Remembering and loving our Jewish neighbor

This sermon was given at Holy Comforter Anglican Church in Sumter, SC, on January 18, 2026. The text provided was Galatians 2:1-10.

Good morning, friends. Shalom to you.

It is a joy to worship with you today.

As the director of the Church’s Ministry Among Jewish People, it is my job to

1. Remind you of the Jewish context of the New Testament and

2. Encourage you to let that context influence how you think about and engage with our Jewish American neighbors.

So the first thing I want to point out is that I will likely say Messiah rather than Christ as we unpack this passage together. Messiah and Christ mean the same thing: anointed one. Messiah comes from a Hebrew root and Christ comes from a Greek root. I use Messiah to remind myself of the Jewishness of Jesus and his message.

God chose Abraham and thereby the Jewish people to be the conduit for the Savior of the world. “Why Abraham and the Jewish people” is another sermon for another time.

Jesus was born, lived, died, and resurrected as a Jewish man. Paul and the first apostles all lived and died as Jews. Next Sunday is the Feast of the Conversion of Paul. When we say he converted, we don’t mean he stopped being a Jew; he didn’t stop being a Pharisee. We mean he converted from his sinful life to a life of devotion to the Messiah of Israel, Jesus the LORD.

Paul the Pharisee, Apostle to the Gentiles

Paul’s being a Pharisee has become an important detail in my understanding of the Apostle to the Gentiles. Sometimes, we want to make the Pharisees the bad guys of the New Testament, certainly of the Gospels. They are among the ones who debate most angrily with Jesus. And yet, they are the ones who are closest in understanding Jesus’ message.

The Pharisees understood that the nations would come to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but this would happen at the end of the age.

The Prophets continually speak of the nations coming to submit to God’s rulership. Take the verse we use to open Morning Prayer in this Epiphany season:

From the rising of the sun to its setting my name will be great among the nations, and in every place incense will be offered to my name, and a pure offering. For my name will be great among the nations, says the Lord of hosts. (Mal 1:11)

That’s from Malachi, a Hebrew prophet. The Jewish scholars in Jesus’ and Paul’s day had an expectation of Gentiles being part of God’s kingdom, but in the next age, in the world to come. Yet, that theological reality was hard to see as the Romans were oppressing Israel.

Still, we see that curious Gentiles were welcomed in the synagogues and called God-fearers. These God-fearers were allowed to worship and learn, but the Gentile men could only be full members of the community if they were circumcised.

God-fearers were few. The Jewish expectation for most pagans worshipping their many gods was that the one God would gather them at the end of the age, judge them, and make them submit to his rulership.

Some Jews still believe this today, particularly Chabad Jews, a branch of Jewish Orthodoxy. Several Christmases ago, when I lived in Jerusalem, I stopped to listen to a street busker. I passed him all the time on my way to the Old City. This time it was Christmas Day. I had just left Christmas lunch at Christ Church Jerusalem. I was wearing a santa hat, quite light with the joy of the day.

The Jewish busker’s music caught me that afternoon, so I stopped to listen. After a while, I went to drop some money in the guitar case. He stopped playing so that he could grab a tract for me out of his pocket. The tract was on what I needed to do as a Gentile to be ready for the coming of Messiah. Yes! These Jews understand that God is for all of us. What we disagree on is the identity of the Messiah, whether the Messiah is divine, and whether he has come already.

So, Paul the Pharisee expected the nations to come to God. But later… much later.

Then Paul meets Jesus on the road to Damascus. He sees Jesus Messiah sitting at the right hand of the Ancient of Days, and Paul understands that the next age has begun! Messiah has come, God has come to earth! It is time to gather the nations to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

For the next 17 years or so, Paul ministered to both Jew and Gentile throughout the Roman world. He started in the synagogue, preaching to the people – both Jew and God-fearing Gentile – who already knew the Scriptures, who already had messianic expectation. He tells them that Messiah has come, that God has come down to earth to atone for our sins. Some believe. A lot don’t. Some react angrily, even violently. We see these same reactions to the Gospel today.

Grafting Gentiles into Israel

In his nearly 20 years of ministry, Paul had been discipling Jews and Gentiles. And he came to understand how Gentiles join Israel. The Pharisees who believe in Jesus, as we see in Acts 15, believe that Gentiles have to become Jews by circumcision. Paul, seeing that the end of the age has begun, says Gentiles are grafted into Israel, even joint heirs with the Messiah, without circumcision!

Eventually, the Jesus followers have to decide what to do with all the Gentiles putting their trust in Jesus. Most commentators say that Paul’s account in Galatians 2 is his version of the Council of Jerusalem recorded in Acts 15, while others think it is some other visit to Jerusalem. 

Whenever this visit to Jerusalem is, Paul the Pharisee and Barnabas the Levite are traveling with an uncircumcised Greek, Titus. This must have been a scandal to some. The Pharisees and Levites would have grown up caring about ritual purity. Whether you were ritually pure affected worship and community. Traveling and eating with a Gentile would have made them unclean by some traditions. But Paul and Barnabas know that Titus has been made clean and part of the family of God by the faith of Jesus. Jesus’ death and resurrection makes it possible for Jew and Gentile to be equal before God, to be joined into one new man – one new humanity – in Messiah. This is what they go to argue in Jerusalem.

