My name is Michael Mosettig. I have been coming to St. Thomas since November 08. My Gospel reference is John 19, verses 12-17, preceding the Crucifixion.

Unlike some in this parish, my Christian and Protestant upbringing was as benign as it was uneventful.  My lapsed Austrian Catholic father and raised Baptist mother, for whom convenience mattered far more than theology, sent my brother and me to the closest Protestant church in walking distance, Takoma Park Presbyterian.  We were among good people, we learned nice Sunday School stories, absorbed the rich language of the King James version of the Bible still being used then (yes, I am old) ---and I wish never abandoned --and the warmth and strength of church music. Whatever austere Calvinism was preached there sailed right over my young head.

Nevertheless, I managed to grow up culturally Jewish ---in three DC public schools  where half my classmates were Jewish, through marriage, through practicing journalism and covering politics --two crafts with high rates of Jewish participation. And perhaps more inferentially than I imagined at the time, in a house often filled with the accents of refugee Jewish scientists from Europe, some of whom I would only learn after the death of my father, were rescued through his efforts. The two current manifestations of this cultural immersion --some command of Yiddish and my production and cooking of what has often been called the best Episcopalian chopped liver on the east coast of the United States.

After high school, I followed an oft-trod path away from church life. And deeply engaged in the study of politics and modern history, I came to ask a question framed around a vernacular expression of the early 60s...out to lunch. The kind of line you would hear on Mad Men...just not there, out of it.  So I often asked:. Was God out to lunch for the first half of the 20th Century that began in the trenches of the Somme and Verdun, through Dachau and Auschwitz and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.? Human history has been forever entwined with violence, war and atrocity, but what separated this half century from all that preceded it was the power of the modern industrial state and its bureaucratic machinery dedicated to destruction and annihilation. 

And some years later, reading one of my favorite novelists -- Charles McCarry-- I was hit with these jolting words -- 2000 years of European Christianity led to Auschwitz. Whoa. That's a lot to absorb in one sentence. Two thousand years of European Christianity led to Auschwitz. 

What the novelist disposed of in a line that had nothing to do with the plot or characters of his book --which is the wont of novelists--  was more fully formed in the work of another writer ---perhaps best described as a Catholic dissident --James Carroll, a seminarian, son of an Air Force general whose moral consciousness was shaped in the fervid argumentation of the Vietnam War era. The book is Constantine's Sword.

I will not attempt to condense in one sentence or paragraph some 700 densely argued pages of the Catholic and Jewish theology, but I will take one quote employed by Carroll from a Jewish theologian, Richard Rubenstein:  "Though there were other social and economic conditions which were necessary before the theological antecedents of anti-Semitism couldbe turned into the death camps of our times, only the terrible accusation, known and taught to every Christian in earliest childhood, that the Jews are the killers of Christ can account for the depth and persistence of this supreme hatred."

From Takoma Park Presbyterian Church, I had no recollection of Palm Sunday or Good Friday tableaux or memories of the crowd shouting for the death of Jesus. That came, when two decades ago, I returned to church, specifically St. Columba's Episcopal Church, up in Tenleytown, guided there curiously enough by a column in a famously Zionist magazine, The New Republic. If they are raving about the intellectual rigor of an Episcopal rector, I better check it out.

But St. Columba's was big into tableaux, dramatizations and group readings.  So on my first Palm Sunday there, I was more than taken a back by their Passion Play. I had never seen a Passion Play and decades removed from church going, I had an appallingly high Biblical illiteracy. Suddenly, all this shouting about the Jews this and the Jews that.What's going on here?  Am I innorthwest Washington in the last decade of the 20th century or in Tsarist Russia waiting for the Cossacks to raid the shtetls?  Do I sit through this or walk out?   I did not walk out and fortunately did sit through numerous thoughtful sermons about the responsibility for thecrucifixion, which made very clear that did not rest with the Jews.  But words matter, and subsequent rectors did scrub the language of Palm Sunday performances.

I cannot attempt in this brief homily to answer questions that have tortured theologians and philosophers from all strains of organized religion and thought since the end of World War II. Vatican II did specifically absolve Jews of responsibility for the death of Christ, and the current Pope has said the same in his most recent book. Yet the Pope of World War II, who never denounced Hitler, is on the road to canonization. And it is not as if Protestants get a pass, from James Carroll or anyone else. For all that we honor the martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoffer, there were dozens or hundreds of Protestant pastors in Germany who stood by silently or even went as far as draping their altars with swastikas. These were, after all, the heirs of the founder of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, who also happened to be one of history's most virulent anti-Semites. Closer to  home, our most famous parishioner and vestrymen, President Roosevelt, and the Congress of that time --reflecting the views of much of the  American  public-- did little to raise the immigration quotas for European refugees. And in the Oval Office, FDR resisted the entreaties of some of his closest associates to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz, which would have slowed down the mass killing they knew was taking place. 

As we approach once more our most solemn day in the Christian calendar, we ponder anew the words of our own Gospels---of a defining moment of Christianity, the agony of the Crucifixion, depicted in countless works of art on church and museum walls -- and wonder what sinews of history and witness and testimony bind those words with the sufferings of millions nearly two millennia later, rarely recorded but still shimmering images in our imaginations --- of trains clattering through Central Europe, their box  cars and cattle cars crammed with human cargo -- of men, women and yes, two million children,-- destined for death only/ only because of the way they chose -- or were chosen --to worship God.

 Amen.....