Anyway, this Clean Sweep show goes into the houses of people who have no clue about what to do with their stuff. They need help. Their closets are bulging, their garages are overflowing, and they are suffocating in their unkempt houses. The experts come in and make three piles: things to keep, things to trash, and things to give away or sell. The show is mostly about how to teach people to sort through their things, how to move more stuff from the keep pile to the trash or donate pile.

Sorting through things is a lifelong challenge not limited to our closets, garages, and attics. We spend our lives trying to figure out what’s what, where things belong, how to ferret through competing loyalties. Our gospel text today seems to put things into two piles: things that belong to Caesar and things that belong to God. But is that so? Is that the way we should sort out our lives? And is that even what Jesus is saying?

The Pharisees and the Herodians sent representatives of their parties to test Jesus on one of the biggest questions of the day: whether it was spiritually lawful for a devout Jew to pay taxes to a pagan emperor. Sorting through things like this was no easy task. This was a lose-lose question for Jesus. You could almost say the blessed Son of God was in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t predicament, except for the fact that he was the blessed Son of God, don’t you know?! It was an ambush, politics at its inside-the-Washington-Beltway worst.

If Jesus said no, he would have sided with the hardliner Pharisees, who believed that paying taxes to Romewith a coin that bore the image of the emperor would break covenant with the God who commanded no graven images. If he said yes, he would have pleased the establishment Jews who supported King Herod and thought of him as their rightful, if not ideal, king. And of course that meant that Jesus would have been in trouble with one group of fellow Jews or another—whether the biblical legalists or the pragmatic nationalists. Getting him into a bind was the point to begin with. Matthew says they came out of malice, and Jesus spotted it in them. They didn’t really want to hear his answer so that they could consider whether their own views needed revision. They wanted to enlist him or court-martial him.

It seems we’re still at this, aren’t we?  Two words: Harriet Miers. Our newest nominee to be a Supreme Court Justice—and Dallas’ own—has people left, right, and center trying to sort things out. How will she vote on a matter that is important to us? Will she side with us or the other side? She is the nominee of a president that wants judges to interpret the Constitution strictly; which is code language for not finding ways to trump the elected legislative branch that makes laws that the people supposedly want. Strict constructionists do not, for example, find support in the Constitution for the right to privacy in matters like abortion or consensual homosexual relations. Conservatives were hoping the president would pick a brilliant legal scholar to promote their cause on the court, and some of them feel betrayed because they worry that Miers was more of a qualified crony than the consummate candidate. Other conservatives support the choice simply because Ms. Miers is an evangelical Christian. This label apparently comes with an assumed worldview that those of like faith can trust without knowing the details. What role faith should play is, of course, debatable by all sides. It’s one of the things that have to be sorted out. Conservatives aren’t even sure; they are split on this one. Throw in liberals and moderates, and poor Ms. Miers must feel like she is being run through the spin cycle.

Jesus answers the Sanhedrin Judicial Committee without a note and in such a clever way that neither side can claim him or dismiss him. Genius. Ms. Miers ought to be taking notes on how Jesus does it. I’m not sure they knew what to do with his answer. I’m not sure anyone knows full well what to do with his answer.

Listen again to his answer: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. So what are Caesar’s things, and what are God’s things? How do you divide things into these two piles?

Rome, of course, claimed that everything belonged to Caesar, and Jews believed that everything belonged to God. The Jews were ultimately right, and they could not figure what Jesus was up to by compartmentalizing things the way he did. But is that what he was doing?

One wrong way to interpret Jesus’ answer, I think, is to say that the state has claim to our public loyalty and God to the private. This divides God and government in a way that is always unhealthy. Government needs people of religious conviction applying their beliefs in public life to the end that all of life may be just and fair and good. And religion needs to take stock of what is happening to neighbors outside their faith community instead of retreating to a personal piety that cares only for the soul and not the body.

For instance, if you are a committed Christian and you pray consistently, witness to your neighbors about salvation in Jesus Christ, and worship regularly with your church, well and good. But if you neglect to vote, fail to make government more responsive to all citizens, and resent paying taxes (or cheat on them, God forbid), then you will get no consolation from Jesus’ words. You violate the part of rendering—that is, giving back—to Caesar what is Caesar’s.

