Delta frequent fliers will know the following proverb. Even if your destination is hell, you have to make a connection in Atlanta. I have been there many times. A Jewish man and I once got into a conversation somehow about Christiainity in that airport. He made a comment about the Apostle Paul that was critical - polite, but critical. I don't remember exactly what he said. I only remember that it failed to take into account a most important fact. So, I responded - politely, I hope - that after all, the apostle was himself a Jew. I wasn't trying to win a debate, just correct an oversight. To his credit he acknowledged the point, but his mistake illustrated a larger reality. Among present-day Jews and Gentiles it often comes as a shock to remember that all the first Christians were Jews.

With the possible exception of Luke and Acts all the Christian writings that we cherish were written by Jews. All the apostles were Jewish. The language and imagery of our faith is mostly Jewish.

That helps explain further the profound disappointment of Paul and others that instead of increasing in influence among Jews, Christianity was diminishing, even while it was increasing in influence among Gentiles. Romans 9-11 offers Paul's best attempt to explain that unexpected turn of events. In chapter nine he came at it from the perspective of God's purpose. That got us into the doctrine of election. At the end of chapter nine he came in from a different perspective. Let's begin with verse 27-29.

The Notion of a Remnant
Isaiah cries out concerning Israel: "Though the number of the Israelites be like the sand by the sea, only the remnant will be saved. For the Lord will carry out his sentence on earth with speed and finality." It is just as Isaiah said previously: "Unless the Lord Almighty had left us descendants, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been like Gomorrah."

The notion of a remnant is very old. When Isaiah wrote about a remnant, he had in mind the catastrophic destruction of Israel by the ancient Assyrian armies. When the destruction ended, only a small remnant of Israel survived. Even today, people talk about the ten lost tribes of Israel. I don't believe they are really lost, but they ceased as a political reality.

The Christian apostle saw a new application of Isaiah's words. The catastrophe in his day was not military but spiritual. Only a small remnant of Israel believed that Jesus was the Messiah.

For the apostle that was reason for hope. God's purpose had not failed in Israel, but it was being carried forward by a minority, by a remnant. Paul held on to this, and in chapter eleven he will set forth the implications of a believing remnant for the future of Israel and the Church.

The Stumbling Stone
To appreciate the new perspective that begins in verses 30-33 we need to reflect one more time on chapter nine. Chapter nine differes from chapter ten, because it is answering a different question. In chapter nine the question was not, "What caused the widespread failure of the majority of Jews?" The great question of chapter nine goes back to Romans 9:6: It is not as though God's word (God's purpose) had failed. Did the failure of Jews to receive Jesus as Messiah mean that God's purpose had failed?

Chapter nine answers, "No." The reason it did not fail was because God's purpose was because God's purpose did not depend on Israel's moral achievements, efforts or desires. It depended on God's action. As a result, chapter nine emphasizes election and predestination. That doctrine focuses on God's initiative to enlarge the circle of mercy among the human family.

The question Paul answers in chapter ten is different. It asks, "Why did Israel fail?" It is instructive that the doctrine of election never appears in Paul's answer. What does appear is human responsibility and free will. Israel's failure stemmed from Israel's choices freely made in the face of adequate knowledge.

Verses 30-33 reflect this perspective. What then shall we say? We have to say that the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith: but Israel, who pursued (that is the language of choice) a law of righteousness, has not attained it. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the "stumbling stone." As it is written: "See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame."

The language of pursuing, attaining and stumbling belongs to the sphere of free will and human responsibility. Israel's failure to receive Jesus as the Messiah is not attributed to divine election but to human free will. The language continues throughout chapter ten.

Paul shows his broken heart again in verse one. Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. There goes the apostle again, keeping in step with the Spirit. Faced with the heartbreak of Jewish hostility to Jesus, the apostle was moved, not by the passion to know or to retaliate, but by the passion to love. His heart was in the right place, and so he was able to keep his head amid the dark realities where it would be easy to lose your head and turn your heart to stone.

In verses 2-3 he continues to lay responsibilitiy for widespread Jewish failure in the free will of the chosen people. For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God (that's free will), but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own ( a free human act), they did not submit (human responsibility) to God's righteousness.

The great theological statement of chapter ten comes next in verse four. Christ is the end of the law so that there may be rigteousness for everyone who believes. Christ is the end of the law in the sense that He was the goal of the law. The Torah pointed to Him, and when He came, the Torah did not wither away, but it required a new understanding. Much of Judiasm rejected such an understanding. They did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own. In what follows, the apostle wants to show how Christ opens up the path of faith as the basis of a new identity for both Jews and Gentiles. Verses 8-13 cut to the chase.

