May 29, 2016
Texts:
Luke 7: 1-10;
Galatians 1: 1-12
1 Kings 8: 22-23, esp 41-43
Luke tells us that after preaching the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus came into Capernaum, a village by the Sea of Galilee. There a centurion, a Gentile soldier in the garrison of the Roman occupiers, comes to tell Jesus about his beloved servant who is near death. He asks Jesus to heal the servant. The centurion is probably what Luke calls elsewhere a "God-fearer," a Gentile who respects the God of Judaism. He has even helped his Jewish neighbors build their synagogue and he obviously has a good relationship with the town’s Jewish elders – rare at the time. But the centurion says he feels too unworthy to have Jesus come into his house where the servant lies dying. So he asks his Jewish friends to plead his case to Jesus, a Jew, and they do so willingly, also noteworthy because Jesus is regarded with suspicion by many of his fellow Jews. Their actions show amazing cultural sensitivity: not knowing Jesus personally, the soldier sends representatives of Jesus' own community to ask on his behalf, and the Jewish leaders seem to be confident enough of Jesus’ power to ask him to heal the sick servant. And Jesus heals him. The story has many meanings, but for our purposes this morning I want to point out two. The first lesson points to the faith of the centurion, a non-Jew. His faith was so remarkably strong that Jesus exclaims in astonishment, “I have not found such faith even in Israel.”
This event also allows Luke to show that Jews and Gentiles in Palestine can get along--a message of ethnic cooperation that was revolutionary in ancient times, just as it is today. Their diversity is respected by all, Jewish elders, a Gentile soldier in the employ of the tyrant oppressors, and Jesus, the revolutionary prophet and miracle worker; and they cooperate for good across all these social and cultural barriers. The story of the soldier’s faith is only one of many in our Bible that illustrates the unity and universality of God. God is God of all, and all have the privilege to enter into his presence.
In today’s Old Testament lectionary reading from I Kings Chapter 8, King Solomon is dedicating the newly built great temple in Jerusalem and the placement in the Holiest place in the Temple of the Ark of the Covenant. The ark contained the tablets of the Law received by Moses. Solomon prays fervently for Israel, but he also prays God’s blessing for non-Jews, those outside the Covenant: In verse 41 he prays as follows, “The foreigner too, anyone who does not belong to your people, Israel, but has come from a distant land because of your fame, when such a one comes and prays toward this house, hear in heaven and respond to the call which the foreigner makes to you…” So there is evidence that the Jerusalem temple, right from the start, accepted its multicultural mission - as a house of prayer for all people.
The Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatian church was written in the early years after Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. It tells us something of Paul’s trials and tribulations as he seeks to found a multicultural church in Asia Minor among Gentile Galatians. Jesus’ followers in Israel are still seeking their identity – within or outside the Jewish synagogue. Likewise, the Galatians are seeking their identity. How close should their new church hew to the line of the mother church, hundreds of miles away in Jerusalem? Especially in enforcing circumcision on Gentile converts. Circumcision was a Jewish practice instituted by Abraham and laid down in the Law of Moses. Did Christian converts among gentile pagans have to enter the fold through the Mosaic Law?
Remember the complicated and conflicted context in which Paul was a missionary of Christ. Jews in Israel and the Gauls of Galatia were both subjugated by Rome. Both communities were experiencing oppression as subjects of the Roman Empire. The authorities expected them to affirm the imperial religion of Rome: Caesar as God.
So were the new Galatians Christians making their way in a hostile environment subject to Jewish law? Absolutely not, says Paul. The new churches among the Gentiles must accept the essentials of the Gospel. Faith in Christ supplants the Law of Moses.
In the generations of subsequent commentary on Paul, from the early Church fathers to Luther to Nietzsche and up to and including today’s promoters of vicious anti-Semitism, some interpretations of Paul’s teachings have undergirded the Church’s hostility to Jews. Christians are chosen; Jews became hated outsiders. This is a tragedy of history but was it a necessary development? NO, say some modern theologians, especially those who have grown up under the dark shadow of the 20th Century Jewish Holocaust. Paul’s affirmation of God’s continuing love for the Jews should have weighed more than his ambivalence about the Law. The enmity between Jews and Christians is tragic. Why has this happened?
Jews, Christians, and (later) Muslims are siblings: We are all children of Abraham and the same father God. Sad to say, this has not led to benign and loving relationships among the siblings, but rather to murderous rivalry. (I’m following Rabbi Jonathan Sachs’s analysis here, from his book on the origins of religious violence that some of our mission groups, including mine, are studying. I thank Joe Collier for his comments.) Have Christians supplanted Jews as heirs of the Promise? If Christians are in, are Jews (to say nothing of Muslims) out. Why do humans tend to think in terms of opposites: good, bad; mine, yours; in, out; OK, not OK? How can we be true to our religious convictions and still welcome other traditions?
Sibling rivalry has a long history. Cain vs Abel; Isaac against Ishmael; Jacob against Esau: Rachael against Leah: the brothers against Joseph. Each said: I’ll scheme and steal and even murder to get father’s blessing. And they repented, but only after much suffering. A great task of our own Christian community is to overcome our tendency to think in terms of opposites. Reconciliation calls us to an attitude of “Both/And; instead of “Either/Or.” Not: Jews vs Christians, men vs women, Black vs white, rich vs poor, abled vs disabled, documented vs undocumented, law vs grace. We are not opposites, but part of the same human family. All of us part of the promise; each of us blessed.
We are miles from realization of this vision and, when you get right down to the nitty-gritty, we discover that we have many ambivalences and qualifiers. But it is God’s vision, and David’s and Isaiah’s and Martin Luther King’s and, for all of his scoldings, Paul’s as well. He says: “There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female; for you are all one person in Christ Jesus.” One person in One World. How should our own little Christian faith community be asserting this truth of the Gospel? We are all exposed to virulent murderous hate, often in the name of our religion: Deport Muslims, castrate gays; burn Jews; wall out Mexicans, drown Syrians; jail Blacks. Paul’s world was immersed in immense conflict, as is our own. Our quarrel may not be circumcision, but we face plenty of other divisive issues.
I hope we can hold to the Gospel that Jesus proclaims: Love your neighbor. In our world of airplanes, virus, cell phones and the Internet, there’s really no one who is not our neighbor. More than ever, we will need our faith community to help each of us to embody the Gospel of Love.