HOW ODD OF GOD TO CHOOSE THE JEWS
Scriptures:
Romans 2:17-24; 3:1-4
Leviticus 23:23-25
Exodus 24:3-8
And let me greet each of you with a HAPPY NEW YEAR as I did just now for the kids. But as I was saying to them, for Jews this is a holy day and not just a holiday – the beginning of a period of 10 days that takes observant Jews through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest and most somber day of the year, in which what has been wrong can be put right.
I thought I would use the occasion of this sacred time in the Jewish calendar to reflect a bit on the relation between Christians and Jews in today’s world. And not just that relationship. By an interesting confluence this weekend also marks the beginning of Ramadan, the holiest month of the year for Muslims. So, it’s also a good time to be thinking about Christian-Muslim relations, and, of course, it’s especially important to be doing this in the aftermath of the five year anniversary of 9/11. We Christians are kind of being left out in the cold in terms of experiencing the sacredness of the next few days and weeks. I guess we’ll have to be satisfied with the impact of World Wide Communion next Sunday.
Mainly, I want to talk about Jewish-Christian relationships today, so let me just say a few words about Ramadan and our relationship to Muslims at the start. (And, by the way, I feel somewhat apologetic because I know this is sounding more like a lecture than a sermon, but maybe you can put up with this style for one Sunday.)
You may know that Ramadan is a month of fasting, but along with that discipline it is also an opportunity for believers to renew their commitment to their Creator. This commitment must be both outward and inward, so that a Muslim not only recites more Qur'an and offers more units of prayer, but she or he does so with reflection, humility and attentiveness. Obviously, these are not activities to be entered into lightly but with a deep sense of the numinous present for the one who is fasting. Fasting during Ramadan is one of the five pillars of Islamic faith. Ramadan addresses the basic energies behind most of what motivates Muslims. In the month of Ramadan, Muslims transform or break old and negative patterns to approach a new realization of the health and well-being of the Soul. If you have Muslim friends or acquaintances, Ramadan is an excellent time to engage them in conversation of how meaningful this period is for their spiritual lives.
I don’t think I need to remind you how important it is today for Christians and Muslims of good faith to seek understandings that stem from their practice of their religion. The recent flare-up over the pope’s remarks about "historical Muslim violence" by quoting a medieval text which condemned the idea of jihad or holy war, leading to outbreaks of violence and sharp protests from Muslim groups, indicates how sensitive and tenuous our relationships can be. Former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey got it right when he said about this flare-up: “Muslims, as well as Christians, must learn to enter into dialogue without crying foul. We live in perilous times, and we must not only separate religion from violence but also not give religious legitimacy to violence in any shape or form." We know that Muslims, like Christians, are part of the great Abrahamic tradition, and that devout Muslims revere Jesus Christ as an important prophet for their own tradition. It is imperative in the years ahead that we as Christians find ever-increasing ways to make common cause with Muslims as our fellow religionists.
Jews, of course, are the primary descendents of the Abrahamic tradition, and we need to begin any discussion of Jewish-Christian relationships by acknowledging the primacy of Judaism as a world religion. You’ve heard me say before that what we as Christians a bit too blithely call the “Old Testament” is really the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures – and while it is “old” in the sense of being ancient wisdom handed down for all of Abraham’s descendents, it is not “old” in the sense of being shopworn or replaced by something else.
And so the Jewish Scriptures establish the “head of the year”, as you heard read from the book of Leviticus, at the beginning of the seventh Jewish month (called Tishri) – a day of remembrance and of prayer. No work is permitted on Rosh Hashanah. Much of the day is spent in the synagogue where the regular daily liturgy is expanded. Four times the shofar is blown with four different calls: the call to community, hearing the brokenness of the world, the sound of moving forward, and finally the sound of hope. That all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? At its best our Christian liturgy wants to express exactly those calls for us to reflect and act upon. There’s another practice that some devout Jews will engage in that also reverberates with us: Tashlikh or "casting off". They will walk to flowing water, such as a creek or river, on the afternoon of the first day and empty their pockets into the river, symbolically casting off sins. While this practice is not discussed in the Bible, it is a long-standing custom.
So, we have now entered the year 5767! And you thought a 3rd millennium and 2006 sounded like a long time! Jews – and before there were Jews, the Israelites – have been celebrating new beginnings with prayer and reflection and repentance for over 5700 years.
In part because of this longevity, we often hear Jews spoken of as “God’s chosen people”. And this has led to some mis-understandings on the part of Christians over the centuries, because on its face it can sound elitist and separatist. But as you heard read in the passage from Exodus, this choosing is not for privilege or because there is something special in God’s eyes about the Jewish people, but rather it is because God has made a covenant with them – a covenant which binds God and the people together. Through this covenant God made promises out of God’s love for the Israelites – promises that God would keep faithfully, even though the people often fell away from the keeping of their promises (the books of the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures are mostly about warning the people that they are not fulfilling their promises to God).
