12/9/56

Scripture: Jeremiah 36: 1-3; 14-26

Will you think for a few minutes about the Bible-burning described in today’s reading from the book of Jeremiah? King Jehoiachim was being adversely criticized. And adverse criticism is embarrassing to a king! The material which Jehudi was reading before the court was a direct attack by the prophet, Jeremiah, upon the reign of King Jehoiachim.

Jeremiah was severely criticizing the king’s pro-Egyptian policy. His policy was dangerous to the Palestinian country because Egypt had already been defeated by the northern power, Babylon. For Judah to play along with the defeated Egypt and Assyria, in defiance of the grim and powerful northern neighbor, was national suicide, in the eyes of the prophet.

Further, Jeremiah was severely critical of King Jehoiachim’s licentious paganism. And he minced no words about it! He said, flatly, that God would punish the king and his people for this foolishness with Egypt, and even more for this wickedness with pagan gods. Nebuchadnezzer, the Babylonian conqueror, would destroy Jerusalem and carry the king as prisoner, and his people as slaves, off to Babylon.

“Thus says the Lord,” wrote Jeremiah. His words were respected in Judah. He was recognized as a great and good man, this fiery prophet. The people of Jerusalem knew about Jeremiah’s views. Many of them were impressed. Even the princes, or administrators were impressed. Jeremiah may not have been exactly a favorite around the city. But he was respected as a prophet, especially at this point in his career.

News was getting around that the prophet was predicting doom for the king and his kingdom. People were getting jittery in the city. Thinking that it was time the king heard what Jeremiah was saying, some of the royal advisors told his highness what was happening. That is how it happened that Jehudi was reading Jeremiah’s scroll of writing before the king and his court as they sat in the winter house part of the royal palace. There was an open fire in a large brazier. It was the ninth month of the fourth year of Jehoiachim’s reign.

There was tenseness in the atmosphere. All eyes were upon the king. How would he take it? Would he receive this word from a man whom all Jerusalem regarded as a spokesman for God?

As Jehudi read, the scroll slowly unwound from the one side, to be read and then rewound on the other side. The king said nothing and did nothing to interrupt the reading.

But to show his contempt for the prophet and his God, he reached over, as Jehudi finished reading 3 or 4 columns of the scroll, and just as these columns were about to disappear around the right side core of the scroll, he carefully slashed them out with a penknife. Lifting off what he had just heard, he dropped it into the fire, leaving only the margins of the papyrus scroll to be rewound. He kept this up, as Jehudi was reading, until everything Jeremiah had written was burned up!

You can almost hear the snickering and then the laughter of the courtiers as the king left the reader, Jehudi, holding the margins. It was clever of the king, was it not? When the reading was over, the king, smiling and calm, ordered the arrest of Jeremiah, the prophet, and of Baruch, the scribe who wrote at Jeremiah’s dictation. Then he dismissed the court. Jehoiachim had been very masterful, very composed and kingly.

But he did not get rid of the prophecy, nor of the truth of it. He did not get rid of Jeremiah, either. Jeremiah and Baruch eluded arrest. Then Jeremiah dictated again, and Baruch wrote down the same prophecy, adding much more than was written in the first scroll.

Not long afterward, Jehoiachim died. But Jerusalem did fall to the Babylonian conquerors, and its people suffered in captivity. Jehoiachim’s son was maimed and carried off to prison in Babylon where he languished until he died.

But today, we have in our Bible all that Jeremiah said, and Baruch wrote. And it is a continuing, living testimony that the truth outlives those who deny it and outrage it.

What is it about this scroll of Jeremiah’s that so embarrassed king Jehoiachim? What induced him to take a place among the Bible-burners of history? There were surely other critics of the king’s policies whom he ignored. There may have been thousands of critics of whom he had never heard. But the princes and the people insisted that Jeremiah was a prophet of God, and as such was God’s spokesman. These princes and people attached sacred significance to their scroll which Jeremiah had dictated and Baruch had written. A great many people had heard Baruch read it in public on one of the fast days.

The king, seated in the winter house, with a good fire going, and his courtiers surrounding him, had remained calm and had preserved his kingly bearing as Jehudi’s voice droned on with the reading. But he must have “boiled in fury” beneath the surface. For this book condemned him - Jehoiachim. It challenged his whole policy as king. And more, also, the princes and the people took this book seriously! Why else should they waste his time with the suggestion that he hear its reading?

So ---- he would show them who was king! He burned the book!

That has been the story of Bible-burners and prophet-killers throughout history. For the Bible, like that part of it which Jehoiachim burned, is a judgment upon what we have been, and a challenge to change what we are, so that we may become what God has in mind for us to be. It is that which makes the Bible embarrassing, hard to read and to hear. That is what makes its faithful readers and prophets unpopular.

For fearlessly uncovering the truth of the Scriptures in his day, and for holding it up as a mirror in which man could see his disconcerting image, Jesus was nailed to a cross.

