What Belongs To God

Jesus asks someone to bring him a coin.

It is a small object to hold so much power.

With a coin you can buy bread, pay a worker, settle a debt.

And stamped on this particular coin is the emperor’s face.

“Whose head is this, and whose title?” Jesus asks.

“The emperor’s.”

Then comes the answer we know so well:

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,

and to God the things that are God’s.”

We can hear that sentence so often that we stop hearing its second half.

We spend our energy working out what we owe the emperor.

What taxes must we pay? What authority should government have? Where does our allegiance begin and end?

But Jesus leaves us with another question,

one that reaches into everything we do:

What belongs to God?

During this Season of Creation,

consider that question with a glass of water in your hand.

You may have paid for that water. Someone maintains the pipes.

Someone tests its quality.

There are bills to pay and people whose work deserves compensation.

But none of those payments brings water into existence.

No receipt can account for the whole gift:

rain falling on the land, water moving through soil,

the life of a watershed on which our own lives depend.

We receive something we did not make and cannot live without.

What does it mean to give God what belongs to God when we turn on the tap?

The people questioning Jesus want an answer that will trap him.

They ask whether it is lawful to pay taxes to the emperor.

Whatever he says, they hope to use it against him.

Jesus asks them to look at what they have brought him.

There is the emperor’s likeness, stamped into the metal.

His authority is advertised on the money they carry.

But his face on the coin cannot settle the question of what belongs to God.

Our psalm begins,

“Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the whole earth.”

All the whole earth.

The world is summoned into praise.

Human worship takes its place within something larger than the people gathered in this room.

And the psalm gives the reason: “It is the Lord who made the heavens.”

The emperor can stamp his face onto a coin.

He cannot make the heavens.

Nor can we.

We can put our names on deeds and contracts.

We can draw boundaries around land. Those arrangements carry real responsibilities.

But they do not make us the source of the life within those boundaries.

The earth was already God’s before we arrived.

And we ourselves belong within it.

We breathe its air, drink its water, eat what grows from its soil.

Caring for creation begins with acknowledging that dependence.

Every meal tells the truth about us: our lives are sustained by gifts.

That is a difficult truth for a culture that teaches us to prize independence

and to measure success by how much we can produce.

Paul tells the Thessalonians that they have

“turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.”

An idol can be something we mistakenly trust to give us life,

something we allow to falsely command our obedience.

We can give that kind of authority to money.

We can organize our lives around the conviction

that having more will finally make us safe.

We can become so accustomed to convenience

that we stop asking who bears its cost.

In this idolatry, the living world begins to appear

chiefly as something available for our use.

A river becomes a supply. Land becomes an investment.

The question of how something can be sold starts to crowd out the question

of whether it should be consumed.

The invitation to turn from idols reaches into those habits.

It asks us to look again at the world we have learned to price,

and to recognize the life God loves; the life that God gives.

This includes our human neighbors.

We cannot separate care for water from care for the people who drink it,

or concern for the land from concern for those whose work depends upon it.

A decision made upstream becomes part of someone else’s life downstream.

And the creatures who share that water have lives of their own.

Their place in God’s creation does not depend upon their usefulness to us.

In our Season of Creation liturgy we pray:

“Where your river flows, let everything live.”

That is a beautiful prayer. And it also asks something of us.

To pray it honestly is to become willing to examine

what we put into the river, what we take out, and whose needs we overlook.

Here in Ojai, we can begin close to home.

We can attend to the water that sustains this valley and to the ways

our households and our church use it.

We can ask what our grounds make possible for other living things.

We can take part in the public decisions that shape the health of the places we love.

Much of that work will be ordinary and unglamorous.

It may involve changing a habit, repairing something we have neglected,

learning from someone who knows more than we do,

or staying with a community effort after the first enthusiasm has passed.

Paul has words for that, too:

“your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope.”

Love involves labor. Hope needs steadfastness.

Many of us come to this subject carrying grief.

We have seen places we love suffer.

We worry about what children will inherit.

And, frankly, some of us are weary of being told that every purchase,

every choice carries the weight of the world.

The gospel meets us there with grace.

Our belonging to God comes before our success at caring for God’s world.

We are loved creatures ourselves, dependent on mercy,

capable of repentance, able to begin again.

In Jesus Christ, God enters our vulnerable, bodily life.

Jesus knows hunger and thirst. He gives himself for the world God loves.

His resurrection gives us reason to hope that the damage we see

and the failures we confess do not exhaust what God can do.

That hope gives us courage to act without requiring us to control the outcome.

We can undertake the work within our reach,

join our efforts to those of others,

and entrust what exceeds us to God.

Faithfulness can grow through small beginnings

into sustained, shared responsibility.

In a little while, bread and wine will be brought to this table.

They come to us through soil and sunlight, water and human labor.

We receive them with thanksgiving, and in them Christ gives himself to us.

The Eucharist teaches our hands how to receive.

Open hands acknowledge that life is given. And that our hands can also learn to share.

We carry that lesson from the table into the rest of the week:

into what we buy and what we waste, into the care of our neighbors,

into our decisions about land and water.

“Give to God the things that are God’s.”

We begin by recognizing whose gifts we hold.

Then, with gratitude and with the help of the Spirit,

we learn to care for them.

Where your river flows, let everything live.

Amen.