Happy New Year! Sunday’s sunset, September 25 marks the new year on the Jewish calendar, the start of 5783. Happy New Year to our Jewish neighbors!

I will never forget that night.  It was Maundy Thursday, the night that the Christian tradition remembers the Last Supper where Jesus mandated foot washing and the continuation of eating the symbolic bread and cup.  I was in seminary, serving a local church in the Chicago suburbs as a Young Adult pastor.  After the communion service – which was very solemn – one of “my” young adults and I were talking afterwards about how we were feeling after the service.  She said this annual service always makes her angry, and that she didn’t know if she could ever forgive them.  Forgive who?  Forgive the Jews for killing Jesus.  I was really thrown off and am sure my face showed it.  I tried to empathize some – although I really wanted to be snarky.  I think I said something like, well, none of the Jewish people today had anything to do with it!  I thought antisemitism was something underground, uncommon, and certainly not welcome in the church.  I was wrong. 

     I don’t think I knew any Jewish people until I was in 8th grade.  Growing up in suburban Kansas – and a preacher’s kid – I lived in a bit of a bubble, to say the least.  We moved to a small college town when I was 8-13 years old, where there were, undoubtedly, even less Jewish people.  Of course, as a kid, I was oblivious to much.

     Things changed when we moved to a suburb of Lansing, Michigan – Okemos – which was where a lot of professionals, executives, and Michigan State University professors lived.  And a strong Jewish population.  This provided a new experience for me.  These were my peers who I studied with, played music and sports with, partied with, etc.  I didn’t really know what to say or how to think, as I recall.  I wasn’t aware of any antisemitic undertones in our home, but we never really talked much about it, either.  I remember feeling really self-conscious letting them know I was a preacher’s kid.  They didn’t seem phased, however.  The weirdness was on and in me.  I remember I was perplexed that they didn’t follow Jesus, who was Jewish.  I couldn’t figure out why they failed to identify him as the Messiah like we did.  It seemed so obvious to us – how did they miss it?  We didn’t talk about it much.  They were just friends, and that alone helped me a lot.

     The fact that I felt discomfort in the presence of “the other” is itself telling.  We human beings like to flock together along all sorts of lines – race, ethnicity, language, culture, religion, and many more.  Depending on our shaping forces, we have varying levels of openness or hostility to those who are not like us.  Christianity, historically, has been hostile to Jewish people, so I should not have been surprised at the encounter I had in Chicago.  This week, I want to talk about antisemitism – where it came from and why it’s a sticking point for people today.  So much so that it is a reason to consider walking away from Christianity entirely.  I share it also so you can perhaps see it more clearly, and be more thoughtfully responsive than I was.

     Origins of Antisemitism.  One of the earliest sources depicting antisemitism might surprise a lot of Christians – the Gospel of John!  By the time the Gospel was written, Christianity was becoming increasingly non-Jewish, and Christians were less and less welcome in Jewish circles.  John was sloppy in his writing, unfortunately, using a sweeping term, “the Jews”, when referencing those who wanted to kill Jesus, when he should have singled out Jewish leadership.  After all, Jesus and his earliest and closest followers were Jewish, so obviously all of the Jews were not out to kill him...  A number of decades later, distancing themselves from Judaism was good for life expectancy given Rome’s frustration with the Jews.  It was easy to get on board the antisemitism train.  John’s example was followed by some of the most renown shaping voices:    

“From late in the first century onward, beginning with the author of the Fourth Gospel (John) and later including Tertullian, Origen, Chrysostom, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, many of Christianity’s most revered leaders vilified Jews, setting the stage for inhumane acts of persecution against Jewish people in the coming centuries, from ghettoization and banishments to forced conversions and mass executions.” – Brian McLaren, Do I Stay Christian? (22)

     Over the centuries, antisemitism fomented.  When the bubonic plague hit Europe, people quite naturally wanted to blame someone.  According to Frank Sowden (Epidemics and Society), “on Valentine’s Day, 1349 in Strasbourg, France, the citizens of Strasbourg rounded up the community of 2,000 Jews, brought them to the Jewish cemetery, and said that it was their religion that was leading them to poison the wells where Christians drank – and that was the source of the bubonic plague. They had either to renounce their religion or be killed on the spot. Half of the Jews held to their religion, and they were burned alive.”

