Sermons & Services

This is not a sermon about the Israel-Hamas war. It is rather a sermon about the theological core of the Christian faith, about the meaning of God’s love for all humanity, made known to us in a particular way in Jesus of Nazareth.

Led by today’s scripture reading from Acts, though, I need to talk about God’s love for all humanity as it relates to the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, and it is impossible to talk about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism without talking about the shameful and tragic reality of Antisemitism. And, these days, it is difficult to talk about Antisemitism without talking about the war between Israel and Hamas.

I’ll start with the war, if for no other reason than to get the depressing part out of the way first.

Like most people, at least as surveys show in America, when I think of the war between Israel and Hamas, I feel powerless, frustrated, angry and sad. The conflict between Israel and Hamas, and the Palestinians more broadly, just seems so intractable. I know enough of the history to sort of intellectually understand the source of the conflict, but I don’t pretend to understand the sense of vulnerability, fear, victimization, trauma, and injustice that both sides feel.

I don’t feel the need to side with Israel or Hamas, so much as I feel the need to side with Jesus and his way of cross-shaped love. Starting with today and going backward:

What Israel is doing right now in Gaza, relentlessly bombing, and now starving, the population to achieve their political goals is unconscionable.

What Hamas did on October 7, 2023, killing, kidnapping, and raping more than 2000 non-combatant Israelis was unconscionable.

The way Israel has marginalized and discriminated against Palestinians for decades is unconscionable.

Hamas’s use of terror through the years to achieve their goal of getting rid of the state of Israel is unconscionable.

Israel’s failure to respect the basic political and human rights of Palestinians ever since 1948 is unconscionable.

The persecution and political oppression that Jews have suffered through much of the past 2000 years, most diabolically in the Holocaust, with such persecution and oppression contributing to the creation of the modern State of Israel on land that was already occupied mostly by Arab Palestinians is unconscionable.

Clearly, there is plenty of unconscionable to go around, not just on both sides, but on all sides.

Now I believe that love, the love displayed in Jesus’ death and resurrection, cross-shaped and empty tomb shaped love, requires the rejection of all violence. So I don’t need to defend the actions of either side, as I support a different way for both sides.

Some might wonder if that is not just throwing the issue of justice to the wind, however. I don’t think it is. It is rejecting notions of justice that are not ultimately based in respecting that every single human being on all sides of this war is a precious child of God, which makes us all siblings, and thus makes all killing fratricide and sororicide.

It is undoubtedly true that Antisemitism, specifically, Antisemitism by Christians, through the ages has contributed to this mess. The way Jews were treated in so called “Christendom,” century after century, was appalling. Christians, especially through our alignment of religious and political power, have led the way of violent Antisemitism ever since the creation of an oxymoronic “Christian empire” under Constantine in the fourth century. It was when the church allowed itself to be aligned with the sword that theological differences between Jews and Christians turned deadly.

It is vitally important that we, as Christians, have enough self-awareness to recognize and repent of the very real, and often very violent, Antisemitism that has marked our history.

God have mercy. Help us repent and repair.

As with white supremacy, to repent and repair, we need to understand. And this is where theological issues come directly to play, because for most of Christian history, people have thought that a rejection of Judaism was a necessary part of our faith. The hard truth is that for most of Christian history, a type of Antisemitism was not a sin or a flaw of Christian thought, but was a necessary feature of the system.

That sense, that a type of Antisemitism was a necessary part of Christian theology, can be seen in the way that many people read today’s passage from Acts. The passage certainly sounds strange, and is probably unfamiliar to at least some of you, so to review quickly: One of the central questions in the earliest days of the Jesus movement was whether someone had to be Jewish in order to follow Jesus. Of course, Jesus was Jewish, and as best we can tell had no intent of his followers ever separating from Judaism. Peter and all the early disciples were Jewish. Paul was Jewish – a Pharisee in fact. Every thought they had about God and who Jesus was and what it meant to be his follower was shaped by the ancient faith of their ancestors who trusted in the God of Abraham.

But it didn’t take long, really, for people other than Jews, that is gentiles, to become interested in the Jesus movement, mostly because of the attractive morality, the communal orientation and sharing of burdens, and the hopeful view of the future – much, if not all, of which was grounded in Judaism. And it is abundantly clear in the New Testament that the Jesus movement didn’t really know what to do with these people. The distinction between Jews and gentiles was built into the order of creation and embodied in the covenant with Abraham and his descendants forever, so blurring or ending that distinction didn’t make any sense. Being a follower of Jesus was a Jewish thing, so it would seem that to be a follower of Jesus one would need to be Jewish – which was possible, but, for men, conversion required circumcision, as a sign of following the law and the covenant.

So, one of the central debates in these early days, was whether gentiles, well, male gentiles (in the patriarchal culture of the time, it is unclear what was expected of women), needed to be circumcised to be considered followers of Jesus. Or more generally, you could say the question was whether gentiles needed to become Jewish in order to become Christian.

Long story short, the earliest followers of Jesus didn’t really know how to resolve this issue, but God resolved it for them. And this passage from Acts is one of the places we see that happening. Peter, who by default once believed that gentiles did need to become Jewish to follow Jesus, received a dream/vision from God. As you heard, he was told, repeatedly, to slaughter and eat unclean animals, a sign that God was up to something new, and that if even being Jewish was not strictly defined by observance of every part of the Law of Moses, then it seems gentiles didn’t need to be circumcised and could thus be followers of Jesus without following the Law of Moses as traditionally understood. (See Galatians 2:1-10 and Acts 15:1-35 for somewhat different, but not contradictory, versions of this “settlement.”)

