Light in the Darkness

 Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

13^th December 2020

Isaiah 9.6-7; 61.1-11

 

Listen to this sermon here:

This week, we are bringing to a close, for now,

            our journey through the Old Testament prophetic literature,

            which has been carrying us through Advent.

 

If you remember, we have been hearing how different prophets

            helped the people of Israel deal with the trauma and grief

            of their experience of the Babylonian exile;

and last week, with the prophet Joel,

            we saw how even after the return from exile,

things weren’t all plain sailing for those who came back from Babylon

            to their task of rebuilding the Temple and City of Jerusalem.

 

Well, this post-exilic period is the historical context

            for the main part of our reading for today

            from chapter 61 of the prophet Isaiah.

 

You may have heard me say this before,

            but the book of Isaiah as we find it in the Old Testament

            is actually three books edited together.

 

First Isaiah, which take us up to chapter 39,

            is set in the time before the exile.

And our first shorter reading from chapter 9 this morning,

            with its messianic expression of hope

                        for a child born to re-establish the kingdom of David

            comes from this period of the text.

 

But then, instead of a new David,

            what Israel encountered was a time of exile in Babylon;

and Second Isaiah, which take us from chapters 40-55,

            is a word of prophecy to the exiles,

and it’s in here that we find the wonderful suffering servant passages

            that we often read at Easter.

 

And then we come to the final section of the book, chapters 56-66,

            which is a prophecy to those who have returned from exile,

and it’s from here that we get today’s main reading, from chapter 61.

 

And the key thing I want us to take away from this, today,

            is that those who are tasked with rebuilding after a period of trauma,

            need a strong sense of vision if they are to rebuild well.

 

This was true for the ancient Israelites,

            and I suspect it is true for us too.

 

So let’s spend a few minutes now with Isaiah,

            to hear what word from God he brings

            to those tasked with rebuilding after a time of exile.

 

Well, he begins with a passage

            that we probably know better from Luke Chapter 4,

where Jesus reads it from the Isaiah scroll

            at the start of his public ministry in Nazareth.

 

We’re coming back to this passage in a few weeks’ time,

            so I won’t spend too long on it now,

but what strikes me as significant

            is that Isaiah recognises

            that all is not well with the world.

 

There are people who are oppressed,

            people who are broken-hearted,

people who are held captive to forces beyond their control,

            and people who find themselves deprived of their liberty.

 

And the vision that Isaiah offers is of a society renewed,

            of a social order rebuilt,

which starts with a recognition of what is still wrong with a world

            where people stand in need of mercy, restoration, and comfort.

 

This centring of the vulnerable at the heart of the rebuilding project

            is where Isaiah believes the people of God should always start.

 

And so Isaiah offers a way for us, with the ancient Israelites,

            to hold space for grief, lament, and mourning,

but into that space to hear words of hope,

            and a promise from God of restoration.

 

And this, in a nutshell, is how we experience the season of Advent;

            it is a time for recognising the darkness and pain of the world,

            but daring to believe that there is a promise of new life from God,

            coming to birth as hope in the midst of hopelessness.

 

Just as Isaiah whispered words of divine restoration to the dispirited exiles;

            just as the Christ child came to a world of poverty and people displacement;

so God continues to come to us in Christ,

            as we too live in a world that is not yet the world as it should be.

 

And the challenge for us, as it was for ancient Israel,

            is to grasp this vision as we play our part

                        in the continual rebuilding of the world

                        that we are called to participate in with Christ.

 

And whilst this is always the calling of the people of God,

            there are some years where it feels more true than other,

            and I suspect that this is one of those years.

 

We may not have to rebuild the walls of our city,

            or reconstruct our holy sanctuary,

but we have certainly experienced a time of exile

            with many of us not having been into London or Bloomsbury

            for a considerable period of time.

 

Well - as I speak to you this morning from the church,

            I can bear the good news that the building is still standing

            and the heating is still working!

 

But this doesn’t mean we don’t have our own rebuilding task ahead of us

            as we look forward through to 2021.

 

I’m reminded of one of my predecessors, Townley Lord,

            who was minister at Bloomsbury in the 1930s and 40s

 

In the church history, Faith Bowers tells the story:

 

Alice Lord felt they had virtually to begin again in 1930. The active membership had dropped and Dr Lord overheard someone outside the chapel observing that the church was finished and would become a cinema within two years. (p.333)

 

How alive a church is depends on one’s perspective. There was life in the old church yet, but it needed to be rejuvenated to serve the new generation. (p.333)

 

Over the next decade, the church saw some growth,

            but then the second world war came, and things changed again.