It is true that government sometimes claims too much divinity for itself and needs to be challenged. In the case of Rome, the very coins that Jews were forced to use to pay their taxes had the image of Caesar engraved on them with the words Tiberius Casear, worshipful son of the divine. You can imagine the moral affront to their religion they felt. In fact, I would suggest that behind the words on our currency—In God We Trust—is the desire to make sure that no American leader will ever be allowed to claim divine status. Americans are all democrats with a small D. We agree with the Jewish rabbinical teaching that Caesars come and go. They can claim divine patronage, but the best they can do is put their own image on an inert object, and every one of them looks just alike. God put his own image in human beings—male and female—and each one of them is different. So while we may pay tribute to Caesar, the greater good is to pay tribute to God by caring for every human being. Perhaps rendering care to every human being is the best way to interpret the things of God that we owe to God.

Notice, though, that Jesus does not give a clear and direct answer to the question of what we owe to Casear and what to God. Any time a political party tries to tell you what you must believe and starts going into detail about with you as to what belongs to Caesar and what to God, how you should vote, that sort of thing, be warned. And any time a preacher or some other religious leader tries to do the same, be warned. Jesus does not lay it out for you; you must sort through things yourself under God. He respects your right and holds you responsible to sort through things.

At the very least he seems to say that we owe some rightful loyalty to government. Jesus will not let us divinize any government as if it is God’s special agent and always right, nor will he let us demonize government as if it is naturally wicked and can never be God’s instrument for good.

The way some people would like to starve government is hardly in keeping with Jesus’ words about giving Caesar his due. Especially since our form of government is of the people, by the people, and for the people, as Lincoln put it. One pernicious antitax champion from this state would like to hold every politician hostage if he or she even once were to vote for higher taxes. He says he wants to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub. Pass the soap, please.

I like the story former South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings tells about how strange this attitude is. A veteran returning from Korea went to college on the GI bill; bought his house with an FHA loan; saw his kids born in a VA hospital; started a business with an SBA loan; got electricity from TVA and then water from a project funded by the EPA. His kids participated in the school-lunch program and made it through college courtesy of government-guaranteed student loans. His parents retired to a farm on their Social Security, getting electricity from the REA and the soil tested by the USDA. When the father became ill, his life was saved with a drug developed through the NIH; the family was saved from financial ruin by Medicare. … Then one day he wrote his congressman an angry letter complaining about paying taxes for all those programs created for ungrateful people. [F. Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary, Vol. 2, p. 400; originally from Jonathon Yates, “‘Reality’ on Capitol Hill,” Newsweek, Nov. 28, 1988, p.12.]

Government deserves our best efforts, not our disdain. If you don’t like it, you can work to make it better. I don’t know what Jesus’ position would be on this issue or that, but I do not believe we can find authority from him to evade taxes or to grumble about paying them just because we don’t like the emperor at the time.

Likewise, I do not know what to tell you your responsibilities are to God in every case. I can tell you that I think it is ironic that if you had to choose between paying Caesar and paying God, you’d choose God every time. And yet you pay your taxes because you have to, and most of you neglect to pay your tithes to God because you somehow think, what, you don’t have to? Sorting through what we owe to God is no easy thing. Jesus never gave us a list. He gave us himself, even unto death on a cross. And that is perhaps our best model of love to follow.

This week I was trying to sort through what I owe to God. And I determined that each day it is a question to ask oneself.

On Friday morning Kim and I finished revising our wills. We had to ask ourselves what we would do with what God has given us beyond our lifetimes. We knew Caesar would make claims upon some of it, but we did not feel we ought to render more to Caesar than necessary. We wanted to take care of our family as the Bible says we must, but we also wanted to give back to the church that has been our church family. How much and what to do in rendering back to God what is God’s is something we have to sort through even beyond our lifetimes.

But at the end of the day and at the end of your life, what God most wants you to render back is yourself. God wants you, completely. And it seems only right, since God gave himself to you, completely. If you are withholding your love for God, let me assure you there will be an audit in the future. If you are not ready for it today, maybe it’s time to start sorting things out.