"Pimps, Prostitutes, Pharisees and Freedom" – John 8:31-36

John 8:31-36

Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” They said to him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone, what do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free.’?” Jesus answered them, “Anyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household, but the Son has a place there forever. So, if the Son makes you free, you will be free, indeed.”

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Oddly enough, I had slavery on the brain this week even before I started to consider this Gospel for Reformation Sunday. Many of you know we had a pretty meaningful evening last Sunday, watching this documentary about human trafficking called Sex and Money. I learned at least one new thing that night which was deeply profound for me and that I’m still stewing about. But before I go there, you should know that I’m no prude about this subject. I was a Psychology, Criminology major in college, remember, and I’ve done my fair share of thinking about these sorts of things. I even watch plenty of documentaries, like that one, in my free time, much to my wife’s dismay (She thinks it’s a bit weird how interested I am in the world of criminal behavior.)

And despite what I feel like I know – or knew – about it all, it wouldn’t have taken much to convince me that it might be worth considering that something like prostitution would/could, maybe even should be legalized in more places. Morality and ethics aside, I can get behind the notion that it would save lots of time and money on the part of law enforcement, the court and criminal justice systems, jails and prisons, and all the rest. I can even see that in some instances, like prostitution for example, there are grown people making adult decisions about what they do with their lives, their bodies and their money.

If it were legal – prostitution, I mean – at least it could be regulated, the argument goes. If it were legal, at least there could be mandatory testing and treatment for diseases. If it were legal, the workers would have more opportunity to manage their own affairs, more power over their own money, more control over their own well-being, less of a chance they’d be taken advantage by their pimps.

But the most enlightening part of the documentary we saw last Sunday came when a woman (I wasn’t taking notes, so I’m not sure if she was a psychologist, a sociologist, a professor, a lawyer, or what), but she said something about being thankful that during the days of the abolition movement in our own country, she was glad no one ever proposed the notion that there might be better, safer, more fair ways to regulate the owning of African people as slaves. It was an all or nothing sort of deal. It was either going to be all okay or it would all be deemed an abomination. And thankfully, of course, it was all abolished, from a legal, cultural perspective anyway.

Her point was that there is no way to pretend – or that we should ever be convinced – that slavery is okay; that you can regulate or make fair or keep safe or make right the enslavement of another human being – whether it’s Africans during the 18th Century or boys and girls, or men and women in this day and age.

Like I said, I’m no prude about this. I can imagine there are grown men and grown women who make adult, informed, considered, consenting decisions about their participation in the work of prostitution. But, if you believe the statistics, this just isn’t true for too many, if not the vast majority, of workers in that field – and it’s the point at which good ol’ fashioned prostitution begins to look a lot more like modern day “human trafficking” and slavery.

For instance, the average age of entry into the human trafficking industry is 12 years old.

Some statistics suggest that 1 in 3 young people is solicited for sex within 48 hours of running away or becoming homeless in the U.S.

The average price for a human being in the world is $90.

And finally, if a woman survives all of that and "decides” to make it a way of life, the average prostitute, in an effort to escape abuse and violence of all kinds, leaves and goes back to her pimp 5-7 times before getting away from him for good, if she ever does. It’s all very much like any abusive relationship. The victims are convinced they are loved and in love with these men. They are groomed into believing this is what they’re worth; how life is; that they don’t have any other option so that this is what they want, even, for themselves.

These women live so long under such mind-numbing, mind-controlling, mind-warping conditions that they believe they are deciding, choosing, consenting to this way of life. Which is where – believe it or not – this Reformation Gospel comes to mind. For most of us, it may not be as shocking or as shameful or as dark as the world of human trafficking, but for others it may just be.

Either way, my favorite moment in this Gospel is when the Jews who were listening to Jesus say, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free.’?”

The truth, of course, is that they come from a long history of slavery, these Jews. Jesus could have said, “Are you crazy? Are you serious? Are you so ignorant of your past that you don’t know? How can you say you’ve never been slaves to anyone? As Jews, we’ve been slaves as often as we haven’t, it seems. What about all those generations in Egypt? Or all those years in Assyria? What about the fact that, even now, centuries later, we’re living under the rule of Rome and none of us is as ‘free’ as we’d like to be?

And none of that is really even what Jesus is talking about or referring to or getting at, except that it highlights how readily we allow ourselves to misunderstand the reality of our circumstances.

