Sermons

A Sermon about Division, Election, and the Truest Thing in the World.

By August 18, 2014 No Comments

The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, 2014 – Genesis 45:1-15; Psalm 133; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15:21-28

I felt a particular heaviness this past week as we saw in the headlines, not to mention all that did not make the headlines, just how deeply, deeply divided we are. On Saturday, August 9th, 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth, was gunned down in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day, by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri. And in the wake of this we have seen what results when militarized police turn American suburbs into war-zones. This is just the most recent incident of unarmed black men and boys being gunned down by police. And this in a week when ISIS continues to persecute and kill Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq, and Israelis and Palestinians continue to kill each other, and a well known and beloved actor took his own life. Division — not just from one another, but divided within and from ourselves. And division breeds enmity — division is murder.[1] And this is only to begin to speak of the division and enmity between God and human creatures.

Paul writes a letter to the church in Rome, a church that is, like most any church at any time and in any place, weak and in danger of fracturing. Jews had been beginning to return to Rome after having been expelled from the city at the hands of Emperor Claudius. Part of Paul’s concern in the letter, and we see this especially in chapters 9-11 from which our reading this morning comes, is that the Gentile Christians in Rome may well turn their collective nose up at the returning Jews thinking that because the Jews had rejected Jesus the Messiah and had been exiled from the city that the tables must have turned and they, Gentiles, were now God’s privileged people over and against the Jews.

Thus, Paul writing to both Jewish and Gentile believers in Rome, asks the question, “Has God rejected his people?” — that is, Israel. After all, perhaps it would appear that way. But the question is rhetorical and it can have but one emphatic answer: “By no means!”

What we see in chapters 9-11 is Paul beginning with Abraham, and continuing on through Moses to the end of the 9th chapter where we hear the prophets and their predictions of Israel’s exile and restoration. By the end of the 11th chapter, where we are, he has come to the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah’s great predictions of the renewal of God’s covenant with Israel. In other words, in these chapters Paul narrates the history of God’s covenant with Israel (NT Wright).

Thus, this whole passage is about the faithfulness of the God of Israel to his covenant. For Paul, this faithfulness is ultimately revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

What’s this covenant business all about, then? Many people see the formation of the covenant in God’s call and promise to Abram in Genesis: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” (12:1-3). Yet, if Jesus is the ultimate expression of God’s covenantal faithfulness, and Jesus was before all things then the mystery of Creation is itself an expression of God’s covenanting.

At any rate, we see here in the early part of Genesis God’s wisdom in choosing Israel — they are chosen and called to be God’s special people, the bearers of the promise through whom his word and his life would be brought to the rest of the world. Note the operative phrases from God’s promise to Abram: “…so that you will be a blessing…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Israel is chosen to be God’s own people not because they are particularly special in and of themselves but so that through them God might bless the whole wide world. However, in light of Israel’s rejection of the gospel, how is God going to be faithful to the covenant, and who is going to benefit from God’s faithfulness?

The answer, for Paul, is that God has kept a remnant within Israel, chosen purely by grace (11:5-6). Yes, in their rejection of Jesus Israel seems to have failed and great judgement falls upon them, but there will be some survivors, a “holy seed” as the prophet Isaiah put it (6:13). This seed will survive judgement (4:2-4), embrace the promises of God for the nations, and become the centre of a new faithful community, rebuilt by God (Isaiah 10:20-23; 28:5ff). And like the stump of a felled tree, out of it new shoots will grow (Isaiah 6:13). The idea then is that this remnant would carry the promises that God made to his people and through this remnant God would regather his people and bless them with a new covenant (Jeremiah 23:1-8; 31:31-34) so that they could again be his people.

This remnant, whom God foreknew and predestined, is Jesus Christ. “God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew,” writes Paul. The same Greek word that is here translated “foreknew” (proginōskō) Peter uses to speak of our being ransomed by God from sin and death by, “the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. He was destined (proginōskō) before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake,” (1 Peter 1:20). Of this same slaughtered lamb John writes: “for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for god saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth,” (Revelation 5:9-10).

Whom did the Father foreknow? Christ Jesus crucified — and in the passion of Christ the whole world was known ahead of time.

Grace.

Thus, Jesus came to fulfill the law not to abolish it. He came not to do away with the category of “Israel”, God’s chosen people, but to fulfill the purpose for which this people existed in the first place. Jesus takes up Israel’s story and lives it out faithfully, bearing in his own life God’s promise and God’s salvation for the whole world and in doing so he finally and fully opens up the family of God to include not only Jews but Gentiles also, as brothers and sisters. Note that Israel’s whole life is taken up by Jesus — all of their disobedience and even their rejection of the gospel is taken up by Jesus and transformed to be the means by which everyone is invited and welcomed to the table.

