Pastor Detweiler’s sermon from Sunday, Aug. 3, 2008:

Romans 9:1-5

“Arriving with us at the fullness of redemption”

It was one of those “get-to-know-you” visits that pastors sometimes make: it was to an older couple who attended worship regularly, was always well-dressed, and pleasant but a little distant. They had joined from another congregation before my time and were not well known. We had pleasant small talk for a while but then Mr. Ehrhard asked the question that was on his mind: “Why do we sing about the Jews after communion?” “Sing about the Jews?” I asked. “Yes.” He got out the hymnal, opened to the post-communion song (“Lord, now you let”) and read “a light to reveal you to the nations and the glory of your people Israel.” “Why are we praising the Jews?”

“That refers to Jesus as the glory of Israel. God’s salvation is their glory – salvation – Christ – is from the Jews.” “No,” Mr. Ehrhard said, “with Jesus the Jews were done away with, they were no longer necessary.” He seemed a little worked up. I suggested that he read chapters 9, 10 and 11 of Romans. God has not replaced the Jews and it is from them that the Messiah came. I got no where and had the feeling that the theological question was actually motivated by some kind of anti-Semitism.

We are reading through Romans this summer. This letter from Paul to a community of Christians he had never met is the closest thing to a theological essay that we have in the Bible and, more than any other book of the Bible, the basis for what Lutherans believe. In Chapter 9 Paul addresses a topic that has become more important as the world has gotten smaller: the relationship of Christians and Jews.

There are many misconceptions about the relationship of Christians and Jews. Among the most frequent is this notion that the people of Israel have been replaced by the Church which is the new and true Israel. This presupposes the rejection of Israel by God, a notion Paul dismisses.

Another misconception is that Judaism is purely a religion of adherence to the Law: that it is a religion of salvation by works and the Christian faith is a religion of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. This overlooks the Jewish view of the Torah as the object of delight and the idea of the Sabbath as the eighth day of the week, the day of participation in God’s kingdom. Martin Luther was guilty of this misconception because of his fight against the legalistic interpretation of Scripture imposed by the medieval church.

Against this notion of the rejection of Israel we have Paul’s writings in Romans 9-11. The issue for Paul is God’s faithfulness: God does not make promises and then take them back saying, “Oh, I made a mistake.” God keeps his promises, including and especially the ones made to Israel. In verses 4 & 5 of Chapter 9 Paul describes the advantages of Israel, God’s chosen people: “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,* who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.” It is not as though the word of God had failed.

To make it even clearer, he says at Chapter 11, verse 1: “I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.”

But what are we to make of Israel’s rejection of Jesus as Messiah? Paul answers that in verse 25 of Chapter 11: “So that you may not claim to be wiser than you are, brothers and sisters, I want you to understand this mystery: 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; The purpose of Israel’s rejection of Jesus is to make room in God’s kingdom for the Gentiles – for us.” Paul believes that seeing the Gentiles with Israel’s benefits will make the Jewish people jealous and so they will be saved.

God has not rejected Israel and the Church has not replaced them as God’s chosen. Instead the Church is alongside Israel. It provides a new opportunity for non-Jews to know God.

I wish it were otherwise, but the Church over the ages has treated Jews as if they were replaced and worthless. We have not paid much attention to Romans 9-11. The notion of the Church as the replacement for Israel has provided theological cover for anti-Semitism. Lutherans bear a special burden about this because of the awful things Luther wrote about the Jews at the end of his life. He was old and sick, and looking for the end of the world. Believing the world would soon end, he thought the time about which Paul wrote was up and proceeded to judge harshly. His objections were theological, rooted in his struggle against all religion based on law. He was anti-Judaic, not anti-Semitic because it was religion, not race, that he objected to. But his writings were used later on as a convenient cover for the growth of the racial hatred we know today as anti-Semitism.

Even as late as the 1700s in Europe and elsewhere, Jews were treated like animals. They were not permitted to live in towns with Christians, they were subject to expulsion from their birthplaces, unable to own property, and usually crowded into a few narrow streets and tiny houses in a few cities.

It was the Rothschild’s banking expertise and the brilliant reasoning with philosophers and princes in the mid 1700’s of Felix Mendelssohn’s grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, that was most responsible for bringing about the humane treatment of Jews. Humane treatment did not equal acceptance.

For example, although Felix Mendelssohn’s parents were baptized as adults and had their children baptized in the Lutheran church before they were teenagers, their estate in Berlin was commonly referred to as the “Jew Garden.” This was long before the birth of modern anti-Semitism and the ascendance in Nazi Germany of this hatred based on race, not religion.

There is a pathetic irony to hatred in the name of Christ. Paul offers a better way: disagreement without denigration. He relies on the faithfulness of God – that God will keep his promises to Israel, and sees Jesus’ life, death and resurrection as a witness to that faithfulness of God to his promises. Simply, Paul says God does not make promises and then change his mind.

When the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. was dedicated 15 years ago, it was a Lutheran bishop, Krister Stendahl, who gave the invocation. Before being the bishop of Stockholm, he had taught New Testament for years at Harvard Divinity School and was a crusader for better relationships between Christians and Jews. He taught generations of students to be unafraid to pray in Jesus’ name in the presence of Jews, but to say “this I pray in the name of Jesus,” thereby neither omitting Christ’s name nor asking Jews to accept him.

This is modeled on St. Paul’s approach in Romans, and is embodied in our Good Friday worship. In the Bidding Prayer, we are invited to pray “for the Jewish people, the first to hear the Word of God, that they may receive the fulfillment of the covenant’s promises.” Then, in the petition, we ask “that the people you first made your own may arrive with us at the fullness of redemption.”

God has not rejected or replaced Israel as his chosen people. Instead he has put us a on a parallel track so we can arrive together in his Kingdom. The Church is alongside the Jews, providing an opportunity for non-Jews to know God.

God does not make promises and then take them back. We cannot use what we believe as an excuse for racial or religious hatred. Our job is not to judge, but to witness to God’s salvation given in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. In so doing we can be faithful to the God who called us in Christ Jesus, the God who keeps his promises to Israel, and to us, the Church.