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Remembrance Sunday
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Scripture citation(s): Matthew 25:34-40
A Sermon by
Chaplain Major Benjamin J. Newland, Army Chaplain
on
Matthew 25:34-40
✛
Jericho
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I’m sitting in the front row of folding chairs in a pavilion whose big barn doors have all been rolled back to let the warm mountain air of a Colorado summer breeze come through. Around two hundred of us have made the annual pilgrimage, or annual before COVID anyways; this year feels special as we struggle to reclaim that easy community the pandemic nearly broke. Five young people are up on stage, tuning instruments and chatting amiably with one another, as glad as we are to be released from quarantine and making music live again.
The word, ‘music’, has become a little too commonplace, I think. It’s so easy to ‘turn on some music’ in the car or on your phone. The Bluetooth speaker is always ready. The truth behind all but the most successfully produced and corporately delivered music looks much more like these five people opening cases and testing microphones: fragile arrangements of passionate people trying to make a living from art. They’ve mostly just graduated from college over the past few years, and their first album was released just as the world was shutting down. Soon they’ll want spouses, and maybe kids, and then will they still be able to afford to do what they’re doing for us this morning?
“Our first song is called ‘Jericho’,” says the young man with the guitar. “It’s about a soldier.”
“Interesting,” I think, “I know some soldiers. And that sounds like a biblical reference.” There’s no way for me to know now that four minutes and eighteen seconds later I will be as emotionally devastated as I’ve been all year.
He sings:
These days I sleep under an open sky
‘Cause I can’t seem to sleep in my bed
Back before we split up my wife told me
It′s just in your head
A civilian’s life used to make sense to me
Then I shipped out an served my two tours
I retired last year
Tried to come back to life as before
But at night I still fly back to Jericho
Where we brought their walls tumblin’ down
Buried my friends who have fallen
And never been found
And God’s children I’ll save from their enemies
With a horn that he gave me to blow
Finish my days in the only place I really know,
Jericho
The punchline of this Gospel reading is so well known, so thoroughly woven into the fabric of Western culture, that it hardly seems there could be anything more to say about it. This scene happens towards the end of Matthew’s Gospel and Jesus has drawn the attention of powerful people who don’t want their status quo overturned. The Pharisees and Herodians, who have no other common cause under the sun, are united in their desire to be rid of Jesus. So they set a trap.
It’s a clever trap. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” There’s no correct way for Jesus to answer. To pay taxes to the Emperor is to support your own oppression and fund a pagan regime that cannot tolerate your worship of the One True God. To refuse to pay those taxes is to incite revolt and maybe to violate the Law of Moses. That’s the trap: whichever way Jesus answers he’ll have given the authorities a reason to arrest him. They aren’t testing him, they’re giving him a multiple-choice menu of what he’d prefer to be executed for.
And it’s a clever trap, but Jesus is good at this. “It’s Caesar’s coin,” says Jesus, “give it back to him.” He called them hypocrites already, now he shows everyone that they are blasphemers as well, these Pharisees and Herodians, carrying this pagan image into the sacred temple—supporting the system that crushes all of them because they get to be on top of the pile while it’s being crushed. There’s no response to be made, so his accusers wander off, not with changed minds but to plot other assaults.
It’s a clever trap, and a clever escape, and a catchy line. “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” That’s a good line, and it gives us space to maneuver in this fallen world where governments are a necessary evil and God doesn’t always seems to be right there ready to help. We have to live, and splitting things up between Caesar and God is an effective way to manage a complicated world.
But the trap was a trap for us too. Because what belongs to Caesar? And what belongs to God? There’s not always a picture on the denarius we’re holding to make it clear what we should do.
