A sermon for Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation,
the online gathering of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church,
November 22nd 2020
Killing the Scholars and Burning the Books in 210–213 BC
Anonymous 18th century Chinese painted album leaf; Bibliothèque nationale Paris
Jeremiah 36.1-8, 21-23, 27-28; 31.31-34
Have you ever noticed
that
sometimes megalomaniac leaders
just don’t
know when to quit?
Can you imagine the kind of leader
whose
denial of the truth might lead them to extraordinary lengths
to suppress
those who try to speak truth to their power?
From controlling the media, to undermining fair elections,
to
silencing voices that challenge them,
these tactics are as old as the hills
and as
contemporary as today.
From King Jehoiakim of Judah,
to the ideologies
of Communism and Fascism during the twentieth century
to the
denial of the election result in Trump’s America,
some leaders
will do anything, literally anything, to hold on to power.
There’s a famous quote from a play written 1821,
by the
German writer Heinrich Heine,[1]
about the burning of the Quran during the Spanish
Inquisition.
Heine said,
‘Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.’[2]
Ironically, his own works were themselves a century later on
the list of books
destined
for the Nazi book burning purges.
And, again and again, through human history,
we have
seen it to be true,
on every
side of the political and religious divide,
that where
freedom of expression is smothered,
and
independence of thought is extinguished,
so the
destruction of persons inexorably follows.
Words become flesh,
and both
are burned.
From the Spanish Inquisition to IS militants,
from
Farenheit 451 to Orwell’s 1984,
book burning has functioned as a potent tool of suppression
and control.
And one of the earliest examples is found in the Old
Testament,
in our
reading today from the book of Jeremiah,
where the King Jehoiakim of Judah sought to silence the
words of the prophet.
The background here is that we are in the late 7th
century,
some
hundred years further on from last week’s reading
from the
opening of the book of Isaiah.
Jeremiah’s ministry spans the fall of the southern kingdom
of Judah
to the
Babylonians, and the beginning of the time of exile in Babylon.
It also sees the ending of the Davidic monarchy
as the
descendants of the great King David
degenerate
into hypocrisy and corruption.
So Jeremiah spends most of his early ministry
proclaiming
God’s judgement against the king and the Temple,
accusing
the temple of being a ‘Den of Thieves’ (7.11)
a critique
later revisited, of course, by Jesus himself.
Perhaps understandably, Jeremiah made himself rather
unpopular with the King,
and by the
time we get to our reading for today,
he’d
been excluded from the Temple and the Palace altogether.
His time as a special advisor to the King had come to ae
end,
and he’d been
fired and given his marching orders.
The King doesn’t want to hear what Jeremiah has to say.
But never one to give up, Jeremiah writes it all down,
and sends
it with Baruch to be read to the King.
And as the King hears again the subversive critique from
Jeremiah,
he takes a
knife, cuts the text up, and burns it in the fire.
It is a vivid example of the kind of opposition
that those
who critique social evils can usually expect to face.
Those who take a stand with Jeremiah,
in naming
evil and calling it out,
can expect those who do not want to hear that message
to cut them
dead and burn their words.
And this is true today,
just as
much as it was true in the 7th century BCE
Just think of the way those who would speak inconvenient
truths in our world are treated,
from the
shameful belittling of Greta Thunberg in the British media
for
her message of climate crisis,
to
accusations of bullying against our political leaders;
those
who would speak truth are gagged and bound.
Of course, the truth cannot be silenced forever,
and
Jeremiah’s words have endured
long after
Jehoiakim’s power had faded.
Another, more recent, example of the burning of scripture
comes from
here in London, just under 500 years ago…
One of my great treasures is a photograph of the front page
of John’s Gospel,
taken from
the first edition of William Tyndale’s New Testament.
It was given to me by my College Principal, a certain Brian
Haymes,
when I completed
my studies at Bristol Baptist College.
Tyndale was the first person to translate the Bible into
English
from the
original languages,
and he is the person Melvyn Bragg once called,
‘The Most
Dangerous Man in Tudor England’
There are only three copies remaining of Tyndale’s first
edition of the Bible in English,
because
they were seized as they entered the country in 1526,
and
burned in bonfires in London,
overseen by
Cardinal Wolsey and Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London.
In scenes which could come straight from Wolf Hall,
six
thousand of his New Testaments were burned
on
the steps of Old St Paul’s Cathedral,
despite
Anne Boelyn and Thomas Cromwell’s efforts
to
reconcile Tyndale to the King.
One of the three surviving copies ended up in the library at
Bristol Baptist College,
but is now
in the possession of the British Library,
who have it
on permanent display just up the road from Bloomsbury at St Pancras.
When he heard that his Bibles has been burned,
Tyndale
famously remarked ‘no doubt they will burn me too, if it be God’s will.’
And sure enough, a few years later,
he was
caught, and burned at the stake.
You see, books are more than words:
they are
ideas made flesh,
they create
worlds,
and they invite us to enter into the worlds they create,
and to
start living those worlds into reality.
Books are dangerous,
words are
inflammatory,
and ideas are incendiary.
A similar story could be told about Martin Luther,
whose
writings were condemned by the Pope in 1520,
and ordered
to be burned.
Luther famously himself burned a copy of the Papal Bull Exsurge DomineI
at the Elster Gate in Wittenberg
almost
exactly 500 years ago (10 December).
A Bishop burned Bibles for being in the wrong language,
a Pope
burned the writings of a reformer for challenging his authority
the
reformer burned the writings of the pope for trying to silence him.
Catholics burned the Koran for being the wrong religion
Nazis burned
books that threatened their ideology.
Jehoiakim
burned the words of the prophet because he didn’t want to hear them,
and still today people systematically silence
those who
speak truth to power.
And into a world of such silencing,
we need to
hear once again the stories of the word-made-flesh.
When God speaks words of salvation and restoration,
he speaks
them in the person of Jesus,
and the written records of those stories of Jesus
make these
words real to us in our world also.
Today is the feast of Christ the King,
the final
Sunday of the Christian year,
and it is the day when we celebrate the Lordship of Jesus,
whose
authority transcends any earthly claim to power.
Kings, popes, reformers, emperors, presidents, and dictators
must all,
in the end, come to recognise
that their power is at best derivative of the ultimate power
that is
vested solely in Jesus Christ.
Symon Hill, who has worshipped with us sometimes at
Bloomsbury,
tells the
story of the origin of groups such as the Baptists.
He says,
For politically progressive Christians in the 17th century,
support for King Jesus
meant opposition to the kings of this world.
'No king but Jesus!' shouted a good many parliamentary soldiers
as they marched into
battle.
They were not the only ones.
A century before, the Anabaptist leader Thomas Müntzer
told an aristocrat
that he had no right
to be 'a prince over
the people whom God redeemed with his dear blood'.
But the tradition goes back much
further:
to the days when early
Christians were persecuted
for refusing to
recognise Caesar as Lord.
Only Christ is Lord, they said.[3]
This, of course, was the insight of Tyndale,
and the
reason he wanted the Bible in English
was because
he believed that the words of Jesus had the power
to
take on fresh life, in new languages, in new cultures, in new ways,
not
restricted to Latin, or Greek, or Hebrew,
but
rendered in English, so that everyone might hear them,
from
the scholar to the plough boy in the field.
The kingship of Jesus stands over and against all attempts
to silence
or suppress the word of God.
And no amount of burning or cutting
can in the
end silence the truth of the gospel
that God is for all,
and in all,
and through all, in Christ Jesus.
[1]
Almansor
[2]
Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt
man auch am Ende Menschen
