Whose Kingdom?

Dear First Pres SLO Family,

Grace and peace to you in the name of the one true King, Jesus the Messiah, who came to save us and show us how to live.

I’m doing something a little different this week. The sound was garbled on our livestream and recording of Sunday’s service, and some of you have asked for the sermon so you can read it. So…here it is. Below is my manuscript of Sunday’s message, “Whose Kingdom?,” kicking off our new series called Jesus and Power.

This Sunday the message is based in John 13, and it’s called “Make Faith Great Again.”

Blessings to you and yours,

Pastor John

Whose Kingdom? Matthew 22:15-22 Feb 9 2025 FPCSLO

I remember once I was in high school, the teacher was called out to speak with someone in the hall. While she was gone, a student thought he’d be funny and started pretending to be her; he got really into it—lots of mocking and imitating. What he didn’t notice after a while was that the teacher had come back in. The teacher was not amused. She reminded him that she was the teacher, as she packed him off to the principal.

Sometimes we forget who’s really in charge.

Sometimes we have to be reminded.

Today we begin a new series called Jesus and Power. There’s a lot in the Bible about Jesus and the powers. I think this is a helpful journey for us to take as we live through this historical moment.

Because it’s good for us to be reminded of who’s really in charge. It’s also good for us to bear witness to who’s in charge in front of the rest of the world.

Text: Matt 22:15-22

We’re in Matthew’s gospel again—it was written to a Jewish Christian audience.

So who are these Herodians?

After the Romans conquered Judea and Palestine, King Herod and his sons were the Jewish kings elected by the Roman senate to keep control of the people.

The Herodians in our passage were followers of the Herods—

they were Jews who wanted to see Israel strong again,

no matter what they had to give up in their faith.

I won’t be coy about this. You’re hearing me correctly.

The Herodians watered down their faith so they could Make Israel Great Again.

Think about how they behaved toward the coming of Jesus.

King Herod didn’t want the baby Jesus to survive and lead his people, and had every newborn Jewish boy murdered.

Herod’s successors didn’t like Jesus’ teachings about love and mercy and forgiveness and humility and sacrifice and—you get the idea.

They rejected their Messiah in order to hold on to their political power.

You can’t make this stuff up.

It’s so important to notice where this text is placed in Matthew’s story of Jesus.

Chapter 22 begins with a parable about the Kingdom of God. A King prepares a celebration for his son’s wedding, and takes on all of the planning details.

Let’s get this straight: The King in the story, clearly representing God,

invites people to his son’s wedding. He prepares a feast—he creates the menu and preps the table and decorations. It’s the King who creates the content of the gathering.

His guests reject the invitation—they even abuse and kill the messengers who tell them about the feast the King has prepared. Don’t miss that.

The villains in the story reject the content of the King’s message and invitation.

A few verses later, the thought-police of the day—the Pharisees—decide to try and catch Jesus saying something that would get him in trouble. They’re still rejecting the content of the King’s message, and that brings us to our story.

Let’s look at the verses.

15 Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. 

This is the response of religious people who have given up their authority to political power. The Pharisees, who were established to help prepare the Jewish faithful for the coming of the Messiah, switched their allegiance to the Herods—to the people who abandoned their faith for a chance to rule.

Don’t miss how this 2000 year old story speaks to our present situation.

And that’s just the first verse in our text.

16 They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. 17 Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax[a] to Caesar or not?”

The junior Pharisees and representatives of the government go to try to trap Jesus in some error so they can discredit him and maybe even get him to disappear. They butter him up, they compliment his teaching, and then BAM! They ask him:

“Are you loyal to Caesar?”

18 But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? 19 Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, 20 and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

21 “Caesar’s,” they replied.

Jesus takes the air out of their attack by asking an innocent question of his own.

Whose face is on the coin? They answer: It’s Caesar’s face.

Then he said to them, 

“So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

22 When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.

The people who came to challenge Jesus just went home when they got a hard question. We don’t have the privilege of walking going away. Here’s why.

