Baptist Bookworm: The Burning Word of God

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 7^th 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 7^th 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,