Hilton Head Island, SC – December 26, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Jeremiah 31:31-34; Revelation 21:1-7
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.
The birth of Jesus transformed how time is reckoned. It didn’t happen immediately, though. Slowly, over a period of a few centuries, as Christianity spread, eventually it was decided in the Western World that year-numbering would be determined by the year in which Jesus was born.
There was a problem there, however. No one can be absolutely certain about the date and year in which Jesus was born. It might have been anytime between 8 or 6 of what came to be called BC, or up to what came to be called 1 AD. In time, the early Church declared the messianic birthday to be December 25. It was an arbitrary decision. They chose that date because it corresponded to a Roman winter festival at the time of the winter solstice. This was a pagan festival, but the Church superimposed Christmas onto it to turn it into a Christian holy day.
Luke’s Gospel says that when Jesus was born, there were shepherds in the fields who were keeping watch over their flocks. Biblical scholars who study the habits of sheep and shepherds say that the only time shepherds were with their sheep twenty-four hours a day was when the ewes were lambing, which was in the spring. Newborn lambs were easy pickings for foxes or wolves, or even large birds of prey. But that small footnote on pastoral enterprise suggests that the messianic birth might actually have occurred in March or April. Nevertheless, Christmas has been celebrated on December 25 for at least seventeen or more centuries. Besides, it would complicate the ecclesiastical calendar to have the Church’s two major holidays only a few weeks apart. And since Easter has never had a fixed date every year, it would even be possible for Christmas and Easter to fall on the same day. But for whatever it is worth, in the early autumn the Jews celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Yippur just nine days apart, so I suppose we could have gotten used to having Christmas and Easter very close to one another too, if we knew exactly what date on which Jesus was born, which we don’t.
All of these considerations are merely numerical. But the birth of Jesus implies something much larger, something epochal. History, at least western history, came to divide time into two segments: “BC” – “Before Christ”, and “AD” (Anno Domine – The Year of Our Lord.”) Why the letters of the first epoch are derived from English and those of the second epoch come from Latin I cannot say. Probably it has something to do with the Roman Catholic Church naming the Christian Epoch with a Latin term, since Latin then was its official language.
However, it is the meaning behind these two designations, BC and AD, upon which I want to concentrate in this sermon. The very term BC, Before Christ, suggests the era dominated by the Jews, and AD suggests the era of the Christians. Obviously there were a great many more Gentiles than Jews before the time of Jesus, and there have been more non-Christians than Christians since the time of Jesus, but BC and AD imply two distinct time periods. First there was the biblical period in the Western World in which Jews were the dominant religious group, and then the time when Christians were the dominant religious group.
One factor countless Christians seem either to forget or to refuse to acknowledge it is that Jesus was a Jew. He was not a Christian. He would have no concept of what the word “Christian” even meant. The word did not exist until several years after Jesus died, and then it was first used in a derogatory way.
Christianity means nothing apart from Judaism. The ministry of Jesus was based on his understanding of the Jewish Bible, a term which to Christians means what we call the Old Testament. Jesus inspired the New Testament, but he had no part in the writing of it, nor could he anticipate that it would be written. We can perhaps imagine that Jesus would even have disapproved of some of the things the New Testament says about him and about God. He might also have objected to dividing time and history into the two epochs, BC and AD. All that is speculation, though.
Before delving further into what this sermon is about, I want to highlight two related matters. First, we are about to enter the year 2022. Technically, it will not be 2022 to many Jews, especially Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews. Instead it will be 5782, although the year won’t change until September 25, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. If you wonder how it is 5782, it is because long ago a Jewish council declared that the world was created in the year that Christians call 3761 BC. There was a rationale they used to figure that out, but I am not going to try to explain it, and I doubt that you would agree with it anyway. In addition, 2022 will not be not the year 2022 to Muslims. It will be 1444. Their calendar begins in the year that Muhammad fled Mecca on the Hijrah ,(literally, “the flight,”) and went to Medinah, which occurred in 622 in the Christian calendar. Therefore Muslims divide the two epochs into “BH” and “AH,” curiously “Before [in English] the Hijrah [in Arabic]”) and, also curiously, “Anno [in Latin] Hijrah [in Arabic]” (the Year of the Hijrah). Go figure. Is language wonderfully adaptable, or what?
The point, Christian people, is that not all people in the world are Christian people, and thus they do not subscribe to the Christian concept of how time should be recorded. How any particular people reckon time is ultimately a social convention, and is not universally accepted by everyone. Furthermore, in the last half century or so, Jews, especially Israelis, have tended to divide the two epochs by the letters “BCE” and “CE.” BCE means “Before the Common Era,” which really means “The Jewish Era.” CE means “The Common Era,” and that means Jews and Christians living together in the western world, meaning everywhere from Palestine west in Europe all the way to Britain, and then eventually to the Americas. Understandably, many Jews soured on the abbreviations “BC” and “AD.”
Are you grasping this? If you have never thought about any of this before, do you see that the division of time into two epochs varies from one religious group to another, and from one part of the world to another? In his great paraphrase of Psalm 90, which we sang as our opening hymn, Isaac Watts wrote, “Time, like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away.” If that sounds sexist, it is, sort of, except that that line was far more acceptable in 1710 when he wrote it than it is in 2021, when the politically correct version says, “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all of us away.”
But let us return to the main theme. What I am attempting to help you understand is that we never would have heard of Jesus if he had been born in India, China, Japan, Africa, anywhere in the Americas, or in Australia. Jesus became the Christ only by his having been born in the Roman province of Judea at the end of the first century BC or in the first year of what came to be called the first century AD. It was Judaism that solidified Jesus’ place in human history. The totality of the three short years of his public ministry was determined by Jesus being steeped in the contents of the Hebrew Bible. Had he been born anywhere other than Judea, he would have been completely unknown, no matter how brilliant a thinker and preacher he might have been. Western history, and to some degree world history, became divided into two parts: the years before Jesus, and the years after Jesus, because Jesus of Nazareth was a first-century Jew.
