Sinai

For what mortal ever heard the voice of the living God speak out of the fire, as we did, and lived? You go closer and hear all that the Lord our God says, and then you tell us everything that the Lord our God tells you, and we will willingly do it." The Lord heard the plea that you made to me, and the Lord said to me, "I have heard the plea that this people made to you; they did well to speak thus. May they always be of such mind, to revere Me and follow all My commandments, that it may go well with them and with their children forever! Go, say to them, 'Return to your tents.' -Deuteronomy 5:23-27 JPS Tanakh

Up until recently, I used to compare the Sinai experience of the Children of Israel with the personal experience of each person who has received Yeshua/Jesus as Lord, Savior, and Messiah, but recent conversations have made me question this concept. In both instances, a person, or millions of people "speaking as one", in the case of Beis Yisrael, stood before God and accepted His rule over their lives. For most of us who have accepted Yeshua, at the moment we first called him "Lord", we didn't have much of an idea how our lives would truly be affected. Certainly at the moment of my own personal acceptance, I couldn't have predicted what would be happening to me as a result five or ten years hence. In teaching this, I usually mention that the Children of Israel accept Hashem as their God and accept their status as His chosen people before God formally begins giving the Torah. Did each and every man, woman, and child standing at the foot of this burning mountain really know what was going to happen to them next?

Now I'm at the point of asking myself if the two events are related in any way at all. When God calls Israel Am Segulah, His treasured, splendorous people, does He subsequently experience anything even remotely similar for the rest of humanity, collectively or individually?

Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. He went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"

"Who are you, Lord?" Saul asked.

"I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," he replied. "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do."

The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything. -Acts 9:1-9

I've just rendered the famous "conversation" of Saul on the road to Damascus, but in fact, this young Pharisee, a Jew by birth and zealous for the Torah, was having his eyes opened to the reality of the Jewish Messiah by having them temporarily closed. Paul thus began his long journey into truth and as the emissary to the pagan Gentiles, which would be his mission for the rest of his life.

I suppose, to the degree that Saul/Paul was Jewish, his encounter with the Master in a vision can't be applied to the experience of the Gentile God-fearers and pagans of that day in their own encounters with the Jewish Messiah and the Spirit of God. Also, to the degree that Paul was Jewish, he was already a member of the covenant and belonged to God's chosen people, so the "road to Damascus" experience really tells us nothing about Gentile conversion. This next scene however, should be more illuminating.

While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God.

Then Peter said, "Can anyone keep these people from being baptized with water? They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have." So he ordered that they be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they asked Peter to stay with them for a few days. -Acts 10:44-48

This rendition of the Roman Cornelius and his household (all Gentiles) receiving the Holy Spirit of God is something all non-Jewish believers can attach themselves to, yet the experience is substantially similar to what happened to Yeshua's Jewish disciples here:

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. -Acts 2:1-4

Again, the Jewish disciples were already among God's chosen while the Acts 10 experience of the Gentiles shows them being brought into the household of God for the first time. Can we say that Cornelius had a "Sinai" experience when he received the Spirit, or was it something else? If the latter, was what happened to Cornelius the same as what occurred with the disciples in Acts 2?

While a great deal of discussion happens in Messianic Jewish and One Law circles relative to the differences between believing Jews and Gentiles, just what are the similarities? While obligations and duties may be distinct between these two populations, what are our common responsibilities? Consider the following:

And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God demand of you? Only this: to revere the Lord your God, to walk only in His paths, to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, keeping the Lord's commandments and laws, which I enjoin upon you today, for your good. -Deuteronomy 10:12-13 JPS Tanakh

Beyond the sweeping intent of the covenant and the details of the 613 commandments, the words "...to revere the Lord your God, to walk only in His paths, to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and soul" communicate a simplicity of holiness, purity, and companionship with God that every living person desires at some level of our being. It also sounds something like this:

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"

"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'There is no commandment greater than these."

"Well said, teacher," the man replied. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices."

When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions. -Mark 12:28-34

While a rigorous Messianic Jewish interpretation would be quick to point out that Yeshua was addressing a strictly Jewish audience, the directives to love the Lord your God with everything you are and to love your neighbor as yourself do not seem like something God would withhold from the rest of humanity. Certainly all of Creation has a duty to worship God and loving our neighbor is an extension, not only of God's love, but of our faith in the Messiah.

While the commandments to love God and to love our neighbor seem to be reasonably applied to both Jewish and Gentile believers, what about God's love? The Torah and Prophets seem to make it abundantly clear that Hashem has a boundless love for the Children of Israel:

Zion says,
"The Lord has forsaken me,
My Lord has forgotten me."
Can a woman forget her baby,
Or disown the child of her womb?
Though she might forget,
I never could forget you.
See, I have engraved you
On the palms of My hands,
Your walls are ever before Me.
Swiftly your children are coming;
Those who ravaged and ruined you shall leave you.
Look up all around you and see:
They are all assembled, and come to you!
As I live declares the Lord
You shall don them all like jewels,
Deck yourself with them like a bride. -Isaiah 49:14-18 JPS Tanakh

There is a virtually inexhaustible amount of scripture that declares God's love for the Jewish people and, while many a Christian Pastor may freely lift such passages from the Tanakh and liberally apply them to the Gentiles in the church, does God speak uniquely of His love to the nations of the world?

What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all — how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died — more than that, who was raised to life — is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:
"For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. -Romans 8:31-39

Most Bible experts agree that Paul is addressing a mixed Jewish and Gentile Messianic congregation in Rome, so I can confidently say that the Messiah (at least from Paul's point of view) does have an inseparable love for us, too. Of course, depending on how you define the word "world", there's also this famous statement:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. -John 3:16-17

While, for the sake of many Jews in the Messianic movement, I may have to modify some of the particulars of my teaching, the Spirit of God's love is available not only to the Jew but to the Gentile believer as well. While traditionally, anyone who is Jewish is to consider themselves as having personally stood at the foot of Sinai and received the Torah, we as individual Gentiles, when we accept the Jewish Messiah's offer of salvation and peace, can also stand at the foot of the Throne of God. Paul confirms this here:

You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. -Galatians 3:26-29

Afterword: Most of my research, at least that which is immediately available, is done. I still have to finish Mark Kinzer's book and make a few other inquiries, but I've finished most of the conversations I needed to have with specific individuals, including my wife. What's left is whatever input God chooses to provide, but the time is coming when I need to make some decisions, perhaps some very hard decisions. I'm looking forward to achieving a measure of closure on this process, but like many such journeys into the wilderness, I must proceed through the darkness and await the dawn.

Flocks

Is there more than one "right" way to worship God and to honor the Jewish Messiah if you're a Gentile? Funny question? Maybe the question isn't so funny. Consider how many churches there are in the world and how many different denominations they represent. While it is true that some of those churches believe they are the only "true" church and the rest of them are "posers", many Protestant churches believe that most other denominations are true worshipers of Christ, despite the various theological differences (and I recently wrote an article called Ecumenical to try and address this point, at least in terms of "Messianics").

I have a feeling that I'm about to "reinvent the wheel", but this is part of the restructuring process I'm undergoing in response to deconstructing my general assumptions about my faith. I've previously remarked that we know a great deal about Temple worship from the Torah, but almost nothing about how synagogue and early Messianic/Christian worship services were conducted. I have sometimes wondered why there is this lack of detail regarding the latter in the Apostolic Scriptures. God seems to be exquisitely specific about information He wants people to know, right down to the details of the Kohen Gadol's robes and every tiny element that comprised the construction of the Mishkan. These aspects (from my perspective, anyway) are direct representations of what exists in the Heavenly Court, where Yeshua is our High Priest, so I can appreciate the level of detail involved in creating an Earthly representation. What does that mean though, for worship venues that are not the Miskhan or the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and specifically for Gentile worship places?

I've been told that the synagogue service is something of a representation of the Temple service and acts as a "substitute" since no Temple currently exists in Israel. According to Wikipedia quoting the Talmud (tractate Berachoth 26b), each "...service was instituted parallel to a sacrificial act in the Temple in Jerusalem: the morning Tamid offering, the afternoon Tamid, and the overnight burning of this last offering." So in the modern Jewish synagogue service, we have a picture of the Temple service representing the desire of the Jewish people to fulfill all of the commandments of God "...as in days of old, and as in previous years" (Malachi 3:4).