And the young man is still up there on stage singing about the soldier:
When it’s sunny I sit in the public park
When it’s raining I ride on the train
At this diner they serve me free coffee
They know me by name
And the guys from my unit come talk to me
‘Bout the jobs they’ve been trying to chase
And I tell them how after its dark I return to that place
How at night I still fly back to Jericho
Where we brought their walls tumblin’ down
Buried my friends who have fallen
And never been found
And God’s children I’ll save from their enemies
With a horn that he gave me to blow
Finish my days in the only place I really know,
Jericho
I spent three years as the chaplain to an aviation battalion, and while I was there I learned that Warrant Officers (the pilots) don’t much like to talk to Chaplains. I can count the number of Warrants that came to my office for a serious conversation on one hand, even if that hand was missing three fingers. So I remember both of those men pretty well.
The first came from another unit entirely, so as to not be seen entering his own Chaplain’s office. He was only there because he didn’t feel like he could safely go to Behavioral Health and still fly, so I was the backup. “I just need to check that I’m not going crazy,” he said. Then he told me about things he’d seen, and done, in his career as an attack helicopter pilot.
“Usually I’m fine,” he said. “Usually I sleep fine. Then sometimes I’ll have nightmares. They’re not even nightmares, really, just perfectly accurate dreams of what happened. And it’s not the visuals, or the sounds, that get me. I remember them all clearly. It’s the smell. I forget, but then in the dream I can smell that cockpit all these years later, and I wake up covered in sweat and I know I’m not going to sleep much for a month or two. What do you think Chaplain? Am I crazy?”
Not crazy, just wounded, I told him. Just a man trying to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. A man who signed up to serve his country, to protect the defenseless, to stand against evil. A man who discovered that such service is generally not as clear as a face engraved on a coin.
The second Warrant Officer who ever came to my office did so about half a year before he died of a suspected self-inflicted gunshot wound. We had to say it that way: suspected self-inflicted gunshot wound, even though he was on a video call with his estranged wife at the time and she watched him do it.
All good story songs have three verses, and the young man on stage is about to bring his song about the soldier to a close now that the instrumental break has reached its climax, and tears are streaming, unwiped, down my face.
A garden grows now where that city burned
Children play with old guns from the war
But the bullets are gone now
They don’t even know what they’re for
And my family back home can sleep well at night
Knowing I’ll keep them safe everyday
‘Till I die and I’m laid to rest under the ruins we made
‘Till at night I can fly back to Jericho
On two wings made by God’s own design
Buried my friends who have fallen
And been left behind
And God’s children I’ll save from their enemies
With a horn that he gave me to blow
I’ll finish my days in the only place I really know,
Jericho
“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” Those are the words that the Pharisees and Herodians deserved. Those are the words that the people following Jesus two-thousand years ago needed. There is still a great deal of truth and practical wisdom to be had from the philosophy behind those words. There’s a reason why even people who don’t know that those words came out of Jesus’ mouth still know those words.
Yet there’s a greater truth underneath those words. Maybe Jesus knew this deeper truth would get twisted out of shape in the hands of those who came to entrap him, so he couldn’t say it just then. Maybe Jesus knew his followers weren’t ready for this deeper truth just yet, and so he gave them what they could understand. He’ll show them, this deeper truth, on Good Friday, and they still won’t entirely understand.
Here it is: you can’t render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, because none of it is Caesar’s. Not the coin with his face stamped on it. Not the service rendered to country. Not the soldier come home from war and wounded. None of it is Caesar’s.
All of it is God’s. Do you hear me? All of it is God’s. I’ve taken you on this journey this afternoon—and I know it’s been a painful journey for some of you, as it is for me—I’ve taken you on this journey because I believe that this truth matters. That this is a matter, quite literally, of life and death. That knowing and trusting this truth can be the difference between life and death.
All of it. Is God’s. The young musicians on the stage and their beautifully crafted moment of fragile transcendence, is God’s. The Apache pilot kept awake by the uncertainty that all the lives he’s taken deserved to be taken, is God’s. The self-inflicted gunshot wound and the eight year old boy who has to live with it, are God’s. Even Caesar, in the end, is God’s.
All of it is God’s. We have to know this. We have to trust it. We have to live our lives as if we were convinced that it was true. I don’t know if we’ll survive otherwise.
The joy and the pain. The broken and contrite hearts. The life and the death. The soldier, the spouse, the child. All of it is God’s. AMEN.
