I suppose that it not really fair to refer to the Pope as "the old man."  He is, after all, only  79 years old, and by some standards, including standards set by some people in this church, that is not very old at all.  He does have Parkinson's, which causes him to move heavily and with difficulty, and so he conveys an image of age and frailty that is not quite accurate.

And, on the other hand, it is not quite accurate to refer to the Wailing Wall, as being a the last remaining wall of the Temple of Solomon.  It was apparently, a retaining wall built during the era of Herod, to shore up the land that supported the Temple.  But it's the closest thing we have.
These small inaccuracies aside, it was remarkable event to see Pope John Paul 2 at prayer at the Wailing Wall.  We recited his prayer from that event here today.  I changed it slightly today, altering his words to say "God of our ancestors" instead of "God of our Fathers."  And I substituted the word "solidarity" instead of "brotherhood."  I felt that both were in line with the Pope's intentions.  But like the Pope, today we prayed in the name of Christ our Lord, which is not our usual custom here.  I don't think that he would have recognized it as his prayer anymore without it.

The news coverage of the Pope's visit to Israel became dominated by those stories about close semantic analysis that seem to take over once in a while.  What were the words that the Pope used to apologize for the Church's role in the holocaust?  Where they the right words?  What words did the Pope use to talk about Palestine?  Did they or did they not signal a support for an independent Palestinian state?
But beneath those issues a much more important and fundamental transformation was being enacted, a process that has been unfolding for nearly 35 years now.   Starting with Vatican II, and work that done at the initiative of Pope John 23, the Roman Catholic Church has dramatically revised its position concerning Jewish people and Judaism, reversing nearly 2000 years of history.   This is a reappraisal of some teachings of the church that were made before there was even a church, judgments that the church made in the first century of its existence, teachings that were mistakes and which have had disastrous consequences, up to an including the pogroms and the Holocaust.   Pope John Paul 2 has taken up John 23rd work in this area.  (It is interesting that both men had first hand experience in the Holocaust era.)

What has changed?  By the end of the first century, by the time that the Gospel of John about 100 CE was written, the early church had come to the following conclusion about the Jews:  Israel had been unfaithful to God, God had sent his only begotten Son into the world, and the Jews had killed him.  The covenant between God and Israel was broken and a New Covenant, one between the Christian church and God, had replaced it.   The righteous and faithful Jews had become Christians. The ones who did not become Christians had in effect, rejected God and thus stood, for all time, as a symbol of that tendency among all humanity who would turn away from, that would rebel against, and reject God.   I do not have to tell you how these teachings have been used and understood for two millennia.

The Gospel of John puts these words in the mouth of  Jesus, "No One comes to the Father except through Me".  Later on, in the patristic period, it was concluded that no salvation was possible outside of the church.  No one could come into a right relationship with God, except through membership and participation in the Christian church.
And in the Middle Ages, when the Protestants split from the Catholics in the Protestant Reformation, most Protestants adopted the same teachings about Judaism. They may have disagreed with Catholics about a lot of things, but the early Protestants still saw the Jews as race of people who had chosen  rebellion against God.  You cannot tell the difference between statements made by Martin Luther and statements by Adolph Hitler about Judaism.  What I am trying to explain is that this anti-Jewishness was not a cultural prejudice, or a socio-economic factor, but that it was a theological judgment.  The Jews stood in a completely different relationship to God than did the Christian.

And these teachings had other implications as well.  By the same logic, adherents of other religions in the world, had to meet the same standard.  Once a person heard about Jesus Christ, and did not join the Church, then they joined the ranks of the Jews, the rejecters of God.  And if you were a child of the church, and found that you could no longer believe the teachings and doctrines of the church, for whatever reason, you, too, joined the ranks of the Jews -- a rejecter of God, a rebel against God, and you were to be condemned.  Many here have told me that they have experienced that judgment in their own lives.

So Christian relationships with all other religions and with all forms of skepticism,  have been for 2000 years, extensions of the Christian relationship to the Jews -- one of exclusionism and condemnation.  And it is these exclusivist claims that Christianity makes that many have found to be objectionable.
So it is a very important development that over the last third of this century, the Roman Catholic church, has, at the highest levels, reversed this position regarding the Jews.  They have done this, not just on the level of ethics, but on the level of theology.

Let me explain.  They have not just said that it isn't ethical or moral to hate the Jews -- saying that Jews have basic human rights.  Nor have they just reversed it on the level of history.  The Nostra Aetate document repudiates the version of the story that says that the Jews killed Jesus, and further says that it doesn't matter who killed Jesus, because Jesus Himself forgave them from the Cross.