Did any of that float over to the Gentiles when we were grafted in? Let me back up a second.

Before and during the Earthly lifetime of Yeshua, we know of a group of Gentiles who attached themselves to Israel and who we call "God-fearers". These God-fearing Gentiles became aware of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob from their contact with the Jewish people and became convinced that the Hebrew God was and is the One true God of all Creation, including the non-Jewish people. Many of these Gentiles did not respond to this awareness by seeking conversion to Judaism (during the Roman occupation of Israel, it might have been somewhat hazardous for a Gentile to request and undergo conversion). These particular individuals and perhaps their families, began worshiping at their local synagogues, both in Israel and in the diaspora. They had no official and particularly no covenant standing in the synagogue or among the Jewish people, but no one among the chosen of God could have argued that Gentiles were not also created in God's image and did not also benefit from God's blessings. This response to God by a minority of Gentiles in that world was likely a realization of this:

See, I have taught you decrees and laws as the LORD my God commanded me, so that you may follow them in the land you are entering to take possession of it. Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, "Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people." What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the LORD our God is near us whenever we pray to him? And what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you today? -Deuteronomy 4:5-8

While Israel, suffering under the harsh lash of the Roman occupation, was not a "perfect" nation, and even though they labored under a religious leadership that was corrupt and in Rome's pocket, Jews did then what they always did, particularly when under duress, which was to humbly seek the will of God and offer devotion to Hashem, Master of Legions, awaiting His rescue and salvation. This unparalleled faith and sanctity of heart and action was not lost on at least some of the Gentiles who witnessed it, including this fellow:

When Jesus had finished saying all this in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum.There a centurion's servant, whom his master valued highly, was sick and about to die. The centurion heard of Jesus and sent some elders of the Jews to him, asking him to come and heal his servant. When they came to Jesus, they pleaded earnestly with him, "This man deserves to have you do this, because he loves our nation and has built our synagogue." So Jesus went with them. He was not far from the house when the centurion sent friends to say to him: "Lord, don't trouble yourself, for I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. That is why I did not even consider myself worthy to come to you. But say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, 'Go,' and he goes; and that one, 'Come,' and he comes. I say to my servant, 'Do this,' and he does it." When Jesus heard this, he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd following him, he said, "I tell you, I have not found such great faith even in Israel." Then the men who had been sent returned to the house and found the servant well. -Luke 7:1-10

For the God-fearer in the Jewish synagogue, worship services were synagogue services. They would have done what most of us would do if we were guests in a house of worship not our own. I imagine that the "rules" for Gentiles would have been similar to what we find on the Judaism 101 website.

Non-Jews are always welcome to attend services in a synagogue, so long as they behave as proper guests... During services, non-Jews can follow along with the English, which is normally printed side-by-side with the Hebrew in the prayerbook. You may join in with as much or as little of the prayer service as you feel comfortable participating in. You may wish to review Jewish Liturgy before attending the service, to gain a better understanding of what is going on. Non-Jews should stand whenever the Ark is open and when the Torah is carried to or from the Ark, as a sign of respect for the Torah and for G-d. At any other time where worshippers stand, non-Jews may stand or sit.

That explanation isn't perfect since in first century Israel, it is unlikely that there would be a bilingual siddur (Hebrew/Greek in this case) but perhaps in diaspora synagogues, there were language accommodations available. In any event, the overarching emphasis in the instructions for guests or God-fearers would be to behave respectfully and within the bounds of not being members of the covenant. For the Gentiles involved in that context, there most likely wasn't any disagreement on this point.

One of the purposes of Yeshua's "becoming flesh and dwelling among us" was to, in essence, open the door for Gentiles to enter into the Kingdom of God by directly attaching us to Israel as alien, but grafted in, branches. If Yeshua didn't change something relative to a Gentile's covenant relationship to God, then his birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension would have meant little or perhaps nothing at all, at least to the vast majority of the world's population. If the only way for a Gentile to fully access a covenant relationship with God, rather than forever remain a God-fearer, was to convert to Judaism, why would Paul have said this:

Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. -Galatians 5:2-5

A plain reading of the text seems to indicate that Gentiles do not have to convert to Judaism to have access to God and that, in fact, it was Messiah himself who came to give Gentiles that access. They (we) are not required to covert in order to have relationship and by ignoring Paul's words and being determined to convert, we are not only disregarding Paul, we are throwing away the meaning of Yeshua's death.

OK. Gentiles have access to God that is more than what a God-fearer had. After all, Cornelius was already a God-fearer when God told Peter to go to the Roman's home. Cornelius and all his Gentile household received the Holy Spirit before the very the eyes of Peter and his Jewish companions (Acts 10:44-48) showing them and us that there was and is life for a Gentile with God that is more that what the ancient God-fearers experienced.

The $64,000 question is just how much more of a life? In practical terms, does baptism by the Holy Spirit make Gentiles full covenant members and Israelites along with the Jews? That's the big argument going on right now.

From a One Law (OL) perspective, the answer is "yes". Gentiles, after receiving the Spirit and being grafted in to Israel become Israelites. They were and are obligated to all of the 613 commandments, all of halacha, and are every bit a part of the Jewish lifestyle, without having to actually convert to Judaism. This is where Messianic Judaism (MJ) parts company with One Law, since MJ maintains that, based on Acts 15 and Acts 21, Gentiles who became Messianic by way of the Spirit had only a subset of Torah obligation. Interestingly enough, the people who had previously functioned as God-fearers most likely were already complying with those requirements in order to be able to worship in the same synagogue as Jews.

The real problem is that, while MJ can tell "Messianic Gentiles" (for lack of a better term) what they are not obligated to, relative to believing Jews, they can't really define, beyond the confines of the Jerusalem letter, what distinguishes a believing Gentile's life and religious practice from a pagan or secular Gentile. It doesn't seem, from MJ's viewpoint, that we have changed very much, if at all, in terms of our practice. We operate more or less in the same manner as the ancient Roman and Greek God-fearers. Do Gentiles not have a practice that makes them Holy to God and sets them (us) apart from the unbelieving nations? I don't have a definitive answer to that one, but the Apostolic Scriptures may provide a clue in its very lack of detailed information about Gentile worship activities.

I've made my way through most of Bruce Chilton's Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography and Chilton suggests something I'd never thought of before. He suggests that Paul and James may have had significant disagreements about a Gentile believer's status relative to Israel. Chilton doesn't put it in these terms, but basically, he says that James, as head of the Jerusalem Council, took a stance very similar to that of modern day Messianic Judaism, while Paul's framework may have approached what we think of as "One Law" for Gentiles, but not in the way you might expect. I know this is a radical suggestion and I can already feel the various MJ readers of my blog preparing their rebuttals but hear me out.

The split between James and Paul according to Chilton's book, was specifically based on how close a grafting Gentiles receive on a spiritual level. It didn't seem so much that Paul expected believing Gentiles to take on the full "burden" of Torah in order to achieve equal with the Jews, but quite the opposite. Paul wrote that the meaning and force of the Torah was overshadowed by the grace of Messiah. The key problem with how James and the Jerusalem Council might have seen Paul was that he was advocating for Gentiles to be completely equal to the Jews in the covenant promises without any Torah obedience or conversion requirement at all. Gentiles then, could enjoy equal covenant status with the Jews before God, and yet be completely independent of oversight by the local synagogue and perhaps be even independent of Jerusalem.

This may, according to Chilton, account for the various beatings and the stoning Paul had to endure (including being left for dead). While the message was eagerly accepted by diaspora Gentiles, the diaspora Jews and, when they finally heard about it, the Israeli Jewish believers, were "less than amused" by Paul's teaching an apparent lack of distinctiveness between Gentile believers and the Jewish faithful. This may account for Paul's problems upon his returning to Jerusalem (Acts 21 and beyond) as well as the punishments he put up with in the diaspora.