 

Faith continues the story:

 

War was declared on 3 September. Attendances at Bloomsbury dropped to forty almost overnight and everything changed. Only three deacons remained. (p.336)

 

Dr and Mrs Lord, with the handful of remaining helpers and the faithful caretakers, kept the church open throughout the war. Residents and tourists vanished, but many service personnel passed through London and were glad of a welcoming church. (p.336)

 

As the victory celebrations faded, it became clear that people were not returning to live around the church in the old way. Office blocks replaced residential tenements. After those heroic years, there must have been a sense of anticlimax as the church grasped that there could be no return to the ‘good old days’. Alice Lord recalled the heartbreaking realization that they had to start again from scratch in these inauspicious circumstances. Committed to Bloomsbury they were determined that this church should not die. (p.337)

 

My point is this, the people of God have been here before.

            There are times of exile, and times for rebuilding,

            times of sorrow, and times of joy.

There is a time, as the writer of Ecclesiastes puts it,

            for everything under the sun.

 

And right now the vaccine promises us a hope

            for the end our time of pandemic-related exile;

in the next few months we will be returning to our sanctuary,

            and rebuilding our community.

 

But as those who returned to Israel from Babylonian exile discovered,

            we will not be able to rebuild exactly as before.

 

Through our time of exile, some things have died,

            projects have ended, ways of being have ceased,

and we will mourn their passing,

            and then we will build anew.

 

One of the positive things I think we have discovered

            during our exile to the land of Zoom

has been that our faith community can withstand

            a time of extended exile from our sanctuary.

 

If you had asked me this time last year,

            whether it was possible to sustain Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

            away from our building, and without meeting together for the best part of a year,

I would have said that I very much doubted it.

 

But just as the Jews exiled to Babylon

            developed new ways of practicing their faith

                        that not only allowed them to survive the exile

            but which sustained them through the millennia that followed;

 

so I believe that the way our community of faith at Bloomsbury

            has responded during the last year

            will create in us a robustness that will sustain us in the years to come.

 

And as we seek to rebuild ministry in Central London,

            we will need to keep our God-given vision for Bloomsbury before us.

 

Just as the exiles needed Isaiah to set before them

            a vision for their renewed society,

so we too will need

            to keep our vision for Bloomsbury before us.

 

All that work we did in 2019

            arriving at our values, vision, and mission statements,

can be for us our call to a different future

            where God’s promises are made real in our time,

            through our community, in our church, and in our city.

 

If you haven’t read these words of values, vision and mission recently,

            I’d encourage you to go to the church website,

and spend some time prayerfully re-reading them,

            and also reading the commentary that accompanies them.

 

We will need these words before us

            guiding our decisions and our prayers

            as we move forwards from where we are, to where we will be.

 

Just as Isaiah’s vision called the Israelites

            to discover that God’s values are for a reorientation of society

                        to one where the poor are empowered,

                        the enslaved are liberated,

                        and money is used to build equity;

            so we too can be part of building a better world,

                        where the present does not get to define the future,

            but rather where the present becomes the occasion

                        for thinking about what God is calling us to in the future.

 

The financial instability caused by the current political situation

            and the ongoing impact of the pandemic

means, I suspect, that our wider society

            is going to need people of faith and vision

            to help rebuild in ways that centre the vulnerable

                        and care for the weak and the oppressed.

 

And just as the trauma of the second world war

            gave rise to the systems of social security and healthcare provision

            that many of us are so proud of in our country to this day,

I wonder what visions for renewal and rebuilding we can advocate

            that will benefit those who would otherwise face isolation and exclusion.

 

From our work with Citizens UK on homelessness,

                        climate change, and community building,

            to the possibilities raised by a renewed attention to a Universal Basic Income,

our world needs people of faith, who dare to believe that a better future can be built

             from the ashes of destruction and the trauma of exile,

because we dare to believe

            that God isn’t yet finished with remaking the world.

 

And so Isaiah calls to us, as he calls to the faithful in every generation,

            and we hear an encouragement to live in hope

            that God is able to do far more abundantly

                        than all that we ask or think,

            according to the power at work within us,

                        as the writer of Ephesians put it.

 

So as we gather today, both online and in person, on the third Sunday of Advent,

            this is a time for looking back at the difficulties of the last year,

                        and being honest about the losses, the sorrows, and the troubles.

            It is also a time for being honest about today,

                        about where we are, in terms of our personal faith, our community of faith,

                        and the difficulties facing our church both practically and financially.

 

            But it also a time for looking forwards with Isaiah,

                        to the promises of God that call us ever onward,

            offering us a profound hope that God has not finished

                        either with us, our church, or our world.

 

Next year will bring its own troubles, I’m sure,

            but if we remain faithful to God’s call and trust in God’s promise,

            we will continue to be God’s people,

called and commissioned to work and live in faith ,

            that through Christ, God comes again to our world of darkness

            to bring in our time the eternally-renewed glimmer of new light.

