Imagine we’ve come to the movies to watch the latest new Marvel epic suitably named AD 406. The curtain rises on the year 406 when in an unusually severe winter in which the Rhine has frozen solid, we watch in that peculiar ecstasy of pure horror the battle-hardened barbarian hordes stream across the frozen river into the civilized world of Roman Gaul.

The Rhine River forming a natural barrier dividing Latin and Germanic cultures has a long history that stretches down well into the 20^th-century. The Rhine, winding in many places through its steep-sided valley formed a natural barrier – a boundary between civilization and the wilderness of the barbarian lands. Barbarian – a name the Graeco-Romans gave to all who lived beyond the geographic and cultural reach of their civilization. The barbarians represented the epitome of the psychological other. We need no further evidence today of how the psychological other functions to embody the terror of difference within individual and collective consciousness.

Vandal is a word that has made its way into the English language as the very symbol of destructive otherness. In his book on Martin of Tours, Christopher Donaldson describes how the Vandals, Alans, and Suevi, swarmed into Roman Gaul in complete disregard for their own loss of life. It was estimated that at least 20,000 Vandals alone lost their lives in the river crossing. Yet they still pressed on – forced by the relentless pressure of mouths to be fed and need for land. The great horde swept on into Roman Europe and North Africa leaving behind them a trail of devastation and confusion. In what had been the civilized and fertile countryside of Roman Gaul the only vestiges that remained were the giant buildings, aqueducts, and monuments of Roman civilization – things that a wattle and daub society had neither use nor imagination for.

On the South Bank of the River Loire, at a place called Marmoutier about 3 miles downstream from the city of Tours, there was a large grassy plain lying between the river and a line of forbidding grey cliffs rising for 100 feet or so. With trees clinging precariously to their face, the cliffs were honeycombed with caves, for all the world giving much the same appearance as the holes of sand-martin nests in the side of a disused quarry. And in the year AD 393 all the caves were inhabited and the grassy plain below was covered with the rough wooden shacks of a great camp of spiritual refugees, numbering in all some 2,000 men – a smaller group of women having formed their own community within the walls of the neighboring city of Tours. Working from  contemporary eye witness sources, Donaldson tells us that the whole concourse was wrapped in a deep silence from morning until evening, punctuated only by the occasional singing of psalms or hymns, and the low voices of those who were reading the scriptures aloud.

The reason for this great gathering of men, many of them the sons of the Roman Gaul nobility, lay not only in the general urge to withdraw from the responsibilities of public service in a time of civic institutional breakdown, but also in the attraction of the unconventional personality of Martin, the holy man and Bishop of Tours. His appearance at the age of 77 belied the extraordinary depth and range of his character. For underneath the deliberately unkempt hair, the pallid emaciated features, and the rough surge slave’s robe in which he was dressed, lay a personality that at one moment recalls for us the image of a Mahatma Gandhi, quickly morphing into that of a visionary William Blake, before yet again emerging into a man forged by his years of discipline in the Roman Army – a military man of commanding presence.

Martin was born in AD 316 into a high-ranking, but non aristocratic Roman military family in what is now modern-day Hungary. His father was a military tribune in the Imperial Guard – then stationed on that other great river frontier separating the civilized and barbarian worlds – the river Danube. His parents were staunch pagans opposed to the growing influence of Christianity – and so they named their son Martin after Mars the god of farm and battle, in the hope he would grow up to become a champion for the restoration of the old order.

In AD 312, with the proclamation of Constantine as the new emperor, the last great period of intense persecution of Christians under the emperor Diocletian ended. Following Constantine’s conversion to Christ – a mere four years before Martin’s birth in 316 – the Church had begun its rapid expansion. Although already an extensive and growing influence, the most significant result of Constantine’s conversion was the incorporation of the bishops into the Roman Civil Service with the rank and more importantly for many, the stipend of a magistrate.

Yet, despite the new imperial patronage, a deeper and simpler reason lay behind Christianity’s rapid growth. Christianity offered to ordinary men and women fed up with the status quo an explanation and philosophy for living that was satisfying. Unlike enforced imperial obligation the Church offered a supportive and voluntary style of community life with an educational system based on the scriptures that met people’s intellectual and emotional needs. Despite strong parental hostility, Martin could not avoid being attracted from around the age of ten to this magnetic vision of a new way of being human with its practice of a more satisfying way of life.

