Sermon for Sunday, October 18, 2026

October 18, 2026
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Matthew 22:15-22


How interesting to have this text in an election year, in the closing weeks of this election year, when it seems impossible to escape political ads. Everywhere we turn, there’s someone yelling about what someone has done with our tax dollars, and we can be sure, in the closing weeks of an election campaign, these ads are not going to deliver good news.


The Pharisees in today’s text are not interested in good news either.


In fact, they are hoping to get rid of the person standing right in front of them, Jesus, who has been preaching good news. Make no mistake—the Pharisees aren’t pro-Caesar or pro-Rome. Then as now, no one likes paying taxes, particularly to a government that one doesn’t approve of but is forced to endure.


But Jewish leaders have navigated their way to what they see as the best of a bad situation. They collect taxes from worshippers, and Rome will leave them alone to lead worship and protect some of their interests as they wish—until the year when Rome destroys it all, which has already happened when the Gospel of Matthew was written.


Jesus knows he’s given an impossible choice of answers to the tax question. If he says to pay taxes, he looks like he’s on the side of the oppressors, the Romans, who are taxing people out of everything they own. If he says not to pay, he gives the Romans even more reason to crack down. He’s given 2 impossible answers, and he offers a third alternative.


As always, with Jesus, the answer offers a much deeper response than the Pharisees were expecting.



In today’s Gospel, as in so many encounters between Jesus and the people with more power, we can almost hear Jesus saying, “You could be asking me any question, and this issue is the one that you think most deserves our attention?”


Jesus uses the coin to ask the question of what has grabbed our attention. Jesus wants us to consider what has left its imprint on us. Is it God? Or is it the powers and principalities of this world? Caesar’s image was on the Roman coin, along with words proclaiming him God—it’s no different today, although the larger collection of voices proclaiming themselves to be the one true savior is much noisier and amplified.


In claiming to be our only hope for human flourishing, worldly powers will claim all sorts of people and possessions for themselves. It was true in the first century, and it’s true today. But Jesus proclaims an older message, one delivered by ancient prophets and in the Psalms, that everything belongs to God. Look at our reading from Isaiah today in verse 4: “I call you by your name; I give you a title, although you do not know me.” Here God speaks to a foreign ruler, Cyrus, king of Persia, centuries before Caesar, a warrior who had created the biggest empire the world had ever seen and which also no longer exists.


We have two readings that remind us that earthly empires come and go, even when they are so large that they seem to be as permanent as the mountains that surround us. In an election year, we realize acutely how our earthly powers want us to believe that they can achieve permanence for all of us. Our Bible texts tell us over and over again that the only permanence comes from God.


Humans always have worldly powers trying to pull our attention away from God. Worldly powers always demand our allegiance or our persecution. It might be political powers, and the attempt by worldly leaders to capture our loyalty is just more apparent in an election year—but make no mistake, it’s always there.


You may be like me, thinking you’ve been mostly successful at avoiding all this election year drama. You probably don’t need my reminder that worldly powers are a much larger collection of forces who are whispering or yelling an anti-God message into our brains or using God language to promote themselves.


Maybe it’s a boss. Maybe it’s other types of advertising that convinces us that if we could just buy the latest whatever, we’d be happy. Maybe it’s our phone that we can’t seem to put down for very long. Maybe it’s money worries or health worries.


We give our attention to many things that are not God. Maybe it’s time to retrain our attention.


Last week at the onground intensive that claimed much of my time and attention, we sat at tables arranged in a semicircle. As we considered this text, our leader, who just happened to be our SE Synod bishop Kevin Strickland, asked us to stare at each face around the circle. He reminded us that all of creation, including every human face, bears the imprint of God not Caesar. He asked us to see each other as God sees us, our God who claimed us long ago.


It was a powerful experience, and it was a profound repudiation of all the voices that are so loud we may not hear them distinctly anymore. I’m talking about all the external voices that we’ve internalized, the ones that tell us that we’re not good enough, that we’ll never achieve enough, the voices that remind us of all the ways we lack so much.


And now for the real challenge. It’s easy to stare at the faces of fellow pastors in training and see them as God sees them. Can I do the same for everyone?


If we could train ourselves to look at every face and see the imprint of God, the result will be transformative, on ourselves if not the larger world. Imagine, seeing the imprint of God in everyone, the ones we love, the ones that political ads tell us to fear. Paul’s letter, our 2nd reading, makes it clear that a practice of seeing God in all has the potential to change the larger culture too.


We can start this practice now, and we can use the election cycle to help us. We can use the political ads the way that monks use the ringing of the monastery bells as a reminder to bring their attention back to God. Every time an ad comes on, look away and praise God’s good creation, the way the Psalmist does. Every time we hear political conversations, let us pray for everyone who thinks that they can pull our attention away from God’s goodness by using fear tactics.


In today’s Gospel, as in many Gospels, we see the invitation of Christ contrasted with the expectations of the world, the promises given by Jesus in stark opposition to the empty promises of every political season. Let us ignore all the ways that the forces of empires, past and present, conspire to pull our attention away from God. Today and every day, let us notice what God is doing in the world, our God who has claimed us and loves us and calls on us to do the same for all of creation. Let us train ourselves to ignore the voices that tell us to fear and to hate. Instead, let us train ourselves to see the imprint of God on every part of all of creation.