Proper 24A
Isaiah 45:1-7
Matthew 22:15-22
In case we were tempted to think that theology, and finding God at work in the world was going to be easy today’s lessons are here to remind us that it isn’t that simple.
We opened today with a passage from Isaiah probably written during the end of the Babylonian exile or early in Israel’s return from exile. Either way, it is strange. Unique in fact.
Here we find Israel’s prophet naming the King of Persia as God’s anointed, literally: messiah. This is the only place we find a gentile being given such a title. The king of the empire who had them in exile. The earthly power responsible for their suffering.
We should at least have a record scratch moment when that reading happens. It should jangle our ear and shake our certainty about how God works.
And then we of course hit on today’s Gospel which gets used as a pat little stewardship teaching every time. Usually the message boils down to “it all belongs to God, GOTCHA CEASAR.” But that vastly oversimplifies what Jesus is saying here and the complexity of the situation.
And here we are. A bunch of misfit Christians tryign to figure out where God is and what God is doing, and maybe if we’re being bold what God would have us do. And we’re doing it in a world filled with people who aren’t like us.
Who don’t see God as we do, who have a different relationship with Divinity, who maybe have no relationship at all.
Our world, and how we relate to it and God is at least as complicated as the world in which Isaiah and Jesus taught.
Our answers cannot be simpler than theirs.
It is all too easy to be the insiders, in here with God. And see everyone else as the outsiders, wrong, out there without God.
Into that human tendency to be sure we know what God wants, and where God is, and what God is doing comes Isaiah saying: Cyrus. Cyrus who doesn’t even know God’s name is doing God’s work in history.
Jesus’ opponents hope to trap him, in either sedition or heresy. But the answer he gives them acknowledges just how complex their and our lives are, how filled with conflicting and maybe even impossible overlapping responsibilities.
There is a phrase that sticks with me from my debate training in my theology class: “it is not fitting” my theology professor would muse, “that we human beings should constrain God.”
And yet we human beings can be so sure. So sure we know what God is doing, so sure we know who God loves, or works through. So sure we are on the right side of things and the people we don’t like are on the wrong side.
But Cyrus y’all.
It isn’t so simple.
You all know me, I’m a bit of a crazy mystic, I don’t like simple answers. I don’t like dogma or rules much either. So I can already hear a few of you thinking uhoh, here she goes again!
But what if we let go of needing to be certain? What if we cultivated a practice of deep curiosity, of looking for God, and those doing God’s work in unlikely places? What if, like my old college professor, we saw the work of a devout Buddhist as the working out of the Kingdom? What if we saw the abuses caused by our own clergy and hierarchy as heresy (despite their positions)?
What if we let go of our tight grasp of in and out, saved and not saved, and instead became treasure hunters searching for the treasure of the Kingdom in every crazy place we could think of?
What if?
We are going to talk about spiritual practices after church today and I think back to a conversation I had with some other clergy online in the last few weeks. We’re a bunch of Episcopalians so we’ve all got the whole “prayers come from a book thing” but we got talking about how we hate that picking up a prayer book is the only way we teach people to pray.
And we started talking about the ways we pray. There was dancing, singing, nature walks, photography, journaling, silent meditation, painting, movement, listening to others, presence, baking bread, cooking meals for hungry folks, cleaning the vessels from communion, washing the dinner dishes, laying your hand on the forehead of your sick child (or parent), the deep breathe before something hard…
The list went on and on.
People finding connection in places others might never have thought to look.
Our world is complicated. The choices we make daily aren’t separate from our lives as Christians or our relationship with God. But neither can we just step out of the world around us because we’re Christian.
We still have to bank, shop, work, live in this world.
And in the midst of that reality, is God. Where we least expect perhaps, among people we might least expect. But, the prophets tell us: present and always moving. When we can see it, and when we can’t. When we can understand, and when we can’t. When we are part of that movement, and when we aren’t.
The good news is that God is present, where we least expect, and where we might not even understand. We get to wonder, to search, to look with the hope of a child turning over a stone…
Search and you will find, God is with us, and God is moving.