Sermon Video: Jesus: Pay your taxes, and serve God - Mark 12:13-17

Hoping to trap Jesus, two rival groups that otherwise hate each other asked him if it was moral to pay taxes to Rome. Rather than answer with a Realpolitik answer, "What choice do we have?" or with rebel's "Give me Liberty, or give me Death" response, Jesus instead asks them to examine the coin and note that Caesar's face is on it. This leads Jesus to conclude that God or Rome is a false dichotomy, an attempt to force the people into a 'lesser of two evils' type situation, but God doesn't work that God. God doesn't choose any kind of evil. Instead, Jesus commands God's people to serve both their governmental authority AND God. The obligations are not mutually exclusive, they often overlap, and despite our grumbling about our obligation to the government, that which we owe to God is far more expansive, comprehensive, and stringent. After all, God demands heart, mind, soul, and body...In the end, the growing anti government attitude within American Evangelicalism is a sign of unhealthiness, a focus on pride and 'personal freedoms' over and above obligations and responsibilities, as such it is one that is foreign to Jesus' teachings in the Gospels.

How we interpret and apply the Bible matters a great deal - an objection to WWUT.

"What Does the Bible Say About Paying Your Fair Share of Taxes?" is a video posted on January 9th, under the channel named: When We Understand the Text, which is a ministry of Pastor Gabriel Hughes of the First Southern Baptist Church of Junction City, Kansas.  I Understand that Pastor Hughes is trying to simplify issues into short responses of only a few minutes, and that complicated issues are not always conveyed the way the author/speaker intends when brevity is attempted.  My objection to this particular video, regarding taxation, is not based upon its conclusion per se, but its methodology.  The conclusion reached by Pastor Hughes is that a progressive system of taxation (i.e. that the rate increases as the taxable amount increases) is "not fair".  And while the merits of various tax systems for both effectiveness and morality can and should be part of the political discussion of any free society, in this particular case the WWUT video rejects any non-flat tax (i.e. any tax system in which different rates are applied to the poor and rich) as being un-Biblical, and hence immoral and therefore a violation of the will of God.

The key question here is this: How is that conclusion reached in the one minute and thirty-two seconds of the video?  The primary point is made by making a reference to the taxation system instituted by the Law of Moses for ancient Israel, that is the Old Covenant.  The video makes the case that Israel's system treated the poor and the wealthy the same, briefly mentioning that it had provisions to help the poor (while not mentioning the most significant aspect of the Law of Moses against the accumulation of wealth, the Year of Jubilee), quickly mentions quotations about the need to pay taxes, in principle, attested by Jesus and Paul, and then simply concludes that this model from Israel should be applied, or at least the principle of a flat-tax taken from it, to America in the 21st century.

The use of the Bible to defend or bash Republicans or Democrats is extremely distasteful to me, and something I find to be detrimental to the Church's call to preach the Gospel and make disciples.  If that was all this video contained it wouldn't stand out all that much from so many other attempts to use the Word of God to bolster political viewpoints.  In addition to being politically tinged (the video shows an interview by Anderson Cooper of Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, thus not overly subtly hinting that Republican taxation policy must be closer to what God wants than that of Democrats), the video also makes a classic mistake of Biblical interpretation by conflating/equating Israel and the Old Covenant with either the United States/Church and the New Covenant.  Thus whatever God told Israel to do, we too must do (again, forgetting that Israel was also told to cancel all debts every 50 years and return all property to its original owners to prevent both extreme poverty and extreme wealth, I'm not expecting a video advocating that practice).  Does the New Testament address taxation rates?  Nope.  Does Paul write about what he believes a "fair" tax rate to be?  No again.  The Church is not Israel, it did not inherit the promises (or curses) of the Old Covenant, it did not take the place of Israel, but has only temporarily been "grafted in" until the "full number of the Gentiles has come in" (see Romans 11).  Any question, then, of applying the Old Covenant's stipulations is not a simple matter of cutting and pasting what God commanded Israel to do onto the modern world, as if in this case God's grander intention when he gave Moses the Law concerning the taxes the Israelites were to pay was to eliminate the possibility that any other system of taxation could be possible, and every other way of collecting taxes must be immoral.  The Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) are exceedingly valuable, and are as sacred and authoritative as those of the New Testament, but that does not mean that they should be read as if they are written directly to anyone other than Abraham's descendants.  To mentally replace Israel with either America (or England, Germany, or any other nation) or the Church (as a whole, or any one in particular) is to do a disservice to the original intent and original interpretation/application of the Word of God given to the people of the covenants of Abraham/Moses/David.  God gave Israel a flat-taxation system with a reset button every fifty years.  What then should be the ideal taxation system for a society consisting of both Jews and Gentiles, Christians and non-Christians, in an era when most incomes are not directly tied to land ownership?  To simply say, "the same as Israel, end of story", is not good enough.

This is not the first time that I've blanched at a video from WWUT, I refrained from posting about earlier ones because they didn't feel egregious enough to warrant a response, and I hesitate to question what another pastor/church is advocating without good cause (this objection is not an accusation that assumes motives, nor a reprimand that claims authority, but a word of caution concerning the handing of God's Holy Word).  It isn't the issue of taxation that prompted this response, nor the issue of playing politics with Scripture, but rather the utilization of an Old Covenant provision to American taxation policy as if it was a case-closed obvious conclusion.  Well meaning and God-honoring Christians can, and do, have a variety of beliefs regarding the application of Biblical examples and principles in our society and individual lives today, that is to be expected and not a negative thing.  The important question here is more basic: How do we interpret the Bible and apply it to our lives today?  Treating America or the Church as Israel is not the solution.