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A sermon on Romans 9:1-5 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
It has been a heavy week for us. The short time between Margie Dahl’s cancer diagnosis and her death has left us all reeling. Though Friday’s funeral was a wonderful celebration of her life, we weren’t feeling ready to be saying goodbye.
Given that that is where my thoughts have been all week, it is tempting to reflect further on it in this sermon, and the readings would have made that easy. Jacob limps into the future with a fresh wound. The psalmist cries out for answers. The Apostle Paul speaks of his great sorrow and unceasing anguish of heart. And the gospel story opens with Jesus trying to find some solitude after receiving news of the death of his cousin, John the Baptiser. There’s a lot of grief work going on there.
But a bit like the trajectory of our gospel reading, I want to acknowledge that Margie’s death and funeral are unavoidably with us as we gather tonight, but then move in another direction.
For a long while, and especially for the last three years, many of us have increasingly felt torn apart inside as we’ve tried to keep faithfully praying the prayers of Israel that our scriptures and tradition hand to us, while being bombarded with news of the suffering and death of countless children and ordinary civilians due to the military actions of the modern state of Israel.
You can quickly find yourself with a splitting headache if you have just watched the news and then you open your Bible and hear, as we did at Vespers on Thursday, a passage that rejoices in the idea of Israel possessing other nations as slaves, taking captive those who had been their captors, and ruling triumphantly over those who had abused them (Isaiah 14:1-2).
On the other hand, we are hearing harrowing tales of traumatic antisemitism in our own country as the Royal Commission continues. We find it hard to unravel these things from one another and we can feel torn in two directions at once. What are we to do with the stabbing pain of all that?
Well, Christian anguish over Israel goes all the way back to the first generation of the church so, although we need to remember that the Bible is not referring to the modern nation of Israel created in 1948, perhaps some of the early Christian responses might help us find a way forward. Let’s listen again to what we heard from the Apostle Paul tonight:
I am speaking the truth in Christ – not a word of a lie –
I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart.
I could wish that for the sake of my own people,
my own flesh and blood,
that I myself might be the one accursed
and cut off from Christ.
They are Israelites,
and everything that really matters belongs to them:
the adoption, the glory, the covenants,
the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises;
to them belong the patriarchs,
and from them comes the Messiah,
who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.
If we are going to take any cues from Paul about how to respond to the painful tearing apart we feel when our Biblical texts and the nightly news seem so violently at odds, then our starting point is not political critique, but great sorrow and unceasing anguish. We begin by sitting with the pain and feeling the heart-breaking depths of it.
This is a starting point, not an either/or, be-all-and-end-all. There is a safe pietistic path that pretends that heartfelt prayer exhausts our calling and so exempts us from any responsibility to think about or engage with the painful questions of right and wrong, but that is not the example Paul sets. He does, however, set an example of starting with the grief and heartbreak, and with a willingness to have whatever angry fingers are pointed at Israel pointed at him. And he never leaves that behind. Whatever else he has to say about Israel is said from within that place of grief, and is constantly shaped by it.
If we can learn to follow Paul’s pathway here, we may find ourselves in a very different and perhaps unpopular place as we seek to examine and respond to what Israel is doing to its neighbours. Because Paul resists a tendency we can see in most of our impassioned contemporary critique of Israel, and that is the tendency to “other” them. We stand at a safe distance, on a moral high ground, pointing the finger at what “they” are doing wrong. Denouncing “them” reinforces our belief that “we” are different, “we” are good.
But Paul refuses to distance himself from the Israel he is critiquing. He reminds himself and his readers that the Israelites are his own flesh and blood. And most dramatically, he says he could wish himself accursed and cut off from Christ if it would save his people, Israel. Which is to say that, in stark contrast to morally distancing himself, he is inviting any fingers that are pointed at Israel to be pointed at him, and any condemnation or punishment that might be directed at Israel to fall on his own head.
Now, as much as I want to say that we need to learn from Paul here, I also need to acknowledge that there is a potentially anti-semitic danger for us here that we need to be careful not to fall into. You see, Paul is, in fact, a Jewish Christian, and most of us are not. We are gentile Christians. So identifying ourselves with the Israelites is not the same thing for us as it is for Paul.
One of the forms of Christian antisemitism is a thing called supersessionism. Supersessionism claims that we have superseded Israel; that Israel used to be God’s chosen people, but God has rejected them and elected us Christians as his new chosen people. So when we heard Paul speak of the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the law, the worship, and the promises all being from Israel, a supersessionist reading of those verses would say that they came from Israel but they no longer belong to Israel; they now belong to us. That is not what Paul says, and not what the Bible says.