Confession and Believing
I have chosen to pass over verses 5-8. Paul's quotation from Deuteronomy requires an explanation that is too tedious. The point of his quote is that the message about what pleases God is accessible, because it appeals straight to the heart.

Now, in verses 9-10 he expresses that message in memorable language. We proclaim that if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.

Please note what these verses do not talk about: baptism, joining the Church, even repentance. What they talk about clearly are the freely chosen human acts that lay in human souls the foundation of salvation. One is the confession, Jesus is Lord. The other is belief in our heart that God raised Jesus from the dead. Those two human acts are not equal. Here is what I mean.

It is pretty clear about the resurrection. Either a person believes that God raised Jesus from the dead, or one does not believe it. But confessing Jesus is Lord seems fuzzy to us. That is because we are too familiar with Christian language. We think a person could just say, "Jesus is Lord," and not really mean it. Let's take a closer look at what it means biblically to confess.

The confession, Jesus is Lord, is not lip service. When we confess, "Jesus is Lord," we are "not merely describing an inward feeling or experience: we are affirming what we believe to be true, and therefore what is true for everyone. The test of our commitment to this belief will be that we are ready to publish it, to share it with others, and to invite their judgment and - if necessary - their correction. If we refrain from this exercise, if we try to keep our belief a private matter, it is not belief in the truth," it is not confession, (Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 22). To confess that Jesus is Lord is to take a position and engage the world around us from that vantage point.

I came across a great example of this last week. A friend e-mailed me from outside the US. He lives in a predominantly Muslim country, and there he has routine contact with university students. He told me the following story.

A young, Muslim woman "is about to graduate from a local university. Feeling intense pressure to write a good dissertation, (she) prayed in the name of (Jesus) that her work would be acceptable. When her professor approved her work, (she) was cut to the quick because (Jesus) answered her prayer! (She) cannot but love a God who cares about her every need, so ulike the God of ISlam!

"(She) now wants to take off her Muslim lead covering and go to church! But this would alienate her from family and friends, and she would lose a rare opportunity to share her faithin in (Jesus)." the Christians there are helping her work through how to be faithful to Christ and not alienate her family. That's confession in the biblical sense.

In verses 11-13 Paul gives this assurance to all who confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in their hearts that God raised Him from the dead. As the Scripture says, "Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame." For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile - the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for , "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."

Do you believe that God raised Him from the dead? Have you confessed that Jesus is Lord? On His behalf I say to all of us, "Believe and confess!" On that foundation our new identity as the chosen people of God rises.

The Failure of Israel
Christians have long used verses 14-17 to advocate missions. We are not wrong to do so, but today, I want you to see what Paul had in mind when he wrote those verses. Listen to them.

How, then, can they calll on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can theyhear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!"

Verse 18 brings home Paul's point. But I ask: Did they (my fellow Jews) not hear? Of course they did: "their voice (the voice of the Christian messengers) has gone out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world." Israel's failure was not a failure to hear.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
I want to end this sermon on a note of mystery. In the ministry of Jesus, a lethal division of loyalty took place between Jesus' followers and those with a different view of Judaism. With the Apostle Paul's mission to the Gentiles, a similar division took place within the Church that only deepened the divide between Church and Synagogue. With the Roman destruction of the temple and Palestinian Judaism Jews and Christians went increasingly separate ways in the world. And, yet, they were not so separate after all.

Rabbinic Judaims began to take shape, as Jews, driven again from their ancient homeland, began building a Jewish way of life in the cities and towns of the Roman Empire. In those same cities and towns the Church took root. By the rise of the Middle Ages the old Roman Empire had become the Holy Roman Empire. Europe had become Christiand from Ireland to Istanbul and from the Arctic to the Sahara.

Interestingly, "the Jews were the only non-Christians tolerated in the Christian world," (Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 44). "The attitude toward them was ambivalent. having perfidiously rejectedthe savior, Jews had to be punished for their obduracy. But because the second coming of the Christian savior was somehow thought to be connected with the conversion of the Jews, Christendom generally also thought it necessary not to eradicate the Jewish presence completely but to tolerate it, though in an inferior position," (ibid.).

The strange and often strained symbiosis of Church and synagogue had survived the first millennium of the Christian era, and in the opening century of the second millennium played itself out on a much larger stage and with consequences that were to affect the planet. We will talk about some of them in the context of Romans eleven.

To what purposes had God preserved Israel? What is the meaning of the strange and often strained, centuries-long symbiosis of Church and synagogue? Is the doctrine of election still a useful category of thought? Does it have a bearing on the salvation of humanity? In other words, what does God have to do with it? Stay tuned.