     And there was strong motive for such pogroms (there were hundreds) beyond the plague:

“Everything that was owed to the Jews was cancelled.... The council... took the cash that the Jews possessed and divided it among the working-men proportionately.  The money was indeed the thing that killed the Jews.  If they had been poor and if the feudal lords had not been in debt to them, they would not have been burnt. – Priest/Historian Jakob Twinger von Konigshofen (1346-1420)

     Pope Charles IV pardoned the city later that same year.

     Martin Luther, whose pen ignited the Protestant Reformation, held strong antisemitic prejudice:

Their private houses must be destroyed and devastated; they could be lodged in stables. Let the magistrates burn their synagogues and let whatever escapes be covered with sand and mud. Let them be forced to work, and if this avails nothing, we will be compelled to expel them like dogs in order not to expose ourselves to incurring divine wrath and eternal damnation from the Jews and their lies... we are at fault in not slaying them.

     Think for a minute about this.  How strong do you suppose Luther’s influence was in Protestant churches in Europe, and Germany specifically?  We should not be surprised that it was not too hard to persuade most German citizens to cut off Jews from their society.  An easy scapegoat.  The holocaust took the lives of two thirds of European Jews – six million.

     In my naivete, I thought that Jews would be thoroughly welcome in the United States – they were Jesus’ people, after all.  But the story of Jews in the US is complicated and ugly, and it is still unfolding.  While Evangelicals boasted love for Israel and Jews decades ago, it became clear that their fondness was related to an apocalyptic hope to hasten the return of Christ.  Also, attempts to Christianize Jewish feasts like Passover did not come off particularly well – Christ really wasn’t in the Passover even though it may have seemed that way to us.  The infatuation with Israel and Judaism may seem harmless, but consider it through the lens of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg: “Philosemitism is antisemitism, too.  Fetishization of Jews and Judaism is also an objectification of us and a denial of our humanity, and also often comes with a side of appropriation.” (24). And there is an uglier dark side as well related to supersessionism: The Jews were God’s chosen people in the past, but ever since they rejected Jesus, we Christians have replaced (or superseded) them. This, by the way, give some the feeling that they have the right to treat the Jewish people as never-to-be-trusted traitors.

     The events that transpired in Charlottesville, VA August 10-11, 2017, reminded us that antisemitism is still very much with us, and willing to get violent. One young woman was killed when an extreme right protestor drove his car into the crowd. Protestors chanting “You (Jews) will not replace us” recall Nazi propaganda that led to holocaust.  Such rhetoric can never be tolerated or endorsed in the land of the free.  Free speech does not give license to spew hatred or prejudice.

     How did Jesus handle people of competing faiths?  One of the most beautiful examples comes from an exchange between him and a woman at a well in Samaria.  Everything about her made this exchange all the more astonishing.  She was a woman. Samaritan. Rejected by her community because of her past and current living situation – they thought she was condemned by God.  Jesus, however, treated her with dignity:

     "Believe me, woman, the time is coming when you Samaritans will worship the Father neither here at this mountain nor there in Jerusalem. You worship guessing in the dark; we Jews worship in the clear light of day. God's way of salvation is made available through the Jews. But the time is coming—it has, in fact, come—when what you're called will not matter and where you go to worship will not matter.

     "It's who you are and the way you live that count before God. Your worship must engage your spirit in the pursuit of truth. That's the kind of people the Father is out looking for: those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in their worship. God is sheer being itself—Spirit. Those who worship him must do it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration." - John 4:21-24 MSG

     Whenever we see or hear someone using hateful rhetoric toward any people group –  focusing today on Jews – we are not witnessing the Spirit of God flowing through them, but rather a hatred from a difference source.  Fear.  Greed. Power.

     When we are tempted to marginalize others as less than, we are being tempted to settle for less than Jesus, less than the Way that leads to life, less than God, less than what we want for ourselves and others.  We will be tempted, too – humanity will always have plenty of chapters where our lizard brains win the day, resulting in loss all the way around. 

    As followers of Jesus, however, we have an opportunity to speak a different word, one that seeks to redeem and restore instead of tear apart.  How will you lend yourself to the healing that the world needs?  How will you be mindful when you are tempted to follow the culture’s lead instead of Jesus?  How will you speak into ugly situations that are causing great harm?  As John Stuart Mill stated in his inaugural address in 1867 to the University of St. Andrews:

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to achieve their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”

How will you do your part to bring about the Divine Commonwealth for all?