In Jesus Name, a sermon based on Romans 11: 1-2a and 29-32, preached on August 20, 2023

I’d like to begin this sermon with an announcement. If you received an email from me last Monday morning requesting a $25.00 Apple gift card for some kind of emergency, please disregard it. It didn’t come from me. Someone somewhere invented an email address using my name, took my picture off our church website, added my smiling face to the address line, and sent an email to multiple church members requesting a $25.00 gift card for a pastoral emergency. What kind of pastoral emergency requires a $25.00 gift card to Apple Music, I don’t know. The scam didn’t make sense, but attaching my name to it gave it enough credibility that more than one person went to the grocery store to buy me a gift card to Apple Music, which infuriated me and made me feel guilty for doing something I hadn’t done. It happened on Monday, so I’ve been fuming about it all week. I’ve been thinking about how not only someone tried to take advantage of the members of this church, people whom I love and care about, but they used my name to do it. Don’t try to take advantage of the members of this church, and don’t use the name of one of their pastors to do it. That’s just wrong, yet it works. To use a name gives the deception a level of legitimacy. To use a picture makes the scam harder to ignore. To hear from one of your pastors, “Please help” inspires your compassion, or maybe it obligates you to do something you wouldn’t have done, so to use my name or your name in vain violates an important standard of ethics in human society. It elevates the crime to manipulation. More than that, to use the name of the Lord in vain violates the third commandment. “Thou shalt not use the name of the Lord your God in vain,” the third commandment says. Have you ever wondered why this commandment matters? Think about it with me this morning. If it made me angry to hear that the members of this congregation were being manipulated using my name, how do you think it makes God feel when people do much worse in His? To get to the heart of our second Scripture lesson, consider with me what has been done in the name of Jesus. Here, in Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, the apostle asks, Has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people. Paul is talking here about the Jews, and in this second Scripture lesson, he is instructing us in how we are to relate to them. What he’s saying is that God has not rejected them. However, for generations, Christians have. When civilizations needed someone to blame, to revile, to slander, to oppress, to discriminate against, that’s who they chose. Worse, these Christians did it in the name of Jesus. A tour of the Jewish quarter in Venice, Italy might feature Europe’s oldest ghetto. In Venice, it happened first that Jews were confined, literally locked in, after the sun set beginning 500 years ago, but antisemitism didn’t stop there. We remember Spain with her inquisitions lasting nearly 300 years, where Jewish people were tortured, imprisoned, and exiled by order of the Church. Such antisemitism hit its evil apex, but unfortunately not its end, with the concentration camps of Germany, so as we consider how Christians have related to Jews, let us not forget the lynching of a Jewish man right here in Marietta, Georgia, just blocks from the Big Chicken. Right here and across the globe, Jewish people have been demonized, judged, and murdered by Christians in the name of Jesus. How do you think He feels about that? We Christians must think about what we are doing all the time. We must judge our actions in light of what Scripture mandates, but especially, we must take time to think about what we do in the name of Jesus, for when we invoke the name of Jesus, there is a certain kind of power that lends itself to our actions, and so generations have grown up believing that Jesus had blond hair and blue eyes. Friends, as you well know, we follow a Jewish man and call him Savior. Yet, when Miriam Ferguson became the first female Governor of Texas in 1924, she was famous for saying, “If English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for Texas school children.” Antisemitism makes about as much sense as that statement. It doesn’t make sense now, and it didn’t make sense to the Apostle Paul, so when Rome decided to push out the Jews from their city, and gentile members of the Roman church were moving into their vacated apartments, he included in his letter to the church there this reminder: Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy… so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy. What does that mean? What is Paul trying to tell us? Here’s the problem with Paul: To understand him, you have to go to seminary for three years, learn Greek, and take theology classes. After all that, maybe then you’ll understand half of what he wrote. He wrote the book of Galatians, which is five pages long, yet I own a commentary on the book of Galatians that’s more than 500 pages long, not including the glossary at the end. If a book has a glossary, it’s not easy to understand. The Apostle Paul is not easy to understand; however, if you know a little bit about him, learning his background and who