A short sermon to provide focus for cafe worship for Climate Sunday in my local church based on the story of Jesus being asked whether Jews should pay taxes to the Roman emperor (Mark 12:13-17).

It might surprise many of you that I have chosen this reading for our annual Climate Sunday Service. It is about taxes, and money more generally, and doesn’t, at first reading, appear to have anything to do with the climate. I want to make the case though that love of money has been a large part of what has caused the current climate and wider ecological crises, and the almost exclusive cause of our failure to address the challenges it poses.

When Jesus asked for the coin, he was asking for an object which not only bore the head of the Roman emperor but also referred to that emperor as God. This was completely intolerable to Jesus and the rest of the Jewish population who saw the God they worshipped as the one true God. In their eyes this was tainted money.

Jesus command to “give back to Caesar what is Caesars” has been interpreted many ways over Christianity’s long history, but the most direct and probable interpretation in the context in which those words were originally spoken is an expression of disgust. This coin is blasphemous and tainted, give it back, have nothing to do with it. Of course, the coin also symbolised the whole economic system of the Roman emperor which was to extract wealth from the people they had conquered and remove it to Rome for the benefit of the conquerors. Jesus’ words also work in this context. This economic system is evil, have nothing to do with it, reject its tainted coins.

In our modern world it is important to remember that our money is tainted. The wealth of the United Kingdom really started to grow in the 17^th Century as great profits were made from exploitation of newly discovered lands often through slavery. The availability of that capital was one of the major drivers of the Industrial Revolution and since that time continuing increases in wealth are largely responsible to burning of cheap fossil fuels and exploitation of natural resources. Whilst progress is being made, continued wealth creation, is still all too often dependent on  degradation of our environment and extraction of finite natural resources. Our coins, metaphorically at least, are stamped with the name of a rival God.

So, can we follow Jesus’ teaching and have nothing to do with this tainted money, dedicated to a rival God? In such an interconnected and interdependent world this is probably just not possible. We can, however, be aware of the corrupting power of money, the love of which is the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10). We can acknowledge that the pursuit of money is one of the major drivers of climate change and environmental degradation. Perhaps most importantly we can be reminded of the second part of Jesus answer, “Give unto God the things that are God’s”.  Whenever we are involved in using money we can be driven by how we can best use it for God’s purposes rather than those of this fallen world. The three worksheets that are going to guide our conversations later in this worship will allow us to start to explore how we can do this.

Cafe worship works by encouraging people to engage in conversations around tables as part of worship. You can see the three work-sheets that I developed to stimulate those conversations at this link. We also included several or the hymns that I have written, Like a butterfly, God of truth and God of justice and Here we are in 2050. You can find the full order of service at this link.