It's important to remember that Chilton's perspective is primarily a Christian one, though he is considered an expert in both early Christianity and Judaism. He also speaks of Paul's "conversion" on the road to Tarsus, though he may not mean conversion from Judaism to Christianity so much as conversion from non-Messianic to Messianic Judaism. Still, his perspective is expected to be a bit "off" relative to the modern Messianic Jewish understanding of Paul. Nevertheless, his material should be taken into consideration and may provide important clues in the history of Gentile "acceptance" into the body of Messianic faith.

While I can't take a position of exactly what Paul did or didn't believe on these matters, Chilton's book at least opens the door to the possibility of a lack of absolute consistency in how Gentile believers were considered and treated by Jewish Messianics. That, coupled with a lack of specific requirements for Messianic Gentiles beyond the aforementioned Acts 15 and Acts 21, leaves a gap in which multiple, varied worship and lifestyle practices may have become available to Gentile Yeshua-worshipers.

I sometimes remark in my teachings, that God is wise to provide concrete, material reminders of His commandments, in the Shabbat, the Festivals, and even at the level of tzitzit and mezuzah. While these, and other practices, may not be required by God of believing Gentiles, I imagine that in the first century, as is true today, at least some Gentile believers saw the wisdom of some of these commandments and "went the extra mile", even in secret, in order to facilitate a more personal connection with God.

I have no concrete evidence to present on this matter, but I know human nature. It would have been almost impossible for first century Gentile worshipers to not be drawn to some of the Jewish-specific practices, particularly if they had Jewish mentors or an experience in synagogue worship. What Gentile Messianics in the 21st century are experiencing isn't unique to the modern age. In fact, Chilton believes that Paul failed to discourage his followers in Galatia from adhering Jewish practices, which they continued performing, even after Paul was long dead.

The letter to Galatia established his (Paul's) position in Ephesus, but it failed to move its intended recipients. More than a century after Paul, there is excellent evidence that the Galatians were in fact keeping the calendar of Judaism, celebrating Easter in a tight correspondence with Passover, and observing regulations of food purity. -from Bruce Chilton's Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography (page 195).

If, as in Deuteronomy 4:6, Gentiles are expected to see Israel's relationship with God and say, "Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people", why wouldn't at least some of them (and us) want to emulate what the Torah teaches in Deuteronomy 6:4 and beyond?

Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. -Deuteronomy 6:5-7

Yeshua said the following to his Jewish audience, but I don't see how it doesn't or shouldn't apply to Gentiles as well.

"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." -Matthew 22:36-40

How far any of the specific Torah commandments are applied in obligation to Gentile believers as opposed to voluntarily available, I cannot say. I know that the Shabbat can be a time of rest for me, just as it is for my Jewish neighbors. Perhaps I don't keep it in the same way or to the same degree as an observant Jew, but neither am I commanded to specifically ignore the Sabbath. Without turning myself into a caricature of a Jew, how much more in God's commandments is available to me, not necessarily out of an obligation, but out of a desire to express love of God? Moreover, what is the higher observance, to comply to Torah or any part of it because you have to...or because you want to?

Afterword: I'm not saying that Jewish people are Torah observant only because they have to, but the bottom line is that the covenant obligation exists. There may be some Jews who comply only out of fear, but that's certainly not God's desire. Beyond the obligation, there are many Jewish people who keep Torah for the sheer joy of obeying and serving God and perhaps they're a model for the rest of us. If it turns out that Gentiles bear a smaller portion of Torah obligation (though beyond just a couple of slices of the book of Acts), we can still offer God a larger amount of our behaviors, our gifts, our devotion, and our love than what's required. While Yeshua said, "If you love me, you will obey me", anyone who has ever been a parent knows that we feel a greater love from our children, not just when they do what we tell them to do, but when they offer us more, just because they love us.

Ashes and Flight

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother. -Kahlil Gibran

In the process of re-evaluating my understanding of my role in the realm of God and whatever connection I may (or may not) have with the nation of Israel through the blood of the Messiah, I've spent (as I'm sure you well know) a significant amount of time deconstructing my theology and stripping it down to its base components. I can't say the process has been painless and a significant amount of doubt has entered my life as a result. In one sense, I wish this journey on every person of faith because for all its difficulty, there are great rewards not only at the end of the road, but at every milepost. In another way, I wouldn't wish this "discomfort" on my worst enemy in life. It's like deliberately inviting the following:

But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does. -James 1:6-8

In my case, this is meant to be a temporary condition, but it's not a pleasant thing to say to yourself and to ask other people, How do I know what I think I know?"

Although I've only been asking these sorts of questions on my personal blog for the last month (which is the reason I created this blog in the first place), I've been pursuing this line of inquiry for a great deal longer, sometimes on my congregation's blog. For instance, in trying to imagine what a mixed Jewish-Gentile congregation might look like in a first century Messianic synagogue, I wrote Friday Night in the First Century Church. Some of my understanding has shifted just a bit since I wrote that article, but it does capture the essence of my quest to understand how to worship the Jewish Messiah as a Gentile believer.

I've also tried to get a better understanding of how Judaism (the larger Judaism, not Messianic Judaism, specifically) sees and understands Gentiles and our place in the world. This isn't as irrelevant as you might imagine. If the current expression of Messianic Judaism (MJ) and particularly those congregations that embrace the Bilateral Ecclesiology (BE) perspective truly encompass a Jewish world view, then understanding how believing Gentiles fit in to the believing Jewish paradigm should be very connected to how Judaism as a whole sees the non-Jewish world.

To that end, I tried to explore the topic in an article called What Does the Talmud Say About Gentiles? Interestingly, I received almost no comments in response to this particular article, perhaps because the One Law (OL) movement has little or no interest in the Talmudic commentary on non-Jews.

Reliable online sources for this information are scarce, but I was able to come up with a body of information that seemed to support a Jewish view of Gentiles as indeed being "created in the image of God" and out of that, a Jewish response to Gentiles that may surprise some, even those who are part of the Messianic Jewish movement.

I'm beginning to realize that it may be because Gentiles are grafted in to the root of the "civilized olive tree" that Messianic Jews have a harder time dealing with believing Gentiles (at least those of us who operate within "the movement") than traditional rabbinic Jews. I think I've said before that, because the larger body of Judaism doesn't see Gentiles grafted in to their root, the threat of "invasion" and supersessionism isn't quite as sharp. Jewish people who have willingly become a part of the Messianic Jewish movement must also (sometimes uncomfortably) deal with sheep from the Gentile pen joining the flock under the same shepherd (John 10:14-17) and the obligation of Messianic Jews to disciple to Gentiles (Matthew 28:16-20).

Yesterday afternoon, I wrote the article Ecumenical in almost a state of desperation because I found it necessary to surrender an assumption I thought I'd never have to give up; the lack of an original Messianic worship template that included both Gentiles and Jews. One fragment of my plan of hope in finding a greater peace between Jewish and Gentile "Messianics" was shot down in flames like Snoopy's Sopwith Camel taking a nosedive thanks, once again, to the Red Baron.

It's amazing what a little prayer and a good night's sleep can do. Although the good night's sleep part wasn't as complete as I needed, God is faithful and like the proverbial Phoenix, I am once again arising from my own ashes into a light of a new day. Speaking of fire metaphors:

But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the LORD will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD, as in days of old and as in previous years. -Malachi 3:2-4

While the Prophet Malachi is speaking to a strictly Jewish audience, Peter's commentary on Malachi allows the "refiner's fire" metaphor to be applied to Gentile believers as well:

In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls. -1 Peter 1:6-9

Once again, I'm pouring water on the embers, dusting the ashes off my skin, rubbing salve into the burns, and rising hopefully. I may even decide to take flight.

Ecumenical

ec-u-men-i-cal -adjective

1. general; universal.
2. pertaining to the whole Christian church.
3. promoting or fostering Christian unity throughout the world.
4. of or pertaining to the movement (ecumenical movement), esp. among Protestant groups since the 1800s, aimed at achieving universal Christian unity and church union through international interdenominational organizations that cooperate on matters of mutual concern.
5. interreligious or interdenominational: an ecumenical marriage.

From Dictionary.com

I honestly didn't think I'd be writing on this blog today. I felt a "drive" to write something but no actual content seemed to come to me. Then I read this at Judah Himango's Kineti L'Tziyon:

The thing is, Kinzer is quite openly ecumenical towards Christians who keep various traditions, and to Messianic Jews of all shades of traditional observance.