he was, his important words are a little bit easier to understand. The Apostle Paul was a contemporary of Jesus, though he wasn’t one of His disciples, at least not while Jesus was alive. While Jesus was alive, and as His teachings began to spread after His resurrection, Paul made his living persecuting Christians. When one disciple named Stephen was stoned for following Jesus, Paul held the cloaks of those who stoned him, and the fledgling Christian community found out about that. Known by the followers of Jesus as a persecutor of the Church, Paul’s name was synonymous with oppression, murder, and discrimination, yet when Jesus blinded him and called him by name on the road to Damascus, the Church showed him mercy. The hallmark of Christianity is mercy. Why? Because when Jesus was alive, that’s what He did. He showed people mercy. He came not to judge the world, but to save it. He was the embodiment of God’s love. He made known the joy of salvation. He made the lame walk, set the captives free, helped the lost find their way again, and told the sinners to sin no more. That’s what He did, and I am one who was saved by His mercy. So are you. If we stop offering people the mercy we have received, have we forgotten what He did for us? That’s Paul’s point. If we stop offering to our neighbors the mercy we received, have we returned to that prison from which Christ set us free? If we, as a Church, stop offering God’s mercy, has God’s mercy dried up within us? Now maybe like you, I sometimes worry about people I see around me. I worry about those who walk by our church on Sunday morning without coming in. I worry that they may be people who wander without direction, or like sheep without a shepherd. I worry about morality. I worry about communities falling apart. What are we to say about all those in our world who don’t follow Jesus? What are we to do about all the broken people? What are we do to with all the lame and the lost, and what are we to do about the good people we know and love who don’t believe? If we are going to do anything in Jesus’ name, if we aspire to make His name known, then we must remember what it is about Him that drew us to Him in the first place. You might know that I grew up in Marietta. While I was growing up, all the churches had these big youth groups with these dynamic youth group leaders. Back then, the Methodist Church would have these alter calls. It was like a Billy Graham Crusade, especially during the summer. I went to the youth retreat one summer, and I heard that preacher calling me to leave behind my sins and to follow Jesus to avoid the fires of Hell, so I did. I left my old life behind, walked up to the altar, and prayed the sinner’s prayer. I didn’t want to be like those who are destined for damnation. I was scared into salvation, only then I got back home and started to feel like I was slipping back into sin. I worried that I wasn’t pure enough, so when I had the chance at another altar call, I went up there again and did the same thing. This process continued for years, so I’ve been saved six or seven times. That’s true. I kept reaching out for Jesus, trying to grab hold of Him and to be worthy of salvation. Then one day, I heard a preacher say that all this time, Jesus had been reaching out for me. That’s mercy. Learning that you’re loved by Jesus changes things. Following Jesus because you know He loves you is different from following Jesus because you’re afraid of what will happen if you don’t. Still, sometimes the Church scares people in Jesus’ name. Is that because the Church fears failing Him? Is that because we are scared we’re failing Him? My friends, we are going to keep on failing Him. I feel like I fail Him all the time. One of my favorite people to have lunch with is a rabbi named Larry Sernovitz. I invited him to our monthly clergy breakfast years ago. The first one was on zoom around Easter time back during the pandemic. I was leading the meeting, and I moved the conversation to Holy Week at our various churches. So and so was having four services on Easter. Someone else was having an Easter egg hunt. Noticing that Larry hadn’t shared, though not thinking about why, I asked him about his synagogue’s plans. He said, “Well, we certainly aren’t having an Easter egg hunt.” As our clergy group felt comfortable enough to meet in person, we met at Roswell Street Baptist Church, where breakfast casserole was on the menu. Larry asked if there was pork in the casserole. Well, there was bacon in one and sausage in the other. “I’ll have fruit,” Larry said. Later, wanting to be a little more thoughtful, I invited Larry to lunch and ordered salads for us both to eat and chicken for us both. Well, the salads came with chicken and eggs on top, and Larry can’t eat the meat of the mother with her chick. That was three strikes. All this time you might be wondering if I ever shared the Good News of Jesus Christ with my friend Larry. I can’t say that I ever preached to Larry, while again and again, as I put my foot in my mouth not just once, but three times, he certainly shared God’s mercy with me. What are we to say about the Jews? What are we to say about any group of people who doesn’t seem to follow Jesus? Show them mercy: the same mercy that saves us. Amen.