Rebuilding the House of God

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

26 November 2023

 

2 Kings 22.1-10, 14-20; 23.1-3
 
I have a question for us to consider this morning, and it’s this:
            ‘What God lives here?’
            ‘What God dwells in this place?’
 
Or, to put it another way:
            What is the nature of the God we worship in this place?
            What kind of God do we embody in our relationships with one another?
And how does this God call us to behave
            in our engagement with the wider world?
 
These are profound questions,
            as they take us right to the heart of what it means
            for us to be the people of God called to this place, at this time.
 
It’s been a tough few years, in many ways.
            The long term impacts of the pandemic are still with us,
                        and they affect everything from Sunday attendance
                        to the way we enact our mission in the world.
 
The answers to the question of who we should be
            as the community of God’s people,
answers that we knew well before the pandemic,
            are not the answers that serve us now.
 
We need new answers,
            we need a new vision of what it means
            for us to be the people of God in this place.
 
We need a fresh encounter with God’s word,
            as we hear God’s calling and purpose
            on our lives and for our community.
 
Well, so far, so revivalist sermon.
            You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again I’m sure.
 
And whilst it’s all true,
            we still need to work out what this actually means for us?
 
How does one have a fresh encounter with God’s word?
            How does one hear God’s calling and purpose
            on our lives and our community?
Where do we go for our new answers, for our fresh vision?
 
Well, the lesson of Josiah might suggest
            that we start with a building project,
a bit of sprucing up the house of the Lord,
            maybe a renewed basement,
                        with a sprung floor and some good air conditioning,
                        and a classy glass screen…
 
After all, that’s basically what Josiah was doing
            when Hilkiah discovered the book of the law.
 
Josiah had become king at the age of 8,
            and his coronation came on the heels of the long reign of king Manasseh.
 
The books of Kings love to characterise their rulers
            as either a ‘good king’ or a ‘bad king’
and Manasseh, in addition to being
            the longest reigning king of Judah, at 55 years,
            is also definitively a ‘bad king’.
 
We’re told that he persecuted the prophets,
            promoted the worship of other gods,
            and enacted violence with ease, on one occasion killing his own son.
 
Certainly by contrast to his predecessor Manasseh,
            Josiah is a ‘good king’, he’s pious, careful, and a fair ruler.
 
When he was in his mid-20s, he decided to embark on a project
            to restore and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem,
            which had fallen into disrepair.
 
No expense was to be spared,
            and Josiah commissioned the High Priest Hilkiah to carry out the work.
 
This is when things get interesting, of course,
            because Hilkiah discovers the scroll of the Law.
 
Now I’m afraid that our recent renovation work at Bloomsbury
            hasn’t unearthed anything nearly as exciting;
although we did find some newspapers and cigarette packets from the 1970s…
 
But Hilkiah found what seems to be part of the book of Deuteronomy,
            a book we know as the fifth book of the Old Testament.
 
The book of Deuteronomy has a very specific understanding
            of how God works in relation to human beings.
 
In a nutshell, it describes a system of reward and punishment,
            where those who are ‘faithful’ to God are rewarded by God,
            and those who are ‘unfaithful’ to God are punished by God.
 
This perspective on divine blessing and cursing
            lies behind the books of Kings
            that we’ve been reading in recent weeks,
and it informs the assessment it offers
            of which kings are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’.
 
A good king is one who obeys the law of the Lord,
            and a bad king is one who is unfaithful.
 
And the proof of whether a king is good or bad
            is found in whether their reign is a success or a failure,
because, according to the theology of Deuteronomy,
            God rewards the faithful and punishes the faithless.
 
Well, this discovery of the law scroll clearly affected Josiah deeply,
            and he realised that the law of God
                        had been neglected in the land for generations,
            through all the long reign of Manasseh.
 
And as a bright young ruler with ambitions to rule long and well himself,
            Josiah embraces this theology,
            and institutes a widespread set of sweeping reforms.
 
And so Josiah is declared by the Jewish historian writing the books of the Kings
            to have been a Good King, a faithful and consequently successful ruler,
            who pleased God and was rewarded accordingly.
 
And I just want us to stop and think for a moment
            about whether we think God really works in this way?
 
