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 

God-in-the-box

 ‘God-in-the-box’

A sermon for Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation,

the online gathering of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church,

October 25th 2020

 

Image credit: By Ancient-origins.net - 

https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-asia/first-temple-crowning-achievement-

king-solomon-and-home-legendary-ark-covenant-021683, 

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92006249

2 Samuel 7.1-17

Last Sunday was our first Sunday service held in our church building, since the coronavirus restrictions forced us to close our doors back in March.

And I think it’s fair to say that, for the 17 of us who were able to be there, it was deeply moving to be back in the sanctuary, even if the service itself was some way from what we remember or desire.

I also hear that those who joined online found it a good service, which is great, because we will need to find ways of straddling the in-person / online divide for some time to come.

And although last week was a trial run, and unless we face further restrictions, we’ll be back in our building for a service again in November.

And as I’ve been reflecting on this experience during the week, what has struck me is the sense I felt of ‘coming home’ to our building.

It was similar to the feeling I get sometimes in a cathedral, that sense that God has been worshipped in this place for so many years, and that this building has been a home for God’s people for so long, that it somehow feels easier to enter God’s presence there compared to, say, the street outside.

And it’s this idea of building a ‘house’ for God, that lies at the heart of our reading this morning from the second book of Samuel.

Here we find one of the key turning points in the Hebrew Bible, the decision to build a temple in Jerusalem.

In the end, of course, it isn’t David who actually builds God’s house, it’s his son Solomon who constructs the great first temple.

But Solomon’s project is simply the fulfilment of the dream that we find articulated here by David, who says to the prophet Nathan, "See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent."

And in this one sentence, the whole history of religion shifts.

If we think back on the story so far, we can trace an evolution in the way the ancient Israelites thought about their God.

The original revelation of God to Abraham was a moment of startling insight into the nature of God.

Up until Abraham, each nation, each tribe, each household, had their own gods.

There were thousands of them, the god of the river who gave fish to eat, the god of the fields who gave grain to grow, the god of the sky who caused rain and sun, the god of my tribe, who helped me fight against your tribe, the god of my house, who I pray to every night for safety and sleep, and so on, and so on, and so on…

And to Abraham, God says that there is only one God, and that God is the Lord of the whole earth.

Abraham’s calling, for him and his descendants, is to become the people who enter into a relationship with that one true God, in order that all the earth might be blessed through their witness to this new truth.

Fast forward through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, to God’s people in slavery in Egypt; and here we come to the next milestone, which is the story of Moses and the exodus.

Through Moses, God leads his people out of slavery, and into the wilderness, on their way to the promised land.

Forget for a minute the discussions about whether this all happened historically, because it almost certainly didn’t.

But that’s not the point.

This story of Moses and the Exodus gives us a story of how God works in human history, it reveals God as the liberator of the oppressed, and the enemy of empires.

And the image of the people of God wandering in the wilderness is a timeless example of God’s people in every age, with each generation making its pilgrimage from slavery to promised land.

And as they wander, as we wander, God travels with us - because God is the Lord of all the earth.  

But then we get to Mount Sinai, and the ten commandments, and things start to change gear, because the people start to seek certainty and stability.

The big problem with a big God is that we have very small lives, and we want to know what we should do, how we should live.

So God gives the Israelites the ten commandments, to guide them in their wandering and to help them live well as the people of God’s covenant.

Except, of course, it isn’t all that long before ten commandments become thousands, and you only have to read through the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy to see how, once you start down the path of asking God for a rulebook, things get very complicated, very quickly.

And so the process of tying God down continues, and the God of the whole earth becomes incrementally that bit smaller, that bit more parochial, that bit more controllable.

By the time we get to David, God is the God of Israel, who fights for them against the other nations, who defends their borders, and asks of them obedience and faithfulness.

And so, for David, the next logical step, is to build God a house.

There’s a bit of clever word-play here, because David says he wants to build a house of God, by which he means a temple, and God says he will build a house of David, by which he means a dynasty.

And so, through this, God gets a bit smaller again, becoming not even the God of Israel, but the God of the southern tribes of Israel, as expressed through the temple in Jerusalem, and David’s descendants as they rule in Jerusalem.

I told you this was a significant moment in the history of world religions.

Here, in the deal David does with God to build a house in exchange for a house, the great God of all the earth glimpsed by Abraham, becomes a localised deity, focussed on one city, and one family.

The Abrahamic assertion that there is only one God, which revealed the presence of God in all peoples and all places, becomes a diminished statement of territorial dominance, denying the validity of other paths to the divine.

And so God gets put in a box.

The ark of the covenant containing the ten commandments, becomes the holy of holies at the heart of a massive temple complex.

Only the high priest can go there to see God, and then only once per year, everyone else is kept at a distance.

The God who travelled with the faithful through wilderness, the God who was with them in slavery, the God who calls them to new life has become a God-in-a-box, in a bigger box called the temple, in a bigger box called the city of Jerusalem, in a bigger box called the nation of Israel.

And the family that put him there, David’s dynasty, get to control God because the story they tell of the deal David did, is one where God promises David an eternal kingdom, and a throne for all time.

And so it might have continued, except, of course, earthly dreams of perpetual power rarely run smoothly.

After all, God has already shown in Egypt that God is against all empires and it turns out that this includes those empires that have been established in God’s own divine name.

God will not stay in a box forever.

Eventually, the temple is destroyed by the Babylonians, and the Davidic monarchy, the line of David, loses its grip on power.

At which point, the promises of God to David in this story go through a process of reinterpretation and they become the hope of a future messiah, one who will re-establish the kingdom of David, and restore the power to Israel that other nations have taken away.

Which is why, when Luke tells the story of Gabriel’s appearance to Mary, he quotes from this text to help his readers understand something profound about Jesus as the revelation of God’s action in human history.

Luke 1.28, 30-33

 ²⁸ And [Gabriel] came to [Mary] and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you." ³⁰ The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.  ³¹ And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.  ³² He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.  ³³ He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."

All the messianic hopes of David’s kingdom are put onto Jesus at his incarnation.

And then Jesus spends the rest of his life subverting them.

Jesus may be, within the Christian tradition, the fulfilment of messianic hope, but it’s a different form of Jesus consistently refuses to raise an army, he turns away from those who would enact a revolution in his name, he resists the title ‘son of David’, always calling himself simply ‘the son of man’.

Jesus refuses to seek a palace, instead claiming that ‘the son of man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Lk 9.58).

He never marries, he has no children.

The God revealed in Jesus doesn’t want a ‘house’ either in terms of a building, or a dynasty.

Instead, Jesus constantly takes people back to Abraham’s original vision of God, as the universal Lord of all creation confounding those who would use him to rebuild David’s lost lineage of power.

Jesus will not be put in a box.

So, my question for us this morning is this: what boxes do we put God in?

Do we try to build temples for our God? Why is our worship space, with its pews and stained glass windows, called the ‘sanctuary’? Why was I moved to tears last Sunday when we worshipped there again?

Do we seek to constrain God to certain worship styles, or favoured theologies?

Is God the God of us, and our people, but not the God of them, and their people?

Do we seek to constrain God’s action in our own lives, seeking settled status within ourselves instead of embracing a life of wilderness pilgrimage?

If so, then we need to beware, because God will not be constrained, and neither will God live in a box.

God is the God of the whole earth, and through Jesus and by the Spirit of Christ we are called to a vision of God that is bigger and more universal and more loving than we can ever conceive.

The eternal kingdom, that enfolds and embraces us all, is the kingdom of God.

And we build other empires at our peril.