Matthew 22.15-22 A teaching about the emperor and God

Today, I want to talk about gratitude. It’s easy in life to forget to be grateful. To be focused on what is going wrong rather than on what is going right or even better yet, focused on the 90% of things going on in our lives that are just plain neutral. Neither good nor bad; they just are and that’s awesome. We don’t have to get all mucked up in feelings over every little thing. Most things it’s great to just be neutral about.

But, what should we be grateful for? Life would be boring if we lived neutrality about everything.

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending my first residency session within the Michigan Conference. We met at St Francis Retreat Center in Dewitt, a place I had never been before. I didn’t want to go. Mostly, I don’t like leaving my house. But also, it’s a 3 hour drive that I had already made the week before for a training in Lansing. I was going to a place I had never been, to meet a group of people I had never met, to engage in a program I knew nothing about.

It went fine. I met a lot of really cool people. We sang some fun camp songs. We did a few activities and engaged in some learning experiences. We also spent a little time trying to relax.

At one point, we were given some sticky notes and a Sharpie. The assignment was to take 20 minutes and go do something. Anything we wanted that brought us peace. It was a lesson in Spiritual Care. The only thing we had to do was write down 3 things we were grateful for on separate notes that we would stick to a board in our main meeting room.

I chose, since it was a beautiful day, to walk the grounds. Immediately, I was transfixed by a squirrel. It was fat and had a massive fluffy tail. I was reminded that I live somewhere that has black-phase grey squirrels. They’re grey squirrels… but black. I have had multiple conversations in my life with visitors about “black squirrels.” There are no black squirrels here only grey squirrels. I swear it was. It’s a grey squirrel. But it’s black. Grey squirrel. I was a biology nerd. Gratitude number #1: Squirrels.

I walked a little farther after watching the squirrel play and a truck drove by me filled with golden doodles. I mean filled. I counted at least 5 heads. The dogs were happy and all trying to look at the window. I envisioned the gentleman parking and they all poured out like a clown car.

I walked on. I saw a couple of people from my group paired up chatting and I remembered this morning in the lobby as I sat and stared at an intriguing painting that hung on the wall in the lobby. It stretched floor to ceiling two stories. It was a wide variety of human beings many of whom wore different uniforms of life. A civil servant, a priest, a drug addict, a nurse. Many of them had these things on their backs that it took me awhile to sort out what they were. At first, they looked like the fiery of flames of Pentecost but then I noticed they were attached to some of the people’s backs, not floating above their heads like tongues. So they were tiny red, fiery-looking wings. I stopped to talk to someone before I figured out what they symbolized, since not everyone had them. Gratitude #2: Art.

I then walked back through to the meeting room, placed my sticky notes on the board, and sat down in my plastic seat. I remembered the evening before and the nice comfy chairs we sat around in as we talked. Gratitude #3: Comfortable chairs.

As I waited to take communion, I focused on the board and started reading the other notes. A whole lot of them said “family.” Some had a paragraph in tiny words. Others said friends, guidance, mobility, various remarks about the work they do as clergy. Of course, God’s love, Jesus, etc.

The idea struck me as I gazed at them, how so many of the notes were about things people missed. They weren’t things they observed in their time, but things they looked forward to when they got back home.

How often is gratitude like that? We focus on distant things. Things from the past. Things we always have or take for granted. We struggle to be grateful right here, right now, in this moment. We struggle to let our attention shift; floating from gratitude to the next gratitude that comes into our life. Our hearts, minds, and bodies are rarely all in the same place at the same time and we wonder why we’re so stressed.

Our gratitude lacks specificity. There’s no need to be general. Of course I’m grateful for God, but why? Why in this moment, right here right now, what specifically am I grateful for? What is God doing in my life this instant as I take in this breath?

Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees’ disciples and the Herodians “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one, for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Caesar, or not?”

Jesus ultimately “said to them, “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are the Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

We are not to just be grateful for God. We are also to be grateful for the things of this earth God has blessed us with. We are to be grateful for those who are here with us. We function as Christians both in this world and then next. We aren’t just sitting around waiting for this life to end, we’re supposed to be grateful in it.

What we cannot forget is that the things of this earth will remain things of this earth. We won’t take them with us when we go, but we will take the memory of how we responded to those things, what we did, who was there, whether or not we did all things in love.

I’m not a fan of taxes. I’m self-employed, a contract employee, I own my own business, and I’m clergy. My taxes are a nightmare. However, I pay them because this earthly money does not belong to me; God allows me to use it while I am here, and there are things I just do not do myself, like public systems, road construction, and utilities, that I pay other people so that I can share their use with others. These are Caesar’s things, which reach beyond myself.

I write on every check I give to a local church that 50% of it is to be used toward their ministry shares. 50% of what I tithe I send out into the greater world to benefit those on a broader scale I may never meet, to train new spiritual leaders for the future, to support God being known across the globe.  These things are Caesar’s.

I am grateful for what I have in the moment, what is waiting for me, what is yet to come. I am grateful for all these things. I am especially grateful for the God who makes these things possible. I am grateful for that squirrel, those dogs, that piece of art, that one chair I sat in. I am grateful for specific things that made an impression on me in the moment. I am grateful for an assignment that I took to mean focusing on the present, being present where I was, not wishing I was somewhere else. To be grateful that if the world fell apart and that’s where I was stuck, there were things there worthy of being grateful for.

God wants us to be grateful for all that God has provided. That includes being grateful to the other people God has placed on this planet with us to do things we cannot do ourselves. Gratitude must be both within our souls and stretch out into the world. So yes, we give thanks both to Caesar and to God.

Matthew 22:³⁷ Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Love God. Love neighbor. Love yourself. Express your gratitude for all of them.