See, Jesus isn’t talking about freedom from some social, political, or cultural kinds of slavery the way we – and those First Century Jews in his audience – are inclined to assume.  Jesus is talking about freedom from the helpless state of our souls and freedom from the slavery of sin that binds everyone of us.

“Whoever commits sin is a slave to sin,” Jesus says. “Whoever commits sin is a slave.”

So, could I see a show of hands?  Who among us is without sin in the eyes of God? 

So, we’re clear about this. We get it. Like Paul says, we all sin and we all fall short of the glory of God. Like it or not. It’s just the way it is. We’re sinners.  Losers.  Broken.  Enslaved.  Bound.  Helpless.

And, like the Jews of Jesus day, there are Pharisees among us, and pastors and pimps and people living next door, too, who try to convince us, and trick us and fool us into believing we need them and their rules and their ways to be free.

But Jesus shows up and says none of that will do. He says we need someone bigger and something better than anything in this world to set us free. Specifically, he says, “the slave does not have a permanent place in the household, but the son has a place there forever. So if the son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

The world is filled with people just like you and me: sinful, broken, enslaved, fearful, helpless people who are either so numbed by or immune to their sins, or so overwhelmed by the gravity and the shame of their sinful ways, that they can’t imagine being released or freed or forgiven or allowed in to the good graces of their Creator. And there are also those enslaved by their ability to be or to appear flawless, bound by their need for perfection because they can’t bear to disappoint their family, their friends, themselves or their score-keeping, sin-counting, judgment-casting, fear-mongering God.

But Jesus Christ – the Son who has a place in the household of God’s heaven forever – makes room for us all there: Pharisees and free people; the pimp and the prostitute; the sinner and the saint. Because of this good news and by God’s abundant, amazing, all-consuming grace we are invited to be more hopeful than we are helpless and to live like liberated people – sinners, forgiven; not dead, but alive; not bound, but free; not afraid but full of hope. And no matter how far away we think we are from the ugly, scary, shameful ways of the world around us, we have prayers to offer and arms to open and resources to give and good news to share, in Jesus’ name, with all those who haven’t heard or come to believe any of this, just yet.

Amen

(While it’s true we’re called to leave judgment and forgiveness, redemption and the eternal state of our souls up to the grace of God, there are things we can and should do to free people who are bound, in this world, by the kind of stuff I talked about here. Check out www.purchased.org if you want to learn more or find some ways to help or get involved.)

"In God We Trust" – Matthew 22:15-22

[If you’re able to find some cash while you read, this might be a bit more fun. In worship, we reached in our pockets and dug around in our purses, holding onto and looking at our money while we listened.]

Matthew 22:15-22

Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said.  So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, ‘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 emperor, or not?’

But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, ‘Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites?  Show me the coin used for the tax.’  And they brought him a denarius.  Then he said to them, ‘Whose head is this, and whose title?’  They answered, ‘The emperor’s.’  Then he said to them, ‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’  When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.

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So, if you were able to play along, you have in your hand, I believe, the most practical and holy tool for – and measuring stick of – faithfulness in the world. I’ll come back to that cash in your hands, in a minute.

We hear right off the bat in this Gospel that the Pharisees and the Herodians were trying to trap Jesus. They were asking him a question that was impossible to answer – in a way that would make everyone listening happy, anyway. He knew it and so did the ones asking the questions.

Theologians and preachers interpret this moment in a couple of different ways.  One is to lift it up as justification for our modern-day penchant for a separation between Church and State, for drawing lines between the civil and religious realms of our lives. Caeser and the secular world on one side, God and faithfulness on the other. But that perspective doesn’t hold much water, really, because it’s not realistic to believe that any devout Jew in the First Century could even imagine setting up any kind of distinction between their politics and their religion, like we pretend to do. The practice of their faith was primary and elemental to every aspect of their daily life in this world.

The second interpretation of the passage has to do with the coin, in particular, because the denarius handed to Jesus as part of the debate would likely have had not only the image of Caesar’s head and shoulders stamped on its face, but it also very likely declared Caesar to be the "Son of God," or “Perpetual Dictator,” or something like it, in words, on top of that.  That meant even possessing such a coin equaled idolatry in the eyes of the religious gatekeepers of Jesus’ day – the very ones trying to trap him in this story.

The coin itself was a violation of the commandments against “having other gods” over and above the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; it was easy to see it as breaking the commandment against idols and graven images; and maybe even “taking the Lord’s name in vain,” if you wanted to get really picky about it.

