Render Unto Caesar

22 Pentecost, October 16, 2005

(Isaiah 45:1-7; Psalm 96; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22)

“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

At no time in my life has this passage from Matthew been as topical as it is in our country, indeed in our world, as it is at this time.

From Kansas to Indonesia, from the local courthouse to the Supreme Court, the overlappng and often conflicting interests of the Church and the State have come up for debate and decision in many, many ways, both obvious and subtle.

An example, I believe, of the inappropriate interference by religion into the domain of the state and society can be found in the recent controversy over the inclusion of “intelligent design” into the public school science curriculum.

Now, I believe in intelligent design.  I think that the opening verses of the Gospel according to John, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made,” is a poetic way of saying that the rational order that we find in the universe – all the laws of science, not only the relationships between species, are there because “the rational mind of God”, to use another poetic phrase, put them there.  That’s the Christian theory of the Logos, the reason of God, the second person of the Trinity, taking part in all creation.  God “speaks” creation.

But that’s my belief.  That’s how I relate my experience of the world to my underlying spiritual and philosophical beliefs.  People with other underlying spiritual and philosophical beliefs, or with no articulated spiritual or philosophical beliefs may see things in a different way, may explain their experience in a different way.

But belief isn’t science.  Science is a very particular method for obtaining a particular kind of knowledge.  It’s best practiced by people seriously trained in its discipline and subject to dispassionate peer review.  And science, above all, involves objectivity and that’s primarily what separates it from the field of religion.  As I have said before, over and over again:  God will not be turned into an object.  That’s why the Bible is just a series of stories of human relationship with God.  That’s why when asked his name God says:  “I will be who I will be.”

The factualization of divine revelation underlying this fundamentalist intrusion into the academic curriculum is the heretical error around which all modern literalisms and fundamentalisms crumble.  People don’t insist that biblical creationism is a fact because they believe in God.  They insist that biblical creationism is a fact because they don’t believe in anything but the facts.  They can’t see the truth in the poetry or the revelation in the myth, that communicate far more reality than any factual theory ever could.

And why would we want to mess up scientific education in this country at a time when global competition is becoming more and more intense, when it’s that very free thinking and education that’s made us leaders of the world, in technology and innovation, in standard of living and quality of life?  If pastors start censoring science curricula and legislatures start ruling or people start voting on the legitimacy of scientific research, then the scientists of the world that used to come here are going to end up in India or China, and the world will change even more than it has already, and not to our benefit.  This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened.  The Christian Roman Emperor, Justinian, closed down the Platonic Academies that had house the leading scholars of his day.  As a consequence, all the great mathematicians ended up in Persepolis in Persia and ushered in the golden age of Islamic civilization, while Europe descended into darkness.  Then the mullahs got involved, and more and more over the  centuries, and more and more in recent times, the Koran in its most literal interpretation came to govern the Islamic education with the direct results of poverty and prejudice that we see in that part of the world today.  I don’t want that to happen here.

Marriage, however, is an example of a place where the state is currrently trying to interfere too much in religion.

Neither president or congress, court or legislature, governor nor voter initiative has any business trying to defend the “sanctity” of marriage, or the “sanctity” of anything, for that matter.  Sanctity, sacredness, is in the religious domain and the government ought to stay away from it – although I know that it is not that simple.  With marriage in particular there’s been an uneasy confusion for centuries and centuries as society and the church have tried to combine two very different things into one package.

Marriage as a secular institution, marriage as a legal institution, marriage as a social institution has to do with the orderly legal structuring of society and the raising of children in a stable environment.  Up until modern times only a minority of people ever got legally married because at the center of legal marriage was, and is, financial responsibility and property rights, and up until modern times only the elite had any finances or property to worry about.

The Church for its part was historically hesitant about getting involved in marriage at all precisely because of its association with the worldly values of property, and its sanction of the “sinful” activities of the flesh.  (As I have pointed out before, until late medieval times people were married on the church steps and then went inside for communion.)

But the church finally incorporated marriage into its sacramental system, probably in part because it wanted a piece of the finance and property action, but also, and I hope primarily, because it saw in marriage, as even St. Paul points out, a true symbol of spiritual union, and a way that God had harnessed our worldly passions and desires to draw us out of our self-centeredness and into a realization of our wider identity as members of the body of Christ.  That’s the sacramental part.  That’s the part that has to do with “sanctity”.

Because of the religious diversity in our society there are widely differing opinions about for whom, how, why and when that sacrament is available.  And like all religious differences in our society we need to be able to agree to disagree.  The state needs to remain neutral.

Problems are bound to arise when the state, the legal establishment, the secular establishment, the forces of social conformity, attempt either to choose which religious view is right, or to find some kind of watered down consensus.  It never works.

The only solution that I can see at this time is the one that Jesus offers in the Gospel reading this morning.  “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.”  Let the state set up a system of legal contracts, “civil unions” if you want to call them that, however is seen fit through the political and democratic process.  Those unions might be different in Alabama and California (or Utah if you really get radical) or the Supreme Court might decide that there needs to be a national standard.  I don’t know, and I only really care about it not as an issue of sanctity but of justice.

But let each church decide to “marry” whoever it wants to marry, in whatever way it sees fit.  I don’t want to be a functionary of the State of California any more.  And I don’t want the California legislature making Episcopal Church law.  I just want to bless the love and commitment felt by those who are called to this sacrament and offer the church’s support for their witness to our unity in Christ.

Now, beyond particular issues, and there are other particular issues:  stem cell research, abortion, genetic engineering, assisted suicide, war.   Beyond and including these issues is the general field of values and ethics and morality, personal behavior, communal behavior, at the heart of all these controversies.  I don’t think that we can claim, as the Church, to be the sole arbiter of values and morality.  James Dobson can’t claim that, Pat Robertson can’t claim that, Jesse Jackson can’t claim that, Pope Benedict can’t claim that, Osama bin Laden can’t claim that.

Values, ethics, morality, personal behavior, communal behavior are at the center of what it means to be a society – even a secular society. (Although I really don’t know where atheists get their values, I know they have them.)  Values are the biggest part of what forms and informs any particular culture. Those values have roots in religious tradition, but they also come out of historical experience.  We learn them in Church, but we also learn them in school, on TV, on the sports field, from parents and from peers.

The Anglican Church, the Episcopal Church has always been in the middle on this.  With its origins in a state religion, it doesn’t view the church as an isolated, separated refuge from “the world”.  For us patriotism is not necessarily idolatrous, nor is pacifism treasonous.  It’s not all that simple; it’s not all black and white.

As mature, conscientious Christians in this Episcopal tradition, we are called to engage in a kind of constant discernment.  Neither the Presiding Bishop or the General Convention, your diocese or your rector are going to tell you what’s right or wrong for you.  But we will challenge you to read the Holy Scriptures, we will ask you to consider the church tradition, we will encourage you to use your God given powers of reason, to listen to our teaching, and then make up your own mind.  And we will also point out that it’s certain that you’re forgiven if you happen to be wrong.

As I said a couple of weeks ago, we live in a society that’s quite a bit like Rome, and Caesar is very close at hand.  But so is God.

Isaiah says the Lord called Cyrus his Messiah – But we have Jesus, and I trust in His way.

Thanks be to God.