We spend so much time on the first part of Jesus’ answer,

and not nearly enough on the second.

Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Fine, Jesus says.

Pay your taxes and fly your flags and argue your politics online.

But there’s more to the story.

“…give to God what is God’s.”

Being a citizen is great, but Christians answer to a higher calling.

I can be proud of being an Italian-American with a little Scottish mixed in; but what defines me is my place in the world as a child of God through the grace of Jesus Christ, holy and dearly loved.

The reminder is that we have an answer when someone says:

“Who’s the real king around here?” It’s Christ, and only Christ.

That means one thing for us:

We can never, ever, give away the allegiance that’s owed to God and God alone.

When people forget who they are and whose they are, bad things happen.

In an interview a couple of years ago, Evangelical leader Russell Moore said that multiple pastors had told him disturbing stories about church members being upset when they heard the words of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus talks about the principles of forgiveness and mercy that are central to the Christian faith.

Moore said: “Multiple pastors tell me the same story about quoting Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and having someone come up after and say:

“Where did you get that liberal nonsense?”

When people forget who they are and whose they are, bad things happen.

So what do we do about all of that?

The words of Jesus in Matthew 22 remind us to keep our citizenship and our status as children of God in their right places.

It fits with what we say and hear every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer.

NT Wright and Michael Bird write about this in their book: Jesus and the Powers.

“We pray for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. If all of us are true to the giver of the prayer, and to those in the first Christian generation who prayed it and lived it, then we must be building for, and working and praying for, the kingdom [of God].”

When we say “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we’re committing ourselves to one King over all things—to one set of principles and values to guide our lives—to guide the ways we live and love and spend and vote.

And out of all the things we find in the Bible, it is the teachings of Jesus and the way that he behaved that define what it means to live by Christian values.

That means that Jesus is the one who is meant to define our politics, too.

And defining our politics that way has teeth to it.

Wright and Bird continue:

“We must act in all earnestness to hold the State accountable and remind it, whether this is believed or not, that even the State is answerable to the Lord Jesus. This Lordship is established neither by terror nor by tanks, but by the fruit of the Spirit manifesting itself wherever the followers of Jesus may go.”

It is our job to hold our government accountable to the values of the Kingdom, whether those values are believed or not. And how do we define those values of the Kingdom? By the fruit of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Seeing a lot of that these days?

I have news for you: there wasn’t enough of that in the last administration, either.

Just ask the people in Gaza—at least the ones that are left.

When we say “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we’re committing ourselves to one king over all things—to one set of principles and values to guide our lives—to guide the ways we live and love and spend and vote.

Talking about the Lord’s Prayer, Wright and Bird said this:

“Such prayer, and such action, constitute the Church’s “program.” This theo-political vision shapes all that Jesus’ followers must ‘do’ in the world.” N.T. Wright and Michael Bird

They stray into a little academic language there, so let me translate.

The words of the Lord’s Prayer are the marching orders of the church of Jesus Christ. Alongside the rest of the teachings of Jesus and the fruit of the Spirit, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is meant to be a guide for our lives as individual Christians, and for any plans we make as a church here on this corner in San Luis Obispo.

Conclusion

There will always be someone who thinks they’re really in charge—

who want us to believe that they’re the final word on behavior and ethics and morals and government.

There will always be someone who wants us to give up the teachings of Jesus in order to hold on to some political power.

We’re invited—no, we’re called—to live differently.

This is the Kingdom of God—the reign of Jesus the Messiah.

And that same Jesus has something to teach us about power,

and about the powers that think their values are more important than the ones that Christ himself teaches.

News flash: That’s not true. No matter how much the headlines say otherwise, this is Christ’s Kingdom—the values of that Kingdom are how we were meant to live—how we were meant to treat each other.

Those values will win in the end.

Those values can begin to take over, right now.

May that be so, today and forever. Let’s pray together.