Reform
2 Kings 22:1-10, [14-20]; 23:1-3
Advent 1
November 29, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
The passage of Scripture that we have heard this morning is not familiar to most of us. I vaguely remember learning about the “revival” that began under Hezekiah and continued with Josiah when I took an Old Testament survey in seminary, some thirty years ago. I remember these things as feeble attempts to stave off disaster for Jerusalem and Judah. Feeble, unsuccessful attempts. The regional political situation saw the Assyrian Empire at its peak and a renewed, badder-than-ever Babylonian Empire on the rise. In the long run little Judah really didn’t stand a chance.
But we only know that from hindsight, from outside of the story. From the inside of the story, things were different. The characters in the story made choices, just as we do, without knowing how any of it was going to turn out. So let’s see what the story has to tell us.
It begins, really with Hezekiah who is described as a king who “did what was right in the sight of the Lord just as his ancestor David had done.” As an aside I will say that anyone who has read David’s story carefully might conclude that this standard does not set the bar very high. Still, looking back, the story-teller may be forgiven a sense of nostalgia.
Hezekiah was a good king, according the story-teller’s standards. He was king in 722 when the Assyrian Empire exploded onto the scene and gobbled up the Northern Kingdom, Israel, like Hitler’s Germany gobbled up Belgium. Judah, the Southern Kingdom, preserved its independence only by paying huge amounts of money in tribute to Assyria.
Hezekiah used this period of uneasy peace to clean house. He removed the local shrines that had been used to worship not only Yahweh but Asherah. Asherah seems to have been considered as Yahweh’s consort, but no one is really sure. As one scholar has said (and I wish I could remember who; he deserves to be cited), “We don’t know what an Asherah was, but we know Yahweh had one of them.” Not helpful for the curious. Anyway, Hezekiah reformed Yahweh worship, getting ride of the Asherahs, suppressing the worship of other gods, and consolidating worship in the Temple in Jerusalem.
Sometime at the very end of the eighth century, say in 702 or 703 BCE, Hezekiah suspended payment of the tribute money that Assyrian had demanded. It wasn’t long before King Sennacherib of Assyria brought his army to the gates of Jerusalem with the demand that it surrender so that people could be resettled or face complete destruction. The seige lasted from 701 to perhaps as late as 691.
We can imagine that Hezekiah had second and third and fourth thoughts during that long siege when all he could see from the walls of Jerusalem were Assyrian soldiers and chariots. Some of his struggles of faith are preserved in the book of Isaiah who reassured him several times of Yahweh’s determination to defend Jerusalem. And, amazingly, Jerusalem was saved. The siege was lifted when Sennacherib heard that there was trouble at home in Nineveh. He withdrew his armies and, a few years later, was assassinated in the temple of his god Nisroch by two of his sons. So it’s not necessary true that “the family that prays together, stays together.”
Hezekiah’s reign ended peacefully and he was succeeded by Manasseh and Amon, both of whom are described as evil kings. They undid Hezekiah’s reforms, rebuilt the high places and altars were rebuilt, sponsored the worship of Baal even in the Jerusalem Temple, and brought the sacred poles back into the Temple.
So bad was Amon’s rule that he was killed in a palace coup. Josiah succeeded Amon and is praised in the most glowing terms. Josiah was his great-grandfather’s great-grandson and, like Hezekiah, began a deep reform of the religious, political, and economic life of Judah.
He sponsored a restoration and remodeling project in the Temple. Anytime an old building is remodeled or restored, there is no telling what may be discovered behind some drywall or in a bricked-up unused space. In the course of restoring the Temple, a scroll was discovered that was a book of law. That’s what the story says. Perhaps it was an old scroll that was discovered. Or, as I think more likely, it was a new scroll written by priests taking advantage of the general chaos that reigns during a remodeling project. Either way, it was almost certainly some form of the Bible’s book of Deuteronomy. The priests took the scroll to Josiah and read it to him. To me this suggests that it was probably quite a bit shorter than the present version of Deuteronomy, but perhaps not. The king listened, horrified, as the law was read, law that was being systemically ignored. In grief and horror he tore his clothes. Then he called an assembly of the people and had the book read to them.
He set about to do the things that Deuteronomy required. The altars on the high places were destroyed and the places themselves defiled. The Asherahs–whatever they were–were removed from the Temple. The worship of the Baals was suppressed. The sacred poles were cut down. The local priests were turned out of work. He called for the Festival of the Passover to be observed as it had not been observed in centuries. “Before him,” says the account of his reign in 2 Kings 23, “there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him.” That is, indeed, as good as it gets. Not even David is praised so well, nor Hezekiah. They are the only two who even come close.
But so what? That’s always a good question. So what? For all of Josiah’s reforms, zeal, and devotion, the disaster was only postponed, not diverted. Josiah was followed by three kings who “did what was evil in the sight of Yahweh.” In less than a century, Judah fell to Babylon, Jerusalem was besieged, its gates burned, its walls torn down, its Temple looted and burned, and its people deported into exile. Josiah’s reforming zeal failed to change the path of history enough to spare Jerusalem and Judah. What was the point of all the struggle to change things, if the disaster could not be prevented? Why bother?
That’s a way of thinking and reacting to approaching trouble that is still with us. One response to the threat of global warming is a kind of fatalism that says, “Well, since we know that, no matter what we do to reduced greenhouse gas emissions, the average temperature is going to rise high enough so that there will be wide-spread damage and destruction, what’s the point of doing anything at all, especially if it’s going to be hard?”
