I know I’ve shared this with you before, but when I was a senior in high school, I landed the role of Tevye in The Fiddler on the Roof for our spring musical. You need to know a couple of things about my high school. First, there were two guys who could sing well enough to land the lead — myself and my friend, Josh, who also worked a lot of hours at a gas station, so I got the lead because I had more time. (Josh remains the better singer, although neither of us could pull of the burly middle-aged father-figure with our tenor voices.) I did find a picture of some of the cast this past week for proof.
Second, I am not aware that our school had a single Jewish student in it, so we had no idea about Judaism when we started the production. Our school was loaded with Catholics but not Jews. Third, our little school was pretty insular, so we were largely unaware of the wider world and even the history around this musical. Probably half the cast wouldn’t have known where Russia was on a globe, and this was before Google, so they couldn’t have cheated!
Now, as I look back on my time in this, I want to give our director, Mrs. Stoughton, credit. She tried to get us to engage with the wider meaning and ideas presented in this musical. We had a field trip to a synagogue in Erie, where a rabbi talked to us about Judaism, tried to teach me how to sound like I was chanting prayers, and gave us a deeper appreciation for what we were doing. But our cultural and religious understanding was minimal at best.
And, honestly, my small-minded Baptist upbringing wasn’t helping me either. There is a scene where Tevye is hungover. This is a good thing, but I had not touched alcohol, let alone been hungover. I had no idea how to play hungover. (The director told another senior in the production to pull me aside and describe it for me. I’m still not sure that was the right way to handle it.) But also, I grew up afraid that anything outside of my little Christian world was a threat to me. I was somewhat used to the Catholics, but listening to the rabbi had me on edge. In my small understanding, if it wasn’t Protestant Christian, then it was wrong and dangerous. Oh, how I wish I could go back in time to listen and learn better!
Because here’s the deal: If something is outside of what is our normal experience, then it feels strange or foreign. Sometimes it even feels threatening. What I keep learning the longer I live is that it is better to seek to understand people or things that are outside of our experience than it is to ignore or fear them. Seeking to understand others deepens our lives and enriches our ability to understand ourselves. Ignoring them leads to stereotyping, belittling, or outright fear.
Today’s “Ask Us Anything” questions are about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. I’m going to work towards answering these later in the sermon, but I want to lay them before you now.
First, if the Jewish people are the “chosen” people, why have they been so persecuted over the years?
The second questioner wonders this: Is the land of Israel really any more special than any other plot of ground, and how does it relate to the second coming of Jesus?
So, I have around 15 minutes to handle all of that. I’m sure that’s plenty of time to thoroughly cover every aspect of this, and surely I won’t step on any landmines along the way. Right? Right. (I’ve loved your questions, folks, but you’ve asked some real doozies this time around!)
I’m going to spend most of the sermon looking at what the Apostle Paul wrote about this relationship between Judaism and what would become Christianity. We have to remember, first of all, that neither Jesus nor Paul were creating a new thing called Christianity. That came over time when it became clear that there was a major division between Jews and Christians.
Paul writes with great frequency on this topic, but his most focused writing on it is in Romans 9-11. I’d recommend reading Romans in its entirety because it’s amazing and because the whole letter touches on what it means to receive the grace of Jesus and on how we are to live with each other amidst differences. We heard some of the first words from Romans. I’d call 1:16 a thesis statement for the letter. Paul writes, “I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.” In that one sentence, we see the core of Paul’s ministry. The work of Jesus is about faith — trusting that what God has done in Jesus is sufficient for salvation. We see that Paul, who himself is a Jew, believed in the chosenness of the Jews to bear this message that would spread to all peoples.
Paul’s ministry itself revealed this belief. His pattern in Acts is striking. He starts in the synagogue; eventually his message is rejected by some; then he heads to a public space where Jews and Gentiles all hear the gospel. It happens in Antioch of Pisidia, Iconium, Thessalonica, Berea, and more. It’s reflective of Paul’s understanding that God’s covenant with the Jews is not nullified in Jesus but fulfilled. God hasn’t cast the Jews aside; rather, God has worked in and through them to bring grace and repentance through faith in Jesus to all people.
Paul’s message does demand repentance — a changing of mind and life — and, let’s be honest here, most of us don’t like someone telling us that what we believe about our lives needs to change, do we? The Law, which is so central to the Jewish understanding of how they relate rightly to God, has met its fulfillment not through individual obedience but through the obedience of Jesus, a radical Jewish teacher who died on a cross. Paul insists that all who come into God’s family do so solely on the basis of God’s grace and mercy, not because of their identity at birth.
And so we come to Romans 9-11, where Paul writes deeply about this gospel — that it begins with God’s covenant with the Jews and then moves to the entire world because of what God has done in Jesus Christ — and about how he wrestles with the constant and sometimes violent rejection of this message from his own people. He begins with his sorrow over this rejection, writing, “For I wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises, to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah” (9:3-5).
