October 19, 2008 Mary Poppins meets the gospel?

If you've never seen Mary Poppins, or if it's been awhile, you may want to watch this clip. Of course, you can also just skip it!





Even the Future Belongs to God
Matthew 22:15-22
Pentecost + 23 – October 19, 2008

With all that's been going on in our world lately, with the stock markets doing the limbo – you know, “how low can you go?” - and the credit crunch and banks failing or threatening to fail, I keep thinking of a line from the movie Mary Poppins.And no, it's not SUPERCALIFRAGOLICIOUSEXPIALIDOCIOUS. Mary Poppins has basically tricked the father into taking Michael & Jane to the bank, his job, with him. Dear old Dad has given Michael a coin, which he wants to use to buy bread crumbs to feed to birds. But this won't do, it won't do at all. And so all of the uptight officers of the bank break into song to try & convince Michael to invest his money, to save it at the bank. And the president of the bank, an old curmudgeon of a man declares, “When stand the banks of England, England stands! When fall the banks of England, England falls!”

Certainly describes how many of us are feeling, doesn't it? But as I thought about the gospel for this morning, it dawned on me that it has more in common with this movie than I ever would have thought. Because in the movie, Mary Poppins has come floating into the lives of the Banks family with her trusty umbrella (& yes, that's really their last name). She's come to be the nanny to their children, but in her wake, Mary Poppins brings great change. Just the way she is in the world, the way she treats people and notices things others didn't brings great upheaval into this family's life together. She is not caught up in the frantic pace of their lives. She's not interested in achieving more, getting more, being more successful - she has a different perspective. She has great influence over Jane & Michael, filling them with joy & laughter, teaching them to look beneath the surface, to care for those who are less fortunate than they are. This causes such disruption in the household that the father nearly loses it! And this disruption overflows into the wider world when they are at the bank, when Michael's generosity, his desire to share his coin with the Bird Lady outside, inadvertently causes a run on the bank, gripping the bank's leaders with fear and desperation.

It reminds me of the scene we have in Matthew's gospel today, for Jesus too, has come, uninvited into the world of the Pharisees and priests and elders of the people. He comes bringing a different way of looking at the world, a different way of being. He is not part of the system, not part of business as usual. He has come and he has changed everything. He's turned over the tables of the money changers at the temple the same day as this story, and he's been telling parable after parable that pretty much say that that business as usual is about to cease. The people in charge, the people who have been in control aren't going to be in control much longer. And they have had it! Enough with this Jesus already. So they make plans to entrap him, to trip him up with his own words. The Pharisees send their disciples, their students, to Jesus, along with some Herodians – people who sided with Herod, in effect supporting the occupation of Jerusalem & Judea by the Romans, people who the Pharisees had very little in common with. And after they butter him up, they ask him, “What do you think? Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?” It's a trick question, like asking someone if he's stopped beating his wife yet. There's no good answer; whatever you say can & will be used against you.

But Jesus is more clever than his questioners are. Presented with options A & B, he comes up with option C. Asking them to show him the coin used to pay the tax, a coin inscribed with Caesar's image and title, Jesus leaves them with a simple sounding answer: “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperors, and to God the things that are God's.” it sounds simple, but it's easier said than done.

Not because it's so hard to give to the emperor what belongs to the emperor. When it comes to that, we don't have much of a choice. We may not like paying our taxes, and we may disagree about how they should be used, but we can't easily avoid paying them.

Giving to God on the other hand is a much bigger struggle. God doesn't send us a tax bill, God doesn't send us a monthly statement stamped with how much we owe. Especially as we face the economic circumstances that surround us, as we wonder what will happen, we naturally start getting protective of what belongs to us. When we don't know how we're gonna pay the bills, if our job is going to be there when we go back to work on Monday, if our house ownership or ability to pay the rent is in question, it is the normal human response to hold tightly to what we have. It becomes harder and harder to consider giving any of it away. Even when we know in our heads that everything we have comes to us as a gift from God, that none of it belongs to us but is just on loan from God, that everything is God's from the beginning (you've heard me say that a time or two, right?), even when we believe that God will take care of us, it's a much harder thing to put that into practice. Believing something to be true and acting in a way that shows we believe it are 2 very different things. We struggle with trying to give even a portion back to God, whether it's through giving to the church or giving to a charity or directly to people who are in need, because we don't know what the future holds for us.

But even though we don't know what the future holds, we do know who holds the future. No matter what our circumstances are, we know that God holds the future. We know that God walks with us in whatever situation we are facing, helping us through each day. The God we follow is faithful. The God we follow is trustworthy! We sing with the Psalmist who says, “you, O LORD have made the heavens... The LORD is king! The one who made the world so firm that it cannot be moved...” We hear from Isaiah the words God spoke to Cyrus, “I am the LORD, and there is no other.” We celebrate with Isaiah that God used the events of history to bring God's chosen people back from exile, that God did not leave them in Babylon forever, abandoning them to their situation. We rejoice with Paul that the God we serve is “a living and true God” who raised Jesus from the dead! And we give thanks for this, not just because it means that we can look forward to life after death, but because it proves that there is no situation in this life so dark, so fearful, so final that God cannot intervene to save us! Even as we wonder what the future holds, we remember God holds the future, for the future is one of those things that belongs to God.

In Mary Poppins, despite the persuasiveness of all of the elders of the bank, little Michael refuses to be swayed by their greed and their fear. He longs to give his one coin away to the Bird Lady, to have the joy of giving and the joy of feeding the birds. And as I said, panic ensues. People hear him crying out “I want my money! Give me back my money!”, and it causes a run on the bank. Mr. Banks loses his job at the bank and all seems lost. And yet, at the end of the movie, we see that everyone has been transformed. Faced with financial turmoil, they are forced to rethink what really matters. They rediscover the importance of their families, the joy of the simple pleasures of life. They are set free from their captivity to money and all it represents.

Now real life is not a Disney movie, and I know that the financial struggles of our world are very real and impact us in very real ways. But I say to you this morning: trust God anyway! The future still belongs to God, and God calls each of us today to gave over our fears for the future, to hand them back to God, trusting that God can and will take care of us. And in this story God is inviting us, challenging us to live into that faith, to loosen that grip we have on our things and our money (and the grip it has on us!), to give a portion of what God has so generously given us back to God's work in the world. Not just so God's work can be done with the those in need around us, but so we can be set free from the fears that bind us, that hold us in chains. Give to God the things that belong to God, and be set free! Amen.