” … all the words of the book which Jehoiakim, King of Judah,

had burned in the fire.”

(Jeremiah 36:32)

What do you make of all the mysterious church burnings across our Southland? Do you think it is the work of violent racists, or do you think it is done by atheists bent on destroying all houses of worship? Or do you believe the church burnings are caused by crazy pyromaniacs, who have picked out empty structures in remote areas because they can safely experience there a selfish thrill and contempt for the rights and property of others? Whatever or whoever is at the bottom of burning churches, certainly the basic human motivation for such activity is bound to be either hostility, or scorn, or contempt for the rights and values of others.

Our Old Testament lesson this morning is about a book-burning which has striking similarities to church-burning. We read in the book of Jeremiah a few minutes ago of how on a cold December day King Jehoiakim sat in his palace. He and his top political advisors were listening to the reading of a paper prepared by the prophet Jeremiah. The subject of this paper was the current crisis in Jehoiakim’s Kingdom and God’s will for that nation. As Jehudi, the Scribe, read from the scroll, the words came in clear cadence, a steady stream of judgments on the King’s immoral and foolish mistakes, and the divine directives for future action.

But King Jehoiakim, sitting in his winter palace, in the company of his chief men, silently expressed his complete contempt for the prophet’s book by cutting with his pen-knife sections of the scroll as the scribe finished reading, and dropping them in the charcoal brazier at which the men warmed themselves, until the whole book was burned.

Though this is the only scriptural account of a public book-burning of the whole or a portion of the Bible, it really records an ancient and favorite pastime of people reported over and over again.  Ever since people have been recording their ideas in books for communicating them to others, people have been burning books to get rid of those ideas.

When William Tyndale’s first edition of the New Testament in English arrived at British ports from the continent where they had been printed, the books were burned as pernicious merchandise. When the royalists rose again to power after the Puritan rule in England, great public bonfires were made for the burning of John Milton’s pamphlets on political and religious liberty. For Adolf Hitler the burning of books played an important role in his campaign to destroy religious freedom in Germany. Book-burning is an old and common custom.

Of course, book-burning is essentially an attempt to oppose and destroy ideas to which one objects, to show scorn, to destroy the ideas, and to intimidate those whose minds are friendly to those ideas. Jehoiakim, the young, head-strong monarch, bent on his own hunt for luxurious pleasures, was thoroughly irked that God’s prophet should presume to insinuate God’s ideas on political and economic affairs into his court. Everybody knew that it was a tense time. The crucial battle of Carcemish, between those two titans among nations, Egypt and Babylonia, had been fought that very summer near the border of Jehoiakim’s own kingdom. Egypt, whom Jehoiakim had backed, was soundly defeated. The balance of power had shifted northward, away from Egypt and to Babylonia. Jehoiakim had staked almost everything on the losing nation. Of course, it was a tense time, and his nation’s whole economy must be reoriented to a new world order, but he wanted no interference to his management of the national affairs by this upstart prophet. As Roark Bradford represented an irate Nebuchaddressar replying to the prophet’s rebuke of his rule: “You mean, de Lawd don’t like my style of kinging?” so Jehoiakim, in burning Jeremiah’s book, was registering his contempt and inhospitality to the ideas the prophet advanced as God’s will for His people.

But the main trouble with book-burning or church-burning is that it never does really get rid of the idea which people find distasteful. The practical effect of burning Tyndale’s New Testaments was to make the public more avid to secure and secrete the condemned publication. Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, tells how his great-great grandfather bought a prohibited Bible and fastened it to the underside of a stool. When time came for family worship, the old man turned the stool upside down on his lap, turned the pages under the straps which held the book to the stool, and read God’s word to his family, as one of the children stood guard at the door to watch.