I’ve seen these One New Man teams in action in our time. Back in 2014 and 2015, when ISIS was still terrorizing the peoples of Kurdistan, Syria, and Iraq, I had the privilege of traveling to southeast Turkey and northern Iraq with two Israeli Jewish believers. We were a one-new-man team taking aid from the Jerusalem congregations to the churches of Turkey and Kurdistan. By God’s grace, we pioneered a corridor that enabled other Israel-based teams to minister to Iraqi and Syrian refugees. The team that went after us was comprised of an Israeli Jewish believer and a Palestinian Christian. Yes, they traveled together, the Palestinian acting as translator.

What a testimony they gave as they would meet people who asked, “How is it you two are friends? Don’t Israelis and Palestinians hate each other?” And they would answer, “We are brothers in Christ. We are friends and serve together at the same ministry.”

It echos the statement that Paul and Barnabas make in Jerusalem with Titus: This Greek is our brother through Yeshua Messiah. He belongs to the family of God because of Jesus’ work on the cross and nothing else.

And despite those voices that opposed allowing Gentiles into the Jesus community, James, the brother of Jesus, rules that Gentiles do not need to behave Jewishly to be accepted into the Jesus community. Peter and John also agree that Paul had been called by Jesus to preach the good news among the Gentile nations while Peter was to minister among Jewish populations.

They, in essence, shook on this agreement. That’s what they mean by the right-hand of fellowship. Not unlike today, taking someone’s right hand was a sign of welcome, relationship, and even partnership.

I didn’t know that this practice of shaking hands with new believers is preserved in some churches until I read Beth Moore’s memoir All My Knotted-Up Life.  She remembers when she made her own profession of faith as a girl and shook the hand of every member of her Baptist church.¹

Paul says the Jerusalem leaders gave him and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship. Surely they took Titus’ hand too to communicate to him and everyone else that Gentiles are welcome in the family of God.

Paul will continue to unpack in Galatians the freedom of the Gospel that says that Gentiles don’t have to add Jewish practice to be full Christians.

How Christians should engage with Jews today

The question at the Jerusalem Council was ‘do Gentiles have to become Jewish to belong to the Jesus family?’ The decision was ‘no.’

Now, nearly 2,000 years later, there are more than 2.5 billion Christians² and maybe 1 million of those are Jewish.³ From nearly 16 million Jewish people,⁴ maybe 6 percent know Jesus as Messiah and LORD. And the implicit question that arises is, “Do Jews need to stop being Jewish to follow Jesus?”

The answer is ‘no.’ Jews do not cease to be Jews when they believe in Jesus. We see this in the life of the disciples. They continue to worship at the Temple. Paul had Timothy circumcised because he had a Jewish mother. Titus was all Greek, so Paul didn’t see the need to circumcise him.

Paul, the one who had been so zealous for the oral traditions so as to persecute the Jesus followers, now lived in the freedom to lay down Jewish traditions to build relationships among Gentiles. He also felt the freedom to take Jewish traditions back up to build relationships among his Jewish countrymen, all for the sake of the Gospel (1 Cor 9).

The Epiphany season has, in the life of the church, been a time to focus on mission. On the Feast of Epiphany, we celebrate the coming of the Gentile magi to worship baby Jesus as LORD and king, signalling that the Good News of Messiah’s coming is not for Jews only but also for the nations.

Now I am here to remind us Gentiles that the Good News of Jesus Messiah is not just for us but also for our Jewish neighbors.

The history of Christian-Jewish interaction is fraught with animosity and violence, most of it coming from the Christian side. Many of our forefathers utterly failed in conveying the love and mercy of God to Jesus’ kinsman in the flesh.

We have an opportunity now to do better.

Antisemitism is at an all-time high. The most recent examples are quite fresh: the murder of 15 Jews celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach in Australia and the arson attack on the Jackson, Mississippi synagogue just last week.

The Bondi gunmen seemed to be punishing Australian Jews for Israel's war with Hamas. No matter what you may think of how Israel wages war against its enemies, attacking Jews who live outside of Israel because of anger at Israel is antisemitism. Full stop.

In Mississippi, the suspected arsonist seems to have been raised in a Christian home. He graduated from a Catholic high school.⁵ When questioned by police, he reportedly said he targeted the synagogue because it was Jewish, calling it a “synagogue of Satan.”⁶ When he was read his rights, he replied, “Jesus Christ is Lord.”

The convicted murderer of the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh in 2018 also cited “synagogue of Satan” as a justification. Do you know that’s from the Bible? It’s from Revelation 2 and 3. It is read out of context by antisemites and used to justify their hate. Last summer, I even had a Christian in Tel Aviv quote it to me as justification to hate Jews. Really!

This is what happens when we forget that the New Testament is a Jewish text, that many of the conversations in the Gospels are between different Jewish groups, when we forget that Jesus has Jewish DNA for all eternity, when we forget to love our Jewish neighbor even when they do not believe in Jesus.

