Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, October 22, 2023

Isaiah 45:1-7+Psalm 96:1-9+1 Thessalonians 1:1-10+Matthew 22:15-22

During my years in Charlottesville, I served for a time with an interim rector who had spent the last years of active ministry as rector of a large church in Pensacola, Florida. He often spoke of the battles he went through to get the Confederate battle flag removed from the church. One would think that in the 2000-and-teens, that would not have been such a big deal, but this is the South we are talking about. While he did succeed in having that symbol of white supremacist hate taken down, the American flag and the Christian flag remained.

That might not sound like a big deal. There are lots of churches that fly an American flag and, in our denomination, an Episcopal flag. We are in the United States, we are part of the civic life in this country, and we identify as Episcopalians, a denomination established as the Constitution was being written.

I, for one, have strong opinions about the flying of flags in church buildings, and I am very glad that All Saints does not sport flags of any kind, just our parish banner that we trot out on occasions when we want folks out there to know who we are.

As followers of Jesus, our principal identity is not related to denominations or national boundaries. Our identity is in the cross of Christ, in the life, death, and resurrection of the one we believe to be God in human flesh. Let's not confuse our spiritual identity with our civic one. There's plenty of that to go around in public life these days.

While I may not have been here for the past two weeks, and I do not know the theme of the sermons that you heard from Susan and Margo, I do know what has been going on in Matthew's gospel during this time. When I last stood before you, the chief priests were trying to trap Jesus with a question about John the Baptist the day after Jesus rode into Jerusalem and cleared out the money changers. This section of Matthew, the sharp debates with the chief priests and Pharisees, is all a lead-up to Jesus's arrest. And Jesus is not really pulling his punches. He tells parables about wicked tenants who refuse to honor the landowner and others who refuse to come to the king's party because they all have better things to do. The religious leaders have, in these parables, turned their backs on God, on doing what God requires of them which is justice and mercy and kindness.

Today, they are back to trying to entrap Jesus, asking him about the Roman coin with the emperor's face on it. If Jesus says don't pay taxes, he's in trouble with the law. If he says taxes must be paid, the people will turn on him for propping up the empire. And just as he did a couple of weeks ago, he answers the question with a question of his own.

“Whose head is this, and whose title?” (Matthew 22:20)

Except that's not what he asks. The Greek uses the words εἰκὼν, icon, and ἐπιγραφή, or epigraph, inscription. The inscription identified the emperor as divine. So already, anyone holding them is violating the first commandment about having no other gods. But the image? The icon? It's the same word we find way back in Genesis chapter one: "Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness..." (Genesis 1:26). The image, the icon (εἰκὼν), of God is us. Jesus does not accuse his sparring partners of heresy or blasphemy. No, he calls them hypocrites, literally someone who puts on a false appearance. They have taken on the image of the world and forgotten that they are icons of the living God. They have forgotten who and whose they are.

The same thing happens to us, I think, more often than we might like to admit. We go along to get along. We don't ruffle feathers or rock the boat. Keep our head down. Keep calm and carry on. Succumb to the ways of the world.

The thing is, we can only do that from a position of privilege. Those who are downtrodden and oppressed, who live on the edge of financial calamity, who struggle with addiction or mental illness, whose skin color or ethnicity or country of origin put crosshairs on their backs? They can't afford to keep calm and carry on. Life is too dangerous for that.

That's one of the reasons why we come here each week, why we need to be here each week: to be reminded that we are made in the image of God. We are God's currency in this world. And we can squander that by burying it in a field, or we can use it to love and serve our neighbors.

We don’t need a flag in our church. All we need is bread and a cup and each other.