I have had one automobile accident in which I was the driver. It was completely my fault. Completely. I was turning at a traffic light controlled intersection. The vehicle in front of me stopped and I hit it. I have heard that 90% of all accidents happen at intersections. When you consider that less that 10% the roads are intersection, that means that we are 80 times more likely to have an accident in the hundred or so feet of an intersection than in any other hundred feet of roadway. I think I have the math right. Anyway, if there is a time to pay attention , it’s while we are in intersections.
And what was I doing at the intersection in question? I was messing with a cassette tape and the tape player. Yep. I was still accelerating when I saw, too late, that the truck in front of me was stopping. Time seemed to slow to a crawl. I hit the brakes hard, just short of locking up all four wheels, but I could see that there was simply no way to avoid a collision. The only questions was, how hard I was going to hit. Pretty hard, it turned out. The truck was a F-250 Ford and I was driving a Dodge Neon. The rear bumper of the truck engaged my hood and peeled it back like aluminum foil. The truck suffered a little scratched paint on the bumper and a bent bracket that held the electrical connectors for hooking up a trailer. The driver was very kind. He bent the bracket back into place and never filed a claim for the scraped paint.
Because I was driving distracted, by the time I realized that there was a developing driving hazard, it was too late to prevent it. But it wasn’t too late to soften the impact. Yes, my hood was a mess and there were broken headlights and turn signal lights. But, except for my bruised ego, no one suffered any injuries. The heavy braking didn’t prevent the accident from happening, but because of the breaking the accident was not nearly as bad as it would have been.
Back to Josiah. Josiah’s reforms did not keep Judah from falling to Babylon. But they were not in vain, either. They recalled Judah to a clearer and more focused loyalty to Yahweh. Especially, I think, the decision to recover a deep practice of the Passover meant that Judah told and retold the story of Israel’s delivery from Egypt, rehearsing and acting out the story of the God who is passionately committed to justice, who hears the cry of the oppressed, who comes down to deliver them, and who sets before them a new way of life that is peaceful, just and humane. Who knows what impact that one decision of Josiah’s had on the next century of Judah’s life, what effect it had on the memories of the exiles who left, what role it had in shaping who the Judeans would become? Judeans left Jerusalem for exile in Babylon and they came back as something the world had never seen before. They came back as Jews. And it was out of his identity as a Jew that Jesus of Nazareth would discover his own calling.
Josiah, of course, could have no way of knowing any of that. He only knew that he had to respond faithfully to the call to live as the king of God’s people. He could only obey or disobey the summons to his own life and ministry. He could not guarantee the outcome.
In that we are no different than us. We can only obey or disobey God’s call to our life and ministry. We can’t guarantee the outcome. We can only be faithful.
The world is warming up and the activity of human beings is a major contribution to that warming. There is as much certainty about this as there is about the relationship between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. We are already living in a world that none of us has ever lived in: a world with an average of 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. Can we reverse this in time to prevent widespread misery and suffering? I don’t know. I only know that we are called to do all we can to make the world a better place to live.
Our time in history has seen fresh eruptions of hatred. After the 9/11 attacks and even more in the few weeks since the Paris attacks, we have seen unprecedented acceptance of public hate speech toward Muslims. To our collective shame candidates for public office have discovered that they have nothing to lose and much to gain by holding up Muslims as targets for anger and hatred. Our leaders–including our own governor–are falling all over themselves to show how terrified they are of Syrian refugees and how suspicious we should all be of all Muslims. As a Christian I find this behavior shameful. I’m not afraid of Syrian refugees. They are not dangerous. Racist white men with guns are dangerous, but our leaders fall all over themselves to make sure that their access to guns remains uninterrupted.
Can we hold back the waves of hate that have been unleashed in the last few years? I don’t know. I only know that Christians are called to live out of love and not out of fear. There are actions we can take. We can challenge the racism that we hear at the coffee shop or read on Facebook. We can write letters to our leaders to tell them that there are some Christians who object to the fear and hatred they espouse and encourage. We can vote for justice rather than out of fear. We can decide that our congregation will welcome the stranger who comes to us in the guise of a Syrian refugee family. We can decide that our congregation will sponsor a refuge with or without our governor’s help or blessing. We can pursue a deepening of our relationship with Muslim students at Luther, standing in solidarity with them as they face the growing menace of religious hatred dressed up in a Christian disguise.
We can do all those things and more. Will it turn aside the tide of fear and hatred? I don’t know. I only know that Jesus called us to welcome the stranger. It isn’t given to us to know what effect our actions will have before we act. It isn’t given to us to know how history will turn out in the short term. It is only given to us, as it was given to Josiah, to be able to obey God’s covenant call, to remember who we are, and to live that out in our shared life and in our life in mission in our community.
That’s how we begin Advent. Not by getting our Christmas wish lists finished. Not by getting our baking started. Not by scheduling our visits and our parties. None of those things are bad things in themselves, of course, but they aren’t about Advent. Advent is about hearing God’s call to live in covenant with God, with each other, with all living beings that share this planet, and with the planet itself. Advent is about deciding to live in covenant as far as we are able, and even farther. Advent is about being faithful and leaving the results to God. Advent is about discovering the book of the covenant in the midst of the chaos of our lives and deciding that the life described in that book is the life we intend to live.
