There’s this whole genre of
TV shows these days about hidden gems from the past lurking in somebody’s
basement. You know, American Pickers and
Pawn Stars and the like. You go back
a little further and there’s Antiques
Roadshow on PBS (and it probably says something about my social life that I
remember that from my grade school days). There are plenty of other TV shows
(many of which happen to be on the History Channel) that are about missing
treasure being sought in various places. These are all quasi-non-fiction
(though some of them are more than a little conspiracy-laden), but there are
also many, many fictional accounts like these as well. Once upon a time it was Indiana Jones, then National Treasure, now The
Librarians and the like.
All of these shows tap into some yearning we have to
discover something exceptional that has been forgotten. There is something important
about finding buried treasure that goes beyond even wealth. After all, in all
these stories (at least the fictional ones) the greedy ones end up succumbing
to their greed and those who find the treasure happen to be the ones doing it
for the right reason. If you don’t know what Pawn Stars is, however; it’s basically what I just described but
backwards. The wealthy greedy ones get the historical artifacts and the ones
who bring them go off and waste all their money gambling in Vegas. But that’s
another story.
Anyway, in today’s reading we have an unexpected treasure
hunt. Most of the best treasure hunts go down this way. Hilkiah, having been
sent by King Josiah to find workers to repair the temple, stumbles upon scrolls
from the Torah (specifically a part of the book of Deuteronomy) forgotten in
the temple. This has all the making of an Indiana
Jones plot minus the melting Nazi faces, except Shaphan doesn’t seem to
understand the importance of what he is bringing to Josiah.
We have to remember that books of the Bible were not just
lying around in Josiah’s day. You couldn’t go down to the corner Hebrew book
store and find yourself a scroll of the Torah. In all likelihood, this was one
of few that existed and it was all-but-forgotten in the dilapidated temple that
was supposed to be the center of the faith of the Hebrew people. It’s kind of
amazing to consider the temple being in such disrepair, and it is a testimony
to how little the faith of the people mattered any longer in those days. If our
church gets dust in the corners I get phone calls on Tuesday morning. And we
are just a little church in the far edges of creation. The temple is the very
heart of the Jewish faith, standing in Jerusalem at the very heart of the
world. The fact that the Torah was left behind in the temple is almost
unfathomable. The fact that Shaphan, a priest, could bring the book to Josiah with
barely a comment, as if he doesn’t seem to care about what it is, is equally
astounding.
The people of Judah had completely forgotten about God’s
law.
Well, the first thing we should remember is that the Old
Testament covers an incredible length of history. Moses leading the Hebrew
people out of the Promised Land was further in the past to these Judeans under
Josiah than the Middle Ages are for us. Nobody remembered this because it was
something like fifty generations before them. At the same time there were many
competing gods. Each of them had their own stories. So, people of Judea would
hear not just stories about Moses and Elijah and YHWH (their God), but they
would also hear about the gods of the Assyrians and the Babylonians and other
groups. By the time of Josiah, Israel (the northern kingdom) was already
defeated by the Assyrians and captive in their country, and (in spite of
Josiah’s reforms) Judea was on a collision course with Babylon, who would soon
exile them as well. These people had forgotten the laws given from God to Moses
and they were ripe to be conquered. And they had forgotten their laws because
they no longer valued being distinct.
If there’s a warning in these verses for us today it is
that the people whose forebears were saved by God in Egypt and given,
eventually, the Promised Land, were always just a generation away from exile
(or, indeed, extinction), because they were always just a generation away from
forgetting the source of the land they had been given. Their faith in God was
always precarious. And in some ways that much has never changed. Our faith is
always just a generation away from extinction. In spite of two thousand years
of history we are always at risk of losing our faith. History has been full of
these ebbs and flows.
Now,
I trust in the Holy Spirit working in the world to continue to bring us
faith—i.e. this isn’t a matter of us fixing the problem ourselves—but I do
worry that we no longer know how to be people of faith in a pluralistic world.
We don’t know how to act around people who believe differently than us.
Religion is no longer at the center of society and we can mourn that or try to
change it, but I think both of those responses are but beating our heads
against the wall. Instead, I believe we need to adapt to it without apologizing
for what we believe or pretending that it’s still another time in history where
we can play the God card and everybody will accept what we say as Gospel.
What
we’re seeing in 21st century America is that those who don’t
practice their faith face no stigma for walking away from the church. Once upon
a time, this was not the case. People came to church for all sorts of the wrong
reasons, but they came. And so a side effect of church being the societally-expected
place to be was that people actually learned a little something about God and
grace and salvation and all the things that Jesus told us about.
Today,
we’re in pretty much the same situation, except those who didn’t actually care
about church don’t bother to put on the show anymore, because it doesn’t
benefit them in the same way anymore. And they aren’t going to feel guilty
about it unless they see me at the Farmer’s Store at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday
morning. Then they will, just a little, but otherwise not so much.
This
can be a problem or it can be an opportunity. And that’s really what Josiah’s
reforms can teach us. It was really too late for the people of Judah by the
time the scrolls of the Torah made it back to Josiah, but it’s not too late for
us—not by a longshot. The challenge for us is to imagine what it looks like to
share a faith that matters enough to cut through a culture dominated no longer
by religious duty but by family and politics and tribal loyalties—like sports
or clubs. I’m not suggesting we can change that, or even that we should.
Instead, I’m suggesting that we still have something to offer that matters.
There’s
a reason people still call me when their mother or father dies. There’s a
reason why the ritual of a funeral still matters, and it’s not just about
celebrating their life and lifting up their accomplishments. It’s about
assurance that many people don’t bother with most of the time, but when faced
with death it hits them in the face. We still have these opportunities. As long
as two or three gather we will still remember the stories of our faith. But in
order to remember them we need to tell them, and we need to live them, and we
need to be passionate enough about it to cut through the thousand other things
competing for our attention. The Holy Spirit will continue to work faith in us;
the question is whether we care. The question is why that should be compelling
for the person down the street who no longer thinks of themselves as religious.
Josiah’s reform is ultimately a failure… if you think the
reason that Josiah made those reforms was in order to bring Judah back around
and save them from their enemies. But in another way, Josiah’s reform was
exactly what he needed to be a person of faith. He did his part. It wasn’t
enough to change history, and yet here we are, reading this story again in
2015, and reflecting on what we can do. There are no assurances we will
complete the work; no guarantee that this church will last beyond this
generation (let alone for another 125 years). We don’t know that. That’s not
why we do what we do. We do it because we honestly care that people hear about
Jesus—that Jesus lived and died on a cross for all the things we make a mess
of.
If that mission ever changes—if we ever become more
concerned about anything than telling people about Jesus—then that’s the only
way we can fail. But if we keep an honest concern for being disciples at the
forefront of everything we do, then we cannot fail. The worst that can happen
is that our faith is not passed on to the next generation, but God will take
care of that anyway. Our task is simple. Love God. Love our neighbors. Share
the good news that Jesus died for you. The rest is commentary.
Amen.
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