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One of the most challenging aspects of my job, let me assure you this is not a complaint.

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I love my job. I have a great job and I love doing it. And I invite the challenges that come with being an Episcopal priest in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is maybe a little bit easier than being an Episcopal priest in other parts of the country.

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But one of the most challenging aspects of my job is when there seems to be. When it is perceived by some or all to be an intersection with politics and the pulpit.

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It is in this interchange that I find an inability to communicate clearly and transparently with people sitting the pew as I seek to make commentary on both the biblical narrative and the life of faith in the church as it affects those of us who are doing our best to live a life of faith.

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The circumstances are usually something like the Sunday morning begins and I or one of my colleagues begins to make remarks about something lamentable.

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Lamentable, like what happened in Ben, Oregon, this week.

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A deranged gunman comes into a school and lives are lost, innocent lives, and the life of the perpetrator.

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And when I begin to make commentary on something like that, I get a little, like, yellow flag from some of you, like, careful where you're going, preacher.

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You know, politics and the pulpit don't mix. And over the course of my almost 30 years of being a priest and embodying a portion of that role, which is preacher, I've learned how to articulate at least my side of things where I can say, while the issue of owning, possessing a gun in the United States of America may be most assuredly a political issue because it is there in an amendment in our Constitution, when a gun is used to kill humanity, human beings, particularly innocent ones, then the problem is no longer political. It's moral.

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And my job is literally to be a moral leader.

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So I must make commentary on moral struggles that we engage as human beings within the context of our social, political, emotional, spiritual lives, that we're living out within the context of our subset of the community and then the greater Jackson Hole community.

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And I bring this up because it is not lost on me that at least for the last 2000 years or so, if you are paying attention to, to the gospel reading that we have this morning, that even in Jesus's time, politics and the pulpit were fraught.

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I think we need to have a little context in order to begin to get into this story. And then I'm going to invite us into a deeper reading of the story. But let's get the context first and then try to have some sense of what's happening in the story itself. The context of the story is that Jesus and his disciples have just made their triumphal entrance into Jerusalem. So in the way that we play that out in our own lives, the story goes, it. It begins, at least the one that we heard today. It begins with Palm Sunday.

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And what we need to remember about Palm Sunday is that this is a particular time in the year, a calendar in the year where tensions are high in Jerusalem, where the occupying Romans are keeping careful watch over Israel, the Jewish people who are beginning to exercise their religious practices and potential around the Passover.

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And so here comes Jesus into Jerusalem, where he is welcomed, welcomed in the manner that one would welcome a military leader. He doesn't come in on a white horse, he comes in on a donkey. But then on the road before him, he's greeted with cheers and the spreading of palms and coats. He is a hometown hero. In this moment, and in this moment that the populace expresses their enthusiasm for the leadership that Jesus is bringing into the culture, Both the political authority of the day and the religious authority, whose influences are attached one to another, are on high alert.

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We are meant to know that when this exchange happens between Jesus and these disciples of the Pharisees, that it is a culturally tense moment.

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The fire is smoldering, and folks are hoping that Jesus or anyone attached to him don't throw gasoline on a fire. And there's not a huge negative cultural event.

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And so in this moment, not the political authority, but the religious authority is seeking to put Jesus between a rock and a hard place. They want to either make him an enemy of the empire or to make him an enemy of the people.

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And so the Pharisees send a group of disciples to engage him in a rhetorical, political, religious trap.

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One of the details in the story that we might miss is that the Pharisees send their disciples to engage him. The Pharisees don't go themselves, but they send their disciples to engage Jesus. And this is hilarious because those of us who have been to seminary, all of us in the pews who have been to seminary and the one standing in the aisle, those of us who have been to seminary know that, like, seminarians are particularly like young seminarians, usually have, like, the strongest held convictions.

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These seminarians who go to engage Jesus around this questioning are like rookie cops.

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You know, they are filled with the law, their minds are filled with the law, but they have no experience for the heart of the work.

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And so they engage Jesus in a dialogue. And in that dialogue, we get this line that all of us remember, like, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God. Render unto the emperor what is the Emperor's. And unto God what is God. Render unto Washington what is Washington's. And render unto God what is God's. Render unto the President what is the President's. And render unto God what is God's. And all of a sudden, we human beings flood this existential space that could be described as the binary, right?

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It's this laziness that we have as human beings to enter into a space where we have some sense that things are either dark, dark, black, or bright, bright white, and there's nothing in between. And we, even as devoted members of this story, might even find ourselves there. I found myself there this week when I was preparing the sermon. I was like, man, like, all the times I have preached this passage or I've heard other preachers preach this passage, no one has ever given, nor have I ever given a list.

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Like, if we live in this binary, then there ought to be a list, right? Like, what is it that we render unto Washington? Like, well, I mean, you know, April 15th, we better pay our taxes.

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And then, like, here it comes, right? Here we sit at a time of election. Like, you should go vote. And like, hey, it is your civic duty to respond to that jury summons. Don't drop it in the trash.

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Like, there are certain things that we do as members of civic culture. And then what would the other list, like, what would we render unto God then? Like, would it be like, well, make sure you come to church, like, maybe two out of four, two out of four Sundays a month. And, like, make a pledge and say your prayers, but say them in earnest, you know, not in a rote way. Say, I'm in earnest. And then, you know, like, maybe we engage in some acts of kindness or something. And when you really take a good look at that binary that we automatically create in our heads that it seems like the disciples put before Jesus, it just kind of falls apart, right?