If he's ecumenical within Judaism and Christianity, then it logically follows that he's ecumenical within the Messianic movement too - even to the One-Law crowd.

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Mark Kinzer is also tolerant towards Torah-observant Gentiles, but his special emphasis and ministry towards Gentiles is combatting supercessionism - as James' blog posts are helping me to see.

Okay, one-law may not be his cup of tea, but he wouldn't break table fellowship over this issue surely.

-Joseph W.

Since I'm reading Mark Kinzer's Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: Redefining Christian Engagement with the Jewish People my ear perked up (metaphorically speaking) at the "sound" of his name. I also "coincidentally" (I believe in a created universe, there's no such thing as coincidence), I had coffee this morning with a fellow who knows Kinzer and speaks extremely well of him. Sometimes the blogosphere has a tendency to misrepresent a person's intent, even without meaning to. Ecumenism; the desire and movement to attempt and achieve greater unity in the community of the believers in Jesus/Yeshua continues to come to the forefront of my thoughts.

It's been almost a month since I started this blog and my personal journey of faith by writing Fractured Fellowship, in which I sought to address the apparent lack of connection or unity between Jews and Gentiles in the Messianic/One Law/Torah Observant movement. I realize the labels are somewhat problematic, but there's an umbrella under which we operate that doesn't quite include either traditional Christianity or rabbinic Judaism and this umbrella contains a set of disagreements and issues we have with each other. Ironically, we all state that, in our own ways, we want or should want to reach out to the Christians and Jews that live and operate outside of our umbrella. So, how can we do this when we don't even have unity with each other?

I think Judah was speaking to the same point on Kineti L'Tziyon today, but it was Joseph who crystalized it for me. I've been trying to bring some internal order from chaos post-my coffee discussion this morning, trying to fit the bits and pieces of what was said into my overall puzzle. I believe this is also the overall puzzle of Gentiles who have entered this movement based on a set of assumptions. We are now finding that those assumptions and paradigms, presented with good motives and accepted with open arms if not quite open eyes, aren't what we thought they were.

Along with the Kinzer book, I've also been reading Bruce Chilton's Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography and there seems to be a few points where Chilton and Kinzer actually meet (which I'll go over in more detail when I write the review of Kinzer's book). One of the points Chilton makes is that there seemed to be a difference of approach and conceptualization on how to incorporate pagan Gentiles into the Messianic Jewish movement (Gentiles who had previously been God-fearers weren't quite such an issue) in the first century. One assumption I had previously maintained, was that there at one time, must have been a unity of thought about how to bring Gentiles into a Jewish worship of Yeshua by the Messianic Jewish leadership. From what I'm reading in Chilton, that unity may never have existed.

Think about it and ask, what if there never was unity within the Messianic Jewish movement, lead by James, the brother of the Master, as to how to approach, bring in, and integrate Gentiles; former polytheistic pagans, into Messianic worship? I had always believed that there was an original template for the early "church" that would describe "Jews and Gentiles who gather together in peace to worship the Almighty and His Son, our Messiah, Yeshua", as I describe on the main page of my congregation's website. If I'm wrong and there is no template, then there is no model for how that's supposed to work today. If I'm wrong and there was no unity as to how Gentiles were supposed to be grafted in, even in the very earliest days of Jewish evangelizing to the Gentiles, then on what do we base our ecumenical efforts today?

Pre-Yeshua and Pre-Jewish evangelism to the Gentiles, the boundaries that defined Jews and Gentile God-fearers in the synagogue must have been abundantly clear. They must have been as clear as it is when the occasional Gentile visits and worships at a traditional rabbinic Jewish synagogue today. No Gentile in his or her right mind would walk into an Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform synagogue thinking they were really Jewish. If the Gentile were at all rational, he or she would enter into the synagogue assuming a "one-down" position and being more than willing to defer to the Jewish authority and Jewish congregational membership around them. There'd be no question about whether or not they should wear a tallit (though all males, Jewish or otherwise, are requested to cover their head with a kippah). Unless they came in with Jewish friends or Jewish family (usually through marriage), they'd do what anyone does where they enter a place where they have no role or standing; they'd find a seat in the back where they could stay out of the way and they'd keep quiet.

The "problem" comes when Gentiles, "though a wild olive shoot, have been grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root" (Romans 11:17), find ourselves glued into the same "olive root" as the "natural (Jewish) branches". Gentiles had never been grafted into the Jewish root before. This wasn't like being a God-fearer when you knew your relationship to the Jewish people and to God was dicey at best. Now, as "grafted in", there was a suggestion and promise of some sort of fellowship, bonding, and even equality with "natural Israel". What did the Jews and Gentiles do next?

I don't have an exhaustive recall of every bit of the New Testament writings in my head, but as far as I'm beginning to suspect, nobody knew. Yes, I'm aware of Acts 15 and Acts 21, but that only touches on a tiny slice of the pie about how Jews and Gentiles with a common Messiah and a common God felt about each other, saw each other, and interacted with each other. God-fearers, such as Cornelius (Acts 10) had gained an understanding of Jewish choseness, culture, and identity from his position as an outsider who learned to love, not only the Jewish God, but the Jewish people. Receiving a visit from an angel, having the Apostle Peter, who had walked beside the Messiah himself, enter his home, and being allowed to receive the Holy Spirit of God, along with other righteous Gentiles, must have gone beyond his wildest dreams. At the same time, the behavioral interaction patterns Cornelius and people like him probably wouldn't have changed, so the God-fearers who became "Messianic" really didn't make waves. Peter's challenges may not have been as difficult as he originally thought.

By comparison, Paul may have had the tougher row to hoe. He had to approach Gentiles who had absolutely no experience or knowledge of the Jewish God ("you mean there's only one?") and the Jewish Messiah. With no previous behavioral context in which to access and apply to Messianic worship, there may have been a lot more friction and struggle in the integration process right from the start.

Certainly Paul's letter to the Galatians seems to indicate there was confusion about who to listen to and how to approach Messianic worship as a Gentile convert. What if these hurtles were never successfully crossed? What if what started out as a mess stayed a mess and never got better?

This certainly would then set the stage for the beginning of the Jewish-Gentile schism in the Messianic movement in the early second century and have fueled the widening of the gap as time progressed. Without the synagogue to act as a stabilizing rudder to Gentile Messianic worship, the fledgling Christian church spun out of control and reorganized in a form (probably multiple forms) that was all but devoid of any Jewish background or practice. If you've ever read Richard E. Rubenstein's When Jesus Became God (and yes, with a title like that, it is controversial in Christian circles), you understand that the jockeying for position of the various factions of Christianity in the days of Constantine were conflictual to the point of violence, rioting, and even murder. Early Gentile Christianity wasn't pretty.

I'm not saying all this to be divisive or to argue, but to illustrate that what we (what I) have been searching for; an original pattern on which to base Gentile participation in the worship of and lifestyle in the Jewish Messiah doesn't appear to exist. If that's the case, do we simply throw up our hands, say that there is no established method except what exists in the Christian church and part company? Here's the core problem.

Telling a Gentile about the Torah; about a deeper understanding of who God is and who human beings can be in Him, is a bit like letting the proverbial Genie out of the bottle. Once you pop the cork, you won't be able to easily get it back in. In fact, once out, the concepts, practices, and lifestyle expand to the point where they'll never fit back into the original container.

I was trying to explain that this morning to someone (I never got to the point of using this metaphor), but this is why when, for instance, First Fruits of Zion (FFOZ) announced it's basic theological shift away from One Law and more in line with Messianic Judaism, all the wheels fell off the cart and Gentile MJ/OL adherents experienced an emotional power surge of outrage and betrayal. I remember going into shock for a bit myself and recovery is slow. Throwing a "dysfunctional family" into crisis may be therapeutically beneficial in order to help them become more healthy, but it still doesn't feel good, and a positive outcome isn't guaranteed. I'm not saying any of this is FFOZ's fault and admire their courage and honesty for making such a change, but the outcome was inevitable.

