To what do you give your allegiance?
We all have “devotions or loyalty to persons, groups, or causes.”
· Some here love the Yankees. Others the Red Sox. (and the chosen few the Tigers or Mets!)
· Some are Republicans. Others Democrats. Some are independent.
· Some here love meat. Others are vegetarians or even Vegans. (& sometimes illness or allergies force us to have a certain devotion.)
Often what we are devoted to has a very personal or familial connection to us.
· Some walk against cancer. Others against diabetes or muscular dystrophy or domestic violence.
What gets us in trouble is when we decide that this allegiance means more than anything else, when we lose faith, hope & charity for strife, division and animosity.
For Christians, our ultimate allegiance is to God. That is where we place our faith and our hope.
And yet all these other things we devote our time and talent and treasure too sometimes challenge this connection we have with our creator. They vie for our ultimate allegiance, and sometimes we raise them above our relationship with God. In the Gospel, those who were opposed to Jesus, wanted to test where his allegiances lie…
“Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”
Answer one way and lose those opposed to the Roman occupation in the Holy Land, answer another way and Rome would come down on Jesus. So Jesus asks for a denarius, a Roman coin from the accusers, and famously says to them (KJV):
“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”
Jesus moves the conversation of paying taxes to the emperor from what the Herodians and Pharisees wanted to hear, a trap that Jesus couldn’t escape, to a deeper level of truth. Yes, give to the emperor that which is the emperor's, it’s his picture on the coin, give it back to the emperor. And give to God that which is God's.
In his response, Jesus is not saying, "give to the Emperor those things that are the Emperor's, and the rest to God." Nor is Jesus saying, "give to the Emperor the worldly things and give to God the spiritual things."
These statements would put Caesar equal to God, and Jesus would never make the Emperor or another thing to be worshipped or obeyed or equal to God. That is the wrong perspective. We may give our money back to the government, to the Emperor in the form of taxes, we pay bills with it, we spend it, we save it. But the almighty dollar isn’t almighty, and it belongs to God just as assuredly as we do.
“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”
“For God created everything that is & by God’s will they were created and have their being.” Everything is part of God’s creation. We are made in the image of God. So the answer that Jesus gives, remind us that we owe God everything, & we owe God our lives: how we live them, how we give them away, it’s all important. Our ultimate allegiance is to God, the creator of all.
Twenty-seven years ago, NASA's Voyager 1 was about to leave our solar system. For 13 years it traveled to the edge of our galaxy taking pictures and collecting data. On February 14, 1990, as the tiny spacecraft moved on to infinity, astronomer Carl Sagan, then a member of the Voyager imaging team, convinced NASA to turn Voyager's cameras around to take one last look at Earth. The photograph of Earth, from 3.7 billion miles away, was hardly beautiful - but this grainy, low-resolution photograph showed the immeasurable vastness of space, and our undeniably small place within it. Sagan later wrote of the image in his book Pale Blue Dot:
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark . . . The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand . . .
"There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal kindlier with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
The perspective of that remarkable photograph is the ultimate answer to the question the Pharisees pose to Jesus: What is NOT of God? All good things - from a stream of clear, cool water to a parent's love for a small child - begin with God, the Author of all that is right and good and compassionate.
In his confrontation with the Pharisees over taxes & Caesar's coin, Jesus challenges us to behold our "pale blue dot" from a perspective of gratitude for its goodness, resolving to respect and protect it for the good of all our fellow space travelers to eternity, and to remember that our allegiance is to God, who created us & our pale blue dot and this whole beautiful universe.
May we with our lives, truly render unto God the things that are God’s! Amen.
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