There could have been no New Testament had there not first been what we call an Old Testament. There could not have been a Christianity had there not first been a Judaism, or what eventually evolved into a Judaism. In addition, there could not have been an Islam had there not first been a Judaism and a Christianity. Muhammad was familiar with both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Bible, except that he, who was illiterate, was familiar with both Testaments from an Arabic translation. In other words, the three great western religions --- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam --- are closely related to one another, despite the three ways that they calculate the numbers of every year. However, if you know history, you know that close relationship has always managed to appear very divided and elusive.
If nothing I have said up to this point either interests you or makes sense to you, here is what I really want you to grasp; it has been useful for many millions of people for the past two millennia to split time into two parts: the years before and after the birth of Jesus, and the years before and after the escape of Muhammad from Mecca to Medinah. The three religions represented by those two divisions signify the pivotal importance of two men on subsequent history. Christianity became the dominant religion from perhaps the beginning of the third century CE up until the sixteenth century, when there may have been about an equal number of Christians and Muslims for a couple of centuries. Then, when many European nations established colonies in North and South America, Asia, and Africa, Christianity again outnumbered Islam until the 21st century CE. Now there are nearly as many Muslims worldwide as Christians.
But what about the Jews? How are their numbers doing? There are perhaps as many Jews who consider themselves Jews by birth as those who consider themselves to be religious Jews. By a very long tradition, anyone whose mother is a Jew is considered a Jew by Jews. At most there are only eighteen million Jews in the entire world, but there are over two billion Christians and almost two billion Muslims. Why are there so few Jews, when the spiritual step-children of the Jews are so numerous?
The explanation for that is simple, if also befuddling. In general, Jews have never proselytized. That is, to use a Christian term, they have never tried to “evangelize” anyone who was not Jewish. The reason for that is because of that “Jewish mother thing.” If your mom was a Jew, you’re a Jew, whether or not you ever attend a synagogue, even on the High Holy Days. Furthermore, because of innumerable pogroms against Jews by both Christians and Muslims, Jews have never been able to propagate nearly as successfully as the “pogromers.” Religious and cultural animosity against Jews by their spiritual step-children has kept their numbers small ever since the birth of Jesus.
Nevertheless, despite their astonishingly small numbers, Jews have been the leaven in the western religious loaf from the time of Jesus and Muhammad to the present day. Eastern religion has had very little influence on western religion, although to the extent that both Christianity and Islam have made considerable inroads into parts of Central and East Asia, western religion has turned many Asian nations into Muslim-majority nations, and a few Asian countries have fairly large Christian minorities as well.
So, you are saying to yourselves, is this nothing more than a quick glimpse of world history? Now I can say that at last we come to our two scripture readings.
The prophet Jeremiah lived in Jerusalem at the time the Babylonian army came and destroyed the city, taking its leaders to Babylon as captives. This was early in what both Jews and Christians call the sixth century BCE. Jeremiah is a gloomy prophet. He saw this collapse coming, and he told his fellow Jews that they deserved what they were going to get.
But Jeremiah also held out the prospect for something much better which would happen at some time in the future. He quotes God as saying, “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord” (Jer. 31:31-32). That covenant was written on two stone tablets, and was explained in much greater detail in the first five books of the Old Testament, called “the Torah,” the Law , by the Jews. So Jeremiah says God says, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (my italics).
The Hebrew word “covenant” (berith) means promise or contract or agreement. In the Bible, a covenant is a promise of God to people and of people to God. This new covenant, of which Jeremiah spoke, would not be inscribed in stone; it would be inscribed in flesh, as people incorporated its teachings into their inner being, their hearts.
Christians have always made much more of Jeremiah 31:31-34 than Jews have. We see it as referring to the New Testament. (Testamentum, from the Latin, means the same thing as berith in Hebrew, or “covenant” in English.)
Is the New Testament really New? Well, yes --- and no. Jesus did give some new interpretations to Hebrew scriptures, but the God he proclaimed is the same God as the God proclaimed by the Christians - - - or the Muslims, for that matter. As the Book of Ecclesiastes says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” And the new Christian or Muslim stuff is just Jewish stuff packaged differently for different kinds of people. Whether it is BC or BCE or BH, or AD or CE or AH, “God is working His purpose out, as year succeeds to year,” as it says in one of those excellent hymns that I know that no one else seems to know, and therefore I didn’t choose it for today, even though it would have been very apropos.
Or there is the opening verse of the next to last chapter in the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.” I have no idea exactly what John of Patmos saw in his revelation, but whatever it was, it suggests that God is not finished with what He plans to do on the earth, and marvelous new things happen in every new year.
“Our God, our help in ages past/ Our hope for years to come/ Be thou our guard while life shall last/ And our eternal home.” The Jews started something that will never stop, and the Christians and the Muslims also took it up. God’s covenants with the peoples of the world work differently in different places. The old and the new are joined together. For Christians, that happens most convincingly in the person of a baby born in Judea at the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. “Silent night, holy night/ Son of God, love’s pure light/ Radiant beams from thy holy face/ With the dawn of redeeming grace/ Jesus, Lord, at thy birth/ Jesus, Lord, at thy birth.” “BC/AD; BCE/CE.” The second year of COVID is over; might it disappear in 5782 or in 2022 or in 1444? What a blessing that would be! Over the next twelve months, we shall find out.