Previously, what I would have said was that there's a void now facing Gentiles who have become spiritually and emotionally attached to at least some of the Torah (such as the Law isn't dead, it wasn't nailed to the cross with Jesus, and the Gentiles haven't really replaced the Jews in the covenant promises of God), but I'm not so sure that the void isn't just an illusion. It's not an illusion emotionally. People's feelings are real. The problem is, what we, as Gentile "Messianics" once thought applied to us never applied. The unity between Jews and Gentiles in the Messiah may well have never existed. There may never been a unity within first century Messianic Judaism as to what to do with Gentile converts once they became grafted in (at least those who had not previously been God fearers).

What do you do with ecumenism now? History tells us that the Christian church, in all it's many and varied forms, operated as it's own "thing" and the church and synagogue remained more or less apart from each other all down through the long centuries. Even now, as at least some churches are acknowledging the Jewish people are still the special, chosen people of God, Christians maintain that to be saved, all people, including Jews, must accept Jesus as Lord and Savior and homogenize into the church. Judaism rightly maintains its distinction and continues to not even entertain the notion that Jesus could possibly be the Messiah if, for no other reason, because rabbinic Judaism doesn't require the Messiah to be God. The church and synagogue maintain a polite relationship with each other and we all feel pretty much free to use the term "Judeo-Christian" but there will always be certain boundaries that will never, ever be crossed, at least this side of the Messiah's return.

Messianic Judaism is neither fish nor fowl (and I'm not even talking about One Law now). While internally experiencing a completely Jewish identity and lifestyle, the larger rabbinic and secular Jewish world does not accept MJ as a Judaism but rather, sees it as yet another form of Christianity. At worst (and I had a Jewish woman tell me this once), they see MJ as another form of "Holocaust", designed to "trick" Jews to convert into Christians.

Some of the blame can be laid at the feet of One Law, but pointing fingers is meaningless at this point. The damage is done. In reality, OL is really just a drop in the racial memory bucket of the Jewish people, who have plenty of other reasons to be wary of any flavor of a Christiandom (regardless of the label) that apparently is seeking to rid the world of Jews through conversion.

The flip side of the coin is how the church sees Messianic Judaism and One Law (and like rabbinic Judaism, they don't actually see a difference between the two) which can be viewed as being "under the Law" and their (our) efforts to connect with the church are viewed as an attempt to bring the church out from grace and back into "Law slavery".

OK, I'm painting a pretty grim picture, but I'm beginning to see that such "grimness" has always been there in these relationships. Whatever Yeshua was thinking when he said, "...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit", we can never know. If he had a picture as to how this was supposed to look and a process by which it was to be accomplished, we can't experience it.

There's this clawing, frustrated creature living inside my chest that wants me to do something to repair this situation and it won't leave me alone. I feel it gnawing inside of me, disturbing my sleep and interrupting my thoughts. It wants me to fix this whole thing somehow, at least within my own little corner of the universe, but I'm running out of tools and diagrams.I've gone through "Plan B", "Plan C", and most of the rest of the alphabet and I'm running out of letters.

If anyone out there has an idea about how to cast a wide enough net and bring us all together for the first time ("fishers of men" from Matthew 4:19 comes to mind), now's the time.

Is the Bible for Christians?

This probably sounds like another of my ridiculous questions, but let's keep in mind that not all of the comments made in the Bible were directed at a general human audience. For instance, much of the Torah is specifically Moses, as the Prophet of God, telling the Children of Israel what their duties and responsibilities are to God and to each other. Even Yeshua/Jesus was speaking, most of the time, to his Jewish disciples and to a Jewish audience. Only on rare occasions, did he ever mention or address non-Jews. So what does the Bible have to do with Gentiles?

I'm in the process of reading through the Book of Jeremiah. I can't help but be taken by the loving comments God has to say to the Children of Israel, even as He is sending them off into exile in Babylonia for 70 years. He's already encouraging them and saying to them that they will call out to Him and He will listen to them and restore them to their Lands and they will be His people and He will be their God.

I can only imagine, even in the bitterness of exile and servitude in Babylonia, that this love must have been of great comfort and that the Jewish nation must have realized, no matter what happened to them, nothing would separate them from the love of God. I don't doubt many a Christian Pastor has used these passages to illustrate the love that Jesus has for Gentile Christians, but can comments made by God, through Jeremiah to the Jewish people be generalized to the rest of humanity? That may not be the case, but let's see.

I ask this question because, as you probably know by now if you've been reading this blog, I've been re-examining my assumptions about God, Yeshua, and my relationship to the Lord of Heaven, in order to see how or even if I somehow fit into His plan. I think I can definitively say that God has not abandoned or forsaken the rest of humanity, but do we have a clear picture of our role in relationship to God? Does the Bible, the totality of the Bible, speak to all of humanity, or do only certain portions apply? To take it a step further, are there portions of the Bible that Gentile believers in Yeshua read in vain?

Besides the Book of Jeremiah, some of the comments made in response to my prior blog article Who am I? inspired today's blog. For instance:

James, of course one can study G-d's word without being obligated to it or parts of it. Think about this: I am not a Kohaine or a Levite, but I can learn a lot from studying the very specific requirements given to them, even though all of them are not only NOT required for me, it would be grave SIN for me if I even attempted to take on the role of Kohaine or Levite (with me not being one).

This seems to answer my question. I can indeed study all parts of the Bible with the understanding that some or even most of the Bible really doesn't apply to me, at least from the point of view of the Bilateral Ecclesiology contingent of Messianic Judaism. As part of my self re-examination, I've been using MJ/BE as one of the mechanisms to test my understanding of my role in life and my role in the universe. I'm not saying that I believe MJ/BE is the best possible lens for which a Gentile "Yeshua-believer" to view himself or herself, but it does present a strikingly different view of who I'm supposed to be, relative to my usual understanding. Utilizing their teachings about Jews, Gentiles, and God, if nothing else, helps me to see where any gaps may exist in my faith and my knowledge. If I can "survive" an examination from the MJ/BE point of view, perhaps some of my dross will be burned away and I can become a more pure product.

I was entertaining visions of having my Bible being reduced to a pamphlet if I was only "allowed" access to the portions that specifically address Gentiles. There's an "urban legend" (I don't know if it's true or not) about Thomas Jefferson that says he used a pair of shears to cut out the parts of the Bible he didn't like. I had a vision of that being done to my Bible so that I could only read those bits and pieces that MJ/BE believes apply to me. Thankfully, it was just a wild bit of imagination.

It's somewhat comforting to know that I can still read those portions that don't have anything to do with me, though somewhat disturbing that some MJ/BE folks may consider it not only inappropriate for me to rest on the Shabbat but even, by implication, a sin.

Fear not. I fully intend on continuing to read all of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, and attempt to gain a deeper understanding of God and humanity from His word. While not 100% of the Bible operates as a set of directives to be accessed by Gentiles, I believe a larger portion of the principles and examples are illuminating for all mankind. As far as I can tell, MJ/BE apparently limits the Torah to a set of directives aimed at two primary audiences: Jews and Gentiles.

The majority of directives apply to the Jewish people and only a tiny subset apply to Gentiles. Even directives in the Torah such as "Thou Shalt not Kill" and "Thou Shalt not Covet" apply only to the Jews, according to MJ/BE. Of course, not even MJ/BE believes that Gentiles are enabled by God to murder and covet freely and without consequences. Their justification for those commandments not applying to Gentile believers is that A. It's already written on our hearts, so we should know better and B. The written version of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" carries with it increased penalties for the Jewish people should they violate that commandment. Somehow this means that the "Thou Shalt Not Kill" written on my heart applies to me but the version written in the Bible does not. Yes, it's confusing to me, too.

