"Mint Errors"
10-12-08
Jesus said, "Show me the money." Okay, so not exactly. He really said something closer to "Show me the coin." So let’s dig into our text a bit more and talk about coins. For all you history buffs, when was the first national coin was minted? Authorized by the Continental Congress, the first coin was minted in 1776. Good ole’ Benjamin Franklin provided the basic design for this pewter dollar, inscribed with the word fugio — Latin for "I fly." This word was paired with an image of a sundial, to depict how "time flies." Franklin must have anticipated how money would fly away someday at the gas pump!
Lots of different coins have been minted since 1776, the most recent, is the last of a series of quarters honoring the 50 states of the United States. In August of this year, a coin depicting Hawaii was stamped for sale. Do any of you collect these state quarters? For most of us a quarter is a quarter. Whether you call it a quarter, two bits or a 25-cent piece, each one is worth 25 cents. In some places, five of them will still get you a cup of coffee, and if you are forced to use a laundry mat or dormitory laundry facility, you know it is pretty easy to go through an entire roll of quarters in one trip. A quarter doesn’t stretch very far, but there is a slight chance that you might have a quarter worth as much as $1,500.
Beginning in January 1999, the United States Mint has, every 10 weeks, released a new quarter celebrating one of the 50 states, and they have been doing so in the order that the states were admitted to the Union. Things were cookin’ until October 2004, when Wisconsin’s coin was put into circulation. That is when coin collectors across America sat up and took notice. The reason: mint errors. Every time the mint produces a new quarter for a new state, it makes about 500 million of them, and as you might imagine, mistakes are made. Normally the quality-control procedures at the mint catch a lot of the errors before they are released into circulation, but in the case of the Wisconsin money, some error coins got by, and they have one of two kinds of blunders.
The state side of the correct quarters has the head of a cow, a wheel of cheese and an ear of corn bursting forth from the husk. On one of the error coins, there is a little mark on one side of the corn ear that appears to be an additional husk leaf half peeled off the ear. This mistake has been dubbed, "extra leaf low." The version of the mistake the collectors have dubbed "extra leaf high" is much the same, except that the shadow "leaf" is not peeled quite as far from the ear.1 Anyway, because only a few of these mint errors made it into circulation, collectors are eager to get their hands on them. So you might want to check your piggy bank, or old jars, you might get anywhere from $150 to $1,500 for it.
Mint errors are not all that rare in the money that reaches the public, and the Wisconsin quarter is hardly the only anomaly in our coinage. Go into any coin shop and you can see several examples of mint-error coins, in denominations from the penny to the silver dollar. The fact is the U.S. Mint, between its Philadelphia and Denver locations, produces billions of coins every year. Mistakes get out there.
In this morning’s text, Jesus points out a mint error of sorts. Feeling clever, influential men try once again to set Jesus up for public embarrassment with the hope of discrediting him. In front of a crowd, they ask whether it was lawful to pay taxes to the emperor. Their question really is, by all accounts, foolproof. If Jesus argues against the tax, they could accuse him of urging rebellion against Rome. Yet, if he endorses the tax, the common people who hated their Roman overlords would very likely view him as sympathetic to Rome, and probably turn away from him. Either way, it doesn’t look good for Jesus.
The plan, however, has no contingency for the calm wisdom of the son of God. Jesus says, "Show me the money." The challengers then hand him a denari, a small silver coin. A day laborer averaged one of these coins a day. Jesus asks them whose head was imprinted on it. The image is that of the Roman emperor. Jesus instructs them to "Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s."
Jesus is telling his audience that day about a kind of mint error that they could make with their money. In fact, as only Jesus could do, he turns the whole incident into a teachable moment in which he reminds them that they should be as attentive to their responsibilities toward God as they are to their obligations as subjects of the empire. Imagine that! Imagine a world were people are attentive to God as much as they are attentive to their obligations as defined by the government.
