Faithful God

There was Jesus going to that heathen city Caesarea Philippi, with its temples to all the gods of Greece and Rome having their supposed connections with the underworld.

It is another Roman soldier who at the cross confesses “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

We haven't finished puzzling over these things when we arrive at the book of Acts and Peter's vision of the sheet being let down from heaven with animals of every kind.

Peter hears the command “Rise and eat...” and he doesn't know what to do, because some of the contents of the sheet were forbidden to good Jews.

After a while, Peter realizes that the vision was about who could be in the church.

And there was that contentious church council held in Jerusalem where the leaders had to argue out the connection between Jews and Gentiles, who is “in” and who is “out.”

And in our Second Lesson today, Paul is working through similar territory.

Paul himself is, of course, a well-trained Jew and can be justly proud of his pedigree.

But he has discerned that he has been sent by Jesus to more people than just his own genetic or religious background.

It is as if God is choosing the ones with two left feet and poor hand/eye coordination for his team at the same time and just as easily as he chooses the fleet of foot and quick of eye folks.

It is just that we Gentiles have been so accustomed to being the majority in the church that we have forgotten than we were the outsiders, the late-comers, the later ones chosen.

Can we hear this again as good news for all of us.

It does not depend upon genetics as some thought, but rather on the call and up-building by God.

We have read the Old testament, and we know that God once made a promise to Abraham and the generations that followed him.

I will be your God and you shall be my people, God said, over and over.

But now that Jesus is come and been turned away and killed, has God rejected his people? Paul asks.

Is God going to look somewhere else for a new people?

Paul's answer is short and pointed: By no means he says.

Israel's rejection of Jesus does not mean that God will now reject and replace Israel.

The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable, Paul asserts.

God's promise is good, no matter if we are confused or in the dark about how it will all be accomplished.

For if God rejects the Jews because the Jews have rejected Jesus, then Paul's whole preaching of the Gospel is in jeopardy, since the good news that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the whole world to himself is based upon the foundational claim that God is 100% faithful to his promises.

We regularly mess up our promises and our fidelity to Jesus is as shaky as any of the disciples.

But God's mercy is not dependent upon our steadiness, but upon the nature of God to be faithful to his own word given.

We believe that God will continue to love and keep Israel because in Jesus, the Jew from Nazareth, we have experienced God loving and keep us, all of us, Jew and Gentile alike.

Everything depends upon the faithfulness of God.

A Lutheran theologian has called us Christians “honorary Jews.”

It is an honor we have not merited or earned, but like any true honor, one which has been given by God.

The astounding Christian claim is that just as God chose Israel to be a holy people, a light to the nations, a witness to all the world, so God has in Jesus graciously chosen us Gentiles.

We are, as Paul says a few verses after our Lesson today, grafted onto the tree of Israel, and thereby made a part of God's promises to Israel.

And if the Lord God of Abraham and Paul is a God worth having, this God is faithful to his word.

Let's be clear about this: the Good News is that in Jesus, God has acted decisively for us, doing what we cannot do for ourselves.

We make promises on Sunday and before we get out the door, we've started to fold, spindle, and mutilate them...but not God.

His word is good, and he will keep it.

In Holy Baptism, you and I have been called, and promised, commissioned, and sent, and all of that remains even after all of the times that we fall short.

In the forgiveness that is announced near the beginning of the service and in the communion meal that we share later on, God's faithfulness is proclaimed to us again and again.

It is truly the Good News we need to get u in the morning and face another day.

And there are other implications as well.

Looking back we ask how could people let Hitler's hate ravage Europe before saying No?

But a similar question is pressing on us now.

It is a very complex and difficult situation, which needs very careful thought: should we stand idly by as Christians and Jews and even “moderate” Muslims are threatened with extermination today with an even more profound hatred than was stirred up by Hitler two generations ago?

With no sense of triumphalism, but in fear and trembling, might we consider that our actions, individually and internationally, might be a part of the working out of God's promises to save his people, all of his people?

That one won't let us rest easy, now does it?

But we have the will to wrestle with it, because we have the confidence that God keeps his promises to us, to all his people, of the First covenant and the New covenant as well.

I will love you, I will sustain you, I will walk beside you, I will weep and exult with you, I will never let you go, I will bring you home to the fullness of the Father's grace.

Last fall Matt and I walked past the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at the edge of a little town in Spain.

The church has been closed and abandoned for a hundred years, but the stone carvings are still telling their story.

In the tympanum, the semicircular area above the main door, is a carving of the Last Judgment.

On the right side there is a monster with a gaping jaw representing hell; in the center, the Father on his throne with the scales of justice, and from the left, the procession of the naked dead passing before him.

But in this fearsome scene, there needs also to be one more figure, the Lord Jesus, who says to the Father, “In spite of the weight of justice against them, grant mercy to them all, Father, for my sake.”

And that is the final Good News.

Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.