THE POLITICS OF JESUS
Matthew 22:15-22
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

WWJD? “What would Jesus Do?”  You’ve heard the question.  The corollaries are inevitable.  I saw one written on a sidwalk on Shattuck Avenue, “Who would Jesus bomb?”  I saw another in the recent motion picture on overconsumption titled, “What would Jesus buy?”  Then, of course, there is the election year question, “Who would Jesus vote for?”  Or, on the website, “www.Jesusin2008” you <http://www.jesusin2008” you/>  can contribute to the campaign platform of Jesus presidential candidate!

        In the 20th Century, the Social Gospel movement, liberal and liberation theologies, led people of faith to engage the political world.  The personal is political.  The spiritual is political. The Body of Christ engages the body politic because political decisions have life and death, just and unjust consequences.  In this country these movements helped enact laws to protect workers, including child labor laws, generated peacemaking and civil rights, and helped give rise to what became known as the environmental movement.  More “conservative” churches fought diligently to “keep politics out of the pulpit.”

But in the last quarter of the 20th century, conservative Christianity dominated the public media and political arenas.  Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, James Dobson and others linked evangelical faith with a conservative political agenda.  

Membership vows in the United Methodist Church include a question that people of widely varied theological and political persuasions can answer:  “Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?”  The answer is “I do.”  But now ... let’s name them ...  What do you name as as the ways evil, injustice and oppression present themselves today?  

Theological and political arguments begin about corporate greed and corporate responsibility, about reproductive choice and right to life, about public education and private schools, about global warming and the free market,  about universal health care and privatization of prisons, about democracy, social democracy, economic democracy, capitalism, capital punishment, war and peace and terrorism.  All these conflicts are given as evidence of “culture wars.”  Whose money is it?  Whose freedom?  Whose rights and who is right?
These questions can build up and embolden the Body of Christ as they challenge the church to be the church for just such a time as this.  Michael Novak notes, “Questions have been the heart and soul of Judaism and Christianity for millennia.”

E.J. Dionne, columnist for the Washington Post, in his book, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right writes as a Christian who believes that “serious embrace of Christianity inevitably leads one into politics...” and that our country is exhausted “with a religious style in politics that (is) excessively dogmatic, partisan and ideological...and with selling out or reducing religion to a narrow set of public issues.” (p. 2)

The Pharisees, religious leaders seeking to defend the Torah, sent their disciples, along with Herodians, secular leaders loyal to the Roman Empire, to try to trap Jesus with a question ... a forced-choice test designed to either discredit his religious leadership or catch him advocating the breaking of Roman law ... they came to him in the Temple courtyard where Jesus already had overturned the tables of the moneychangers and set both the religious and political leadership on edge.  They asked him, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”  

Jesus asked them for a Roman coin that they used to pay taxes.  He pointed to the emperor’s image on it ... and he said, “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s.” “And give to God the things that are God’s.”  You decide ... What are the things that belong to Empire?  What are the things that belong to God?

This wasn’t just a clever evasion.  Jesus asked a question for people of faith living in a world of political realities and social responsibilities ... Jesus asks again and again, what belongs to empire, what belongs to God? What do I owe those who govern? What do I owe God?

The politics of Jesus was sung before he was born by his mother Mary, “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

The politics of Jesus began his public ministry as Jesus read the words of the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

We live in Caesar’s world.  Issues central to governments are our concerns because they affect life ... our life ... all life. Whatever we know about Jesus’ politics we see through the lens of compassion. What will this do for ... the least, the last, the lost.  What will this do, as one person described it ... for those in the dawn ... the sunset ... or the shadows of life?

This year the United Methodist Board of Church and Society has published a “Comparison of Political Party Platforms and The United Methodist Church.  Statements from the Social Principles are printed along with statements from the two major parties on issues like Energy Policy, Living Wage, Social Security, Budget and Governmental Spending, Death Penalty, Immigration, Middle East Peace, Global Poverty, HIV/AIDS ... and many more issues.

Today, we will have copies of these statements available at Adult Study 11:30, as well as copies of the California Council of Churches analyses and recommendations on California ballot measures.  Two representatives of the League of Women Voters bring information and clarification and we will all engage in conversation re: ballot propositions and decisions of life and faith as citizens of this community, this state, this nation.  

Also, on October 29th, 6:30 (insert) you are invited to an interfaith gathering at Rosa Parks Elementary School. There we will join 17 other congregations and we will question all the mayoral, council and school board candidates of this city on:  public education, health care, immigration, affordable housing, public safety.

These are attempts to look at concrete, this-worldly issues through the lens of faith in community ... to bring the clearest understanding we can of the will of a compassionate and just God to bear in decisions we have to make about how to treat each other and how to treat the world. Give to God the things that are God’s.

E.J. Dionne begins and concludes his book Souled Out with this observation that religion’s public role is changing.   He observes that millions of evangelical Christians, “are growing impatient with narrow agendas as they reach out to the poor in Africa and in their own communities, as they worry about the obligation to stewardship of the earth, as they grapple with practical ways to reduce the number of abortions, and as they struggle to approach gay friends and relatives in a spirit that is consistent with being Christian.”

Liberals, on the other hand, “are remembering things they had forgotten about the spiritual sources of their own dreams.  They are recalling ...a civil rights movement led by a Christian preacher inspired by the Declaration of Independence and by scripture ... they are coming to understand that their central goals – to lift up the poor, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, and challenge injustice – have biblical roots ...”

When it comes to understanding the real politics of Jesus ... let us hope, and pray, and work, for a new consensus that can embrace this barrier-breaking, compassionate savior, Jesus, who reaches out to the pained, who cares most for the lost, the oppressed, the marginalized, whose word and work always was to heal and restore and make whole.

And, crucial as we may believe it to be, the outcome of this election does not define or defeat us.  Whatever happens, people of faith will carry on.  The reign of God is within us, among us, and beyond us.

 “Give to the emperor the things that belong to the emperor.  And give to God the things that belong to God.  You discern!  You decide!  The question ... the task always stays with us ... What in our lives belongs to God?  Well ... What in our lives does not belong to God?