Does God always reward faith and punish disobedience?
            Certainly many of us will have been brought up
            to believe that this is the case…
 
The theology of Deuteronomy is alive and well
            in the contemporary Christian church,
and it takes various shapes,
            from the more extreme gospels of wealth and prosperity
            to the moralising crusades of those who would demonise the LGBTQ community.
 
The temptation to equate success with God’s blessing is always before us,
            but when we stop for a moment and think about it
we know, don’t we, that sometimes good things happen to bad people,
            and that bad things happen to good people?
 
Read the book of Job if you’re in any doubt!
 
So what are we to make of this story from ancient Israel,
            of a Good King who reforms the religious life of his country
            in search of God’s blessings?
 
Well, I wonder, what are we hearing God say to us
            as we ‘fix up’ our own house of God?
What word of the Lord will guide us in the coming years?
            What wisdom will we uncover that will shape our community going forwards?
 
What we will not hear, I hope and pray,
            is a message of fear,
where God is poised to bring down divine judgment
            on those who get it wrong.
 
We need a word for our time,
            and our time is not Josiah’s time.
 
I do not believe that reform in our time
            will be a purging reform focussed on scapegoating the supposedly sinful.
 
But there’s an interesting cameo in Josiah’s story,
            which can I think point us in a helpful direction:
and that’s the visit Hilkiah the High Priest makes to the female Prophet Huldah.
 
We cannot underestimate how significant it is
            that the religious elite go to consult this holy woman.
 
In a male dominated culture,
            and in a biblical text where women are hardly even named,
            and when they are it is usually in the context
                        of them being property, wives, or mothers,
            we meet the Prophet Huldah who speaks for God
                        into the highest levels of society.
 
As we discern God’s call on our community,
            as we seek to hear God’s message for our time, and our building,
we need to listen to the marginalised, the excluded, and the oppressed,
            because it is likely that God’s voice will be heard through their voices.
 
As we learn to listen to the least, and to put God first,
            we may begin to discover a religious reform for our time,
where the competing loyalties of our age,
            the economic, social, and political forces that clamour for attention,
are relativized before the God who calls us to follow the counter-cultural path
            of radical love, radical inclusion, and radical justice.
 
The book of Deuteronomy contains the great command,
            that echoes down to us directly from Josiah’s temple,
            via the voice of Jesus himself:
 
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
            You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart
            and with all your soul, and with all your might.” (Deut 6.4-5 // Lk 10.27 //s)
 
Putting God first never goes out of fashion,
            because it has never been fashionable to do so.
 
But if we want to hear the word of God for how we live our lives,
            how we spend our money and resources,
            and how we interact with one another,
then it is, in truth, the only place to start.
 
And so I do think we need to recover the word of God in our time,
            and I think we need to remember that when God speaks,
            what God speaks is a person.
 
As the opening of John’s gospel tells us,
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
            and the Word was God. 
² He was in the beginning with God. 
                ³ All things came into being through him,
                and without him not one thing came into being.
What has come into being ⁴ in him was life,
            and the life was the light of all people. 
⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.
 
When God speaks salvation,
            God does not speak a text but a person,
the divine Word is the Word made flesh,
            and word of God we need to recover, to rediscover,
            is the God of love and justice revealed in the person of Christ Jesus.
 
So, to return to my question from the beginning,
            of ‘What God lives here’, of ‘What God dwells in this place’,
 
The answer, I hope we will discover together,
            is the God of love made known to us in Jesus,
            revealed to us as we are attentive to the least and the lost.
 
The question that Josiah may well ask us,
            is whether we are listening carefully enough?

Sorrow and Love

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

12 November 2023 – Remembrance Sunday 

 

Hosea 11.1-9

Friends, we just sung a great truth,
            one which we need to hear on a day such as today.
 
Did you notice it in the words of the hymn?
            “Sorrow and love flow mingled down”
 
This wonderfully evocative line from Isaac Watts,
            invites us to reflect on the emotions of the crucifixion.
 
And the next line takes us deeper into the juxtaposition:
            “Did e’er such love and sorrow meet”
 
‘Love and sorrow’, ‘sorrow and love’:
            the anguished finality of death,
            and the absolute faithfulness of God.
 
Today we gather today on Remembrance Sunday,
            to remember and honour the sacrifice of so many in war,
            and to commit ourselves once again to the Christ-like path of peace,
and I think this combination of ‘sorrow and love’
            captures for us something of the tragedy of lost lives,
            the heartbreak of lost loved ones;
            the cost of war on all who live and die under its shadow.
 
