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	1st Reading
	Psalm
	2nd Reading
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	Written Transcript of Homily
	Footnotes

Let me start withe Pharisees and the ( ? ? ?).

We don’t really know who the ( ? ? ) were.

But, they were associated with Herod the King.

Now Herod was a peace of work.

Herod was not a King by nature, he was a Roman — middle Eastern politician, who always seemed to end up at the right side of the argument.

His great patron was Queen Cleopatra.

This is Herod the Great we’re talking about

Who lived at the time Jesus was born.

He’s the one who tried to kill Jesus.

He was a politician, and the Romans knew he was useful.

First he backed Mark Anthony and then he backed his rival Octavian Augustus..

But Octavian knew that he would be useful.

So Herod got along with the Romans.

So Herod petitioned to be made King of the Jews

and he wasn’t even a Jew, he was an arab.

But his family had been converted Judaism about, ooh.. About a century before Christ.

And he married the last princess of the ( ? ?) Dinensty

And he just rebuilt, he had a great sense of building, he rebuilt everything. He rebuilt the temple, and he made it as glorious, and more glorious than the temple of Solomon.

He was an amazing man.

He also managed to kill his own sons.

He was blood thirty, tyrant, he was terrified of losing his throne.

He had secret police and informers everywhere, when he was about to die, King Herod the Great had the leading citizens of Israel arrested, and he gave orders that they be killed the moment he died.

So at least there had been weeping in Israel when he died.

And when he died, they were all free.

So...

Nobody wept in Israel when he died.

His songs, his grandsons – his sons he hadn’t managed to kill, but his grandsons were most of the ones you read about in Jesus time ministry.

But they had people everywhere, listening to everything, nothing happened without, what we would call FBI , the secret police, whatever you wanna call them, listening.

Now the Pharisees were not clergy.

They were a political religious party.

They were about ten thousand of them.

And you became a Pharisee by swearing to uphold all the of points, all six hundred and thirteen points of the law, and the rabbinical interputation there of.

Like how much water you had to wash your hands, how much water did it take.

It was exhausting.

And they were sort of religious vigilantes.

They made sure people kept kosher.

The ( ? ? ) and the Pharisees were unlikely political partners.

But... t hey were both worried about Jesus

Because both this political party and this party of religious fanatics wanted to make sure things went along without any problem.

They liked their temple, their government, lets just make any waves.

But the Romans, and they knew that Jesus was going to be trouble

So they decided to band together to get Caesar.

So the Pharisee when and asked him a question and hey brought some ( ?? )and they knew, this is my suspicion, they knew these ( ? ? ) would make sure that the Government knew and the Romans knew if Jesus gave the wrong answer.

So they asked, “Is it Lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?”

Now Caesar, title of the Roman emperor, and well, the Romans were an occupying force.

However, there was peace.

These different factions couldn’t kill each other.

The roads were good

The shipping were good

Piracy was down

You could make a living, it wasn’t so bad.

Well, is it legal to pay taxes to Caesar, show me the coin of the tribute.

They handed them, I think it said a silver denarious, well...

When they handed him the coin, Jesus had them, they didn’t have Him.

Because coins usually had in scriptures of Gods or Goddesses.

This was where the bit about money being kosher came in.

Remember the story about the money changers in the temple?

Why would there be money changers in the temple?

Well, because you couldn’t make an offering to God unless the coin was kosher.

You took your Roman money and you got into the temple, before you got into the sacred part, you exchanged your money for Jewish money, which had no images of men or beasts or Gods or birds.

Just had maybe floral decorations, maybe had an image of the temple on it.

You had temple sheckles.

So you didn’t go into the court with pagan money

Because the emperors were Devine 

Their images were on the coin

So to carry a coin that was minted by the Romans meant you were carrying an image of a false God

And you call yourself a Pharisee.

You follow?

They were carrying around the images of Pagan gods, and they knew it!

Because they knew they couldn’t go into the inner part of the temple with this non-Kosher money.

So Jesus had them.

They were hypocrites they were play-actors, that’s what the word means.