To cut a long story short, by the time Martin reached the age of 15, his father – increasingly fearful for his son’s development into Roman manhood, arranged for him to be press-ganged (kidnapped) into the army. Martin was to spend the next 25 years of his life in conscripted military service. Army service did succeed in making a man of Martin – but not in the way his father may have envisioned.

Martin was far from being just another plebeian conscript. He enjoyed the privileges of being a Tribunes’ son. Interestingly, Martin found his way into the Army medical corp. As a medical officer, he would have been responsible not only for the surgical treatment of soldiers in the field but for their social and emotional welfare within garrison life. Thus, Martin found a strong synchronicity between this care for his men and his developing sense of what it meant to live as a Christian. For he showed an unusual compassion for the poor whom he would have encountered hanging around the edges of his garrison town of Amiens. This sensitivity – in another military officer decried as weakness – would have found acceptance or at least toleration among his peers as an attitude characteristic of a healer.

Martin’s concern for the poor is captured in the famous incident of his encounter with a beggar at the city gates – poetically depicted in our great St Martin window. In the window we see Martin cutting his cloak in half and placing one half around the beggar’s shoulders. Incidentally a soldier’s cloak was a garment of joint ownership. The half he gave to the beggar would have been the half he owned. The half he retained was army property – and not his to give away. That night he had a vision of Christ, clothed in half his cloak saying for as you have done unto the least – you have done unto me.

Martin died in AD 397 – a mere 9 years before the catastrophic collapse of the Roman Legions along the Rhine wall in 406. While he didn’t live to see this catastrophe, he nevertheless lived in the preceding decades during which anyone with any foresight might have foreseen this eventuality. For during the preceding decades leading to the curtain rise on the 5^th-century, sensitive and intelligent people had known that the end of the centuries of stable government and cultural achievement was fast approaching. The signs were all around them.

Inflation had been steadily mounting for a century or more and had become so out of control that many were beginning to return once more to the simpler system of barter. Ordinary people knew that the wealthy were seeking every possible way of avoiding taxes and turning their backs on the virtues and responsibilities of public service which had become an increasingly unsavory and dangerous occupation. From time to time the army would attempt to raise up a new emperor – someone whose value had been proved in the field – to take control of the empire and make Rome great again. But things had gone too far for such simple solutions. In the Western half of the Empire the problems lay deeper than a return to the efficient management of the economy and the revival of a spirit of public service. Rather it was a complex exhaustion of morale in the inner minds and spirits of men and women throughout the West – where many increasingly feared that the civilization of Rome had run its course.

Donaldson notes that if there was any hope for the future of Western Civilization, it was hard to see it lying in the hands of the governing classes. Rather the future had come to rest in a group of men and women who had completely withdrawn from the civilized world – men and women who were quite careless of whether it sank or swam.

Martin is a transitional figure spanning the inflection point at the turn of the 4^th & 5^th-centuries. He remained hugely influential across the whole of Western Europe as far north as Scotland. When Augustine arrived at Canterbury 200 years late he found the ruins of a Roman Christian church dedicated to St Martin. St Martin’s Canterbury still stand today dwarfed alongside the great Cathedral. A mystic revered by the Druids for his love of nature in preference for the highly urban life of most Christian bishops. A pastor and a healer of souls who attracted the brightest and the best of a generation disillusioned by the degeneration of civic society. A reluctant and yet more than able administrator bishop – under whose leadership a disciplined structure of administration developed relatively free of the growing corruption afflicting the more worldly among his fellow bishops – increasingly corrupted by their magistrate’s privileges and state stipend.

Martin as a transitional figure is an avatar for us today. For we also are living at a similar inflection point to that of the late 4^th and early 5^th centuries – a time when the post-Enlightenment spirit of progress, order and the global peace – the product of Pax Americana -seems increasingly spent. Like the men and women of the age into which Martin was born, disillusionment and loss of hope mark the pervading zeitgeist of our age.