Hope in the face of despair

 Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

6^th December 2020

 

Joel 2.12-13, 21-22, 28-29

 

One of the mantras of Citizens UK,

            the community organising network that we’re part of here at Bloomsbury,

            is that the ‘world as it is’, is not the same as the ‘world as it should be’.

 

And it seems to me that this observation

            takes us right to the heart of the season of Advent,

when we recognise that in some deep and profound way the world is out of joint,

            that it isn’t what it could and should be,

            that something is persistently and obstinately wrong.

 

In many ways, Advent 2020 exemplifies this for us

            more than many years have done.

I don’t know what you were hoping for in 2020, but I bet it wasn’t this!

 

Can you cast your mind back to nearly a year ago,

            to New Year’s Eve - the dawn of a new decade, a time for fresh hope?

Well, here we are… and who’d have thought it!?

 

Things don’t always turn out as we hope,

            and the world as it is, is not the same as the world as it should be.

 

Well, we’re not the first generation in history to have our hopes dashed,

            and we won’t be the last either.

The Prophet Joel, from whose book our reading this morning comes,

            lived in just such a time.

 

If you’ve been with us over the last few weeks,

            we’ve been journeying with the Old Testament prophets

            through the time leading up to, and into, the Israelite exile in Babylon.

 

Well, Joel picks up the story after the end of the Exile.

 

Following a generation of captivity the winds of political change had stirred in Babylon,

            and the new ruler Cyrus decided

            that exiled peoples could return to their homelands.

 

So the Exiled Jews had set off back to the land of Israel,

            with a mission to rebuild their capital city,

            and to restore and re-consecrate their Temple.

 

But things were never so straightforward.

            For starters, not everyone had gone into exile.

 

The Babylonians had taken the educated and the elite,

            but the working classes had mostly remained in the land of Israel.

Whilst in exile, the exiles had forged a new kind of Judaism,

            they had written their scriptures,

            and created ways of being that allowed them to keep their faith

                        even when separated from their land and temple.

 

To put it another way, the Jewish faith had evolved in Babylon.

 

But those who had stayed in the land knew nothing of this,

            and so when the returners came back to Israel,

there were tensions from the beginning

            between those Jews who had been exiled, and those who had not.

 

It’s a bit like going to an Irish bar in New York:

            it’ll be more stereotypically ‘Irish’ than any bar you will ever find in Ireland itself,

and you can just imagine the difficulties that would emerge

            if someone decided to try and force everyone in the mother country

            to start adopting the characteristics developed by those who had left

                        a couple of generations earlier.

 

In addition to the cultural and religious tensions,

            things were not helped for the returners from exile

by the fact that they had come back to a time of famine and drought.

 

There’s been a plague of locusts (1.4) which has wiped out the crops,

            and people are starving.

The great return is not turning out as it was supposed to.

 

And it’s into this context the book of Joel comes to be written,

            as a response to a natural disaster

            and a general air of tension and disappointment.

The world as it was, in post-exilic Israel,

            was not the world as it was supposed to be,

and Joel wrestles with that reality before God.

 

The first thing to notice about Joel’s response to this situation,

            is that he is rather more pro-worship than some of the other prophets of his era.

Whereas Amos and Isaiah are scathing about the kind of worship

            that makes people feel good but which doesn’t result in social justice,

            Joel has a different approach.

He calls people to turn towards God with weeping and mourning,

            to rend their hearts and not their clothing.

Joel’s response to calamity is to bring that hurt and pain

            before God with brutal honesty,

not through some public show of piety,

            but with a genuine expression of grief.

 

And he assures those who would do this

            that God is gracious and merciful,

            that God will not be angry with them,

                        but rather will respond with steadfast love.

 

But for Joel, this turning to God is not simply

            about people being honest with God about the difficulties of their lives,

            although it certainly starts there.

Joel rather has a more holistic perspective

            on what returning to God might mean.

 

For Joel it encompasses not just hope for the individual,

            or the community that they are part of,

but also for the environment in which they live.

 

Writing off the back of a natural disaster,

            where nature has gone awry and people have paid the price in their suffering,

            Joel speak words of comfort not just to people but to the planet itself.

He tells the soil not to fear,

            he speaks to the animals, the pastures, the trees and the vines,

            and he offers a vision of fresh hope and restoration for the natural world.

 

There is something deeply profound here

            about the interconnectedness of people and planet, of humans and nature,

                        that both need the mercy and love of God,

            and that the future of one is tied inextricably to the other.

Without the land, the people die;

            but without the people, the land is untended and unfruitful.

