Here is a video of the sermon from on July 30, 2023 at Christ Presbyterian Church in Madison.
I was standing outside the 16thStreet Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham on a beautiful Saturday morning in late October of 2018. A sign recalled the evil that had literally exploded at this site on a Sunday morning in 1963.
A bomb planted by white supremacists went off in the church, killing four black teen girls, injuring others. As I stood there with others on a civil rights tour that was taking us through several of the historic cities that were part of the story of righting historic wrongs, notifications began to show up on my cell phone. The news was coming out of Pittsburgh.
Eleven Jewish people gathered at synagogue there had been killed by a white man with a gun after he had posted anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant statements on social media.
Another sacred site had been turned into a killing place.
In the middle of the park is a small plaque and tree honoring Anne Frank. She was the young German Jewish girl whose family took refuge in Amsterdam during the rise of the Nazis, only later to be captured and sent to a concentration camp where she died at the age of 15 – just a year or two older than the girls killed in the church bombing.
Evil just keeps returning. Which is why Anne Frank’s words on that plaque were so important on that Saturday morning as we stood outside the site of one atrocity only to be learning the details of another.
“How wonderful it is,” she wrote in her famous diary, “that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
As we have been journeying through Psalm 23 this past month, we have arrived at the last verse today: “Surely goodness and kindness shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.”
That is such a happy ending after reading about valleys of death and enemies glaring at us as we sit at a dining table. And yet that day in Birmingham, that day in Pittsburgh suggested that even in the house of the Lord, goodness and kindness could be ripped away.
Let me take you this morning through another story that may seem like goodness and kindness are still too far away. But stay tuned for the ending. Goodness and kindness will arrive not just at the house of the Lord, but also at the house of Yonason and Michele Meadows in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood.
They are the parents of a family of six children. Yoni, as he is known, is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. He was a chaplain at Meriter Hospital here from 2017 to 2021 and now manages pastoral care education at Advocate Health in Milwaukee. He was one of the rabbis who went to Pittsburgh after that horrific and hate-filled mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue.
For Yoni and his family, though, antisemitism is not something just far away in Pittsburgh. It landed painfully in their front yard in 2021.
We as Christians have a particular need to pay attention to antisemitism. Jesus, after all, was Jewish. So were his closest followers. And yet as the early Christians began to form their own sect, first within the Jewish community and then bringing in people who were not Jewish, hostility began to grow.
The biggest threat to the early Christians came from the Roman Empire, but their Jewish neighbors were much closer, had less power and were easy to cast as the enemy. Contemporary theologian Willie James Jennings of Yale University describes the anti-Semitism of the early Christians as training camps where people learned to hate the “other” – lessons that were transferred to many other groups by Christians across the centuries.
We live with that reality today. It is a reality that does not create a place of goodness and kindness. But it is a reality we can do something about with the way we live in our lives, in this community.
Sophie Carson, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, described what happened next in a story she wrote two months ago.
She wrote that Yoni suddenly “took a ‘tremendous blow’ to the back of his head and crumpled to the ground. One of his hearing aids broke; his glasses bent.” He screamed and considered launching himself at the man but held back, afraid things could get worse.
Yoni told Sophie: “He looked at me, seemed surprised that I reacted, which I took to be: You harass Jews and they just take it.” The man laughed, turned and walked away, never saying a word.
Later, when Yoni told people at the synagogue about the attack, they asked what the man looked like. Once Yoni described him, they said this man had been taunting Jews for months, but this was the first time that they knew of that he had hit anyone.
Anti-Semitism had come to their front yard. But it was the second time in a week it had affected the Meadows family.
Sophie described what happened just a few days before the attack on Yoni.
“Four of his children had purchased ice cream on the city’s east side when a man spotted his 15-year-old son Elazar’s yarmulke. ‘I know you worship Yahweh,’ the man shouted, coming toward the siblings. ‘I know who you are.’
“The four siblings – all teens and young adults – rushed to their car, jumped in, and locked the doors before the man could reach them. Then, they watched as the man crossed the street, giving high-fives to people who appeared to know him.”
Two years later, having processed these things and many other moments when their Jewishness made them stand out in stores, at work. Yoni told Sophie, “It’s like a white noise machine of anxiety and insecurity.”
Daughter Meira, now a student at UW-Madison, wonders, “What’s happening to our world, what’s happening to our community, what’s happening to our family?” She has gotten involved with organizations on campus working to raise awareness about Jewish issues. And with good reason.
While there was a political component to that – a reaction to Israel’s policies toward Palestinians – Jewish students – there are about 5,200 Jewish students at UW - understandably felt targeted.