To a degree, I'm a believer of the principle of Occam's Razor which, according to Wikipedia, states in part, ...that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. In order for the above explanation about the Torah to work, you have to perform more than a few literary and theological gymnastics (not unlike some portions of Kinzer's Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: Redefining Christian Engagement with the Jewish People, which I will review at a later time). Hardly the "simplest explanation". While I don't advocate Gentiles dressing up and pretending to be Jewish, I do believe that a larger portion of the Bible describes principles and lifestyle standards that can and should be applied to the wider Ekklesia. There is nothing wrong with Gentile believers feeding the poor, as it says in the Torah. There is nothing wrong with Gentile believers visiting the sick as it says in the Torah. There is nothing wrong with helping your neighbor with a problem, even if you don't really like your neighbor, as it says in the Torah. Most importantly, there is nothing wrong with a Gentile believer reading of these principles in the Torah/Bible, understanding that these are behaviors that God approves of in all humanity, and behaving out of these principles as written in the Torah. It takes nothing away from Judaism and specifically Messianic Judaism. Some support for this can be found in the commentary of Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth on Torah Portion Vaetchanan. Quoting R. Shmuel David Luzzatto, Rabbi Sacks says:

The effect of Christianity and Islam was to spread the Jewish message - albeit in ways with which Jews could not fully agree - throughout the world. Today these religions represent more than half of the six billion people on the face of the earth. The 'Judeo-Christian ethic' and the Abrahamic faiths have shaped much of the civilization of the West. The Torah really did become 'your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations.'

One of the obvious intents of God for the Jewish people and the Torah, was to be a "light to the world", as cited in the aforementioned Torah Portion. This is echoed in Yeshua's statements in both Matthew 5:13-16 in which he calls himself a "light of the world" and in Matthew 5:43-48 in which he refers to his Jewish disciples as that light. Connecting that to Matthew 28 and the ministries of Paul and Peter to the Gentiles, it seems clear that Yeshua expected his Jewish disciples to ...go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you (emphasis mine). I'm not saying in this, that Yeshua necessarily told his Jewish disciples to go and teach the Gentiles to obey the totality of the Torah commandments, but putting all this together, there seems to be an intent for Gentiles to be taught a set of morals, ethics, practices, and principles of righteousness that are God-based and Torah-based (as perhaps opposed to Torah-inclusive). If all of the Torah that we needed was already written on our hearts, why would Yeshua specifically direct his disciples to teach all of his lessons to the nations? And why oh why, would Gentiles have the Bible in our hands today if we didn't need a written copy of what is written on our hearts? If MJ/BE is right, all I really need is to consult with my human intuition and just "know" what God wants me to do. No need to "test the spirits" by comparing my feelings with the word of God (and this last comment is definitely tongue-in-cheek).

Yes of course, the Bible is for everyone and, although not every specific commandment or situation is directly applicable to Gentile Yeshua-believers, much more can and should be relevant and meaningful to us than a mere portion of Acts 15.

Who am I?

This is something of a companion to yesterday's blog What am I doing here? but without most of the rant and frustration. Right to it, then.

In traditional Christianity, the Christian is defined as saved by grace and a beneficiary of God's grace through Jesus Christ. The Law, which previously defined the Jewish people, was done away with, and was replaced by grace. Christians who have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are defined by grace and not by the Law and behaviorally, are free from about 99% of what used to be required by the Law (that figure might be a slight exaggeration on my part).

In the traditional One Law view, Gentiles and Jews both are saved by grace, not works, but out of faith and grace, adhere to "God's preferred lifestyle for the redeemed community" by their obligation to the 613 commandments, or at least as many as can be obeyed without the Temple in Jerusalem and (for most of us) living in the diaspora.

In the Messianic Jewish/Bilateral Eccelesiology viewpoint, only Jews (Messianic or otherwise) are obligated to the full weight of Torah. Any Gentiles who choose to worship in an MJ/BE context accept that only a small subset of the written Torah applies to them and that, all other requirements of God for believing Gentiles are "written on their hearts" (Romans 2:12-16), although exactly what is actually written there is poorly defined by the MJ/BE movement. The Acts 15 letter is seen as defining the most important requirements for Gentiles, but cannot be the full limit as, for instance, not murdering isn't listed. Yet the letter is viewed as specifically not requiring full Torah obedience from Gentile believers in the Messiah.

That brings me to my topic for today. In my conversations with adherents of MJ/BE, I, as a Gentile, have been defined specifically by who I am not, and what I cannot do relative to the Bible and the Messianic Jewish community. MJ/BE proponents characterize my worship life in terms of a set of restrictions and lack of access. For instance, as a Gentile, I am not allowed the blessing of an aliyah because only Jews are obligated to Torah and thus, allowed to read the Torah in public (I suppose I should say "read the Torah aloud in a Messianic Jewish service", since I'm sure I wouldn't be prevented from reading a Torah portion to myself in a public library or reading out loud from Deuteronomy to my grandson in a public park). I cannot pray wearing tzitzit because that commandment was only given by Moses to the Jews. I might be able to pray from the siddur but this becomes questionable since the siddur was written for a specifically Jewish audience.

I'm not saying this to complain but rather to illustrate that the MJ/BE perspective seems to see Gentiles in their midst relative to who we are not rather than who we are. We are seen by what we are not allowed to do rather than what we can do. We are defined, basically, in terms of the negative rather than anything positive. Is it any wonder that some Gentiles may chafe when asked to cheerfully consider themselves as what amounts to a restricted "species"?

Here's a couple of thoughts:

The actual intent is to say that we are thankful that God has enlightened us so that, unlike the pagans, we worship the true God and not idols. There is no inherent superiority in being Jewish, but we do assert the superiority of monotheistic belief over paganism. Although paganism still exists today, we are no longer the only ones to have a belief in one God -Rabbi Reuven Hammer of Masorti Judaism

What Paul means is that circumcision and Jewish identity do not elevate a Jew above the Gentle before God. There is a difference in role but no hierarchy of status -Mark Kinzer, Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: Redefining Christian Engagement with the Jewish People

Both Rabbi Hammer and Dr. Kinzer state that the distinctiveness of the Jewish people and the differences in covenant roles between Jews and Gentles do not actually make Jewish people better than Gentiles nor does it make Jews more loved, cared for, or more privileged in the eyes of God than Gentile believers. This would seem to all be evident from Paul's statement here:

You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. -Galatians 3:26-28

Paul isn't eliminating the distinctive differences between Jew and Gentile any more than he's eliminating the distinctive differences between men and women. He is saying though that God doesn't favor the Jewish people in His love over the Gentile any more than He favors men in His love over women.

In other words, I, as a Gentile, am loved by God every bit as much as a Jewish believer. God does not consider me a Jew but neither does He consider me a "second-class citizen" in the Kingdom of God. The question is, does any Jewish person in the MJ/BE movement consider Gentiles to a inferior and further, does MJ/BE encourage this impression?

It's hard to say. When you are only defined by your limitations rather than any positive qualities you may possess, it's difficult to understand how you are viewed by the Jewish leadership and congregation around you (assuming you're a Gentile who belongs to, or at least attends, an MJ/BE congregation).

MJ/BE proponents chafe when Gentiles begin to complain about how we are depicted as negatives and we are told to accept our lot in life happily. If we don't, we're accused of various and sundry behaviors such as envy, racism, and lack of faith. In a sense though, that's like accusing a person who is critical of President Obama's policies of racism just because the President is African-American. Is the President "criticism-proof" on the basis if race? Can I not be critical of the MJ/BE movement, or at least some aspects of it, for any reason other than "racism"? Can I not request that MJ/BE explain their statements more fully, especially if they somehow expect me to comply to their "requests" out of "respect"? I've been accused of "straw man" arguments in the past, but in this particular instance, I think the shoe is on the other foot.

Here's what would help.

MJ/BE proponents are attempting to convince Jewish and Gentile elements in related fragments of "the movement" (One Law, Two-House, and other forms of Messianic Judaism) of the correctness of the MJ/BE perspective and the error of everyone else's view point. If MJ/BE wants to be at least listened to if not actually heard, it might be helpful if they took a more even approach to their presentation. MJ/BE is very good at defining who is Jewish within their context but extremely poor at defining Gentiles in a way that would make any Gentile anywhere want to be a part of their framework.

