Day: November 7, 2021

“Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s;
and unto God the things that are God’s”

When “golden October decline[s] into sombre November” bringing us ultimately through these times of endings to new beginnings in Advent, then, as T.S. Eliot puts it in his play, Murder in the Cathedral, “who has stretched out his hand to the fire and remembered the Saints at All Hallows, remembered the martyrs and saints who wait?” Somehow there is a significance about the Octave of All Saints that is meant to remain with us. Yet we so easily forget the glory of All Saints and its meaning for us in the pilgrimage of our souls. The Octave of All Saints is the strong reminder to us of our true citizenship in heaven which is the pattern of our lives in faith.

“For here have we no continuing city”, Hebrews reminds us (Heb. 13.14) and in the Octave’s commemoration of “Founders, Benefactors, and Missionaries” (BCP, p. 302), the powerful lesson from Hebrews about the community of faith reminds us that “they”, reaching back to the saints of the Old Testament, we might say, as well as the great pageant of souls over the centuries who have gone before us, “seek a country”, indeed, “they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”. Paul, building upon such an understanding reminds us that “our citizenship is in heaven”.

But that does not mean a flight from the world nor does it mean its contrary, collapsing the things of God into our world. It is more about how we participate now in heavenly things through our desire and longing for what is everlasting. November, in all of the fading glory of nature, reminds us of what does not pass away. All Saints’ recalls us to who we are with God in the Communion of Saints. Such is the true dignity and freedom of our souls. We are freed to God.

That freedom does not mean ignoring the constraints and laws that belong to the various forms of the human community; constraints, laws and regulations which are often arbitrary, annoying, inconsistent, questionable and even prejudicial. There are and have always been bad laws. There can be no doubt about the anti-Christian bias in some sectors of our country. But we don’t get to be anti-nominians, those who reject law. Rather it means tolerating all manner of things precisely because they are limited and finite. To put it in the language of today’s Gospel, Caesar is not God; worldly powers are not omnipotent however much they presume to such pretensions. Jesus says to Caesar’s man in Jerusalem at the time of his capture and passion and in response to such pretensions to absolute power that “thou couldst have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (Jn 19.11).

Our prayers for those in authority over us is always that they not abuse their power in the overreach of authority or in the attempts to coerce our thinking. Our actions may be constrained out of some sense of the common good; that is one thing. It is quite another to require us to think only in a certain way, to try to compel our thinking by proscribing the use of language, and to demand not our toleration but our celebration of the agendas of identity politics and policies that are inherently divisive. That is intolerable and runs the risk of rendering unto Caesar the things of God.

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