Sermon Sept 17, 2006 Using Romans 11:28ff

Centered on worth of our lives no matter whether we’re the Secretary General of the United Nations, the President of Haiti, a Supreme Court justice, or a ditch-digger, God asks his people to be faithful. Our society hammers you and me with the message today that it really doesn’t matter what we think in this room, because the only folks that matter are the movers and shakers in places like Washington D.C. or Richmond, or New York City. And because we’re so battered by that message, because we buy into that because we don’t have multi-million dollar houses and drive Maseratis and our name doesn’t show up on the nightly news, we can feel pretty inconsequential.

But I’m here to tell you today that after Jesus was baptized, tempted in the wilderness and returned to start his ministry, he didn’t say he came to make the rich richer, the poor poorer, focus on those who could give him something back, be obsessed with numbers, and that it was ok to love some folks and hate othe. No, Jesus, the center of history…the example for you and me, said this…

“The Spirit of the Lord is one me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. (dramatic silence, I’m sure) The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

You may be wondering why we’re going to talk about Israel and Palestine, because it’s a sensitive issue with opinions on all sides. On another level, you might be thinking, why does it matter at all what I think about Israel and Palestine, because my life and opinion isn’t important to all the powerful people in the world. And if you’re thinking that, you’re dead wrong. The reason Christ came to show the way for us and to restore us to relationship with God was NOT so that we can have the right opinions and ideas and say the right things and call ourselves Christians. A life of following Christ transforms the way we view the world, the way we see and interact with our friends and enemies, and calls us to set the example for those around us of what we were created for as humanity. So even as ridiculous as this sounds, and you might think I’m full of crap, in the light of eternity, your decision to follow Christ as a lifestyle, the center and foundation of your life, will make your life count and affect more lives than any secular, powerful, wealthy person could. But we have to get a sense of how much our lives are worth here with one another; walking with another, sharing life with one another, and in the process being transformed.

Romans 11:25-32

Today I would like us to talk about the issue of Israel's relation to the “Promised Land” in the Middle East. This message this morning will not primarily be a verse by verse look at Romans 11, but an effort to draw out what we have learned from Romans 9 -11 and the rest of Scripture for a very troubling problem in the world today. The existence of Israel in the Middle East and the extent of her borders and her sovereignty are perhaps the most explosive factors in world terrorism and the most volatile factors in Arab-Western relations.

The Arab roots and the Jewish roots in this land go back for thousands of years. Both lay claim to the land not merely because of historical presence, but also because of divine right. We won’t try to figure out today how peace could come to this land, but we WILL talk about reasons why they don’t have peace. And we will seek to wade through some biblical guidance that could direct us in thinking about peace and justice in that part of the world. What we think about this, and what we say, does matter, not only because it affects the way we set the example for our friends, coworkers, or fellow students in the way we talk about Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, Iraqis, Iranians, Afghanis and others, but also because in being commanded to be peacemakers by God, you or I may find ourselves over there sometime in our lives. (Haiti visitors raise hand) So we need to try to grasp how to pray for that situation, and think about every single person over there as a unique creation of God, hungering for relationship with Him, no more important than us or the folks that live in Hburg or Wboro. And we need to know how to talk to others in a way that honors the truth. So for all those reasons, and for the reason that God is very much involved in this situation, we should talk about it in the context of Romans 11.

What we've seen in Romans 11 is that Israel as a whole—that is, as an ethnic, corporate people enduring from generation to generation—had a past with God, and will have a future with God, but in the present those physical descendents of Israel who have not said “Yes” to the Messiah are the enemies of God, just like the rest of the world living in rebellion. 28: “As regards the gospel, they [Israel] are enemies of God for your [Gentile] sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. Israel has a future, but that future is on bended knee before Jesus, and the present doesn’t reflect that.

Some day. Because verse 28 says, for now “they are enemies.” In other words, they are rejecting their Messiah and as a result placing themselves in direct rebellion against God.

Turn with me to John 8:42 – 59.

When we talk about the Israel and Palestine situation today, it is all wrapped up most directly in the issue of land. Both Jews and Muslims claim divine right to the land. We might be tempted because of a basic understanding of Scripture to pop off and immediately make a judgment either way, but it’s much deeper than that, and being willing to wade through some tough Scripture just might shape us to think and interact differently when it comes to this issue.

In developing the answer to this question I would like to place before you seven suggestions to guide your thinking which are based on Scripture.

1. God chose Israel from all the peoples of the world to be his own possession.

Deuteronomy 7:6, “ The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.”

2. The Land was part of the inheritance God promised to Abraham and his descendants.

Genesis 15:18, “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.'”

Then in Genesis 17:7-8 God says to Abraham, “I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. 8 And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.” And time after time, even when Abraham and Sarah are old as the hills and have no kid, God reminds them, I’ve got something in store for you, just wait on me.

Genesis 21

This, of course, creates a huge difference between the Islamic view of God's covenant and the Jewish and Christian view of God's covenant. But we believe that this is God's word, confirmed by the Lord Jesus, and so we have to deal with the reality that this is what God said to the forefathers of Israel. And that’s often where folks might stop. But it's not that simple. This is not an issue that can be dealt with in soundbites.

3. The people of Israel were given possession of the Land not as sole owners, but as stewards of it for God, and they were reminded that their keeping of the land depended on their faithfulness and continued dependence on God. (and this is what this all hinges on).