But it also invites us to enter into the deep emotions of loss,
            to consider our own experiences of tragedy and bereavement,
as they merge into the deep theological tragedy
            of God’s own child dying before his time.
 
It evokes for us feelings of hopelessness, futility, and grief,
            overwhelming yet somehow contained
            within an overwhelming moment of divine love.
 
There is a deep mystery here:
            ‘sorrow and love’,
            tragedy and hope,
            futility and faith, flowing mingled down.
 
And the mystery of the Trinity, I think, can help us here,
            as we seek to understand
                        that the cross is not God sending the Son to his death;
            but rather that in the death of the Son,
                        God too suffers and dies.
 
The cross is God’s entering into the depth of human suffering,
            God becoming at one with us in our most vulnerable moments of mortality,
            God dying as we all must one day die.
 
As Jurgen Moltmann memorably put it,
            on the cross we meet ‘The Crucified God’.
 
Let me read a quote for you from this wonderful book,
 
When God becomes human in Jesus of Nazareth,
            God not only enters into the finitude of what it means to be human,
but in his death on the cross
            also enters into the situation of humanity's godforsakenness.
Jesus … does not die the natural death of a finite being,
            but the violent death of the criminal on the cross,
            the death of complete abandonment by God.
The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment,
            rejection by God, his loving parent.
God does not become a religion,
            so that humans participate in him
            by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings.
God does not become a law,
            so that humans participate in him
            through obedience to a law.
God does not become an ideal,
            so that humanity achieves community with him
            through constant striving.
Rather he humbles himself
            and takes upon himself the eternal death
            of the godless and the godforsaken,
so that all the godless and the godforsaken
            can experience communion with him. [1]
 
This way of understanding of the cross tells us that God was present
            at the Somme, at Ypres, and at Passchendaele,
not as a divine General directing the troops
            to die in the name of a higher purpose,
but as a Tommy in the trenches,
            facing the enemy with intermingled fear and courage,
            doing his duty with love and sorrow.
 
‘Sorrow and love flow mingled down’:
            this is the God of the cross.
 
And this phrase from the hymn
            also captures some of the complexities
inherent in our reading this morning from the prophet Hosea. [2]
 
Here we have another poet,
            also writing a hymn to reflect on where God is,
            in the face of human frailty and suffering.
 
The poet Hosea, from ancient Israel,
            draws on imagery from across the spectrum,
as if grasping desperately for a metaphor, however inadequate,
            to capture the turmoil brewing in God’s heart.
 
And so in quick succession he introduces us
            to Israel as a recalcitrant son (v. 2),
                        as one who is idolatrous (v. 2),
            as an ungrateful patient of the divine healer (v. 3),
                        as wandering livestock (v. 4),
            as recipients of divine tenderness (v. 4),
and ultimately, as one hell bent on turning from God (vv. 5, 7).
 
All of this imagery,
            piled quickly upon itself in the opening verses of Hosea’s song,
is used to communicate one thing:
            that despite God’s history of tender care and concern for Israel,
the story of God’s people
            is of those who consistently reject that tender care
            in favour of following their own inclinations.
 
Hosea’s poem begins with a painful recollection
            of times that God has previously showed love and tenderness to his people,
            only to be rejected time and time again (vv. 1-5).
 
Ancient Israel’s “childhood” is recalled,
            with the prophet remembering that God called his son out of Egypt (v. 1),
a line we will be hearing again in a few weeks
            when we get to the Christmas story
            and we recall God’s son Jesus going to Egypt with Mary and Joseph.
 
But here it is referring to Israel’s release
            from the oppression of the Pharaoh,
the wanderings in the wilderness,
            and the entry into the promised land.
 
In Hosea’s poem, the sweetness of this experience of liberation,
            is quickly soured by Israel’s subsequent acts of disobedience.
 
The text summarizes Israel’s story in this way:
            The more Israel was called by God,
            the more they rebelled against God (v. 2).
 
So blind had God’s people become
            that they couldn’t even recognize who was healing them (v. 3).
 
And I just want to pause for a moment here, and hear that again.
 
So blind had God’s people become
            that they couldn’t even recognize who was healing them.
 