 

And then we get this extraordinary vision of hope,

            which we more normally encounter at Pentecost

                        because it is quoted by Peter in his sermon

            following the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the disciples in Jerusalem.

 

But heard here in its original context,

            the promise of God’s restorative Spirit carries a promise of great hope.

The traditional and deeply rooted barriers that exist in society,

            of age, gender, and social status,

            are broken down by the coming of God’s Spirit;

and Joel offers a vision of an egalitarian community

            where not only are people at one with nature,

            but where people are united with each other.

 

And so we come to today, and to 2020.

            And the divisions in our world are plain to see.

 

From the injustices of race and ethnicity,

            highlighted so powerfully this year through the Black Lives Matter protests;

to the disproportionate health impacts of the pandemic

            on the elderly and the vulnerable;

to the ongoing denigration of people

            because of their gender or sexuality;

to the way climate change is affecting most

            those who are most impoverished;

to the global economic injustices caused by financial systems

            that protect the wealthy and keep the poor, poor.

 

And what, I wonder, can we hear from the book of Joel,

            as we come to the end of a year

                        when it has been as clear as ever

            that the world as it is, is not the world as it should be?

 

Advent is a time for being honest about the distance that exists between us and God;

            between the kingdoms of the earth, and the kingdom of heaven.

It is that place in the Christian year when it is OK to not be OK;

            to admit that we have turned from God,

            or to lament that God seems to have turned from us.

 

As we await the birth of Christ, the coming God to humanity,

            we wait in solidarity with exiles,

            in unity with those who suffer and struggle,

            and in concord with creation as it groans with suffering.

 

So here, in Advent 2020,

            I wonder if we can hear Joel speaking to us?

Can we hear the call to turn back to God,

            to rend our hearts and not our garments?

Can we discover an honesty in our worship

            that takes us to the place of raw reality before God?

 

Over the next couple of weeks,

            we have two events coming up at Bloomsbury

that may be particularly helpful to those of us

            who want to bring our whole selves before God,

            with all our grief, pain, and anxiety.

 

Firstly, on Sunday evening next week,

            we will be having a meeting called ‘A Safe Place To Talk’,

which is particularly set aside for those of us who suffer

            with times of poor mental health,

for us to be honest with one another,

            and to share our struggles and find strength in community together.

 

And then, on the Monday evening of the 21st, the Longest Night of the year,

            we will have what is often called a Longest Night Service,

                        or sometimes a ‘Blue Christmas’ service,

            where we will recognise before God

                        that sometimes life is difficult, sad, unresolved.

Do come along to these if they would be helpful to you.

            There will be more information in the news email,

            and again in next Sunday’s service.

 

But more than this, can we also hear Joel’s call to creation,

            to a world facing natural disaster,

            that God is still capable of bringing new life where life as it was has died?

 

We are still in the grip of the worst pandemic in living memory,

            and although there is good news on the horizon with the vaccine,

            many will still die before we get through this.

 

And whilst the government’s ambitious promise this week

            that the UK will cut emissions by 68% by 2030 is unquestionably good news,

there is much still to be done both in London, our country, and the world,

            before we find our way through the looming climate emergency.

 

It is so good to have people from Bloomsbury

            participating in the London Citizens Just Transition campaign,

where we are calling on Mayor to create 60,000 good green jobs,

            and to upgrade 100,000 homes by retrofitting green energy heating and insulation.

 

Tackling the climate crisis is an opportunity to make people’s lives better here in London,

            as well as around the world.

Caring for creation, and caring for the poor and the vulnerable, can go hand in hand,

            and I think Joel would agree,

            with his vision of the interconnectedness of people and planet.

 

And can we hear Joel’s call, to live into being

            the world of equality that dawns in our midst,

as the Spirit of God breaks down the barriers

            that divide humanity, communities, and families.

 

I remain endlessly proud to be part of a community of faith

            that fearlessly articulates our values of inclusion for all,

            regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality.

The Spirit of God is truly poured out on all, without distinction.

 

And for all of its shortcomings,

            this year of mostly online worship

has enabled people to join us who would otherwise not have been able

            to worship with us due to age, infirmity, or distance.

 

The gathering of our community before God

            to hear the words of good news has continued,

            and has even strengthened in some ways.

 

People have forged new bonds,

            and we have re-focussed as a church on the gift of our gathered community,

            creatively working out what it is to summon God’s people to worship,

to turn once more to the God who gives new life to all.

 

As Joel put it:

            The Lord is gracious and merciful,

            slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.

 

Amen.

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,

            and in all, and through all, in Christ Jesus.

 

[1] Almansor

[2] Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen

[3] https://thirdway.hymnsam.co.uk/editions/julaug-2012/features/why-monarchy-matters.aspx