It is the position of the Roman Catholic church now that the Covenant between Israel and God was not broken because of the life and work of Jesus.  It is the position of the Roman Catholic Church now that the Jews never did reject God, and that God has never withdrawn God's affection and election from them.

In other words, even those Jews who came out and heard Jesus speak, and then went home and decided that nope, that boy is not the messiah, still remained in the unbreakable and inescapable love of God.

In other words, what the Church has been teaching about the Jews for 2000 years was wrong.  And by implication, what they have been teaching for 2000 about other world religions might be wrong as well.

Some Catholic thinkers are digesting the implications of this.  They understand that it means that they don't understand God as much as they thought they did.  It seems that God has an unbroken covenant with the Jews, and  that God has another covenant with the Christian church, and that the one does not cancel out the other. And if God has two different covenants with portions of Humanity, then, why not 3 or 4 or 40 or 500?  Perhaps all the religions of the world are means of grace, inspired in some way by a gracious God anxious to reconcile all people to God's self.

But I am running on ahead of these Roman Catholic thinkers now -- running ahead, as if to say, look, I know, we know where you are headed, we know where you will end up.  You will end up someday where we are all ready.  For we believe that all the world religions are equally true, and equally ways to get to God.

But do we?  Actually, I think because we come from a tradition of skepticism and doubt and questioning and humanism, we are tempted to say that we believe all the world's religions are equally true, because we actually believe that they are equally false.  That is to say that all of them contain elements of supernatural myth and magic and story and legend and while all of those elements are true, they are true in the way that a novel is true, or a good movie, which is to say that they are not scientifically true, but really not true, or false.  What is true in every religion, we tend to think, is that part which is only suggested by all of that stuff, the mystery of God as received by the mystic of every religion, of every sect.

Which works, too.  But that theological position has its costs too.  It ends up being grounded in personal experience alone, and so it is hard to teach to the children, it has trouble agreeing on common worship, it loses it grounding in one story.  It can accommodate the sophisticated doubter from any tradition, the mystic of any tradition, but it has trouble accommodating the simple, earnest, believer of any tradition.  The Roman Catholic church, I believe, will end up in a different place than we have, as they reconsider their traditional teachings in the light of a very diverse world.

Let us leave the Catholics over there and turn to us, to our tradition.  One of the distinguishing features of Unitarian Universalism is that, for a church tradition coming out of Protestant Christianity, it has for decades included many who are Jewish.  Some estimates are that 10% of UU's in North America consider themselves Jewish or having Jewish ancestry.   And for the most part, this has been a fairly successful relationship.

There are two reasons why it has worked.  One is ethical; we are  committed to tolerance and right relationships within our church communities.  The other is theological; we come from that branch of Christianity that has viewed Jesus as more human than divine.  This has made for common ground.  You see there has always been a link between believing that Jesus was the Son of God and believing that the Jews were in rebellion against God.  If you believed one, then you pretty much had to believe the other.  Well, no more.

One of my theological visions of the Unitarian Universalist Church is that we can grow into a place where Jews and Christians can meet each other once again.  O, we could be a place like those first century bodies in which the children of the One God, some followers of Jesus, some not, some from Gentile world met and kept the Sabbath together.

Where the story of Jesus was still so fresh and alive and people had not yet decided what it all meant.
Where, as we will in our church, the people ate the ritual meal at Passover, and remembered how God had liberated them with a mighty hand from bondage in the mightiest Empire the world had ever seen.

Where the cross was not yet a symbol of blame directed at one group, but an awful reminder of the power that another Great Empire had to crush the dreams of the many.

And where the cross could be still seen a simple remembrance of how God can make a way, when there is no way, just as God did by the shores of the Red Sea, when Pharoah's Army got drownded.

To imagine and remember our way back to before the church and the synagogue were divided,

To be with Paul as he struggled to make sense of how God could call two groups of people in such different ways and still be God of all,

To remember and imagine our way back before we started "hitting people over God", before the holocaust, the pogroms, the inquisitions, the crusades, and the long centuries of slaughter and hate,

To remember and imagine our way back to before the day that faith meant believing in some doctrine or formula
to pick up the broken threads of history and reweave them,

To put Now and Not Yet back together into one promise from one God for One people and one Earth.
And God's Mercy and Grace were all around us.

Amen