So then, when we think of the covenant which God made with his people, we can’t not talk about Jesus crucified, risen, and reigning. What we see here, in Jesus, is the faithfulness of God — God has done what he promised to do even though it is very surprising. We also see here the faithfulness of Israel — indeed, the faithfulness of each and every human creature. For Jesus is the faithful one on our behalf, the one who lived in perfect loving obedience to the will of the Father. Thus, in the faithfulness of Jesus, both sides of the covenant are fulfilled — God’s side as well as man’s — and Gentiles as well as Jews are revealed to be part of God’s family.

Revealed. There is a continuity, clearly, between the witness of the New Testament to the love of God and that of the Old Testament. Namely, in the New Testament this love that we see in Christ has not ceased to be the love which elects Israel (Karl Barth). Note that it isn’t a new act, but a new revelation of the one act of God in Christ for the world, Jew first and then Gentile. And if God foreknew Christ crucified then all of history is an unfolding of this, a making known of a hidden mystery, a movement from the hidden wisdom of God to the made-manifest wisdom of God.

History then, is a working out of the grace of God in Christ Jesus who was before anything else was. This is the grace upon which the whole world, the whole cosmos turns — this is the grace that is Christ Jesus, from whom we and all things have our being and in and through whom we and all things have been and are being gathered up.

This working-out-in-time-and-space of God’s surprising plan of salvation which we see in the cross of Christ is what Paul means by “mystery”.

The crumbs do fall from the table of the Lord, and the request of the Canaanite woman is fulfilled (Matthew 15:28). And, in Christ, this was the plan all along. Not an exclusion of the Gentile or the Jew, but an embrace of the other in Christ, because in the narrative of the cross we ourselves who are God’s ‘others’ are disclosed as lethal enemies who have received mercy rather than wrath (Craig Hovey). In Christ, each and every one of us, indeed the entire universe, has been embraced. This stands in stark contrast to the ways in which we murderously exclude and reject one another, and ourselves.

A few concluding thoughts, then. I have yet to say it explicitly but it has been implicit throughout the whole sermon: If Christ Jesus is the remnant of Israel, the one who faithfully carries God’s promise and salvation for the world, if he is the “holy seed” in which God’s covenant is renewed, then the church is this renewed Israel — Jew and Gentile together as siblings, reconciled to one another and to God. And if the church, who through the Holy Spirit is never apart from Jesus, is the renewed Israel, we might want to stop and consider: If the choosing of Israel did not mean some sort of special privilege over and against all other nations (but actually was meant for the good of the nations), then the same is true of the church. The church is not the locale of some sort of special privilege, the finish line, but is rather the community in and through which God works for the benefit of the whole wide world through His covenant with Israel. As such, the church is a foretaste of the salvation that is for the world. Do we understand and believe this? Is our common life conducive to this end? When we make decisions here at St. Matthew’s, both individually and collectively, is this the goal to which all of our decision making is oriented?

Secondly, if Jesus is the balm which heals division and exclusion, then it is only in Jesus’ giving of himself to us, and in our reception of him, that we are embraced and can embrace one another across a multitude of divisions and exclusions. This happens — Christ’s giving of himself and our receiving him — primarily in the Eucharist. The bread and the wine are not trivial — and our receiving of them is not sentimental — they are radical, literally. That is, a return to the root that is Christ Jesus himself, and our life together in him.

Christ’s giving of himself for us and to us is now, and has always been, the truest thing in the world, the thing that creates and sustains, the thing that defines how we must now understand ourselves and the world. I wonder if it would have been possible for Darren Wilson, the white cop who shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown, to have done so last Saturday if each Sunday they shared the Eucharist together? At the very least, the Eucharist ought to form people who refuse to kill one another.

In light of the militarization of police, and global war and violence, and various mental health issues, what a witness this alone would be. As you come to the table in a moment, look around you and note what you see — brothers and sisters in the Holy Spirit; family. “Has God rejected his people?” Despite all that we may see in the world or feel in ourselves the answer can only be, “By no means!” O that Christ might bless the world in and through us who are his own, and may we be open to being just such a people. Amen.

[1] Division is Murder was Ephraim Radner’s preferred title for A Brutal Unity but was rejected by the publisher, or his wife.

Sermon was preached by Jonathan Turtle at St. Matthew’s Riverdale
on the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, August 17th, 2014.
Jonathan Turtle

Jonathan Turtle

Jonathan serves as the parish assistant at St. Matthew’s and as the chaplain at Emily's House, the first paediatric palliative care hospice in Toronto. He is a graduate of Wycliffe College and a postulant in the Diocese of Toronto where he will be ordained to the diaconate in May 2015. Jonathan lives and plays in Toronto’s east-end with his wife and two daughters!