The Reverend Doctor Robert D. Hughes, III, author of Continuum's recently released Beloved Dust: Tides of the Spirit in the Christian Life, has accepted our offer to contribute to our occasional Author's Circle and has written a timely sermon for the American electorate. Please enjoy!
SERMON FOR Chapel of the Apostles, School of Theology, Sewanee: The University of the South,
Oct. 22 2008 PROPER RCL 24A TRACK 2
Texts: Isaiah 45:1-7; Ps. 96: 1-9; I Thess. 1:1-10; Mt. 22:15-22
Robert D. Hughes, III, Ph.D. Norma and Olan Mills professor of Divinity
School of Theology Sewanee: The University of the South
“Cyrus and Caesar, What in God’s Name is Going on Here?
A Sermon about Politics, but not a “Political Sermon.”
“Render to Caesar,” Caesar, please, not “the Emperor.” That was one of those changes the NRSV seemed to need to make because it needed to make changes. It is not, I think, felicitous. Well, a preacher in this place needs a lot of chutzpah to preach on that text, given Fr. Dr. Bryan’s learned book on the subject [Christopher Bryan, Render to Caesar: Jesus, the Early Church, and the Roman Superpower (Oxford U.P.: 2005). And what a time to preach a sermon about texts that really cannot avoid politics, so close to an important election. No, I do not intend to put the 501(c)3 tax exempt status of either the University or the Church at risk. But our lessons today require us to ask what in God’s name is going on if Cyrus and Caesar can be seen as instruments of the divine providence, and what that might mean for us.
Let’s get a little exegesis out of the way first. Jesus is well aware that his questioners are trying to entrap him, and they have done a good job. If he says “pay the tax,” he will lose the support of Zealots and other Jews who have nationalist leanings. If he says “refuse the tax,” they can snitch on him to Pilate. But Jesus’ answer is even cleverer than it looks, slipping out of the dilemma by suggesting that if you are using Caesar’s coinage, you have accepted his governance and are obligated to keep his rules. With a rabbinic irony that is typical of him, he hoists the protagonists on their own question by pushing them deeper. Yes, it is Caesar’s image on the coin, but if you are a believer, in whose image is Caesar? God’s. Just like all the rest of us. And that is the point, of course. Caesar is just an ordinary man with an extraordinary job. To do that job he is entitled to what he needs to do it. But his claim to “divinity” is precisely the same as all the rest of us, no more and no less. So, he is to get his due, but no more, taxes, but not incense on his altar.
And what of Cyrus? How can another pagan emperor be the very instrument of God’s deliverance of God’s people? For that is how Second Isaiah sees him, and, indeed, it would seem that he did provide some relief for Israel compared to what had gone before in Babylon. Earlier than that is Joseph’s co-operation with Pharoah, which lasted until Moses delivered Israel from what had become slavery. Or think of First Isaiah seeing in Assyria the rod of God’s anger, even if coming under judgment for overplaying his hand. Though poor old Jonah gets sent to Ninevah and they repent, much to his dismay.
It’s no good trying to turn the prophets or Jesus or the early church into anti-imperialist revolutionaries, as Dr. Bryan has so thoroughly pointed out. The situation is much more complicated than that. So, what in God’s name is going on here, and what does it say about our situation?
Just this, I think. Governments are instituted among human beings for certain purposes, among which are the preservation for all of certain inalienable rights given by God to all in God’s image, and indeed to all creatures. These inalienable rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To some degree or another, all government does indeed derive its authority from the consent of the governed. Sound familiar? It means that kings and queens, emperors and empresses, and presidents and prime ministers may well be instruments of God’s ordinary providence in promoting social good, and some may even become, however unconsciously, instruments of God’s extraordinary providence in shaping the story of redemption. But in no case should that go to their heads or cause them to overplay their hand, let alone abuse their power for personal ends or gratification--abuse being anything that denies all their subjects are also in the image of God.
We live in an age in which corruption and abuse of power have become so widespread that “politician” has become a dirty word for a degraded profession. If we allow that to stand, we make a grave error, a theological error as well as a social one. “Polis,” after all, means “city.” Politics is the art of human beings living together in larger and larger groups, starting with families. Aristotle actually got gobs of it right--you might want to read him. To be “political” is to be “civilized.” One is a Greek derivative, the other Latin (sounds like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe). Even the countryside is more livable when there are also cities that bring the economies of scale in commerce, art, and government that only they make possible. Establishing cities, perhaps as recently as 10,000 years or so ago, changed human life forever, and made possible most of what we think of as human and humane. To be apolitical is worse than being a bumpkin; it is to be a true outcast, literally an outlaw, outside the law, condemned to a life that is nasty, brutish, and short.
