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?
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?
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