What would help would be for MJ/BE proponents to define the Gentiles in their midst in terms of their contributions to the community of faith (beyond the mere financial offerings, which only serve to make people feel their only worth is material, with no spiritual components involved). Is MJ/BE able to say why God gives a rip about non-Jews and deliberately has grafted them in to the same Olive Tree as the natural branches, side-by-side, so to speak? If MJ/BE could do that, they might actually get other people to listen to them rather than argue with them and they might avoid the appearance of being elitist. When pressed, MJ/BE can extend itself in this direction, but it's a bit like trying to pull a horse's teeth:

James, Gentiles can GIVE everything that Jews can give. They can teach (although matters pertaining to Jewish issues / Torah / education of Jewish children, preparations for Bar Mitzva should be taught by Jews), visit the sick, tend to the widows and orphans, give to the poor (all poor, and especially the poor of Israel - per NT precedent), share the Good News of the Kingdom with everyone, etc. and etc. I can go on! -Gene Shlomovich

Keep in mind that I don't think that MJ/BE has the ultimate interpretation of the Bible at their fingertips and I don't believe that any one group has a 100% correct insight into the meaning of God's Word and Will. I do believe that we all, each and every one of us, struggle all our lives to find our place with God, as we journey step-by-step on the path of righteousness. I believe that each person individually negotiates his or her relationship with God. We all have individual paths to walk and no two people walk the same road. We also are each at different points in our roads, relative to closeness to God, understanding, insight, and faith, so developmentally, no two people are at the same spiritual level.

Also, keep in mind that we continue to labor under the weight of just a ton of tradition and interpretation in our worship lives which sometimes gets in the way of seeing each other. This is probably why no two MJ congregations are exactly alike. One may pattern themselves on the Orthodox and another on Conservative or Reform movements. Naturally, each one will think their interpretation is "better" and maybe even more "Jewish", but then, what did all this look like at the time of Yeshua or in the day of Moses, when the two tablets brought down from Sinai were still warm with the freshness of God's finger upon them?

All monotheistic religious forms invariably drift from source, at least a little, over time. We can see this in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (after all Sharia Law is more an interpretation of ancient Arabic tribal laws and less anything you'll find in the Koran). While each congregation is within their rights to choose their tradition, it's a mistake for them to apply their tradition as the only "rightness" onto individuals and communities outside their immediate confines.This accounts for the variability we see in different Messianic Jewish congregations (that are populated mainly by Jews) and explains that, to be a valid MJ, you don't necessarily have to be MJ/BE.

So who am I? First and foremost, I was made in the image of God and no person or group can take that way. Secondly, I am loved by God by virtue of my being a human being and am accepted into the Commonwealth of Faith by the blood of Yeshua, the Jewish Messiah. I can consider Yeshua my shepherd. My prayers are heard by God and Yeshua is my intercessor, sitting at His right hand. I have the intelligence and skill sets that God gave me and those are not devalued because of my ethnicity nor because my covenant standing with God is different (not better or worse) than the Jewish people.

Here's another way to put it. I heard a story once:

Many years ago, there was a very learned Rabbi who would periodically take a trip on his donkey to another town to converse and exchange knowledge with other Rabbis in his region. He had a reputation for being particularly intelligent and a skilled debater, often proving his peers and contemporaries in error on some Talmudic interpretation. He was on his way back home from one of these conferences one day, when he saw a figure in the distance walking towards him. As the figure drew closer, the Rabbi was able to make out he was a man and as the man came closer, he noticed that the man was greatly deformed. Aghast and without meaning to, as the man came up alongside the Rabbi's donkey about to pass, the Rabbi blurted out, "What a hideous person!" He was immediately embarrassed by his outburst but the deed was done and could not be taken back. The deformed man stopped, turned, and looked up at the Rabbi. The Rabbi was well known in the area and the deformed man immediately recognized him. In a slow, soft voice, the man replied, "If you don't like the way I look Rabbi, take it up with my Creator."

This is an actual Rabbinic tale I read once, but I cannot recall its source. I do not tell this story to put down anyone, but to illustrate that, if I am different from you in any way, it doesn't mean that I'm worse than you or inferior than you...it just means I'm different. If you don't like the fact that I'm different, take it up with my Creator. He's the one who made me who I am. I'm only responsible for what I do with what He created.

What am I doing here?

My wife forwarded an email to me that was sent to her by a Christian friend. The original author of the email was inviting a group of folks to an Erev Shabbat service at an (apparently) One Law gathering in the town I live in tomorrow night. It referenced an OL group that meets in LaGrande, Oregon and mentioned a "Rabbi" from Oregon who would be in attendance.

The email addresses of all the recipients were visible and a few of the names seemed familiar, but I couldn't place them exactly. It reminded me of a somewhat similar email I received last week from a fellow I know, forwarding a message about Boaz Michael being in my area next Monday night to do a teaching. I recognized a lot more of the names in the email recipients, but none of them currently attend my congregation.

It's moments like these that I realize just how fragmented "the movement" is in my little corner of the world. While we all generally operate under the same "label", because of the various theological and personal differences involved, we don't worship together, except perhaps at special events, and even then, we might not see each other for years at a time.

It's times like these (and especially lately) that I ask myself, why am I doing this? What am I doing here? Is there any meaning to what I'm looking for, or am I just spinning my wheels?

Then I look at the various comments in this and other similar blogs and my sense of fragmentation of "the community" is enhanced. We all operate within our own little bubbles, telling ourselves our own little stories about who we are, who God is, and especially, why the "other guy" is "wrong". If I were to even casually analyze the different articles I've written, the ones that have garnered the most comments have been the ones where people were arguing the most.

Is this really the united body of Messiah, coming together as one, encouraging each other, loving each other, and worshiping the One God, in fellowship?

I know, I know. I could let the proponents of MJ/BE chase me back into "the church" so I'd never be seen or heard from again, but it's not the warm, comfy cocoon for me that it is to other people. I've already explained in my previous article Forked and elsewhere why returning to the church would be a bad fit for me. I sometimes wonder why returning to a church setting seems like it would be so attractive a destination for a Gentile believer from a Jewish MJ/BE point of view. That I don't find it attractive, lets them accuse me of being both a "Christian hater" and a "Jew hater". Strange thought, that.

Maybe if I'd been "raised in the church", I'd have the necessary nostalgic feelings that would draw be back into the comfort of meeting on Sundays, sitting in a pew and singing "Onward Christian Soldier", and enjoying a good, ham brunch after services. Oh, my parents did take me to a Lutheran church when I was in Junior High. I think it was largely so I'd get a moral and religious education (my father wasn't a believer then but would come to faith after I reached adulthood and left home). The only thing I discovered is that I was either bored in the services or generally hassled by the other kids in Catechism class (I was never a popular teenager). No, nothing nostalgic there. When I was old enough, I told my parents I was never going back, and I didn't.

When I finally came to faith as an adult in my early 40s, at first, I was clueless. Injected into church life, I had no idea what to do there. It took time, but I started to make a few friends, went to Bible classes, and various other events. I was even asked to be an usher, which kind of surprised me, because I didn't think I had any role in that context.

I also discovered that Christians, at least in the church I was attending, were just as human as anybody else. There were church politics, cliques, in-groups, out-groups, agendas, and so forth. Growing the church was a big agenda item, but as far as I could tell, it wasn't motivated so much from the desire to bring the "unsaved" through our doors as to increase the esteem and reputation of the church in the community by making it bigger and bigger. I read a statistic once that said churches get bigger, not so much because unbelievers find faith and enter a particular church but because people who are already believers cycle between this church and that, looking for "programs" that fit their needs.

A lot of the questions I had about Christianity, didn't seem to have answers. I assumed it was because I was so young in my faith that I just didn't have the experience and spiritual maturity to glean these hidden gems.

Eventually (a long story) I entered the "Messianic" or "One Law" movement in a local congregation and thought I had found the answers I was looking for, or at least was on the road to discovering them. Although I found a core group of people who I could relate to and worship in brothership with, I found that people were people and, in some ways, the divisions, cliques, politics, and other separators were more intense than in the church.

Nevertheless, I'd found a niche (not all at once, but that's another long story), a way to participate, to use my skill sets, and to serve others the way I thought God wanted me to.

So here I am ten years down the road, looking at all the broken pieces of glass representing the different shards of the MJ and OL communities, like so many pieces of a broken window pane glittering in the Sun.

Like humpty dumpty, they seem impossible to join together again, but unlike that famous fairy tale egg, I don't know if they were ever in one piece to begin with.

