Is now a good time to talk about the separation of church and state?
By all means, please separate church and state. Keep religion out of politics. And politics out of religion, I hope. I believe that religion and politics are both very human and very fallible structures that we’ve built, one to - hopefully - better understand our spirituality and the other - hopefully - to better care for the community. They don’t always do that, though, do they. They’re complicated and messy because, as structured as they may be, they involve people. And people are complicated and messy. So when they turn to partisanship, power, control, management, uniformity, become self-serving or even more cynical things, please: keep them apart. They’ll only hurt each other.
But if, like Jesus - and countless other spiritual leaders in history - you might view this differently and you might see it, instead, as the interconnectedness of God - or however you know that life-giving force of love and creativity, that divine spirit that I’d call God - well, that can be a different thing.
Let me talk about Jesus for a minute. In the bible, Matthew, Mark and Luke all relate a story in which religious and secular leaders got together and tried to trap Jesus with a question about paying taxes (see Matthew 22:15-22, for example). Should the people pay taxes to the Roman emperor, or not? If he says no, he risks being reported to the state authorities and being arrested. If he say yes, he risks alienating all the people. It’s a trick question and they’re trying to trap him.
So Jesus asks to see a coin and, showing the image of the emperor on it, he says “give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and give to God the things that are God’s.”
Clever, Jesus, we’ve traditionally thought. And it is, because it somehow lands on both sides and forces them (and us as individuals) to try and figure out what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God. But I don’t think Jesus meant to be clever, I just think he answered sincerely. They just weren’t all on the same page. And we’re not either.
I think his questioners saw this as an either/or option only, just as we would today. But for Jesus, God is the divine spirit that is in all things, especially us. It might have been Caesar’s image on the coin, but we are created in the image of God. And the earth. Divine and human. It’s not separate, it’s connected; it’s not an either/or, it’s an “and.”
It might seem to us that we’re far from the kingdom of heaven Jesus envisioned. But maybe that’s part of the point of Jesus and other great figures of love and grace and “godliness.” We live in the world of our making and God’s. Again, however we might know God, there is divine and “earthy” in all things. The structures we might build around our beliefs and our societies are meant to help us understand and engage those things better, to grow and give them life. Ok, so they’re not always doing that. But we could try and see them differently, maybe as Jesus did.
It shouldn’t be just “religion” to love your neighbour and to care for others, especially those who struggle to care for themselves. It shouldn’t be “religion” to feed the hungry, heal the sick and educate people. It shouldn’t be “religion” that we show empathy and offer compassion and grace to each other. It shouldn’t be “religion” that we treat all people with respect and dignity, wherever they’re from or however they come to be here. It should simply be who we are.
