I listened to an interview this week that has totally captivated my imagination. I’m going to resist the temptation to basically just parrot back to you the whole interview, but I posted a link to it on the Trinity Facebook page. I hope you’ll listen to it and come back and talk to me, because I’m so geeked up about it I literally could not sleep Tuesday night.
But before we get to the interview and why I couldn’t sleep, I want to talk a little bit about this Gospel reading for today. Because I think I wouldn’t have found the interview as engaging if I was not already caught up in the challenge Jesus seems to be throwing out in this reading.
The reading opened with the Pharisees plotting to entrap Jesus with some false flattery and a seemingly innocuous question about taxes. But here’s a detail you need to know. The tax the Pharisees are asking about was not just general taxes. This was a very specific tax called a census tax or head tax. It was a tax Rome levied on residents of Roman provinces. Basically, when Rome conquered a region, they then assessed a tax on the residents of that region to pay for the occupying army. It’s like, imagine if one day a giant pit bull showed up and your house and was like, hey, this looks like a sketchy neighborhood, I’m going to move in with you and “protect” you. And, you were like, thanks but no thanks pit bull. I feel pretty safe in my neighborhood, and anyway, you’re terrifying and I don’t really feel comfortable with you living in my house. And pit was like, don’t care, I’m moving in to “protect” you, and you can feed me for the privilege. Oh, and by the way, I only like the really expensive dog food from the refrigerated section. You know, the food that looks and smells better than you feed yourself, and costs twice as much.
Here’s the other thing to know about this tax. It could only be paid in Roman coin. Jerusalem had been a city for long before it became a province of Rome, it had its own currency system in operation. But one of the tools Rome used to gain control was to take over the economy by forcing the introduction of Roman currency. So now imagine the pit bull that’s taken up residence in your home will only accept payment in something they call “dog bucks.” And you have to go out and convert all your money to dog bucks in order to pay this fee for a service you don’t even want in the first place. You can begin to see how this tax was really enraging the Judean people.
The Pharisees asked Jesus about this tax because they knew there was no right answer. If Jesus said yes, you should pay the tax, then all of the people who were joining his movement because they thought he was opposed to the Roman government would be angry. But if Jesus said no, you shouldn’t pay the tax, then he was opening himself up to arrest by the Romans. Either way, the Pharisees thought, they had him.
So what did Jesus do? He said to the Pharisees, “you hypocrites. Show me the coin used to pay the tax.” Remember I said the tax had to be paid in Roman coin? Here’s what I didn’t mention. The Roman coin featured a picture of Tiberus Caesar and the words “Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest.” Written on the coin was a claim of the divinity of the Emperor, a statement which was blasphemous to the Jews who believed in the divinity of the One God. When the Pharisees stood in the Temple, the most sacred place in all of Judea, the place where the One True God was believed to dwell, and in that most sacred place pulled from their pocket a coin claiming the divinity of the emperor, the Pharisees true loyalties were revealed. This conversation was never about whether or not to pay taxes, it was about whether to engage in the system of the empire, a system ruled by fear, in which a few benefited at the expense of the rest, or the system of the kingdom of heaven, in which the mighty are brought down, the weak are lifted up, and five loaves and two fishes is enough to feed multitudes. That coin in the Pharisees pocket revealed their decision, and they were amazed and left him, temporarily at least, and went away.
I think that is really the operating question of this reading. Not, should we pay taxes, but do we want to live under the system of empire or the system of the kingdom of heaven. And because we don’t read this passage in isolation, I started thinking about all the things we’ve learned over the summer about the kingdom of heaven. Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, the tiniest of seeds that, when buried in the ground, becomes the largest of shrubs, and the birds make nests in it’s branches. The kingdom of heaven is like yeast hidden in flour, until the baker makes up the loaves and surprise, the loaves rise unexpectedly. The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in the field, it is like a pearl of great price, it is like a net. It is a field of weeds and wheat. It is landowner who wanted all the crops of his tenants, and even they threw him out, he went again and again to collect from them, not withholding even his son in his desperation to gather from them the harvest. It is a party where everyone’s invited, both the good and the bad, but it is not enough to show up and eat the free food. The kingdom of heaven is mysterious, expansive, creative, it cannot be contained or constrained, but it is always just beyond our grasp, just bigger than our imagination. It is, as the prophet Isaiah said in our first reading, “the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places.” Jesus spoke in parables because the kingdom of heaven cannot be explained. Rather it is this nagging hope that there is more than we can know, and that somehow, we are being called to be a part of it. I don’t know about you, but that system, the system of yeast, and seeds, and growth, and life, that is the system I want to be a part of.