There are days when I ask myself, what am I doing here? What's the point? Am I really doing any good? Why bother arguing and fussing with all these other folks? Everybody seems to feel as if they have an ownership over what decision I'm supposed to make about my relationship with God and particularly how I'm supposed to worship him. Is God really that overwhelmingly concerned whether I pray to him in English or in Hebrew, or does that only offend other human beings? I know that all men have sinned and have fallen short of God's expectations for us, but I also know that if I'm sincere in my heart and in my actions, repent, and cry out to Him, He will not abandon me. Neither will He denigrate me, call me names, accuse me of being a bigot, a supersessionalist, a replacement theologist, or a racist. He will accept that I'm not perfect and that my worship form isn't perfect. It's what's in the heart, not the "ceremony" that's most important to Him.

While it might be a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God, it's also the only place where I can be truly safe. Human beings, as the Bible says from time to time, aren't reliable.

There are days when I feel like saying "to heck with it". There are days when I say to myself, "This isn't worth it". It would be easier just to walk way from the blogs, from the community, and from everyone's ideas, prejudices, biases, and opinions and never look back. There are days when I want to say, "You want this mess? You can have it".

If I'm so offensive, so racist, so evil, so unacceptable, and such a threat, then I can only make you feel better by taking myself out of the picture. If I choose to stay in my home on Shabbat, read the Bible, and pray, how does that hurt you? If I choose to remove myself from the endless stream of arguing and discontent, how am I being disrespectful of you?

I don't think God wants me to do that, but there are days when the temptation is enormous. But if I don't take myself out of the stream of arguing, accusations, theological attacks, personal attacks, what else is there? What can I do instead?

Yes, we all feel safe within our little bubbles. I don't doubt that each of you feel safe in your own "bubble" synagogues, churches, and faith communities. If you didn't, why would you be there? The community of faith is the only place where we, as believers, are supposed to be safe from the dangers of the fallen world. Who ever would have guessed that the community of believers...at least in it's larger context, would be just as dangerous.

As a result of all these conversations plus my inquiries and research, I have become open to change as far as who I am and what my role is as a Gentile worshiper of the Jewish Messiah. The problem is, I don't necessarily believe that any one of you and your groups is 100% correct in your beliefs and assumptions. You all incorporate a specific collection of interpretations based as much (or more) on traditions that make you feel good about yourselves as on what it actually says in the Bible.

If it were within my power, I would strip away all of that and reduce the Word and Will of God down to its bare, naked components, then reapply them to humanity, "first to the Jew, and then to the Gentile", and eliminate ambiguity, ambition, and ego from the equation. I'd also remove the sense of fear, threat, and need for control that drives most of these blog comments and that would herd me into a church I have no essential connection to, just to make other people feel safe, regardless of what it would to do me. I would distill the Word and Will of God down to its original form and we would all conform to His will and not our own will and we would know, this is what God wants. Of course, it's not up to me.

I can only make you feel safe by either removing myself from your awareness or complying with your directives. I can only make myself feel safe by remaining within my current worship context or removing myself from all faith communities and out of the stream of Internet conversation.

Is this what God wants? Notice, I'm not asking you what you want. I'm not even asking me what I want. What does God want? Another way of asking "what am I doing here?" is to ask "why did God put me here?" There are times when I think I know. There are times when someone tells me they liked my teaching and I think that's why God put me here. There are times when I have a conversation and feel very connected to the other person through the power of God and I think that's why God put me here.There are times when I see a dirty floor in the kitchen at the place where we worship and I clean up the mess and I think that's why God put me here.

But for every one positive, loving, and compassionate contact I have with a human being and every small act of kindness I manage to accomplish, I can find ten other conversations with other believers that do not communicate the love of God for the rest of us or for humanity. This isn't God's fault, it's ours. Why do we argue with each other all the time? Is God that difficult to figure out? Why aren't we looking for the healing and connecting points between our groups? I've been looking for them. Where I can, I try to make them and build a small bridge. But the blowtorch of religious opinion and attitude is hotter than I and my bridges are fireproof. I can't do this forever. I'm burning alive in the midst of everyone's fear and anger and need and desire for them to be always "right" and everyone else to always be "wrong".

C'mon, God. Some of your people are really scary. Some of your people are really opinionated. Some of your people are more motivated by their fear than by Your love. Some of your people burn more bridges than they build and call incinerating relationships "fellowship". C'mon God. Let me know. What am I doing here?

Afterword: Yes, this is a rant. I get frustrated sometimes. I'll get over it.

Comparisons

I always have to be reading something. During my lunch hour from work, I walk ten minutes to the main branch of the Boise Public Library and spend the time in a quiet corner (when I can find one) reading. A few days ago, I was looking for some books for my wife (she gave me a list) and I came across Bruce Chilton's Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography. Apparently, Chilton has written enough that he's gotten his own wee page at Wikipedia, so I won't go over his bio in any detail here. I always find it interesting when non-Jewish Christian (I guess that's an assumption, because Chilton's bio doesn't actually say he's a believer) authors take on the Jewishness of New Testament figures and not attempt to remove the Jewishness replacing the Jew with a Gentile figure.

I'm only a couple of chapters into the book and may write a full review later, but so far, Chilton paints Paul as an intriguing young man and opens up the world of first century Judaism to his audience. However, his continual references to Paul's "conversion" on the road to Damascus makes my spider-sense tingle. How can you acknowledge the Jewishness of Paul, have written a book called Rabbi Jesus, apparently affirming the Jewishness of the Messiah, and still say that a Jewish man had to "convert" in order to worship the Jewish Messiah?

Compare that picture to the book I started reading last night, Postmissionary Messianic Judaism: Redefining Christian Engagement with the Jewish People  by Mark Kinzer, which says, in part, that Judaism and Christianity are not two separate religions and further says Christianity is an extension of Israel's worship of God. I'm only into Chapter 1 of the Kinzer book and plan to read both works in parallel, Chilton's book at the library and Kinzer's book at home. In order to crystallize the points of the Kinzer book for my review, I am finding it necessary to write copious notes as I read, which is easier in front of a computer in my home office, since I keyboard much faster than I can write with pencil and paper.

My first impression of the Kinzer book is that it's not as automatically Gentile despising as I had been lead to believe and actually says its purpose is to heal the schism between Messianic Judaism and the Christian church. I was frankly amazed by that statement since the proponents of Messianic Judaism/Bilateral Ecclesiology (MJ/BE), who seem to claim Kinzer's book as the template for their theology, strive to convince me that I must completely divorce myself from any Jewish or Hebraic context and thought and return forthwith to the Christian church, maintaining a polite and discrete distance from all things MJ/BE.

I'm putting all this in rather blunt language and there are subtleties that somewhat modify the reality of the MJ/BE representatives I've encountered, making the transactions not quite as hostile as you might imagine, but Kinzer's message (so far), seems to be one where he's talking to me, not at me.

Keep in mind, I can make no assumptions about Kinzer personally. All I have is his book and I've only read the Introduction and part of the first chapter, so I've much more material to cover. So far though, it doesn't seem as if he is trying to push Gentile believers away from him, his ideas, and his perspective.

In reading both Chilton's and Kinzer's books together, I do get two different pictures of my faith. Chilton seems to affirm that somewhere in Paul's experience as a Jewish Rabbi, he creates a new, separate religion that eventually is called Christianity. While Chilton works to present a picture of Paul's life as a Jew, raised in the diaspora, educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel, and eventually pursuing the Messianic community under the authority of Caiaphas, he takes the traditional Christian view. Paul becomes something else besides a Jewish Rabbi, though built on top of his Jewish foundation, when he actually encounters the Messiah and proceeds in his later life as the Messiah's emissary to the Gentile pagans in the world around him.

Compare that to Kinzer's stated purpose in the book he's written specifically for Christians, as showing a Judaism growing from its chosen status by God and the church, growing as an extension of that Jewish faith, as a branch growing from a tree. Paul wouldn't be converting to Christianity at all, would remain wholly and completely Jewish in his faith and relationship to the Messiah, and would be introducing the God of the Jews to the Gentile nations.

I'll keep reading and render my reports periodically, but one thing that this comparison shows me so far is that Chilton's work promotes a separation between church and (Messianic) synagogue far more effectively than does Kinzer. If anything, at least as of part way through chapter 1 of his book, Kinzer seems to actually be trying to get Gentiles to learn more about how Messianic Jews see Yeshua/Jesus.