Yet there’s a key distinction between the inflection point of the 4^th-5^th centuries from that of the 20^th-21^st. As the 5^th-century unfolded – despite the devastations brought about by the first wave of barbarian incursions and the collapse of the Pax Romana – invasion also brought an infusion of energy and vitality – forging a new spirit in Western Civilization – a spirit now channeled and guided by the growing institutions of a vital and energetic Christian Church. For Martin and his church stood at the beginning of something new – whereas we and our Church today feel increasingly as if we stand at the end of something old.

I believe that the jury’s still out on the accuracy of such a premonition, real though the experience maybe. As we navigate our way forward in a time of civic challenge at home and challenges to peace and democracy abroad, we might pay closer attention to the movement of the Spirit of the God of unchangeable and yet also everchanging power. God who empowers the work of restoring the world through the raising up of things which have been cast down and inviting us to collaborate in the renewal of things that have grown old.

Embroiled in this process as we are – of finding the confidence as Christians to entrust ourselves to the hope that is within us as we navigate our way forward in challenging times – we could ask for no better guide than Martin, our patron – whose spirit is infusing those who bear his name to become increasingly molded into his likeness.

What is that likeness we might ask? It’s the likeness of a man of courageous hope, deep humility before the divine mystery, a man of resolute faith infused with the gentleness of gratitude. We can only pray and work hard to ensure that gratitude is our well spring – gushing forth through lives marked by Martin’s spirit of compassionate generosity.

What’s on the coin? We’ve all played the game of spinning a coin in the air and calling out heads or tails before it lands. The coin eventually lands with one side or the other facing up and depending on who called correctly – heads or tails – they get first choice. This is a tried-and-true method of deciding between two possibilities by entrusting the decision to fate’s choice.

Ancient coins were – as modern British ones still are – stamped with image of the reigning monarch along with an inscription – just in case there’s any identity confusion.  Jesus was presented with such a coin by his opponents – increasingly disturbed by the challenge of his message and its appeal to the ordinary folk who flocked to the Temple to listen to him. Keep at the back of your mind the question what’s on the coin.

As we watch the playing out of the internecine struggle within the House Republican caucus – confirming the current fractious and fragmented state of America’s body politic – picture the state of Roman Palestine in the time of Jesus. Like the Palestinians of today, occupation led 1^st-century Jews to sometimes unite in common cause but more typically – fracture around different responses to occupation and how to bring about its end.

In 1^st-century Palestine, five major Jewish factions faced the central choice presented to all occupied people – collaborate or resist. Those on the resistance side of the tension further divided over the use of violence as a tool of resistance.

The Sadducees, the religiously conservative priesthood – jealous for their hereditary privileges along with the Herodians, the aristocratic oligarchs of the Hasmonean Dynasty of Herod the Great – the last ruler of an independent Israel before the Roman occupation – chose to collaborate with the Roman occupation. In fact the Herodians went one step further as the Greek-speaking, culturally cosmopolitan globalists – the designer clothes wearing, fast living, pleasure-seeking 1^st-century .1%. The Sadducees clinging to unchanging tradition. The Herodians for whom God was simply a primitive artifact from a superstitious past.

The parties of resistance were the Pharisees, the Zealots, and the Essenes. The Pharisees, religiously progressive – the party of moderation resisting the occupation through keeping themselves apart from any involvement in Roman administration – while firmly rejecting violence as a tool of resistance. While the Zealots – also known as the Sicario were a 1^st-century Hamas or Hezbollah – engaged in violent resistance through assassination of Roman officials and Jewish collaborators alongside widespread intimidation of the Jewish population. The Essenes, on the other hand, are known to us principally through the excavation of one of their settlements at Qumran where archeologists unearthed the treasure trove known as the Dead Sea Scrolls – were separatist-survivalists who refused to have anything to do with both the Romans as well as their fellow Jews. Hold-up in communities in isolated parts of the Negev – they waited for the coming of the Messiah whom they pictured as God’s warrior king who would free them from the occupation. John the Baptist presented a very Essene image and preached an Essene message.

Matthew 22:15-22 therefore paints the startling picture of Pharisees, Herodians, and Sadducees consorting together to entrap Jesus. Adversity makes for strange bedfellows. It’s a testament to the power of Jesus’ message that factions who normally would have had nothing to do with one another were forced to come together to try to take him down by tricking him into convicting himself of blasphemy and or treason.