Paul then addresses this in a new way. He starts to see his people’s rejection of Jesus as part of God’s plan for allowing space for others to come to Jesus. We heard that in chapter 11, “A hardening has come upon part of Israel until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved….as regards the gospel they are enemies of God for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors; for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.”
Paul uses the image of a vine to explain what he means. He calls the people of Israel the “rich root of the olive tree,” and he calls the Gentiles who have responded to the gospel, “a wild olive shoot…grafted in their place to share the rich root.” Just follow this image with me for a moment. This new vine, can it exist apart from the old tree? No! Can the old tree support and grow into a fuller, stronger tree with the new vine? Absolutely! Are they both alive? Yes! And, as God tends to them over time, they’ll need each other to become fully what God wants them to be.
What Paul is saying is that these converts to the way of Jesus have been grafted into what God has been doing down through the years through the Jews. Christianity was never really meant to be its own thing. It was a fulfillment of God’s plan from the beginning that was fostered through the Jews and, when the time was right, fulfilled in Jesus.
Paul even makes plenty of room for those who reject Jesus to find their way back to what God is doing, writing that God has the power to graft back in branches that have broken off from the tree.
It’s our human tendency to believe there have to be winners and losers; we love separating ourselves into teams, which sure doesn’t seem to be Paul’s assessment of God’s plan. Rather, it’s about how God is bringing all of us together into this one glorious project for the sake of the world, so Paul cautions, “If you do boast, remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you….You stand only through faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe.”
Sadly, history reveals that Christians have mismanaged the gospel over and over again. One of the ways we have done this is called supersessionism, which is the belief that the Christian Church has replaced the Jewish people as God’s covenant people. Let me be clear: You cannot read Romans 9-11 and think this is a viable conclusion for how Paul is portraying this.
So, to touch on the question of why God’s chosen people have been persecuted so much over the years, I think it’s a cocktail of a host of evil behavior that has cloaked itself in religion. Some of it builds off of this idea of supersessionism and justifies its hateful actions by a “if they’re not for me, they’re against me” mentality. But the venom that drips from this idea has led to all sorts of terrible behavior by Christians down through the ages — the crusaders murdering 2000 Jews in Germany on their way to take the Holy Land back from the Muslims; the Holocaust, of course. But it also happens on a smaller scale like the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh back in 2018.
So, I’m not sure I can fully explain “why” this happens. The way I read scripture leads me to believe that God does not direct or will this kind of evil but has given humans plenty of space and freedom to make of the creation what we will. But we humans have quite a nasty track record of using that freedom for evil.
What do we do? We take what we’ve made of creation — governments, militaries, economies, myth-making — and then we often use it to overpower others. (And let me say that this is a human issue. Christians do it. Muslims do it. Jews do it. Atheists do it. No one is innocent here.) We take all of these things and sometimes we use them to build up the world, and sometimes we use them to be destructive.
So, let me put this plainly: If religion leads us to think it’s OK to oppress others, then it’s bad religion. It’s not the way of Jesus.
This brings me back to the other question about whether the land of Israel is any more special than any other plot of ground and its relationship to the return of Christ. I think the answer to that question is that no plot of ground is any more special or sacred than any other. Psalm 24:1 says, “The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it.” Yes, God chose a people and gave them a land, but the story keeps going beyond that. That people were supposed to use those gifts to be a blessing to the whole world. The Bible doesn’t stop in Israel. God is redeeming every square inch of creation, not just a strip of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.
I grew up in an environment where Christian fundamentalism and its theology ruled the roost. Part of that belief was that the land of Israel was an essential piece of ushering in Christ’s return, and we still see some Christians today exercising their power to set things up for the apocalypse and the Battle of Armageddon. They believe they’re doing God’s will; I think they’re wrong. (We preached through Revelation a couple of years ago if you really want to know what I believe about this.) And their actions have led to the oppression of people along the way. To that I say: If your religion leads to the oppression of others, it’s bad religion. It’s not the way of Jesus.
To wrap up, I want to return to Paul. You’ve heard how he writes in Romans that Christians are a new vine grafted into the old one. In chapter 12, Paul writes about how we’re to live. He calls us “living sacrifices,” our lives offered as pleasing to God. He urges us not to be “conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of our minds” so we might discern God’s will. He moves into these commands — “let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection.” And he closes the chapter with these words, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
That’s the antidote to bad theology wrapped up in the powers of politics and economics and violence. It’s living kingdom lives that are a glimpse of the reality of heaven. It’s seeing the world through the eyes of Jesus and living in it as though he were living our lives. It’s that kind of living that gives me hope even when it would be easy to despair.
I’ll close with this powerful poem from Wendell Berry.
Hate has no world.
The people of hate must try
to possess the world of love,
for it is the only world;
it is Heaven and Earth.
But as lonely, eager hate
possesses it, it disappears;
it never did exist,
and hate must seek another
world that love has made.
Hatred and violence are a virus trying to overcome the good, loving world God has made. Thanks be to God that because of Jesus Christ you and I have the calling, opportunity, and responsibility to bring healing to God’s good world.