Many forest trees and shrubs will have what is called a ‘mast year’, where they produce an extraordinary amount of fruit or nuts. In our region, we most often notice this with acorns. There is no definitive underlying pattern for when mast years occur, nor are forest ecologists certain about how exactly such an endeavor is coordinated. Historically, ecologists assumed in the light of evolution that mast years were an outcome of a basic energetic equation: make more fruit when you have more starch. But if this were true, individual trees would mast by themselves when they have had a good year, but that is not the case. To quote my favorite ecologist, Robin Wall Kimmerer: 

“If one tree fruits, they all fruit—there are no soloists. Not one tree in a grove, but the whole grove; not one grove in the forest, but every grove; all across the county and all across the state. The trees don’t act as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.”

I will point out here that the participation of all trees in mast fruiting means that each and every tree in the grove, across the county, is deeply important. If just the biggest and strongest tree masted, it would not matter and its efforts would be wasted. The biggest tree in the grove relies on and is supported by the sick trees, the young trees, the old trees, and the injured trees; just as these trees are reliant on the healthy trees in other ways. 

The author of that quote, Robin Wall Kimmerer, comes from the Potawatomi Nation which was relocated to what is now Oklahoma; where a mast fruiting species, the pecan, lives. The pecan, in its ability to be stored for long periods, has provided food for people in times where other food sources were scarce (similar to our New England maples). She speaks further of a relationship between mast fruiting and human needs:

The pecan groves give, and give again. Such communal generosity might seem incompatible with the process of evolution, which invokes the imperative of individual survival. But we make a grave error if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole. The gift of abundance from pecans is also a gift to themselves. By satiating squirrels and people, the trees are ensuring their own survival.

The story we heard today from Mathew is a familiar one to many of us. I think most of us can name the two greatest commandments without too much thought, they boil down to ‘love God’ and ‘love your neighbor’. It is short and sweet, and beautiful in its simplicity. Especially in comparison to other lists of commandments we get. Try as I might, I can’t necessarily remember *all ten* of the Ten Commandments easily. 

However, something I noticed in this story that feels important, is that Jesus doesn’t just give this list one and then the other. He breaks it up to say something about the second–that it is like the first.

You could take this to mean that the second is like the first in that, when we love our neighbors as ourselves, we are loving God. This parallels some other sayings and teachings of Jesus, such as later in Matthew when he gives a lesson on ‘The Least of These’.

You could also take this to mean that they are like each other in that when we pray to God, and love God with all our heart, mind, and soul–we are actually loving our neighbors as ourselves. It is a big endorsement of prayer, and illustrates how much it can matter. Even though we sometimes feel powerless to change the trials and tribulations of our collective lives such as death, natural disasters, and war–we can still pray, and it matters. 

However, we can also take the fact that these two commandments are given as a relationship to each other to mean something more. Maybe it means that we are called to live together in community with one another, that our culture of rugged individualism is a myth. The second being like the first in that it isn’t just a good thing to love our neighbors, people who don’t believe in God do that all the time. It is like the first in that the second commandment is deeper than just charity, if it is like the first, then loving our neighbor should feel/be like loving God with all our heart.

After sitting with this notion for some time, I have begun to think that maybe Jesus was not giving a set of commandments in the strict sense. I think that maybe he was limited by his audience. They, like many of us today, might have felt like they needed commandments and some clear guidelines to follow. A methodology they could replicate to live like Jesus did. They needed two rules to follow instead of a new way of being in the world, commandments instead of an entirely new way of living. I think maybe Jesus, in his wisdom and love, was not *necessarily* giving us new commandments, but maybe giving us a new blueprint of living in a world that can feel like a bummer a lot of the time. A world where we live by being bound together in love to God and to each other. The second is like the first in that the loving, sustaining relationship we have with God is mirrored in the love we share with the communities we live in, that provide us sustenance. 

That sounds really great, I like that sentiment, it also sounds really exhausting to heap this overhaul of my way of living on top of my life as it is–no matter how much I would like to, or how much I want to. I am booked out: I have homework to do, and lots of it. I have family obligations to attend to. I have things I need to do for myself to feel like a person. I have a (wonderful) internship to work at and work in. I have trains to catch. I might be able to get a start on redoing my whole life at the end of the semester.

That all being said. I think there is a different way to go about this “overhaul” thing. I’ll go back to the small ecology lecture I gave at the beginning of this sermon. What I hope you noticed is that this way of living, to love our neighbors and love God, is mirrored for us in the natural world. The pecan trees that mast and provide an abundance of pecans for humans do not do so in a way that depletes them or causes them to burnout; rather they have a life process that both ensures their own livelihood and provides for their neighbors. 

I am reminded of my senior year of college. I lived in an off campus apartment with my two friends who both worked close to 40 hours a week to support themselves. I worked too, but less hours then they did, and for the entire year I had Fridays completely clear. It was awesome, I did my grocery shopping, I baked lots of cool cakes and stuff, and then I did all the dishes in the sink, swept the floors, made the living area look habitable again, and so on and so forth. It became my weekly habit that actually did not require that much of me, that folded easily into my day, but meant abundance to my friends. 

I am not a saint, it wasn’t entirely unselfless, like the pecan groves I also ensured my own survival, because somehow all the sudden my friends had so much more energy on Friday nights. We watched movies all bundled up on the couch together, we played darts (we did not get our security deposit back), we played board games, talked about our silly little hopes and dreams. Our flourishing was mutual, through only some additional chores on my own, I received so much more in return than I ever really gave. So I encourage you to look for the flourishing and the mutuality in your life. 