So, what’s on the coin? For the Pharisees, Roman coinage was a source of spiritual contamination because the inscription on the head proclaimed Caesar not simply as emperor but as Kyrios or Lord – a title only Yahweh could claim. The gist of this encounter between Jesus and his interlocutors centers around the legitimacy of taxation. In this context, the question concerned the dispute among Jews as to whether it was breaking the Covenant with God to pay taxes to a false god – that is Caesar – or simply a civic duty forced upon them.

In a somewhat surprising alliance of convenience, the Pharisees and Herodians pose the taxation question to Jesus. If he answers that it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar – he will be acknowledging the emperor as a god, and thus convict himself of blasphemy. To advise not paying taxes, he commits treason against the Romans. So, the strategy was to flatter him with the title of teacher and watch which way he jumped.

We know how clever a debater Jesus was and so we are not surprised when Jesus avoids the trap by stating the obvious. Asking for a coin – most likely from one of the Herodians as no Pharisee would ever carry such a thing – Jesus is suggesting there is no conflict between a civil duty to pay taxes and a religious duty to honor God as an ultimate responsibility. The beauty of his answer is that he offends both groups while depriving them of the satisfaction of hearing the jaws of their trap snap closed. 

Render to Caesar the things belonging to Caesar and to God the things belonging to God seems a simple solution. But as we know all too well, it’s one that requires an examination of and balancing between competing allegiances. What and how much is owed to Caesar? What and how much is owed to God?

The reading of Matthew 22:15-22 in parishes up and down the land, marks the launch of the fall pledge drive. Eschewing gimmicky stewardship campaigns much loved by Episcopal Church Central, this year’s annual stewardship letter will soon be dropping into your letter boxes. The focus of this year’s letter is to thank everyone for their support last year by highlighting the vibrancy and extent of our outreach ministries in 2023 – the wonderful fruit of your support. In the mailing you will also find a supporting budget narrative with a pie chart of expenditure along with the all important estimate of giving card for 2024. After prayerful contemplation please complete the estimate of giving card and return it to us asap – please.

However, having noted the connection between Matt 22:15-22 and stewardship themes I want to take Matthew’s text in a different direction by returning to the question what’s on the coin? More explicitly– what coin design can tell us about ourselves.

US coin design is traditional and for the most part unchanging. It tells us that original designs never need to change. By contrast with the accession of Charles to the British throne, the Royal Mint has issued a whole new set of coin designs. Each coin’s head features Charles in profile -facing left as his mother faced right. His image bears no crown– a nod to less deferential times. On the tail the coins depict examples of endangered species of British flora or fauna – reflecting the King’s conservation and ecological concerns.

The coin images – head and tail – of his mother’s reign projected images of national greatness and political unity. As did the humble coin in Matthew’s story – a symbol not only of economic value but also a representation of worldly power and political values.

As representations of economic value and national pride the design of our coins and banknotes has tended to project pride in national achievement. Such pride – the celebration of power also lies at the root of our plunder of the earth’s resources as a celebration of human achievement. Too much deference to Caesar and not enough honor to God.

Therefore, it’s curious to see on a nation’s money images expressing a godly concern for the protection of the environment against the human instinct to plunder and despoil the natural world. Alongside being tokens of economic value, the new British coin designs project the spiritual values of our growing desire for economic power to be better harnessed to the project of environmental restoration – heralding a more equal balance between the interests of Caesar and those of God.

A rereading of Jesus’ statement Render to Caesar that which belongs to Caesar and to God the things which belong to God – might lead us to see that he’s not making a sharp distinction between civic and spiritual obligations so much as offering a picture of balance between the expression of earthly power and our spiritual aspirations. Facing up to the serious challenges ahead still requires of us some hard choices as we bring our material and spiritual aspirations into closer alignment. What better way to do this than in the redesign of the humble coin – reminding us of a need for greater alignment between political and spiritual values as hinted at in the new British coin designs. Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God – of earthly power harnessed to the fulfilment of God’s work of restoring the face of creation. What better project to meet the challenges ahead.