To top it off, when Peter went to speak about Jesus to some gentiles, God sent the Holy Spirit into them, so Peter just kind of throws up his hands and says, to the fellow Jews to whom his relating this story, “If God gave these gentiles a gift equal to the one he also gave us when we had faith in the Lord Jesus, who was I that I might hinder God?”

Sadly, far too often, this whole passage has been read to endorse Christian Antisemitism. It is basically taken to show that those ridiculous Jews only care about legalism and meaningless ceremony, not a religion of love and freedom. And given that the mainstream of the Jewish community ended up not accepting gentiles without full conversion to following the Law of Moses, clearly Judaism was wicked for not believing in the way of Jesus. See how, through the accusation of legalism, it could well seem that Antisemitism is baked into what Christianity is all about?

And even if we, Christians of our variety, don’t believe that, and even if we take steps to avoid reinforcing that message, we would still sadly have a hard time saying why it’s not true. I mean, the New Testament, like in this passage about Peter, does sort of sound Antisemitic, so we often just accept the conflict between Christians and Jews as one of those dumb things that’s in the Bible, but we don’t accept, because well, it just can’t be right.

And, actually, that’s the sentiment that I want to reinforce today. As the story about Peter and the inclusion of the gentiles shows, it’s more complicated than dismissing it as one of the dumb things in the Bible, but I wholeheartedly affirm the sentiment that we don’t accept it, because well, it just can’t be right.

Here are three ideas I want to offer to you to understand a little better why Antisemitism is not just baked into our faith:

First, and perhaps most importantly, we need to believe that God’s steadfast love of the Jews has never ended and will never end. The idea, called supercessionism, that Christians have replaced Jews as God’s chosen people is a tragic misreading of the New Testament. This idea was sadly prevalent among the puritans that gave rise to our branch of Christianity and even those who birthed First Church. So I want to say without nuance that Jews do not need to “accept Jesus Christ as Messiah and Lord” in order to be “saved.” (I have gone in this direction theologically because of the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether in Faith and Fratricide, although I think of the role of Jesus somewhat differently than what I understand to be her view. Also, I want to acknowledge that “saved” in this sense is probably also a specifically Christian conception.)

Whatever one makes of the religions of the world, and I believe that each one must be considered individually and uniquely, we need to take seriously the fact that Christianity is a child of Judaism, that Judaism is the vine into which we were grafted by Christ, and for Christians to try to cut down that vine is an act not just of fratricide, but suicide. “A tree cut off from its roots cannot live.” (An Angolan proverb.) God has an ongoing, beloved relationship with our ancestors, the Jews, that stands no matter what, Jesus or no Jesus.

Secondly, to address the message of the New Testament somewhat coarsely, and speaking against one of the worst theological claims that we hear today, “the Jews” did not kill Jesus. Although Jesus was presumably in intense conflict with some of the leaders of Judaism in his day, it is clear in the New Testament that Jesus was not killed by “the Jews” (as an ethnic or religious group) over some religious or theological issue, he was killed by the Romans as a threat to public order. He had to be sacrificed for the sake of control. Did some Jewish leaders who were politically aligned with the Romans, oppose Jesus? Yes, certainly. But he was not killed in the name of the God of the Abraham: he was killed in the name of earthly power – of the need of those in power to keep that power. Jesus may have been only a gnat, but better that one gnat be sacrificed, than risk the birth of a movement. If one wants to blame a group for the death of Jesus, that group should not be Jews, but all political leaders who are willing to use violence to achieve their ends. God loves everyone, but if you have to blame a group, Anti-political-leaders-who-rely-on-violence-and-fear-ism, or Anti-political-elite-ism, makes more sense than Anti-Semitism. And this applies to Rome, to the U.S., to Israel, and to Hamas.

Thirdly, and this is perhaps my most practical and simple point of all. And indeed, I hope you see your own theological and moral commitments in this comment, because I believe this is how most of us actually make our moral decisions. If it doesn’t seem like love, it probably isn’t of God. God is love. And I know that moral judgments and theological convictions can be complex and difficult, but theologically, practically, personally, Jesus-shaped love is our guide. We need to fit our theology into our understanding of love, not fit love into our understanding of theology. Antisemitism, acting as if God’s relationship with the Jews has somehow been broken – it doesn’t sound like love to me. And if it doesn’t sound like Jesus-shaped love, it’s not of God.

So, when we think of Antisemitism today, and the way it has, honestly and tragically, been part of the core of Christian history, we need to be guided by a different spirit:

Jews have an abiding and unique relationship to God that doesn’t end just because God has decided to graft others into the vine of God’s salvation;

Jesus was not killed by “the Jews,” but by Roman power and its allies, by the political elite who wanted to maintain social order, just like too many political leaders today use violence for political gain;

And finally, if it doesn’t seem like Jesus-shaped love, it can’t be true.

If we are guided by those three convictions, we’ll go a long way toward fighting the tide of Antisemitism that does exist in our country, our world, and strangely, tragically, in our faith.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Mother of Us All, Amen.