This surely is a perfect description of human sin,
            the inability to perceive one’s redeemer as anything but an enemy!
 
And just as with all of us, sin brings consequences,
            so and in ancient Israel’s life
                        their turning away from God’s will and ways
            triggered the rising up of the nations against them (vv. 5-7):
                        foreign domination ensues (v. 5),
                        with the raging and devouring sword afflicting them (v. 6).
 
For even Israel, God’s chosen and beloved people,
            it will seem as if God ignores their prayers (v. 7):
God’s beloved will become God’s forsaken.
 
Sometimes the path to liberation from sin involves a confrontation
            with the seriousness of the results of our actions.
Forgiveness is not absolution from consequences,
            and sin can open the way to hell on earth.
 
Sometimes there is no path out,
            merely a path through.
 
The psalmist of course knew this
            when they spoke of their journey
            through the valley of the shadow of death (Ps 23).
 
But the glory of God’s eternal love,
            is that even in the midst of sorrow,
            even in the depths of God-forsakenness,
God is still there.
 
And so we get an interplay in Hosea’s poem
            between God’s action in confronting Israel
                        with the destructive consequences of their sin (vv. 5-6)
            and God’s hiddenness from them at their time of greatest trial (v. 7).
 
It is the paradox of the cross,
            written large across the story of God’s people,
as sorrow and love flow mingled down,
            with sin and death meeting loss and pain,
            all held within God’s eternal embrace.
 
Judgment, in ancient Israel’s case, involves both aspects:
            God afflicts Israel through the agency of the nations,
            and God’s face becomes hidden from them.
 
When God hides,
            and God’s face is often hidden from us
            in moments of great human sin,
then terrors are unleashed,
            and the redeemer and liberator of our souls
            is suddenly out of reach.
 
This is the bind of sin;
            we turn from God,
            and we find that God is no longer visible to us.
 
This is the hell of war,
            as humans descend into the depths of killing,
and the only saviour we can see
            is the salvation found through yet more violence.
 
And yet… the message of Hosea
            is that no matter how bad it gets.
No matter how great the sin, no matter how great the betrayal,
            no matter how great the violence,
God does not give up on humanity.
 
Paul too grasped this truth,
            writing to assure the Christians in Rome:
 
‘For if while we were enemies
            we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son,
much more surely, having been reconciled,
            will we be saved by his life.’ (Romans 5.10)
 
The God of Hosea’s poem
            is the same God spoken of by Paul;
a God who chooses, quite apart from human initiative,
            to be reconciled with God’s own enemies.
 
In a world of enmity,
            when people fight to the death over land and ideology,
without warning,
            God’s heart is strangely warmed (v.8).
 
A series of anguished questions in the poem
            reveals that God’s turning away was, from the perspective of eternity,
                        but a moment (Psalm 30.5)
            “How can I give you up?” God exclaims (v.8)
 
Just the thought of ignoring God’s people, refusing their prayers,
            brings God out from behind the locked door of concealment,
and into the open, where God is available again
            as a God of compassion and mercy.
 
However deep the pit that humans dig for themselves,
            it is never deep enough to keep out the light of God’s love for eternity.
 
But let’s be clear:
            this shift from absence to compassion
                        was not prompted by any human deed,
            it comes from God’s resolve alone,
                        God’s free choice to be a God of compassion.
 
In the face of all the reasons why God might choose absence,
            all the reasons why God might choose vengeance,
nonetheless Hosea’s insight is that God chooses presence,
            God chooses reconciliation.
 
Between vv. 7-8 there is no change in Israel,
            only a change in God.
 
But rejecting hiddenness, God brings forth new promises:
            proclaiming “I will not execute my fierce anger,
                        I will not again destroy Ephraim” (v. 9).
 
As Walter Brueggemann has shown,
            God not only resolves to set aside God’s anger,
God in fact takes the righteous divine judgment
            into God’s own self. 
 
And so we’re back at the cross,
            God on the cross, absorbing into the broken body of the son
            all the pain, all the hurt, all the agony of broken humanity.
 
The key insight to this is found in v. 8,
            where God resolves not to give Israel up like the cities of Admah and Zeboiim,
            which were destroyed along with Sodom and Gomorrah
                        (Deuteronomy 29:23; cf. Genesis 10:19).
 