Thus, that little couplet that I used as the title for this sermon is a rather cute way to say briefly how complicated the relationship of “choosing” is between God and the Jewish people. “How odd of God to choose the Jews,” was coined by British journalist William Norman Ewer, and it’s sometimes been perceived as an anti-Semitic crack that undermines this relationship. But for most Jews, as far as I can tell, the line just causes a kind of wry smile, because if God had truly favored the Jews throughout history, why would that history have been so bleak and filled with persecution? The “choice” of God feels much more like a burden than a boon. It is time for Christians to join with God’s chosen people in accepting the promise of God’s covenant with the people and in so doing recognizing the work that God calls each of us – Jew and Christian alike – to be doing in the world today.
In fact, a Jewish wit has added a second line to this phrase: "Not odd of God/Goyim annoy 'im." Goyim, of course, are any people who are not Jewish. There’s a Talmudic story that when God first offered the covenant of the Torah God did so to all of the other people of the earth as well – the Ammonites, the Moabites, the children of Ishmael – in fact, there was not a single nation among the nations to whom Yahweh did not go, speak, knock on its door, asking whether it would be willing to accept the Torah. But each one of them had a different reason why they would not enter into covenant with God. At long last Yahweh came to Israel and asked them: “Will you accept the Torah?” They said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient” – which is the verse you heard read today from Exodus. Are we goyim still annoying God today by not keeping the promises that we would make in covenant with our God? Of course, the Jewish prophetic tradition would aver that Jews also annoy God when they do not live up to the promises of the covenant. Part of our commonality as Christians and Jews living in a society that desperately needs our witness today is to find out how together we can live into and thus live out the promises of God’s people.
However, before we can discover and act upon that commonality in beneficial ways, there are still two major issues that need to be put on the table and faced squarely. The first is the matter of Christian anti-Semitism. Like any prejudice, this is a subtle, not-easy thing to discern in our own psyches, especially among people of good will who do not like to think that they hold any anti-Semitic attitudes. My first church was in Long Beach, NY, which is a community that in the 1960s when we were there was about 70% Jewish with Protestants in the distinct minority. I struck up a good relationship with a progressive Reformed rabbi, Bernie Kligfeld, and after a couple of years of helpful conversations, we decided to have a pulpit exchange – I spoke at the synagogue on Friday night and he spoke at our church (which was named The People’s Church) on the next Sunday morning. (That led to some interesting culture shock, by the way, in terms of the differing ways we do liturgy, since some of the members of each congregation attended the other’s service as well – Jews don’t take up a collection during their synagogue service, so their members were somewhat non-plussed when the offering plates went around; our members were a bit flummoxed and didn’t quite know what to make of the blowing of the shofar.) During my presentation to the members of the Reformed congregation I made the following statement: “I could not come before you without also attempting to be honest with you about anti-Semitism as it relates to the Christian church. And being honest I would have to say that I have seen latent and even not so latent anti-Semitism within members of my own church.” Well, you can imagine the heat I took from that statement when I got back to The People’s Church. But it was a true statement – and all the more so because people didn’t recognize the stereotypical attitudes that come with being steeped in a culture that has in so many ways despised Jews and the contributions they have made – a culture where phrases like “dirty Jew” and “kike” are bandied about without being refuted -- a culture where some will still claim that the Holocaust never happened…and be believed by the credulous. A little while back I bought a video of the movie “Gentlemen’s Agreement”, where Gregory Peck as a crusading writer affects becoming a Jew for the sake of an article he is writing, and cannot believe what he discovers in terms of the subtle anti-Semitism that exists even among people he cares about. Although this film was produced in 1947, its presentation of the insidious way attitudes that reflect anti-Semitism can affect us is true nearly 60 years later.
The second issue that concerns us is the fact of the nation of Israel. Discerning how, as Christians, to be faithful critics of Israel when it takes wrongful actions against Palestinians or Lebanese without being or seeming to be anti-Jewish is one of the most difficult tightropes Christians have to walk today. The so-called Christian Zionist movement has not helped in this regard. It simply does not help our day-to-day relationships as Christians and Jews together here in Las Vegas or across this country for us to take an uncritical stance toward Israel or its rights and actions in the Middle East. To go back to the statement of former Archbishop George Carey, our beginning stance needs to be that we must “not give religious legitimacy to violence in any shape or form." If that means condemning Israel for acts of violence, then that, too, is part of the dialogue we are having as Christians and Jews together. It does not make the dialogue easier – in fact, it may make it much harder if we are seen not to be fully supportive of Israel. But dialogue that does not have such rough turns is not genuine meeting.
The single most positive step we could take to move the dialogue on to next levels is to disavow any and all efforts to convert Jews to become Christians. I once heard a rabbi say that the underlying assumption of the Christian is the hope of converting the Jew, since Christianity is by nature a missionary religion seeking converts. Since it sees Judaism as culminating in Christianity, the Jew is simply one who has not yet accepted Christ. I disagree most profoundly with this characterization, even while I recognize that there are those who would hold it. I was privileged during most of my working life with the National Council of Churches and Faith & Values Media to work in an interfaith context with Jewish colleagues – and what made those working relationships viable was the knowledge that we treated one another as equals, with no thought of one converting the other. The equality of Judaism as a religion is the first tenet of any true Christian-Jewish conversation and relatedness.
“Then what advantage has the Jew?” Paul asks. “Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. For in the first place the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.” May Paul’s words enable us to affirm our connectedness with our Jewish brothers and sisters and find ways for us to fulfill our promises to our same God together.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
September 24, 2006