More than 400 years ago, in 1533, William Tyndale was alarmed at the corruption in his time. He resolved to translate the Scriptures, then unknown to any people except specialized scholars, into the common language of his people, so that anybody who could read, could see themselves and their times in the light of God’s revelation. Of course this action proved so embarrassing to the bishops of the church that they, feeling themselves exposed by God’s Word, tried Tyndale for heresy and had him put to death at the stake in 1536.

Hitler found himself embarrassed by the Bible. He had his ideologists gloss over it, reinterpret it, fuse it with pagan legends of German folklore to make it a good piece of Nazi propaganda literature. But there were always those in Germany who knew the Bible and who read it clearly. Those who insisted on reading it clearly, Hitler threw into concentration camps.

But the Bible embarrasses us, too, does it not? We get over some of it pretty fast, and ignore some of it that we don’t like. Much of the prophetical we ignore and much of what appears miraculous we avoid (unless we get anxious for some miracle to happen to us.) And so the Bible becomes just “good literature” or a record of good deeds, or a report of what men have reasoned and dreamed --- interesting to read (if one likes that sort of thing) but not of any arresting importance.

We may be disinterested in the letters of Paul. Some say that the poetical sections of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount are interesting, but not the rest. Or one may say “I don’t follow the teachings of Jesus on the treatment of enemies.” But what is in the Bible not only comforts us, but haunts and hounds us.

We can regard the Bible as just a good book from which to quote. Almost anyone with an ax to grind can, like the devil, find a verse or a longer passage in Scripture to suit his purpose.

We can regard the Book as a treasure house of wise sayings. Novelists may use it as a source of catchy titles for current books. It can be bound in white for nurses at graduation and for brides to carry with ribbons and orchids. Rich folk can have it bound in red Morocco for their desks, and poor folk can get it at dime stores for good luck or respectability around the house.

But who will read it seriously, study it at the points where it rasps our complacency and condemns our faithlessness and shames our poor standards of ethics? These are points of our very need of the Bible; for with our embarrassment and discomfort comes also our faith in God’s power to make clear His love for us and His judgment upon our lives.

Jehoiachim may not have realized it clearly, but what embarrassed him more than Jeremiah, was the possibility that Jeremiah did speak for the living God. There was made clear to the king the possibility that God does manage to get himself across to people in one way or another.

The prophets, Jeremiah among them, were not teaching that any mere book -- any combination of words in any language by any man -- can contain the judgment and the love of the eternal God. But the words of the Scriptures are the attempts of honest men, who loved and revered God, and lived for Him, to express their conviction that God is far more than man’s finite wisdom can express.

One of the common characteristics of so much of the prophetic writings is the expectation that one day God would come in person to supersede their words and give them meaning. For generations, a Messiah was expected. And this season of the year always gives us reminder of it!

There is a statue of the great Episcopalian preacher, Phillips Brooks, in front of Trinity Church in Boston. Behind the figure of that well known New England minister, Christ is portrayed, standing with his hand on Brooks’ shoulder. A working woman, pausing to gaze at the two figures, asked, “Who is that standing behind the preacher?” Someone told her: “That is Christ.” The woman replied, “It doesn’t look like him.”

Probably you can say that about every picture that has ever been painted of Christ. But, if not by statues and paintings of Christ, how then shall we know him, and through him the God who sent him? The only authentic picture of Christ is the Bible. And for this reason, those who make just an “ethical scrap book” of the Bible miss its whole point. Martin Luther once called the Bible the cradle of Christ.

So, you and I, looking through the Bible, begin to really read it only when we read there of the eternal God who comes, in Christ, to confront us face to face.

The fourth Gospel, that of John, opens with startling words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And the same gospel reads: “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”

It is not surprising that the Book which God uses as the means to come into your life with his love and judgment, in Jesus of Nazareth, should be embarrassing to us at the points of our imperfection and waywardness and stubbornness and disbelief. So long as we are what most of us are it ought to embarrass us, and prick our consciences, and stir us to new hopes and visions and determination.

There are, of course, different kinds of embarrassment. A Toronto writer says that the most faltering, hesitating, and poor speeches he ever hears are those of happy bridegrooms attempting to reply to the toast to the bride. It is true, is it not, that when we are confronted by those who love us, our inadequacies, and shortcomings, even our sins, rise up to mock us. It is embarrassing!

God, who is perfect love, cannot come to us without embarrassing us. For we are so imperfect, so wayward, so neglectful. And yet, had we rather he did not come to us?

Why not go at the Book of Books with a fresh approach? This Christmas time, instead of looking for just the nativity story, or waiting for it to be read in your hearing at church or in childhood pageantry, try reading the gospel of Mark all the way through --- perhaps even at a single sitting. And the next time, try all of the gospel of Luke. See what God has to say to you through the whole of a gospel writer’s account. Get some helps, if you desire them, like Goodspeed’s “Story of the Bible” or a good commentary.

But when you read it, let the Bible speak to you; let it impress you; let it disturb you, embarrass you, challenge you, inspire you. Let it put Christ right beside your mind and within your soul.

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, December 9, 1956

Wisconsin Rapids, December 11, 1966