This was plain in the Old Testament, and it was plain the teachings of Jesus. It really is a situation of “If…then” expectations from God from his people to show if they were really seizing life and depending on Him or were in it for themselves. (Our relationship with God is not this one-sided, terribly unhealthy picture of relationship where one person is giving, giving, giving all the time and the other is taking, taking, taking. God from the very beginning made perfectly clear to his people and makes things perfectly clear to us today if we have ears to hear and eyes to see that he has expectations for us if we are to call ourselves his people.) And God lays this all out in multiple passages in the Bible, always starting first with what should come first for us: “I am the Lord your God. There is no other God. Worship me alone. Put me first. Pursue me.” But the struggle we continue to face as followers of Christ is that this is often a situation of extremes, where we emphasize ONLY God’s GRACE for a period of time (which I was say is today) in reaction to ONLY God’s judgment…and in all reality, God is calling to recognize both things. This is life, life is the fullest, life to the utmost, but it starts and ends for us in saying to God with our lives, “You know better than I do…I submit to you…and sometimes we have repeat this over and over and over to ourselves to convince ourselves that this is true.”

Turn with me to Deuteronomy 28:63; this is the ultimate if…then clause in God’s covenant with the people of Israel. Throughout the history of Israel, covenant breaking and disobedience and idolatry disqualified Israel from the present divine right to the Land.

4. Jesus has come into the world as the Jewish Messiah, and his own people rejected him and committed the mother of all covenant-breaking (MOACB) with their God.

Even though Jesus was the Messiah and did many mighty works and taught with great authority and fulfilled Old Testament promises, nevertheless the people of Israel with the exception of a faithful remnant rejected him. This was the most serious covenant-breaking disobedience that Israel had ever committed in all her history. (If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace- but now it is hidden. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in. They will dash you to the ground…they will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”

Israel has broken covenant with her God and is living today in disobedience and unbelief in his Son and her Messiah. That is why Paul says in Romans 11:28, “When it comes to the gospel [the good news of the Messiah] they are enemies of God.” (40 years later) (remember Paul’s statement of their enemy status balanced by his tears)

So the Jews have forsaken their heritage and calling.

5. Therefore, the secular state of Israel today may not claim a present divine right to the Land.

This follows from all we have said so far, and the implication it has for those of us who trust that the Bible points us toward God and trust Christ as our Savior and as the Lord of history, is that we should not give blanket approval to Jewish or to Palestinian actions. Some of the actions that are taking place on both sides are downright despicable and disgusting and wrong, and we should not be afraid of saying that. Palestinians with a twisted perspective on reality walk into marketplaces with bombs strapped on their chests with nails and chips of wood on the outside to shred through the people in the marketplace when the bomb explodes. Israelis respond by indiscriminate shooting of Hellfire missiles into refugee camps and bulldozing legitimate Palestinian homes and building walls between themselves and Palestinians…literally treating them as if they were subhuman. There’s a terrible amount of hatred and wickedness flying back and forth, and the situation itself has taken on an identity of its own that’s like a snowball rumbling down the face of a mountain.

(Annual Conference discussion and decision; Rachel Corrie story)

We are not whitewashing terrorism and we are not whitewashing Jewish force. That shouldn’t be our aim. Our aim SHOULD be, first and foremost, to recognize that neither party has a divine right to land. Working out what that justice will look like is still a huge and daunting task. But I think we will make better progress if we do not yield to the claim of either side to be ethnically or nationally sanctioned by God in their present conflict.

And that’s the giant “So what?” question you might have in your head today. Who cares, Nate…What does Israel and Palestine have to do with me?

And it should matter for us, when push comes to shove, that we’re able as Christfollowers to identify the cycle of hatred, to recognize what generations of violence can do in a situation, to see how the situation has taken on a life of its own, to lament and weep over how twisted Israeli and Palestinian relations are, and to recognize that WE can make the same mistake as both parties in this situation, as Germans in the 1930s and 40s who claimed to be Christians that gassed Jews, blacks, homosexuals, and those who supported Jews, as Russians who at the order of Stalin killed 30 million of their own ethnic people because of his insecurity, and we’re right smack dab in the middle of a temptation to be caught up in hatred and acting out of fear here in America.

We should not go the path of so many here in America in the wake of 9/11 and lash out against others in fear, let ourselves be gripped by hatred or let leaders manipulate us into acting on emotions that run counter to what Christ calls us to; whether those leaders be Christians or government, Democrat, or Republican. We choose not to enter the cycle of hatred, and instead choose to enter into the loss of our friends and neighbors here in America who have lost loved ones in Iraq or Afghanistan or on 9/11. We choose not to dehumanize Iraqis or Afghanis or Muslims or American soldiers or anyone else, but instead recognize our call to love all people. This is not Kum-ba-ya, let’s all dance around trees and ignore reality love either. We take that picture of our lives as a mirror from last Sunday, and we enter situations with the love of God…bringing that light into the darkness of hatred, death, suffering, confusion; as Christians, we should not be the ones denying reality, but the only ones fully realizing reality…

We are first and foremost the people of God, and we will live like it. This is our goal.

7. How can we as the church direct our thoughts, our prayers, and our lives to be the hands and feet and mind and voice of Jesus in this situation? We follow the example of Jesus; lay down our lives for our friends and enemies. That is our goal, and if you know that that is not a reality in your life today as a follower of Christ, make that a goal to work towards.

You recall that all-important word that Jesus spoke to Pilate in John 18:36: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”

I have a dream that someday the world will look at Christians and say; they say they love others, their lives back it up. They say they’re different, that they have different goals, that God is transforming them; their lives back it up. That when push comes to shove, Christians would have the guts and courage to die working as peacemakers to break down artificial barriers rather than lash out out of fear and discomfort to destroy others. How much more effective will our suggestion that we love others be when that reality is lived out. That is a dream of mine, and Scripture seems to point to that reality as well. And we always look forward to that great day when Jew and Gentile who have treasured Christ will receive what was promised. There will be a great reversal: the last will be first, and the people who defined their lives by the simple obedience of Jesus will receive the crown of life.