So Jesus can’t win, it seems. He can’t give an answer that would make him “right” in the eyes of the Pharisees – those Jewish leaders – because if he says ‘yes, pay the tax,’ he’s guilty of breaking all of those commandments and inviting others to do the same. And if he says, ‘no, don’t pay the tax,’ the Herodians – the supporters of King Herod and Rome who were part of the action that day – would find him guilty of treason, or sedition, or something worthy of ridicule, if not some sort punishment.

But, Jesus is over it. He’s been teaching and preaching and healing and telling parables and all the rest. He’s been approached by children, followed by his disciples, questioned by family members of his disciples, and by chief priests and scribes and Pharisees and now these Herodians, too.

And notice that we’re in Chapter 22 of Matthew’s version of the story here, which means Jesus has already rolled into Jerusalem on the donkey for the festival of the Passover, he’s already turned over the tables in the temple and that means, I’d say, he knows the cross is right around the corner, or just over the next hill – if you will – so he’s over it. He’s done. He can’t be bothered with any more of these questions, let alone trapped by them, as the ones asking them had hoped .

So he doesn’t answer, really. He does that thing Jesus does with so many of his parables and teachings. He leaves things up to them. He holds up a mirror so that they have to consider what’s really behind their own questions – and the answers they think they’re looking for.  And they don’t know what to do with that; they’re amazed; they leave him and go away, with their tails between their legs.

They’re left to their own selfish devices. They’re left to wonder about their own response to Jesus’ rhetorical response: “Give to the emperor what belongs to the emperor. Give to God what is God’s.”

In other words, Jesus’ answer to his own proposition is kinda, sorta, “yes.”

“Yes.  All of our attention and our resources and our devotion belong to God.”

“Yes.  We can still be faithful and pay our taxes and support politics and politicians and the public good, while devoting ourselves faithfully to God.”

And “Yes.  In so many ways we are called to avoid devoting ourselves to the earthly things and the material stuff that our coins can buy in this world and ultimately devote ourselves to God most fully, instead.”

And I don’t mean for that to sound simplistic, because it’s not.  In fact, it’s one of the greatest struggles of our day, it seems to me.  This desire we have for things and for stuff and even just for survival, in some instances, and the way that conflicts with God’s invitation to sacrifice and to share and to be a blessing for the world around us is anything but simple or easy.

Now, I happen to think, for Christians and other believers in God, that it’s kind of cool that our currency has the phrase, “In God We Trust” on it, even if I wonder how much attention we give to that most of the time. It’s not about nationalism. It’s not about patriotism. It’s not about suggesting that we trust God in ways that are more or better than the ways that other nations do. But it’s that if we consider that statement, “In God We Trust,” in light of this Gospel story, it can be a really great reminder about where our allegiance is or – or where it should be – where God is concerned.

And I wonder if one of the reasons we don’t pay attention to that motto – In God We Trust – so much as it refers to our money, is because we don’t use cash and currency like we used to. We charge things on credit cards. We pay online. We write checks. So much of the money we spend or save, never amounts to anything more than numbers on a page or figures on a computer screen or transactions that happen out there in cyberspace somewhere. (There’s a whole psychology about the sneaky ways the world makes it easy for us to detach emotionally and spiritually from the ways we use our money – or let our money use us, as the case may be.  Just ask anyone who’s taken Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University class.

So what if, as a real way to drive this Gospel home, we took a moment to add “In God We Trust” to the memo line of every check we wrote? What if, after signing our name to every credit card receipt we handed over, we scribbled “In God We Trust” underneath our signature, or even just the letters “IGWT?” What if, on whatever computers we use to pay our bills or manage our finances or budget our households’ spending, we attached a note with those words, “In God We Trust?”

Wouldn’t that be a great, faithful – practical and holy – way to remember where our allegiance really lies as we’re paying our cable bill or refinancing our mortgage or honoring our commitments to the Church.

And think of the witness this could be to anyone who notices those words on our checks… Imagine the holy conversations you could have with whatever bartender, server or cashier who might ask you what the heck those letters mean on your VISA receipt… We could start a movement, people.

But really, I wonder if we’d think more about what we’re spending. I wonder if we’d be reminded – and encouraged by God’s presence and power over every part of our daily lives. I wonder if we’d be more grateful for the ways God provides for us. I wonder if we’d be more faithful about how we use our money, more generous when it comes to giving it back to God, and more trusting in the God whose love for us so deep and so wide it can’t be counted in coins.

Amen