After all, in the spring of 2022, there was a swastika etched into a dorm bathroom stall, slurs yelled at a student and someone who said they were harassed for “looking Jewish.”
And if you have been to events at Temple Beth El here in recent years, you know there is always a Madison police officer at the door providing security. With good reason. There has been no shortage of attacks on synagogues.
Those Nazi references surely are unnerving to Jews today. They know the horror of Holocaust.
We know that antisemitism has deep roots across the centuries. And we know in this country, it is having a resurgence.
The Milwaukee Jewish Federation counted 101 antisemitic incidents in Wisconsin n 2022, a 6% increase from a year earlier, with a particularly sharp rise on college campuses. Even more startling, that’s an overall 494% increase in antisemitic incidents in Wisconsin since 2015.
Nationally, Jewish people are the most targeted faith group, according to the FBI. They are the victims of more than half of religiously motivated hate crimes.
Where is the goodness and mercy promised on Psalm 23?
Where is that house of the Lord where we can dwell for all the days of our lives?
Let’s stay with the house image for a moment. In that short reading from the Gospel according to Luke that we heard from Helena today, Jesus talks about building a house on rock so it does not get washed away in the torrent of a flood.
So how do we build a house that will be a place of goodness and mercy for our Jewish siblings, for all those facing hatred and oppression and violence in our time? How can we make that house secure, as though it were built on rock.
Here a few ideas. You may have more.
A starting point with so many of these things is proximity, getting to know the people who are facing evil so that we better understand what is happening, so that we care about their pain, so that they do not feel so alone.
On an institutional level, that is one thing we are doing here. Our partner in resettling refugee families is Jewish Social Services. While this is a functional partnership, it also binds us together in a common cause.
A second thing is to find ways to respond when our neighbors – whether Jewish or Muslim or Sikh, whether Black or Latino or Asian – face direct threats.
After the hate-based murders at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, nearly 1,000 people in Madison gathered at the First Unitarian Society in a resolve to stand together against hated. The following Friday evening, there was a special Shabbat service at Temple Beth-El, a service intended for healing and solace where the wider community also gathered and – in an extraordinary moment - the synagogue’s three Torahs were passed through the crowd.
After the white supremacist actions outside the synagogues near Atlanta last month, the Fellowship of Reconciliation gathered messages of love, solidarity and steadfast support from it members around the world. They were delivered on July 2 at an interfaith service by Rev. Fahed Abu Akel, a Palestinian Presbyterian minister who lives in Atlanta. As a side note, he founded an organization called the Atlanta Ministry with International Students, which surely parallels some of the work we do here at Christ Pres.
So standing with our Jewish siblings in moments of crisis certainly matters. We can do that as a congregation and we can also do it by being touch with our friends who are Jewish.
Two places I can think of where we need to be careful.
One is the conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinians. Many folks here are sympathetic to what has happened and is happening to the Palestinians, both in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza. We need to be clear that the issue is with the Israeli government, not with the Jewish people. There are many, many Jews – here and across the nation – who have big issues with the Israeli government. While criticisms of the government can be interpreted as anti-Semitic, we need to be extraordinarily careful never to cast our criticisms in that light.
And we need to be attentive within our worship life to the tensions in the New Testament between the early Christians – many of whom were Jewish – and the religious leaders of Judaism in those first decades.
So we should be careful with the words we use in worship. We need to explore the context of the stories in the New Testament that seem to cast all Jewish people as the bad guys.
We need to be careful about misinterpreting the Hebrew scriptures as if they were written with Jesus in mind rather than the early Christians looking back at those scriptures to help interpret the life and teachings of Jesus in ways that were familiar to them.
Those are a few ways we can bring goodness and mercy into the world around us.
Ann Frank wrote it so well: “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
But there is still that image from Psalm 23 of living in the house of the Lord for the rest of our days. Surely, the house of the Lord is built on solid rock. But what happens when evil comes to the front yard of the house of the Meadows family?
Even beyond the assault on Yoni, there were well aware of the threats of antisemitism, whether physical or emotional.
Yoni put it this way: “We don’t face antisemitism from one direction. We face it from eight directions at once. So where do we go?”
Sophie Carson described what they did in the conclusion of her story. In that spot where the man assaulted Yoni two years ago, there now is a sign. It reads, “Everyone welcome.”
They are dwelling in the house of Lord’s goodness and mercy. In the midst of their fear and anxiety, they trust that with God’s watchfulness, nothing can really trouble them.
So let us join in that hope with a song. It comes from the Protestant monastic community of Taizé in France, a community that began in 1940 in part to help shelter refugees during World War II, including Jewish refugees. The song is called “Nothing Can Trouble.”