But the telling part of this, is not simply that He says “Pay to Caesar what is Caesars” because coinage belongs to the government.

It still does.

The money in your pocket is not yours.

How true that is.

It belongs to the government.

I remember when I was a kid growing up in the grange.

There wasn’t much crime in the grange.

And there was a deputy officer who had very little to do.

And he would occasionally drop by the schoolyard when we were pitching pennies and throwing rocks and threatened to arrest us because we were damaging government property.

He didn’t last in the grange very long, let me tell you.

This guy, he needed to get a life.

Well, at any rate, coinage belong to the emperor, and they didn’t have ways of knowing what the King looked like so Kings had the right to put their face on the coinage.

And if you minted coins it meant you could consider yourself a king.

And if you weren’t a king and minted your face on a coin that was a declaration of revolution

So, the coin was a statement of who your king was

And you see, the Pharisees were admitting, their King really was Caesar, despite what they said later.

So give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but render to God what is God’s.

And to me this is important part of the text, what is God’s coinage?

Haven’t you read in the beginning, male and female, He made them, in His own image He made them?

Humanity is the coinage of God

God’s image is stamped on every human being.

And so we render to God.. Humanity

You return humanity back to God.

That is all sorts of different meanings

for instance, when you have children, oh this kid is gonna have everything I didn’t have, and do everything I wanted to do - he’s a chip off the old block!

Well, you can think that for a while, but then they become teenagers and let you know that they aren’t chips of anybody’s old blocks, they are who they are.

And they will do waht they will do.

You know?

You render your children back to God, in a certain part of your life, you give them back to God and you pray hard.

And you trust God, because boy, children.. They’re so childish.

Well, w hat else, what else is the image of God?

I remember, St. Thomas, the soup kitchen, it was a very odd soup kichen..

There are lots of soup kitchen, but at every soup kitchen you heard the gospel passage, you heard the sermon, you sang a song, you prayed and then you ate.

Our guest use ot call it singing for your supper.

At St. Thomas, we didn’t do that.

We prayed with the people who worked.

But we never prayed with our guests, because we figured they had heard the gospel, instead of hearing it,t hey needed to see it in action.

We were giving them food, not because they needed it, but because the Lord told us to do it.

For us, it was an act of worship.

We were reversing the image of God that was so hidden..

By addiction, by sin, by a mental illness..

By the harshness of the world.

You know, every person is made of the image and likeness of God, it’s just that image and likeness is very much covered over.

Have you ever found a statue in the dirt, or maybe a crucifix in a mud puddle?

You pick it up, and it’s terrible, and you clean it off, and you take it home and put it in the kitchen,where you put all that stuff you don’t know what to do with.

Well, the image of God is around us everywhere, and it’s covered with, well.. With filth.

And it’s sometimes takes a great stretch to reverence the image of God in fellow human beings.

But, to me, this statement, render to God what is God’s, means that it the Christian should be noted for his kindness and his courtesy.

We lived in a discourteous world.

None of us can agree with who should go first at the stop sign.

Good Lord, Skokie can be a little dangerous because they have the two-way stops.

You know, I always say, in Chicago, the motto of all drivers is ‘take no poisoners’, you know?

Well...

The line in the grocery store, I mean..

Isn’t it wonderful when a new line opens up and everybody heads for it like a bee line?

You better not be some little old cripple, you may get run over by some shopping cart – it may be my shopping cart.

We’re not curteuous, but you see, if we render to God what is God’s, we reverence image of God in every human being.

That whether we can communicate with them or not, we smile and give them the benefit of the doubt, we let them get a...
Oh god help me I should do this, we should let them go ahead of us in traffic occasionally.

We may let them cut in line without getting all upset.

To reverence the image of God in humanity, for us, kindness is a commandment of God.

It is one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit.

And iti s a form of worship.

So, let us pray today that we have the grace and the wisdom and the strength to proceed God’s image.

In people and in places where no one else can see it

And we might reverence it with kindness and compassion and with genuine respect.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.