September 2008
 

 Fish, Coins, and Community                                                            From the Pastor

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.         --Jane Addams

On our desk at home, my husband and I have an intricately carved wooden sculpture.  Besides its very unusual bottle shape, the sculpture features a series of adobe-like homes carved into the “belly” of the wood.  Imagine a gigantic chestnut hollowed out with a carved diorama of wooden houses stacked one on top of the other on the interior.  An etched ladder rests against a couple of the homes.  My husband brought this handmade object home from a silent auction at the Ludlow church where he serves.  He was drawn to it, as was I.  Not simply because of the many hours that it must have taken the artist to complete the carving… No, I am drawn to it because of the way it portrays community (all those cliff dwellings stacked together!) and the way the homes appear to be held, protected, and enclosed by the wood itself.  It reminds me of how God holds us and we hold each other in community, sometimes just on the edge of a precipice.  Just as the homes in this carving are connected, so too are we.

Over vacation this summer, Frank and I have had the opportunity to discover and re-discover, in some ways, our own New England surroundings. We have attended worship in Boston (Park Street Church and Old South), Vermont (Weston Priory), and an Episcopal Church right over Mt. Tom in Holyoke (St. Paul’s).  We’ve learned about the Shaker community in Canterbury, New Hampshire, and we took an evening Duck Tour through Boston.  Over and over again, the recurring theme for our vacation has been community, community, community.  Over and over again, we’ve been reminded of how people have come together to celebrate the joys and sorrows in their communal life and also to overcome particular challenges and tragic mistakes.  We marveled at the way the Shakers carefully organized their communal life (you should see their laundry and dining areas!) and welcomed orphans from the surrounding community.  We re-visited the horrible, divisive, and deadly accusations of witchcraft inflicted on part of the community in historic Salem. A national park service ranger at the Customs House (where the writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, once worked) explained how customs taxes from the bustling seaport of Salem once helped to build our young and struggling nation.  We were touched by the ministry of Old South Church and moved by that church’s intentional mission of keeping the building open and accessible to visitors and tourists ‘round the clock, for most of the week.  The church receives prayers from those visitors and tourists during the week in a special prayer box and intentionally incorporates these prayers in their Sunday worship.  We watched children from the YMCA in Holyoke play at St. Paul’s Episcopal church and observed that the church was offering a temporary space for the children while their usual meeting place is being renovated.  We spoke with Salvation Army workers, volunteer tour guides, local hospital staff, priests and park rangers, monks, and enthusiastic church goers.  We listened, learned, and broke bread with new friends.

But one of the more interesting and different things that we did was to attend a community gathering in nearby Holyoke to discuss and learn more about a ballot initiative facing voters in November, an initiative that seeks to repeal the Massachusetts personal income tax. Voters confronted a similar initiative in 2002 that was narrowly defeated.  Frank and I went to this gathering because of a community invitation that we learned about during announcements at a local Episcopal church.

The community leaders who gathered in Holyoke were concerned about the effects of eliminating 12.7 billion dollars or 40% of state revenue obtained through personal income taxes.[i]  Would this measure make their community more or less vulnerable?  They discussed the larger impact this loss of revenue would have on their community as a whole and on local public services such as fire, police, public education, snow removal, etc.  One couldn’t help but notice the diversity in the room— property owners and renters, Caucasians, Hispanics, people of faith and secular, people from Holyoke and those from surrounding communities.   And witnessing such a gathering, one could not help but to be reminded of how we are connected to each other in profound ways, ways that aren’t always visible, but are there nonetheless.

But what does a community gathering, taxes, and the Bible have to do with each other?  More than we might think.  In the Bible, Jesus responds to certain tax questions in his community.  In the gospel of Matthew, some of the Pharisees ask the disciple Peter about whether Jesus pays the temple tax (a religious tax).  “Does your teacher not pay the temple tax?” the religious tax collectors ask Peter.  “Yes,” Peter answers, “He does.” (Matthew 17:24-27).  Later, Jesus discusses the question with Peter privately and suggests paying the tax so that “we do not give offense to them.”  Further on, some of the Pharisees try to find out if Jesus approves of paying taxes to Caesar.  “Should we or shouldn’t we?” his questioners ask, and Jesus answers in such a way that his listeners are forced to ask themselves some hard questions about what belongs to God, what belongs to Caesar, and what belongs to them.  Answer: it all belongs to God.  (See Psalm 24:1 and Matthew 22:15-22)

For some, the payment of our taxes is simply a civic obligation. For others, taxes have a definite religious and moral aspect—they are a way that we care for, help to build, and strengthen our commonwealth, future generations, and the larger community of which we are a part.  For many of us, I suppose, taxes represent some combination of both a civic and moral responsibility. 

How do you consider this tax issue?  When you ponder this question, what motivates your response?  Will you personally speak with others who are not part of your immediate zip-code before formulating your individual response?  (Are these part of God’s kingdom, God’s great community too?)  Will Jesus’ biblical concern about paying tax “as not to give offense” give us pause to consider what or who (besides ourselves) the state’s potential sudden loss of revenue might hinder, help or hurt?  Will our discipleship inform our moral reasoning, judgment, and actual behavior?  In this moment of honesty, does our payment or non-payment of personal income taxes compel us to be more or less fiscally concerned and giving toward the larger community in which we participate?  Lastly, how will our fishing together in this deep sea of questions during these troubled times help us to discover the necessary coin that will best represent our investment not only in ourselves, but also our neighbors, our community, and our collective future? (see the fish story in Matthew 17:27)

Fortunately, there is still time enough to gather information and share perspectives before we decide-- not simply as civilians of a greater Commonwealth, but as Christian servants and disciples who participate in God’s realm and who struggle to discover God’s greater good both within and beyond ourselves.

Peace to you,  

Rev. Dee

Readers who are interested in reading a more in-depth sermon on this topic of taxes are invited to read the sermon by the Rev. Nancy S. Taylor, the senior minister of Old South Church in Boston.  Her sermon is entitled “Of Tea, Taxes, and Talk” and was given on Sunday, July 6, 2008.  The sermon can be found at www.oldsouth.org/sermons/nst06july08.html