Sermon — October 22, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Jesus said to them, ‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,
and to God the things that are God’s.’” (Matthew 22:21)

You’ll sometimes hear this verse quoted as an argument for the separation of church and state, often in its traditional translation “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” I’ve heard it used to say that you should “keep politics out of the pulpit,” to avoid taking stances on divisive issues in the context of prayer: leave to the politicians the things that politicians say, and keep the content in church focused on the things of God. And I’ve heard it used to say, in the other direction, that you should keep religion and religious values out of schools and courts and legislatures, along much the same lines.

And for what it’s worth, I agree. We’ve seen what can occur when religious fundamentalism tries to drive public policy, around the world. A pretty good rule of thumb comes from the IRS, believe it or not. While churches can and should take stands on any number of social and political issues, from poverty to climate change to racial justice, they can’t engage in partisan politics; if a pastor stands in the pulpit and endorses a candidate for office, then at least in theory, the church risks its tax-exempt status. Fair enough. The separation of church and state is an important principle in modern society.

But it’s not what Jesus is talking about in the Gospel reading today.

When Jesus says, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” he isn’t drawing a distinction between mundane political concerns and his own more elevated religious teaching. He’s taking a particular stand on the most important political question of his day. Jesus and his disciples and his audience are the Jewish subjects of an unpopular Roman emperor who rules from far away. The trap the Pharisees set is a good one. They ask him whether it’s in accordance with the law to pay taxes to the emperor. They’re asking about Jewish law; of course it’s lawful under Roman law to pay Roman taxes. But the Roman occupation, like any foreign occupation, was wildly unpopular. So the trap is set: if Jesus answers, “no,” well, that’s sedition. He’d be encouraging people to defy the Roman state, and he could be condemned and arrested, and likely crucified. If he answers, “yes,” well, that’s the kind of collaboration that would discredit him in the eyes of his fellow Jews, at least the patriotic ones. “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” doesn’t mean, “leave me alone and keep your politics away from my religion”; it’s one of the two possible political answers to a political question!

But, as he often does, Jesus frames his response in a way that evades the trap. He asks them to take out a coin, and asks, “Whose face is that?” They don’t want to look ridiculous, so of course they say, “Well, that’s the emperor.” The emperor made that money. It’s the emperor’s mints who stamped it with his face. It’s the emperor who uses it to spread his image throughout the empire, so everyone who buys or sells knows whose subject they are. “So,” Jesus says, “give back to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” These coins bear the emperor’s image; he can have them back. But in the same way, you should give to God the things that are made in the image of God. And what’s made in the image of God?

…Well it’s you! And me! All of us. All human beings are “made in the image of God.” And this isn’t just a nice, poetic way to express the dignity of every human being. It’s quite literally the word of God. It’s what God says, in the very first chapter of the Book of Genesis, in the first story of the creation of human beings: “Let us make humankind,” God says, “in our image, according to our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26) The Pharisees are the best and the most devoted and the most pious among the people of God, and Jesus’ response leaves them speechless, because they know what he is saying: Give your taxes, sure, to the emperor; but give your whole self to God. And so Jesus escapes the trap; he refuses to countenance defiance of the Roman Empire, but nevertheless subsumes its importance under the much greater kingdom of God.

In a few moments, I’ll baptize two children in the name of that same God, and we’ll welcome them as new members of the Body of Christ, the Church. The ancient teachers of the Church often wrote that in baptism, the image of God in us is restored; that the smudges and smears we’ve inherited from our ancestors are wiped away, and the image is made clear. They noticed that in Genesis, God said that we were made in the image and likeness of God, and they taught that in baptism the fullness of the image of God is restored, so that over the course of our lives we might grow into that likeness.

Baptism marks an entrance into the life of the Church—not this church in the narrow sense, not St. John’s Charlestown, but the Church with a capital C, the universal body made up of all the baptized. Baptism marks us as God’s own, as human beings formed in the image of God, just as clearly as the coins Jesus held in his hand were formed in the image of the emperor, and marked as his own.

And we carry that mark with us through our whole lives, whether we know it or not. That’s true in a chronological sense, of course: we carry the mark of baptism over the course of our whole lives. Like any of us, the children we baptize today may not always be active members of this or any other local church. But they will be members nevertheless of the Church with a capital C into which they are inducted today, the Body of Christ living in this world. And wherever they go in all the years of their lives, they will always find a home in the family of God.

But we carry the mark with us through our whole lives in a second sense, as well. We are like coins, and we do not change our faces from Lincoln at the supermarket to Washington at CVS. We are stamped with the image of God, everywhere we go. When Jesus reminds us that we carry the image of God, and tells us to “give to God the things that are God’s,” it really is an invitation to offer our whole lives to God. This doesn’t mean that we should give up everything we have and join a convent, although some people do; it doesn’t mean we should dedicate every second of our lives to the church. It means that we should see each little slice of our lives as part of your lives with God, so that we no longer have A work life, and a family, and friendships, and kids’ sports, and hobbies, and spiritual life, each in its own separate compartment; but our spiritual lives, as lives as people of faith, permeate all the rest.

So I want to offer you a challenge, all you beloved, image-bearing people of God: Without changing anything about your weekly schedule or your daily commitments, can you start offering more of the parts of your life to God? Without increasing the amount of time you spend in church or in prayer, can you allow your spirituality to spread through every day? Without talking any more about God, can you come to understand more of your life as belonging to God? And what would that mean? What would it mean to remember that you are marked with the image of God? What would it mean to let God into your life at the most mundane moments in your day? What would it mean, in other words, to “give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”? Namely, your whole self.