Today’s Scripture Reading (February 15, 2017): 2 Chronicles 34
On April 6, 1933, Nazi Germany began its practice of burning books. The campaign was initiated by the German Student Union, and organization made up of all of the Student organizations of the various Universities in Germany. The action was proclaimed as a nationwide “Action against the Un-German Spirit,” the climax of which was a literary purge of books thought to have contained dangerous ideas – and this purge was done by fire. The purge was directed at books that consisted of what the organizers called “Jewish intellectualism” and heralded the need for the book burning as an action that was required in order to allow a return for the nation to the traditional German “family values.” It is surprising how often the cry for “family values” has accompanied cries demanding the burning of books.
A quick survey of a list of the authors burned in the German burnings contains a few surprises. Included among the German authors burned on that night were books by Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, novelist Franz Kafka, and political theorist Karl Marx. But along with the works of the many German-speaking writers that were burned were works by French authors, including the novelist Victor Hugo (Les Miserables), as well as American authors such as Ernest Hemmingway, Jack London and Helen Keller – British writers such as H.G. Wells and James Joyce and Soviet writers such as novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was as if the Germans believed that by burning the books they could make the ideas disappear. It is not a new idea – but the idea has never worked.
It is likely that the books of the law had been hidden during the years of the evil reigns of several kings prior to the reign of Josiah – maybe even during the reign of Manasseh, Josiah’s grandfather, but the books had probably been hidden even earlier than that. The hiding of the books was probably done in an effort to protect them from those who wanted them destroyed along with the ideas that were found within them. It may have even been that the books had actually been forgotten in their absence. Until the day that the workers began to restore the temple and found this book in the very walls they were attempting to fix. The particular book that was found by the workers in the Temple was likely to have been the book of Deuteronomy.
As a result of the finding of the book of Deuteronomy, the religious reforms that were completed under Josiah’s reign went far beyond just the repairing of the temple and extended to a reform of the actual ideas and practices on which the faith of the nation was designed to be built. It was a much-needed reform of the faith.
Today, the cry is about fake news. We mentally burn the ideas with which we don’t agree. If you listen to President Trump, you will probably stop listening to CNN – the King of the Fake News. (Disclaimer – no, that is not how I feel, and CNN remains one of the top news sources to which I pay attention.) But in our culture, we find it easy to cut down ideas with which we are not in agreement. We burn them and try to destroy these ideas so that they will not have an influence on us or those around us. The problem is, at least for me, that there have been ideas within these disliked sources that I really needed to hear and that have shaped who I am.
The reality of our contemporary Christian faith is that we need the same kind of restoration of ideas that Josiah brought to the Temple. The sacred books are not lost, but often they are ignored, even by people within the church. And in most of our churches, the carpet may need to be replaced, and walls may need to be painted, but what is needed even more is a return to the ideas that are essential to our faith – instead of those on the periphery of our faith. These are concepts found in the writings that we carry around with us in our Bibles (another book that seems to find itself on the lists of the banned frequently.) And our reality is that it is these ideas by which we really need to really live our lives.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Zephaniah 1
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