This is not just a point about philosophy. Jerusalem is a city, the first city of God. If it is no longer that, if we have come now to see that no earthly, human city, can be our permanent abiding place, that is only because we look for one to come. One of the deepest expressions of our hope, of the longing of our hearts, is for the heavenly Jerusalem, the bride of the Lamb who was slain for her, the Commonwealth of Justice and Peace in which God’s will is perfectly done on earth as in heaven, over which God reigns directly, no longer by vicars, be they prophets, priests, or kings.
Meanwhile, we must muddle along, living as close to that ideal as we can manage. And here we get some unexpected help from our epistle reading. It makes two wonderful references to the power of the Holy Spirit. Paul says that the gospel is not just received for intellectual reasons, but because when it was preached the Holy Spirit became manifest in power and brought the Word to life in the hearers, inspiring them just as the authors had been inspired in writing and preaching the Word.
A deeper study of the Spirit reveals that the Spirit is the source of our common life together as God’s people, our koinonia, I would suggest in the world as well as in the church. Also, the Spirit gives gifts to particular people to make that common life possible as a gift to us all, the Greek for gift being charism, from which we get “charismatic” in all its meanings. And, finally, the Spirit sweeps like inexorable tides through our history, birthing the final pleroma, the fullness and sanctification of all things in Christ to be taken into the Trinitarian life. The Spirit gifts us with that future which is Christ, setting the present free from the past without destroying or ignoring that past.
In his excellent book, Work in the Spirit [Oxford U.P.: 1991], Miroslav Volf suggests that what makes any and all work humane, morally appropriate for humans, is our ability to see that in some way it contributes to the Spirit’s building up of that pleroma, of helping to construct that city, that polis, for which we long, whose maker and builder is God. The integrity of the human community and of the non-human natural environment are direct corollary values. If the essence of moral conversion is, as Lonergan suggested, from selfish interest to valuing the Good, then political conversion, as his successors have suggested, is from self interest, either personal, group or even national, to the common good, ultimately the Commonwealth of Heaven. If politics is work, then like all human work it will have, following Volf, these three elements: a commitment to the integrity of the human community, a parallel commitment to the integrity of the non-human natural environment, and, ultimately, a vision of the City of God, the pleroma of the Spirit, and the way our efforts contribute to that end.
For a number of excellent reasons, one being that his roots are Pentecostal, Volf suggests it would be most helpful if we stop interpreting work with the categories of vocation (which should be reserved for the universal call to God in Christ), and instead think of work in terms of gifts or charisms. We do best what we are gifted to do, naturally and supernaturally. If this is true of all work, it is true of any, including the work of politics, of building and governing the humane city in anticipation of the City of God. That is, we should expect to find among the members of our community, not those set apart by some magical divine right for power, but those with charisms or gifts for governance and administration. The art of electoral politics, especially in a democracy, should not be a searching of Sybilline books to discern a mysteriously hidden will of God in a call to a particular person known only to the elect, but rather the discernment of gifts, of charisms, for leadership, justice, and peacemaking on behalf of the common good.
If I may be permitted a brief editorial comment in the midst of a homily, I think we have had far too much of the former of late, acting as if it were God’s ordained will that so and so be elected, even if this is known only to an elect elite. As an American patriot, I hold it as constitutional that no one, repeat, no one, rules this republic by divine right. We are not looking for such an anointed one. We look for someone humbler, and our looking must be humbler if there is to be a redeemed politics and a politics for the redeemed.
Now, back to the sermon. What I think we can do instead of looking for esoteric calls and anointings is to ask the guidance of the Holy Spirit in conjunction with our own reason, to help us as Christian electors, with our neighbors of other and no faith, to look beyond party, beyond ideology, beyond self or special interest, beyond even the moral issues de jour, and discern with the Spirit’s own gift for discernment the charisms of leadership, of governance, of administration, of both vision of, and ability to help build, the humane, the human city, as type and foretaste of the City of God; not as that City itself, for here we have no abiding place, though we look for one to come. But as its sacrament, its effective sign, asking that our efforts to muddle through together may somehow sweep us all into the great tides of the Spirit carrying us inexorably to the supper of the marriage of the Lamb to that City which is his bride, the Commonwealth of Heaven, our mother, the New Jerusalem. That City will come, in spite of our failures as well as through our efforts, for in the end it is gift also.
As we seek in candidates for public office signs of these charisms of governance, most especially the ability to inspire all of us to see the City of God in the Spirit’s pleroma as the end and fulfillment of our work, we can, and will, and should disagree in our discernments. But at least we will be asking the right question, and, as theologians know, that is at least half the battle. God grant us all a good discernment in the 13 days remaining and all the elections to come. If God could use Cyrus and Caesar, we trust God may even find a use for us and the leaders we choose. May it be so.
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