So back to this interview. And I’m going to once again resist the temptation to just read the whole thing to you, just oh man, go listen to it. But I will share this one part. The interview was with Economist Muhammad Yunus. Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work in alleviating poverty by bringing banking and microlending opportunities to people in poor, rural communities. As part of the conversation, the head of the World Bank talked about how they had changed their structures to play off the best practices that Yunus had developed through his work. At which point the interviewer cut in with a question. Ok, he said, this is all really interesting. But most of us don’t have billions of dollars that we can just loan out to create new economic systems. What can we do? And Yunus responded with these really simple things. Do the thing that you can do. Teach your children to think creatively and entrepreneurially. Build a business, and build a social enterprise on the side. Work for a company that engages in social responsibility. Learn, wonder, ask good questions.
So here’s where my imagination really went crazy. Because it’s stewardship season at Trinity. Next week, we’re all going to be asked what we are going to pledge for the upcoming year. I’ve told you before my financial pattern. Twice a month when I get paid I put ten percent of my income in my retirement account, and I give ten percent away to the church. But this week after thinking about the economic system of the kingdom of heaven, I started wondering if maybe the problem was not in my financial habits, but in the fact that I was thinking about it wrong. Check this. The money I put in my retirement account, I think about that as an investment in my future. I put money in there because I expect it to grow on its own. And I know a little bit about the market, and honestly I don’t really know exactly how Portico does it, I just trust that in forty or so years when I go to get it out, there will be more in there than I put in. I know there is risk involved in this. I was on internship in 2008 when everyone’s retirement accounts tanked, I know the whole thing could go up and I could lose everything. But I pay in, because I think that the risks are outweighed by the reward, that the potential payout is worth the gamble.
I invest in my retirement, but I give my money to the church. You notice the difference in language there. So this week, I’ve changed my mind. I’m thinking of it differently now. From here on out, the amounts stay the same but the intention changes. I’m investing in my retirement and I’m investing in the church. Here’s why that matters. If I’m investing, that means I’m expecting growth, it means I’m expecting something is going to happen. Now, bear with me now, because this is not prosperity Gospel. I’m not saying I’m going to give ten percent of my money to the church and God’s going to give me more money in return. The growth I am talking about is not monetary growth, but instead a growth in the kingdom of heaven. For example: We just bought new furnaces. Think about how that feels. Now, try this, we just invested in new furnaces. Why are the furnaces an investment? Lots of reasons. One: the new furnaces are more fuel-efficient, they are both better for the environment helping us be better stewards of God’s creation, and they are cheaper to operate, helping the money we pay in heating to go down. And if we pay less money for heating, we have more money to put toward other things. Because the furnaces cost less to operate, it costs us less to keep Co-op warm. When the bus drops kids off afterschool, they can wait inside and not be cold. When community groups want to use our space for meetings or activities, we can open it up to them without having to be as concerned about the heating bill. All these opportunities for spreading the kingdom of heaven open up to us, all because we decided to take the risk and invest in new furnaces.
We need a new roof. Not going to lie, the roof was a little tougher, because we don’t pay a monthly “roof bill” like we pay a gas bill. So what’s the return on investment in a roof? People drive by our building all the time, and believe me, they notice the roof. They will notice the new roof, and they will think, that church has life to it. A new roof will allow us to continue to open our space for community events like the movies we showed over the summer, or the candidate forums we hosted last year, without worrying about it raining on our guests. Maybe the roof will give us opportunities for things we haven’t even dreamed of yet. If there’s a crisis, like the hurricanes in Huston or the fires in California and people needed a place to stay, and we’ve invested in a roof, we can house them.
And as the “returns” from these investments start to come in, who knows where we’ll go from here. Maybe we’ll decide we need to invest some time in volunteering with the Food Pantry, or in tutoring GED students at the Woman’s Co-op, or we’ll feel a call to invest our voices as part of BC Vision. Or our relationships as we get to know our neighbors at Georgetown better. Maybe my long-lived dream will come true and we’ll end up owning a trailer park. All I know is what I’ve learned from Jesus’ parables, that the kingdom of heaven is big and messy and grace-filled, creative, and expansive and beautiful. Dear friends in Christ, I’m not giving my money to the church anymore. I am investing in the growth of the kingdom of heaven. I have no idea what God is quite doing with this investment. But I’m taking the risk, trusting in the promise that God is faithful, and that like yeast hidden in wheat it will grow in ways that are miraculous and strange. I hope you will take it along with me. Amen.
Note: You can listen to the interview with Muhammad Yunus on the 1A website: https://the1a.org/shows/2017-10-17/the-father-of-microfinance-has-a-plan-to-fix-capitalism
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