We are the followers of Jesus today. If we were standing in that crowd, and Jesus were telling us "Give therefore to the government, the things that are the government’s, and to God the thing that are God’s," what sort of "mint errors," if you will, do we make with our money and our possessions? Believe me, the last thing I wanted to talk about this morning was money. Money is all we seem to hear about these days. Then again, this may be a good time to talk about money. Some of us have plenty and some of us are a paycheck away from losing our homes. Many of us have had to make adjustments to our standard of living, while others have job security and are "riding" out the latest economic crisis. Either way, we are served well by being reminded what Jesus’ show-me-a-coin question is all about, what we have is not really ours. All things come from God.
Now, I want to take a minute and be very clear that I do not believe that some have more than others because they are more devout, God-fearing folk. I don’t believe that God rewards some people for faithfulness and ignores others who work their bums off, but can barely feed their families. That God is a little too arbitrary for me. Circumstance, family dynamic, job security, risky choices, conservative choices, and environment all play a part in our financial situation. I have a difficult time believing that God wants the majority of the world to suffer in poverty. That said, I do believe that if we view our monetary and spiritual wealth as belonging to God, then how we use our possessions will matter differently. All things belong to God. I think forgetting that is an error.
There is an old story that illustrates how easy it is to deny that what we have comes from God. A prosperous farmer was miserly in what he gave to his church. So his minister went to visit him in hopes of getting him to increase his giving. The minister pointed out to him that the Lord had given him a fertile piece of land and had blessed him with sunshine and rain so that his crops would grow. The preacher added, "You know, this farm and everything you have is really on loan to you from God. You should be more grateful." The farmer replied, "I don’t mean to complain, Reverend, but you should have seen what a mess this place was when God was running it by himself!"2
Can you sympathize with that farmer? There is a natural sense of pride we feel when we have accomplished something that makes us reluctant to share the credit, even with God. But to say that all things come to us from God is to acknowledge that behind everything is God. God’s grace, blessings, and mercy are far more important to our lives than most people give much thought to. We make a mint error when we think that we do not owe God the coin of God’s realm, which includes such things as vision, risk and hope and results in our commitment, gratitude and generosity. I realize that practically this is easier said than done. To view our lives and possessions as belonging to God takes faith, and isn’t always a comfortable idea to reflect on.
Psalm 24 reminds us that, "The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it" and that therefore we are both users and custodians of it. You could say that this is a stewardship sermon, and I bet you were hoping you only heard one of these types a sermon a year. Yet Jesus talks about stewardship and money more than any other issue before us today. The topic is hard to avoid, and is in fact, an important topic to reflect each and every day. The word "stewardship" comes from an Old English expression, "sty ward," that meant "keeper of the pigs." Eventually it came to refer to anyone who had responsibility for the estates or properties of another. It may be surprising, therefore, that the word, originally used for a pig keeper, later became a proper name for a royal British family, the Stuarts. But as King David’s prayer shows, he would have understood that. Even kings are only temporary agents for the guardianship of God’s world. In the church, we often use the word stewardship to refer to how much money we give the congregation’s budget, and that is part of it, but the biblical sense of stewardship is larger than that. It involves how we use everything God has provided for us, including our planet and environment, our talents, our time, our ability to think and to feel and even our lives themselves. And it is based in gratitude for God’s gifts. It would be a mint error to think any less. In God’s economy nothing is wasted. Jesus tells us that our life and our possessions are all treasures of God, and they should be used in such a way as to honor God. I pray that each of us has the courage to use our lives to give to God the things that are God’s. Give thanks, among many other things, for God the giver of good things. Thanks be to God. Amen
Blessings,
Melissa
1 "U.S. Mint error coins." The Coin
Site, 2001, coinsite.com.
2 As written by Bob Kaylor, Senior Minister of the Park City United
Methodist Church in Park City, Utah, in the Sept./Oct. edition of Homiletics.