I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 18, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 22:15-22.
There is this thing that happens in life. For some of us it happens at an early age, for some it creeps up on us later,. But whoever we are, it’s guaranteed to happen. I am talking about those moments when you thought your life was going to unfold in one way, and then you realize it is not. That the narrative you’d been working with is not true anymore, or maybe it never was.
I remember, for example, when I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes during my freshman year of college. It upended a lot of my expectations about the way life was going to be. I had harbored some dreams of joining the Peace Corps and living abroad with a backpack like my mom had done, and suddenly that was no longer possible. Now, I still managed to have a great college experience, but nonetheless, the story I’d been planning around was no longer going to work. I had to find a new story to live into.
I wonder when this has happened to you. I am quite sure that it has, maybe more than once. Maybe it was when you lost a family member or a spouse. Maybe a divorce or an illness, or just a dream that didn’t come together in the way you’d hoped. Or maybe it’s just reading the news these days and feeling like the world around us has entirely lost the plot about being kind, being just, being human.
Whatever it is, I think a lot of us are living with the grief and heaviness of stories we’d rather not carry, even if we’ve learned how to get by.
But what if there was a second story? What if there was an alternative story; a better story that we could tell and live into? What if the narratives that weigh us down are not the only way to understand our lives?
I’m not just talking about a positive reframing of bad situations. There are some things that are just categorically terrible. If I could undo my chronic illness or your deep grief; if I could stop the bullets that kill innocent children; or undo the hatred that divides families, I absolutely would.
But my hope, tenuous as it may feel sometimes, lies in the fact that there is something more than just disappointment and degradation at work in our lives and in the world around us. Because there is a second story unfolding, coursing along beneath us like an underground river, only occasionally breaking forth to reveal itself, but always there, always also real alongside our pain.
And it is this second story that Jesus came to tell, and live, and die by. It is for this second story that Jesus rose again. And the title of this story is “good news;” it is “love will win;” it is “get behind me, satan, because you can kill our bodies, but you cannot kill our collective hope.”
But whatever we call it, in today’s passage from Matthew, we see how Jesus is able to draw even his enemies into the possibilities of this second story.
You see, the Pharisees and the Herodians, like most of us, are caught up in the first story—the one embodied by Caesar, the one that is most evident all around us. The story that tells us it is foolish to dream of justice or to believe in love when injustice and cruelty persist generation after generation. Through the lens of this first story, Jesus is a problem—he is a threat to the terrible yet relatively familiar order of things.
And so they try to trap him with their question, forcing him to either align himself with or against the emperor. Surely, they think, no matter how he answers, they’ve got him cornered. And if we were living only in the story of Caesar, they’d be right.
But what the Pharisees and the Herodians did not count on is that Jesus does not play by the rules of the first story, nor is he bound by the limitations of its craven imaginings.
When he says “give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” he is not just saying pay your taxes and go along to get along. No! He is saying: you may not realize it, but you are part of two stories, even now, every one of you. The story of Caesar, and the story of God. And the day of your liberation is the day when you realize they are not the same thing.
Because yes, that first story is of empires and the taxes rendered upon us—the taxes, not just of money, but of scarcity and time and illness and disappointment. Life will demand its payments from us, and we will weep, because this is not the story that we hoped for when we started out. But if we follow Jesus all the way to the Cross, we already know that this is a story we must live out.
But then there is the second story. The story of God, and God’s refusal to abandon us, even when we have become so very lost. The story of God’s triumph over death and of lives that might be lived in something other than fear or desperation.
And this second story, this hidden spring of living water, this invitation to give back to God the things of God within us—faith, and hope, and love, and humility, and mercy, and justice, and forgiveness, and truth-telling, and dignity, and peace, and wonder—this story, though it might seem secondary, is, in fact, the one we must never stop telling. For it is the story that will save us.
Friends, I’ll be honest. I am not immune to the deep grief of our times any more than you are. I rage at the injustice and the suffering, and I feel helpless some days, and bitter on some other ones. I make no peace with wanton cruelty. I believe our culture has been degraded by a whole host of influences, technological, economic, and reactionary. And I do not think that it is the role of the church to retreat from these struggles. Jesus’ invitation to follow him means that we are meant to, as the poet Dylan Thomas says, “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
But day by day, I am reminded that I cannot do that apart from the second story’s claim upon my soul. I must give to God the things that are God’s, even as we grapple with the world of Caesar. And that means my rage, however righteous, must be grounded in love, peacemaking, and nonviolence. This loving rage is the paradox that Jesus lived out and flipped tables with, and it is what Jesus demands of us, too.
Our question, which has always been the fundamental question for the church, is not whether we do this, but how. How do we live in the tension of these two stories, caught between taxes and transcendence? How do we engage the profane with holy music still on our lips?
The short answer is: we become more like Jesus. Because thus far, he is the only one who has ever done this fully. And we trust in his second story, and we live and die by it, and we encourage one another along the way.
We use the liturgy as our teacher, and our community as a living laboratory of grace in action. We encourage one another when times are very bleak, and we rejoice when that living water erupts in our midst.
And we keep doing this, year by year, season by season, through the rise and fall of things, until such time—a time known only to our Lord—when the first and second stories merge into one, and all we have paid will be redeemed, and all we have lost will be returned, and all of Caesars coins will scatter into the river of God, and we will stand at the edge of some entirely new story altogether.
And even if all the other stories we told were never quite true, this one will be.
This one will be.