It is clear from Acts and Paul’s letters that Jesus commissioned him to preach the Gospel to the Greeks and Romans. Yet, Paul always started in the town synagogue. Always.

Why?

1. The good news of the Jewish Messiah “is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” (Rom 1:16)
   
2. Paul says in Romans 9: “I am speaking the truth — as one who belongs to the Messiah, I do not lie; and also bearing witness is my conscience, governed by the Holy Spirit: my grief is so great, the pain in my heart so constant, that I could wish myself actually under God’s curse and separated from the Messiah, if it would help my brothers, my own flesh and blood, the people of Isra’el!”

Paul mourned that more Jews didn’t recognize the Messiah. Paul felt like he would have – if God had allowed – given up his own salvation so that more Jewish eyes would see Jesus as he had.

As antisemitism rises around us, we have two choices in how we engage our Jewish neighbors:

• Be judgmental about their not seeing Jesus.
• Be loving, treat them as Jesus’ family, even when they cannot see Jesus as we do.

A couple of years ago, I met a Jewish believer, Lee Spitzer, who was the head of the American Baptist Churches. He gave me a book he wrote – Sympathy, Solidarity, and Silence: Three European Baptist Responses to the Holocaust.

Those three reactions were not limited to Baptists. Christians around the world either had sympathy for the Jewish plight from afar, maybe offering prayers – and prayer is not be discounted – or Christians showed solidarity by working to save Jewish lives, or they were silent.

Let us not be silent as synagogues are burned and Jews attacked for being Jewish. To be silent is to be complicit.

Remember those who don't feel safe

Back to the last verse of our Galatians passage, Paul says that the Jerusalem leadership only asked one thing of him and his ministry team: “to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.”

At that time, the Jewish believers in Judea were suffering the brunt of persecution. The result for some was poverty. We see in Acts 6 that the community had a food distribution for widows.

Remembering the poor is a command that goes back to the Hebrew scriptures. It is one of the expectations of being in covenant with God. The Kingdom of Judah was exiled to Babylon in part because the leaders did not care for the poor – the widow, orphan, and foreigner – and went so far as to oppress and exploit them (Jer 7).

Lack of finances or lack of food are not the only forms of poverty. One can be in poverty of peace of mind or safety when persecuted and harassed.⁷

Not long ago, I was invited to speak at a synagogue about my last trip to Israel. I shared some of the work of CMJ in the Holy Land while also explaining how I am encouraging Christians to nurture friendships with their Jewish neighbors.

At the end of my talk, the cantor came up and hugged me and said, “I feel a little less afraid and a little less alone.”

So I ask you to remember the Jewish American who is not sure if they should go to synagogue this Saturday because they feel unsafe. Remember the Jewish person harassed because they are wearing a Star of David or yarmulke. Remember the synagogue communities rebuilding after fires or fixing buildings after vandalism or installing new alarm systems and locks so they can be safe while worshipping.

There is a well-worn quote sometimes attributed to St. Francis: “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.”

We must preach the gospel of love in action to our Jewish neighbors before we ever use words. We must prove our love. I know there is a small Jewish community here in your town. Check on them. Listen to their stories, their anxieties, their joys. Be their friend, truly, without condition.

Only God knows what seeds are planted, what seeds are watered. Only God gives growth and brings forth fruit.

Let us pray.

O God, by the preaching of your apostle Paul you have caused the light of the Gospel to shine throughout the world: Grant, we pray, that having his wonderful ministry in remembrance, we may show ourselves thankful to you by following his holy teaching and by loving our Jewish neighbors; through Jesus Messiah our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever. Amen.

Footnotes

1. Moore, Beth. All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir (Tyndale Momentum, 2023) 55.
2. Zurlo, Gina. “World Christianity: It’s Annual Statistical Table Time!” Overseas Ministries Studies Center. Princeton Theological Seminary, January 27, 2025. https://omsc.ptsem.edu/world-christianity-its-annual-statistical-table-time/
3. Harvey, Richard. “Messianic Jewish Theology.” St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology. University of St Andrews, June 18, 2025. https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/MessianicJewishTheology.
4. TOI Staff. “World’s Jewish Population Hits 15.8 Million, on Eve of Rosh Hashanah.” Times of Israel. Times of Israel, October 2, 2024. hhadttps://www.timesofisrael.com/worlds-jewish-population-hits-15-8-million-on-eve-of-rosh-hashanah/.
5. Ebrahimji, Alisha, and Caroll Alvarado. “A Baseball Player and Honor Student: What We Know about the Teen Who Confessed to Burning Mississippi’s Oldest Synagogue.” CNN. Cable News Network, January 14, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/13/us/stephen-pittman-mississippi-synagogue-fire-wwk.
6. Keene, Louis. “Synagogue Arson Suspect Posted Satirical Antisemitic Cartoon on Day of the Attack.” The Forward, January 14, 2026. https://forward.com/news/796632/stephen-spencer-pittman-mississippi-synagogue-fire-suspect.
7. Douglas Mangum and Derek R. Brown, Galatians, Lexham Research Commentaries (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012), Ga 2:1–21.