© 2026 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. Does that mean my tithe to the church is supposed to be before taxes or after taxes?”
Before I moved to Arkansas, I served as a stewardship consultant in the Diocese of Alabama. I volunteered my time to meet with rectors, vestries, and congregations to talk about the importance of faithful giving, and the first time I was asked that question I wasn’t prepared for it. In fact, I wasn’t even sure the person asking it was being serious. But my half-hearted chuckle was met with an icy stare. She was waiting for an answer. “Does the ten percent you’re asking me to give to the church come out of my pocket before or after Uncle Sam takes his bite?”
The first time I attempted an answer to that question didn’t go very well. In front of an audience I did not know and who did not know me, I tried to argue that, if God really is the first priority in our lives, our pledge would be based on our pre-tax income. The implication, of course, was that anyone who didn’t calculate their tithe that way was in effect pledging their principal allegiance to the state instead of to God. I could feel everyone in the room tense up. This stewardship consultant was questioning the faithfulness of this entire congregation, and after that no one was interested in being generous.
The next question I got was about living on Social Security and how much someone should be expected to give on a limited income. And the next was about giving to the church while saving for college. And the next was about someone who had lost their job. And, although I had decent answers for each of those questions, no one heard them because everyone had tightened up at this inexperienced stewardship consultant who may have known a lot about faithful giving but didn’t know a lot about faithful people. When I got the same question in future congregational visits, I used a different approach. Should my tithe be calculated before or after taxes? That’s up to you, I said with a smile. You get to decide because the truth is that, no matter how you calculate it, once you’re giving ten percent of your income back to God, God’s got a hold of your heart, and I trust God to do the rest.
Questions about giving and taxes have always been controversial. The responses that religious leaders make rarely inspire generosity and almost always lead to resentment. The Pharisees and the Herodians knew that. They were tired of Jesus and his anti-establishment teachings. His parables about their faithlessness had embarrassed them in front of the people, who were increasingly loyal to him and his vision for their future. It’s easy to get the crowds on your side when you don’t have to deal with the nitty-gritty details of balancing the people’s desire for religious autonomy with the Roman Empire’s demand for political fidelity. The religious leaders had negotiated a fragile peace with Rome, and Jesus had openly challenged their willingness to turn their back on God in favor of that negotiated peace, and they had had enough of it. Let’s trap him in his own words, they said. Let’s ask him about taxes.
The poll tax was exceedingly unpopular among the Jewish people. Unlike other taxes that were levied on trade or particular activities, this tax was required of every person in the province simply for being alive. In effect, it asked the Jewish people to embrace their own subjugation by Rome. About twenty-five years earlier, the tax had led to a widespread Jewish revolt, which the Empire had put down with characteristic brutality. Paying the tax was not merely a financial obligation but, like salt in an open wound, it forced the Jewish people to admit their powerlessness in the face of Roman occupation and, by extension, the domination of their God by the unholy gods of their occupiers. But any religious or political leader who taught the people to refuse to pay it could be handed over to the authorities for arrest and punishment as an insurrectionist.
“Teacher,” the religious leaders said in their most flattering tone, “we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” They had him. There was no way out. Either he would admit that paying taxes was lawful and thus alienate his revolution-minded followers, or he would declare that no faithful Jew should have to pay anything to Caesar and open himself up to prosecution by the imperial authorities. Either way, his opponents would win. But Jesus’ answer revealed that the question itself, by forcing us to choose between belonging to God or belonging to the empire, was itself built on a false premise. The question for God’s people is not to which kingdom they will belong but how they will remain faithful to God while living in a faithless world.
“Show me the coin used for the tax,” Jesus said to them. He didn’t have one. He wouldn’t have brought that unclean coin with its graven image and brazen violation of the second commandment into the precincts of the sacred temple. But they would. “Whose image is this and whose title?” he asked, holding out the coin they produced, reminding them what it represented. “Ti[berius] Caesar Divi Aus[usti] F[ilius] Augustus,” it read on the front, with “Pontif[ex] Maxim[us]” on the back. Caesar Tiberius, son of the divine Augustus, Exalted One and High Priest—it’s hard to imagine anything more objectionable to Jewish sensibilities being minted on a coin. “Whose image is this and whose title?” he asked them. “The emperor’s” they answered. “Then give back to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
They were amazed at his teaching, and so are we—amazed because he managed to escape their trap so successfully but also because of the profound moral and ethical teaching offered in those words. And the more you think about them the more they teach you. Does the coin belong to Caesar in a way that it does not belong to God? Does the blasphemous inscription and image it bears somehow make it exempt from divine authority and ownership? Do we want to live in a world in which only some things belong to God while everything else belongs to the gods of power, greed, lust, and war? Or are we willing to take another look and see through the icons and images of earthly identity and detect, by looking with spiritual sightedness, the createdness and holiness contained within all things? As Wendell Berry said, “There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.”
If the head on the coin is a graven image and, thus, unholy, does the one who pays the tax undermine their identity as a bearer of the image of God? Or is it possible for us to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s while also giving ourselves—the ones who bear the image and likeness of our Creator—back to God? Will we pretend that only part of our lives—ten percent, perhaps—belongs to God and the rest belongs to this broken world, or will we seek a way for everything we have and everything we are to bear the image of God in this world that God has made?
What if you make your living doing something unholy? What if you are a loan shark or a drug dealer or a hitman? Or, more likely, what if you are a predatory landlord or a contractor who withholds wages and benefits from undocumented laborers or a geochemist who works to perfect the art of fracking? What if your investment income comes from tobacco companies or private prisons or arms manufacturers or the oil and gas industry? Is Jesus telling you that you don’t have to tithe on whatever part of your income is derived from ungodly sources? Or are you supposed to give more than ten percent in order to sanitize the sinful stain on your money? How much is enough to justify a life that belongs mostly to the empire? How much will it take to restore us to God’s kingdom?
Of course, stewardship doesn’t work like that. It’s not a tax we pay to the church or to God. Our giving isn’t the end we seek but a spiritual practice we undertake in search of our true identity. All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee. I have found that the more I give back the more I realize that everything I have already belongs to God. By giving to God a significant portion of my income, I have learned that God isn’t asking for ten percent in order to excuse how I spend the rest of my money because it isn’t “my money” to begin with.
Stewardship has taught me the importance of seeking God and embodying my faith with every decision I make. It has taught me to stop asking how much of my money, my time, my talent, and my life I am supposed to give back to God and to start looking for ways to give more. Asking whether our giving to the church should be calculated before or after taxes isn’t a bad question. It’s a starting point. And, if you take that question seriously because you want to do the right thing, God’s already got a hold of your heart, and that can only lead to good things.
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