The term used to describe the overturning of God’s heart here
            is the same term used to describe the overthrowing
            of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:21.
 
In other words, Israel’s sin
            is here compared to the sin of the cities destroyed in Genesis 18-19,
but where Hosea 11 differs from Genesis
            is in its insistence that God would absorb the judgment Israel deserved.
 
As Brueggemann puts,
            “God resolves to contain the ‘earthquake’ in God’s own life.”
 
Israel deserved judgement, but what it got was mercy,
            obtained through a God who was willing to suffer for their sins.
 
And so we’re back at the cross,
            and God suffering for us and with us.
 
 
When Christians think about God’s willingness
            to suffer on behalf of sinful humans,
            they often think about Christ hanging from the cross.
 
But Hosea’s poem, written in the face of the consequences of human sin,
            helps us realize that the cross
                        is not a new development in the life of God,
            rather it represents who God is fundamentally.
 
The cross is a climactic moment,
            but one that is situated along an already existent trajectory. 
 
In Christ, God does not become a suffering God;
            rather, Christ makes flesh God’s eternally deep longing
                        to always be among God’s people,
            a longing that reaches back into the history of God’s revelation
                        and forwards to our own experience
                        of what it means to be sinful humans in our time and context.
 
God’s willingness to suffer on behalf of creation,
            is supremely seen in Christ,
who takes into himself not only sinful human rage
            but also divine absence.
 
The cry of dereliction from the cross:
            ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’
is the cry of every sinner reaching the depths of their fractured-ness,
            and yet it is also the cry of the one
who finds in the depths of their despair
            that God has not, in the end, abandoned them.
 

---

[1] This quote is lightly amended to correct exclusive language.
[2] This sermon draws extensively on Michael Chan’s commentary https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/narrative-lectionary/hosea-2/commentary-on-hosea-111-9

Bonfire of the Vanities

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 5^th November 2023

 

1 Kings 18.17-39
  
Today’s Bible reading from the Lectionary
            stopped one verse too early, in my opinion.
 
Where we left the story, was where every Children’s Bible
            and every Sunday School class leaves the story:
with the glorious fire from heaven descending,
            and consuming the offering that Elijah had faithfully prepared,
while all the people fall on their faces
            and worship the Lord as God.
 
My question is, do you know what happened next?
            Let me read the next verse for you.
 
1 Kings 18.40
Elijah said to them, “Seize the prophets of Baal; do not let one of them escape.”
            Then they seized them, and Elijah brought them down to the Wadi Kishon
            and killed them there.
 
And my question for us this morning,
            in a world of killing, is this:
 
Who does God want to die?
 
Who does God want to condemn?
 
Today is the 5^th November, it’s bonfire night, a day of fire and death,
            a fitting day for the lectionary to give us the Bible reading
            of Elijah’s great bonfire on Mount Carmel.
 
Say the old nursery rhyme with me if you know it:
 
Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
 
Various versions of this rhyme are available,
            and it has its origins in a poem by John Milton,
            better known for his epic poem Paradise Lost;
but the point is always the same,
            which is that on Bonfire Night in England
we gather to joyfully burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes,
            remembering his treasonous act of conspiring to blow up the King.
 
The real Guy Fawkes was executed at the age of 35 in January 1606,
            just down the road from here in Westminster.
 
He had a distinguished military career,
            but became involved with a small group of English Catholics
            who planned to assassinate the Protestant King James.
 
His fate is well known, although ironically,
            he died by hanging and not by burning.
 
But in celebration of his failure to overthrow the King,
            Londoners were encouraged to light bonfires on each 5^th November,
provided that (and I quote)
            "this testimony of joy be carefully done without any danger or disorder".
It’s good to know that health and safety legislation
            was alive and well in the early seventeenth century!
 
In fact, so keen were parliament
            to ensure that Guy Fawkes treachery was not forgotten
that an Act of Parliament was passed,
            which designated each 5 November as a day of thanksgiving
                        for "the joyful day of deliverance",
            and this act remained in force until 1859.
 
Guy Fawkes Night bonfires were accompanied by fireworks from the 1650s onwards,
            and it quickly became the custom to burn an effigy on the bonfire,
sometimes of Guy Fawkes himself,
            but also sometimes of other popular villains, including the Pope!
 