Two chapters later, Paul describes gentile Christians as new branches grafted onto an old vine. The supersessionist image would be the old vine uprooted and a new vine planted in its place, but Paul says that gentile Christians are grafted onto a vine with roots that remain someone else’s. “You do not support the root, the root supports you,” he says (Romans 11:18).
So if we are to follow Paul in painfully and tearfully identifying ourselves with our Jewish heritage, we need to do that with a humble mindfulness of our dependent, latecomer status, and not imagine that we can do it from the exact same place as Paul. Otherwise we fall into “othering” the Jews all over again, just from a different angle.
In the context of our current struggles with understanding and responding to the Israeli military’s brutal treatment of its neighbours, what we need to take from Paul’s example is anything but a supersessionist move. We are certainly not saying that Israel’s behaviour can be explained as a result of God’s rejection of them and replacement of them with morally wonderful us. Instead, Paul’s move is effectively saying, “Whatever guilt you are pointing the finger at in them, you should attribute it to me and point the finger at it in me too.”
For us, as grafted branches, this is not a flesh-and-blood identification. It is a terribly painful moral identification. It is to refuse the “othering”, to refuse to see the world as divided into bad “thems” and good “us”. Whenever we point the finger at evils perpetrated by others, and imagine those evils to be unique to them and entirely foreign to us, we are engaging in a form of scapegoating that serves to hide or deflect attention from our own failings.
This can be seen repeatedly in the sorry history of Christian attitudes to Jews. As Bishop Tom Wright points out, the church didn’t just fail to prevent antisemitism but added fuel to it by declaring that the Jews killed Jesus, despite all four gospels insisting that it was the Romans. The killing of Jesus by the Empire was itself a classic example of scapegoating, and the Gospel passion narratives are seeking to bring that to light so that we won’t keep repeating it, but when Christians point the finger at the Jews for it, we are falling right back into it. We are failing to learn the lesson of the central symbol of our faith.
What we are seeing here is something we all get caught up in, and something that most of us find difficult to recognise in ourselves and much easier to recognise in others. When Israeli nationalists label all criticism of Israeli military policy as antisemitism, many of them are probably not being deliberately cynical and manipulative. They are just looking from their own insider perspective, and pointing the finger at the evils of others while blind to their own.
And many of us, when we are pointing the finger at the brutality of the IDF, might do well to pause to read the report from the Yoorrook Justice Commission and see whether we really occupy any sort of moral high ground or actually have just as much blood on our hands. Ultra-nationalist Israeli settlers have no monopoly on the stealing of land and the destruction of other people’s culture and livelihood.
But I am not suggesting for a moment that recognising that most of our privileges have been built on genocide should silence our call for an end to similarly brutal practices wherever they might be encountered. Apartheid and slavery were practiced in this country too – just ask Uncle Den about his stolen wages. So what I am suggesting is that when we sound the call to end these things, we do so with the great sorrow and unceasing anguish of people who are, like Paul, ready to have the finger pointed back at us and to bear the blame and culpability for those same things.
And if we think this is a gross exaggeration, and that there really is no comparison between their current actions and our not-so-distant past, perhaps we should ask ourselves this. Would we be willing to condone the ultra-nationalist Israeli settler movement completing their project of occupying the Palestinian territories on the condition that whenever they gather for anything ever after, they begin by saying “We just pause to acknowledge that this always was and always will be Palestinian land, and that sovereignty was never ceded”?
No? I didn’t think so. But that is the point. That is the place where our great sorrow and unceasing anguish are born – the place of recognising that we are just as complicit and caught up in the hostility and violence that are tearing the world apart as anyone else is. When we stop frantically pointing at everyone else’s culpability as a means of hiding from our own, our consequent sorrow and anguish will not paralyse us into silence, but enable us to call for peace and justice from a new place, from a place of humbly recognising that we too have to embody the change we are calling for. Instead of accusing others from a place of imagined moral superiority we can see our own reflection in them and invite them, as brothers and sisters, to build a changed world with us.
As we break bread at the Lord’s Table shortly, we will speak words about receiving what we are and becoming what we receive. What we are is a broken people, a fractured creation. But in receiving in the broken bread a sign of what we are, we are being set free from the cycles of hostile finger pointing that perpetuate that brokenness, so that in sorrow and anguish we might become what we receive, the bread of life, broken and shared that the world might be made new, the wine of God’s love, poured out that all might taste and live.
None of this provides easy answers to the world’s pain. None of it makes finding solutions to the political and military horrors of our world any easier. But as we find our way into the great sorrow and unceasing anguish that Paul spoke of, we will find ourselves in a new and deeper solidarity with the Messiah who comes from the Jews and who the Israelite prophets described as “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief”. And in that solidarity, we really do become what we receive and there is bread and love for all, and basketfuls left over.