The immediate result of Jehoiakim’s burning of Jeremiah’s scroll was the prophet’s rewriting his whole book which remains to this day in our Bibles. As the king could not destroy the ideas he found distasteful by burning the book, neither was he able to hinder the fulfillment of God’s word for him and his nation, for the divine judgments did fall just as Jeremiah had spoken them. Judah was defeated and her people carried away into Babylonian captivity.

Ideas can no more be killed by burning books and churches which contain them, than men can hold back the dawn by building stone walls. The gospel and the truths and values which the churches enshrine cannot be reduced to ashes by torching churches of black or white congregations. Truth cannot be chained merely because men’s minds are inhospitable to it. In dealing with strange ideas we find difficult to accept, better to follow the advice of Gamaliel to the Sanhedrin concerning the rising Christian movement: “If this work be of men, it will come to naught; but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found to fight against God.”

But strange as it may seem, in spite of the futility of book-burning and church-burning, our world does not seem to be through with such irrational behavior. Some years ago when the Nobel Prize winners gathered in Stockholm, Sweden, from all over the world to receive their prizes and listen to the citations honoring them for their meritorious achievements in intellectual pursuits and humanitarian services, one writer who was to be honored was conspicuously absent. Why? Why was the author of the prize winning novel that year not present? Oh, because his book: Dr. Zhivago, with its mild censure of Soviet practices was frowned upon by Kremelin officials and its publication suppressed in Russia. Today, the Soviet regime of tyrannical repression of freedom has been dethroned, and the ideas of human dignity and liberty still live in Russia.

Back during the unrest of the Civil Rights struggles in our own country in the late 1950s, law enforcement leaders of several mid-south states and officials of the F.B.I. met to determine what could be done to stop the bombing of public buildings and places of worship. There had been some 96 instances of bombings and many hundreds more of threatened acts of violence. What was back of all this, they asked? Why, it was the ancient attempt of people to deal with ideas that they didn’t like in violent and repressive actions. It was the old business of book-burning and church-burning again. That sort of terrorist activity did hurt a lot of people, stir up hatreds and bitterness, and distracted people from their pressing constructive tasks, but it didn’t ever destroy the idea. If the idea were false, originating in the purposes of evil people, it would perish of itself, as Gamaliel said. The stars in their courses are set against it in this moral universe. But if the idea is of God and truth and righteousness, it will prevail in spite of all men’s violence.

The rash of contemporary church-burnings have stirred up concern nationwide to oppose whatever evil emotions and ideas have sparked the fires. Church leaders have come forward with funds and services to rebuild demolished sanctuaries. National, state and local officials are strengthening measures to apprehend and punish church arsonists, and to increase security for preventing further fires in remote or secluded locations.

Just as the current church-burnings remind us of Jehoiakim’s cold, violent, and inhospitable response to God’s word which came to him through the writings of God’s prophet Jeremiah, so also do these church-burnings today remind us of the tragic results of the incarnation, the word of God made flesh in the birth of Jesus, which St. Luke reports in his forlorn gospel statement: “and there was not room for him in the inn.”  “No room” — “No room” — these two words, said Harry Emerson Fosdick, “epitomized the whole meaning of Jesus’ relationship to the world. That was to be the Master’s experience throughout his ministry; no room for his teachings in the minds of men or for his quality of spirit in their lives; no room in the synagogue for his reforming zeal or in the nation for his prophetic message. The crucial difficulty of Jesus’ life which closed to him the hearts he longed to change, and brought him at last to Calvary, was the tragic evil of inhospitality to his message.”

“Cannot we now say to ourselves that for us to be hospitable to God’s word, or to any truth of God’s, or to the living Christ himself, may be as important as any act we may ever perform. . . One of the mysteries of life is to be surprised into unsuspected greatness by a momentary hospitality, like St. Paul’s on the Damascus Road, so that afterward he says, ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.’ Still Christ comes to us. Only we can change the outcome.  Room for him!  Room for him here!”

How do the habits of our minds run? Toward cultivating a hospitality to God’s word and an openness of mind to the Living Christ?