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Because things on the list that we might render to Washington's. To Washington are not so different than what we might render to heaven. Or things that we render to heaven might have a positive influence of what we render unto Washington. And so we then have to challenge ourselves a bit, like, do we really live in this binary that we've created in the US of, like, church and state? And. And then I'm like, no, I don't think we do. And so that took me back to the story and the details of the story are so compelling. They're really wonderful. And I want to point a couple out to try to lead us in a little bit different direction when it comes to this story and maybe when it comes to our own lives.

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If you look at the details of the story, when the disciples, they. They lay out this trap for Jesus, like, you know, should you pay your taxes? Thinking, like, if you pay your taxes and you're faithful to Caesar, you're not faithful to the faith. And if you're faithful to the faith but not Caesar, then you become an enemy of the state. And that Jesus has this kind of beautiful responsiveness, this, like, presence in a rhetorical situation that is wonderful. He asked them to produce something, he says, like, you know, like, take out a coin.

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And here the disciples of the religious authority, he doesn't take the coin out of his own pocket.

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He invites the religious authority, those attached to the temple, those to the Pharisees, to take the civic coin out of their own pocket.

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They are implicated in this very moment as folks who are participating in the occupation of the Roman Empire.

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And then there's this beautiful detail in the story that we miss.

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And I think it's the centerpiece of Jesus Didache or Kerygma or teaching.

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He asks them this beautiful question.

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He says, look at the coin and what do you see?

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And they look at the coin, and they see the image of what we would assume is Tiberius.

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It's a Tiberian denarius, is the likely coin that they produce. And Tiberius is not the emperor. The Caesar in this moment, his son is. But they see the image of Tiberius on the coin. He asks them, who do you see? And they say, well, you know, we see the image of the emperor, and then Jesus directs them, well, then give the coin to the emperor.

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If that is whose image is on the coin, then you give the coin to the emperor.

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And in this moment in time, Jesus is drawing us back, drawing us all the way back through his questioning to the very beginning of our story, to the Pentateuch, to the five books of Moses, to the first of the five books of Moses, to the first two chapters of the five books of Moses, right?

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He is asking us a question, an existential question in this rhetorical exchange.

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If the coin has the emperor's image on it, then whose image is on you?

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Whose image is on me?

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In whose image are we made?

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And we remember the story, right? That you and I and every other human being, past, present and future, is made in the image of God.

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And so then the trajectory of Our lives becomes rendering ourselves, rendering our lives toward God and the work of God in the world, which is beautiful and complicated.

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Over the course of the last year or so, I have just been immersing myself in my own personal devotion, in my own personal practice, to work at seeing the kingdom of heaven at hand, to try to have some sense that if the kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of heaven and if it is eternal, then it is happening all around me, all around us.

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And one of the ways that I've directed my personal spiritual practice, and you may have heard me say this a time or two before, because that which I think about and pray about and feel about comes out into this context. But you may have heard me say that I have invited myself and that I invite you to see the same things differently, to have a sense that perhaps something beautiful, something powerful, something loving, something healing, something nurturing, something cosmic is hidden in plain sight right before us. And as we work at rendering ourselves to God, then we begin to see the very same things that we've always seen, but we see them differently.

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This evening, we, you and I, have an opportunity to do one of my favorite things to do all year long.

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Ten years in Jackson, I have never missed this opportunity.

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You will hear me in announcements say that this evening, from 5 to 7, if you would like, you could meet a group of us up at Lupin Meadows trailhead. And from five to seven, as you bring your own picnic and perhaps a folding chair. From 5 to 7, we'll speak to one another in hushed voices as we listen for the elk bugling in the glory of the Tetons and the beauty of the fall colors.

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This experience of listening to the elk be bugle makes my heart sing.

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And if we were there this evening with a naturalist or a biologist, that naturalist or biologist might teach us that the elk, of course, has a voice box not dissimilar from the ones that you and I have. And when the elk bugles, the elk doesn't just use the voice box, but also uses his throat and his mouth and his lips to make this remarkably distinctive sound.

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And the naturalist or the biologist might remind us that every year, from late summer into the fall, and occasionally in the winter, we hear the elk begin to bugle during the rut or the mating season as they engage in this reproductive cycle that comes around with the calendar year, with the predictability of seasons, we might even learn one of the details, that the highest frequency pitch of the elk bugle is the highest frequency and animal a big animal makes in the animal kingdom.

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And we might be like, wow, that's interesting.

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That's one way of seeing things.

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And then I might encourage you, if you so desire, that after you put your picnic in the back of the car or the truck, as you're making your way north in our valley toward the park entrance, that you take in the cottonwood trees and the aspen trees.

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And I might tell you that those trees this time of year remind me in such a beautiful way that it is okay to die.

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That those trees remind me every year, no matter what, that it is okay to die. And also.

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And also that dying might be beautiful.

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And as I make my way across the bridge at Moose over the Snake River, I might feel the power of that water.

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I might remember that not only is it the artery that fuels our valley, but that I, little old me, has had so many opportunities to baptize beautiful souls in that river that is right under the bridge that I'm driving over. And when the Tetons begin to come through the windshield, I might feel the strength of the divine masculine in those young mountains. And that power that comes through the windshield with those mountains and their divine masculine might remind me of the southern end of the valley of Munger Mountain and the divine feminine that helps us balance and integrate our experience.

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And as we get to the trailhead, and my eyes meet your eyes, and my heart meets your heart, and we meet one another over a quiet conversation and a shared picnic meal, I might remember that nothing, nothing can come between us. And when. And when that first elk begins to scream across the mountains, through the trees at some other elk, I might hear a sound in a moment in time that connects heaven and earth.

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That all of a sudden, in this normative annual experience that happens that most certainly has a biological naturalist overlay, that something powerful, something cosmic, something mystical, something spiritual, something of God that I am a part of and you are a part of, is also happening at the very same time, I might invite you to see the same things differently.

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Amen.