This "guy" as it came to be known,
            is of course these days normally created by children
            from old clothes, newspapers, and a mask.
 
But the real Guy Fawkes has had an interesting afterlife:
            being hailed variously as a traitor, a martyr,
                        a political rebel, and a freedom-fighter.
 
As the saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s hero.
 
Actually, the 2006 film V for Vendetta,
            in which a vigilante rebels against a right-wing dystopia
                        while wearing a Guy Fawkes mask,
            has led to a resurgence of sympathy for Fawkes;
and the adoption of the same mask by hacker group Anonymous
            has contributed to this,
with Guy Fawkes, in many people’s eyes,
            now being viewed as a figure of righteous anti-authoritarianism:
            more folk-hero than folk-demon.
 
And so we come to today, to ‘Bonfire night’ 2023,
            and I wonder who you might imagine on the bonfire this evening.
Probably, I’m guessing, NOT the Pope!
            Maybe not even Guy Fawkes himself…
 
But I wonder, in our world,
            who the good people of England might vote to put on the bonfire?
Who is the demon that you would like burned away?
            Maybe some global political tyrant?
                        Some figure of popular hatred?
            Maybe someone convicted of a terrible crime?
 
There are those living in our city this day who are scared for their safety
            because others have been publicly threatening them.
We live in a world of antisemitism and islamophobia,
            of racism and fear of the other.
We live in a world where some people believe
            that God is telling them to kill other people.
 
Just this week I attended the Mayor of Camden’s interfaith reception,
            and we heard how people in the communities of our borough
                        are living with fear,
            afraid to walk the streets of our city
                        because their clothing, or skin colour, or facial characteristics
                        might mark them out as targets of violence.
 
And so I will repeat my question:
            Who does God want to die?
 
Who goes on our altars of sacrifice
            to be consumed by the holy purifying fire from on high?
 
And I’m sure some of you will be answering:
            ‘Well, no-one! All we want is for the killing to stop!’
 
And good for you – I do too!
            Except my question is, do we?
 
A commitment to absolute nonviolence is very hard to maintain,
            as Remembrance this coming week will remind us.
 
Sometimes, even the most liberal and pacifist among us
            longs for the violent and aggressive enemy to be defeated,
            which usually means that it is their turn to die.
 
And so I will repeat my question:
            Who would you place on the fire?
 
In Florence, on Shrove Tuesday in 1497,
            supporters of the local Dominican friar
collected thousands of household objects
            and burned them in the public square.
 
This ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, as it came to be known,
            was focussed on objects that might tempt one to sin,
including vanity items such as mirrors, cosmetics, fine dresses,
            playing cards, and musical instruments.
Other targets included books, manuscripts of songs,
            and artworks including paintings and sculpture.
 
This theme of burning items to purify society
            has a long tradition in both history and literature.
From Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451,
            which depicts a dystopian McCarthyite America
                        where books have been outlawed
                        and "firemen" burn any that are found,
to the real book burnings in Nazi Germany
            and the ideological repression in the Soviet Union;
burning to purify is as much a part of our contemporary world
            as it was in ancient Israelite society.
 
Even within our own British Baptist family,
            we are beset by arguments about purity:
                        who does God approve of?
                        And who does God condemn?
 
The divisions around LGBTQ inclusion divide us into camps…
            and in a situation that is analogous to the stand-off
                        between Elijah and the prophets of Baal and Ashera on Mount Carmel,
            there are many praying fervently
                        for God’s purifying fire to descend once more.
 
But, and I’ll ask again,
            who does God want to condemn?
 
In a world of killing, where societies and communities
            assuage their collective guilt by scapegoating the vulnerable,
                        by marginalising the marginalised,
            we urgently need an answer to this question.
 
And it’s a question that runs through the Hebrew Bible,
            as story after story explores the idea
of whether God is for one group and against another,
            or whether God is for all people but against evil.
 
This is an important distinction,
            because it decouples the issues of evil and purity
from a fixed association
            with specific groups or communities of people.
 
Within the Hebrew Bible,
            there are some who believe that holiness
                        is the distinctive preserve of that subset of humanity
                        known as the people of God,
            and that the role of religion within the Hebrew society
                        was to maintain the purity of the people of Israel,
            whilst opposing all those who do not worship the Lord as they worship.
 
