Last Sunday After the Epiphany (C), February 10, 2013; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of faithfulness, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

One of the benefits for me of regularly sharing the pulpit of Emmanuel Church with a Rabbi is that it continues to challenge and change the way I encounter Holy Scripture.  My sensitivity to the need for “corrective lenses” is heightened.  My desire to preach against the ways that the Christian Church has promoted supersessionist theology is even more keen than before I got here five years ago.  Christian supersessionism is very much like racism as far as I am concerned – it’s systemic, it’s oppressive, it’s often internalized, and it’s always wrong.  It distorts our vision and damages our souls.

And so on this day on which we mark the end of the Epiphany season with stories of the transfiguration of Jesus, in light of the stories of Moses’ shining countenance, I’m drawn to preach about the Apostle Paul and his words to the Church in Corinth, because our passage today sounds like Paul is dismissing Moses and the Israelites as old news.  It sounds like Paul is preaching the newness and better-ness of Christianity.  But I have to tell you that Paul was not a Christian. Paul was a Jew, through and through, arguing with people within his own tradition for openness and inclusivity in the realm of God.  (We have those kinds of arguments in our own tradition, don’t we?) Furthermore, Paul was not inventing the ideas of openness and inclusivity (nor was Jesus inventing the ideas of openness and inclusivity).  Both Paul and Jesus (though probably to a lesser extent), were declaring stretched boundaries and widened gates for belonging and beloving as people of God, using the Law and the Prophets as their prooftexts.  It’s continuity and expansion of belonging and beloving that the Apostle Paul and the writer of the Gospel of Luke were asserting in encouraging people to follow Jesus.

I know that there are those who love to dislike Paul, but I think it’s because they don’t know him.  I used to dislike him.  It was the Jewish New Testament scholar, my seminary professor, Larry Wills, who taught me to know and love Paul, using a very different kind of interpretive framework or lens to understand Paul.  The new framework or lens has been getting developed for the last 35 years or so, and takes into account all of what Paul wrote (that we still have in scripture) rather than excluding the things that don’t fit in a more traditional Protestant Reformation framework.

As the blizzard this past weekend developed and my estimates of Sunday attendance got significantly lower, I started imagining that I’d be preaching to a particularly small but mighty group of you!  I thought whoever was here would be feeling especially glad to be alive. And I thought maybe you’d like to learn what the newest and best scholarship about the Apostle Paul is teaching us about the Jewishness of Paul.  I would like to convince you that Paul was not a phony, or ignorant, or a jerk, or a liar.  I would like to persuade you that we don’t need to imagine that Paul was hating and rejecting his former self/tradition, or critiquing abuses of the Law.  He was a great writer and he had a passion for welcoming folks into the beloved community by proclaiming that the God of Israel’s mercy and grace extended to all nations – that is, all Gentiles.

The context for our passage from 2 Corinthians is this:  having founded the community of Jesus followers in the city of Corinth, Paul moved on to gather similar communities in other cities.  After he was gone, people who Paul derisively called “superapostles” came to Corinth and insisted that, in order to really be people of the God of Israel, the Gentile men had to be circumcised and the Gentile people had to follow Jewish dietary laws and other established customs (halakhah).  The thing is, Paul’s audience in Corinth was made up of Gentiles.  He was arguing that the Torah does not apply to Gentiles.  Paul never spoke out against Jews observing Torah – just Gentiles!  In his letter to the church in Rome, he wrote “Do we then render Torah void?  God forbid!  On the contrary, we uphold the Torah!”  And you might remember what Rabbi Berman often says about Torah being so much deeper and wider than our English word “law.”  It is a way of being, created before the world.  (As in, “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”)  Torah is the Word, the way of being, given to Jews.

So if all of this is true (and I believe it is), what does any of it have to do with us?  Well, according to Paul, God’s mercy and grace extend to us even if we aren’t Jews.  This is good news.  It’s great news actually! Interest in openness and inclusiveness has its roots in the Hebrew Bible and is continued in the Christian Testament and we bear witness to openness and inclusiveness at Emmanuel Church, not out of some new-age liberalism (which, of course, is perfectly good) but with scripture, tradition and reason, and with the authority that comes from engaging with a God Who is always doing a new thing.

“New covenant” doesn’t nullify any previous covenants from the standpoint of the God of Israel – God was offering new covenants to God’s people throughout ancient history – the new covenant of Noah, the new covenant of Abraham, the new covenant with Moses and the people in the wilderness, the new covenant with David, the new covenant written on the hearts of the people described by the prophet Jeremiah, the new covenant proclaimed by Jesus.  In her book entitled, Paul was Not a Christian, Jewish New Testament scholar, Pamela Eisenbaum asks the rhetorical question, “Has Jesus’ act of faith rendered the covenant between God and Israel meaningless?  God forbid!  On the contrary, we who are members of Israel are fulfilling the prophesies of Torah by acknowledging God’s redemption of the whole world.”¹

Here’s what I notice about the story of Moses veiling his face and about Paul’s interpretation.  Moses was radiant, brilliant, dazzling, terrifyingly luminous, because of his encounters with the Divine.  The people were afraid – and so to avoid frightening them, Moses veiled his face when he talked to them.  The scripture tells us that Moses had been plagued by doubt and anxiety, and that he sought the Divine Presence, and positively glowed after he encountered God.  According to Paul, Moses had good intentions but in trying to protect people from their fears, he obscured something essential – the reflection of the glory of God.  According to Paul, being shielded from the reflection of the glory of God hardened the people’s minds.  That’s an interesting idea.  Paul is encouraging his audience to be bold.

It makes me think of how hard it can be to express joyfulness – to shine with the glory of God – harder than lamentation sometimes, because of sensitivity to others’ anxiety or sadness, or maybe fear that it won’t last or it’s not real.  One of our newest parishioners, Jane Redmont, addresses this phenomenon in her book, which has been a favorite of mine for many years.  The book is called When in Doubt, Sing.  In a chapter called “Daring to Raise the Alleluia Song,” she includes a piece about the Shehecheyanu – the Jewish prayer for a moment when you’re feeling so glad to be alive, grateful to have survived to this point.  It doesn’t negate the any of the sorrows prior to this day or the sorrows felt by other people.  It’s bold to say it – to pray it – to radiate with it and not to hide it.  It seems like a most fitting way to end this sermon – giving thanks to God for the joy of this gathering:

Baruch atta Adonai eloheinu melech ha’olam, she-hecheyanu v’ki-yemanu v’higianu lazman hazeh.  Blessed are you Holy One, sovereign of the universe, Who has kept us in life and sustained us and brought us to this time.

← Back to sermons page