challengers gave the obvious answer that the image was that of the Roman emperor, Jesus instructed them to “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” he turned the whole incident into a teachable moment in which he reminded them that they should be as attentive to their responsibilities toward God as they were to their obligations as subjects of the empire.
What is important is remembering who you are and whose you are. “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (v. 21). In other words, Jesus tells them to give to the civic authority what belongs to them, and to give to God what belongs to God. And, Jesus could have added, “make sure you know the difference.” Jesus did know the difference. Jesus was not concerned with politics; Jesus was concerned with love and justice. “Give to God what is God’s” is a mandate to re-evaluate life. Knowing the difference between Caesar and God isn’t an either-or kind of thing. Rather, it’s a matter of love and justice, a matter of living in the way Jesus lived. // When I think of people who actively and creatively balance this giving to the society and giving to God, I think of former President Jimmy Carter. When Carter, a devout Christian, received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, the Nobel committee wrote in their press release from Oslo, Norway: “In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international cooperation based on international law, respect for human rights, and economic development.” Jimmy Carter’s deep commitment to this work has its basis in his deep faithfulness to Jesus Christ. For some of us the world is an either–or kind of place. For some of us, God is an either-or kind of God. But for Jesus, the tension between Caesar and God did not exist. God was everything. To Caesar he gave respect, but never the authority over how he was to live or die. We see this most profoundly at the end of his life, when Jesus stood before Pilate, the highest Roman official in Israel, the one who had the power of Jesus’ life and death in his hands.
“Pilate therefore said to him, ‘Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?’ Jesus answered him, ‘You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.’ From then on Pilate tried to release him, but the Jews cried out, ‘If you release this man, you are no friend of the emperor. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against the emperor’” (Jn 19:10–12).
While it’s easy to focus on ourselves and to become overwhelmed by the stresses and demands of our daily lives, we need to look up and look out. We need to remember that we are part of something bigger: a larger community, a nation, a world. For Christians, the basis for our allegiance to our community, our nation, and our world is our faithfulness to God and our commitment to following the way of Jesus Christ in love, in justice, in forgiveness, and in peace.
“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
With God’s help – we will.– Rosemary A. Rocha
*Hymn of Response # 466 God of Grace and God of Glory
*Sending forth
*Postlude
Thought for the Day
It's not that we have so little power, it's that we don't use the power we have. - Danusha Veronica Goska, Sojourners magazine, August 2004