We saw this division last week
            in our sermon on the religious wars
            that divided Israel into north and south after the death of Solomon.
 
But there is a counter-tradition within the pages of the scriptures,
            which asserts that the purpose of calling one people
                        to be set aside as God’s people
            is not to condemn the rest of humanity, but to bless it.
 
This is the tradition that casts God’s people as a light to the nations,
            a beacon of hope in a dark world.
 
And which of these traditions we embrace is important,
            because it tells us something profound
                        about how we see ourselves as the people of God in our time,
                        and in our context.
 
Are we called by God to become those ‘set aside’,
            those who condemn the world by our purity,
            who show the world the wages of sin by our holiness?
 
Certainly, many Christians have taken that view,
            standing with Elijah in the light of holy righteous fire,
while those who relate to God differently
            are condemned before their eyes.
 
But this, friends, is not the path to God that I embrace,
            it is not the Baptist way, or at least it shouldn’t be,
            and it is not the Bloomsbury way either.
 
We stand in a tradition that resists those
            who would tell other people whether they are acceptable to God or not.
We stand for freedom of religion,
            for an open path to God that creates space
            even for those with whom we want to disagree.
 
The early Baptists went to prison for their refusal to say the creeds,
            and this is why we resist creedal forms of religion
                        that tell people what to believe
                        and condemn those who believe differently.
 
The early Baptists were at the forefront of religious freedom,
            with Thomas Helwys famously writing to the King
demanding freedom for not just Baptists like him,
            but for Muslims, Jews, and atheists too,
before dying in Newgate prison because King James,
            yes the same King James who executed Guy Fawkes,
had decided before God that he was the sole determiner of religious orthodoxy
            and that all who disagreed with him were worthy of punishment.
 
But who does God want to condemn?
 
Did God want the prophets of Baal and Ashera to be put to death?
            Did God want Guy Fawkes to be executed?
Did God want King James to perish in an explosion?
            Did God want Thomas Helwys to die in prison?
 
Did God want the vanities of Florence burned?
            Did God want the books of Nazi Germany burned?
 
Did God want more than 1,400 Jewish people
            to die in a terror attack at the hands of Hamas last month?
 
Does God want the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza
            to be displaced and bombed?
 
Does God want the Israeli settlers in the West Bank?
            Does God want the Palestinian suicide bomber in a market place in Jerusalem?
 
Does God want Putin to successfully annex Ukraine?
            Does God want the Ukrainian defenders to liberate their country?
 
Does God want the Taliban to rule Afghanistan?
 
There are those who would say a resounding ‘yes’ to each of these,
            although I suspect there is no-one who would say ‘yes’ to all of them.
 
But my suspicion is that God wants none of this,
            and that those who claim to kill in God’s name are always wrong.
 
In fact, I suspect that those who kill are always wrong,
            even when they do so for the very best of intentions.
 
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reflecting on his participation
            in the plot to assassinate Hitler,
couldn’t convince himself that killing even such a tyrant as Hitler
            was within God’s will, commenting
 
‘When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility,
            he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else.
He answers for it...
            Before other men he is justified by dire necessity;
            before himself he is acquitted by his conscience,
                        but before God he hopes only for grace.’
 
The fire from heaven on Mount Carmel
            did not consume the prophets of Baal and Ashera,
            it consumed the wood of Elijah’s offering.
 
The killing was all Elijah.
 
Those who claim to act on God’s behalf,
            to speak God’s words, to interpret God’s will, are not always right.
This is as true for the saints and prophets in scripture as it is for us.
 
If we are seeking God’s will in our troubled times,
            I think we need to look first to God’s revelation in Jesus,
who resisted the path of violent struggle
            and welcomed those whom others would exclude.
 
In Jesus’ parables, he often mentions fire as an agent of God’s judgment,
            and a careful reading of these reveals that God’s judgment
                        is always against the principalities and powers of evil,
                        the structures and systems of oppression.
It is these that God’s fury burns away.
 
God’s anger is never directed to people,
            but always to those ideologies and philosophies that make people less
            than the beloved human beings they were created to be.
 
God’s love for humanity is absolute,
            just as God’s judgment on evil is absolute.
 
Last week, Udoka introduced us to a poem,
            and I want to close today by reading it again:
 
“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic