The Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin
and the Lost Word
Sermon preached at Midway Hills Christian Church
September 12, 2004
2 Kings 22:14-20; Luke 15:1-10
Maya Angelou tells a
wonderful story of the power of the Word of God in her life:
One
of my earliest memories of mamma, my grandmother, is a glimpse of a tall
cinnamon-colored woman with a deep, soft voice, standing thousands of feet up
in the air on nothing visible. That
incredible vision was a result of what my imagination would do each time mamma
drew herself up to her full six feet, clasped her hands behind her back, looked
up into a distant sky, and said, “I will step out on the Word of God.”
The
depression, which was difficult for everyone, especially so for a single black woman
in the south tending her crippled son and two grandchildren, caused her to make
that statement of faith often.
She
would look up as if she could will herself into the heavens, and tell her
family in particular and the world in general, “I will step out on the Word of
God.” Immediately I could see her flung
into space, moons at her feet and stars at her head, comets swirling around
her. Naturally, since mamma stood out on the Word of God, and mamma was over six
feet tall, it wasn’t difficult for me to have faith. I grew up knowing that the Word of God had power.
The Word of God has
power. Nobody knew that better than the
Hebrew prophets.
Today, we take a look at the
story of a lesser-known prophet, Huldah.
She is one of only four women that the Hebrew Bible calls
‘prophetess.’ Her prophetic sisters are
Miriam of the Exodus story, Deborah of the Judges, and Noadiah of the post
exilic community of Israel.
For me, this story in 2 Kings
is one of the most fascinating in all the Bible about the Word of God. It’s a story that has echoes of our gospel
lesson for today. A story about
something lost and something found.
Instead of a sheep or a coin, it is the very Word itself that gets
lost…then found.
How many of us have done
remodeling in our homes? In the process
of remodeling have you uncovered some things you forgot you had?
Well that’s what happened in
these chapters in 2 Kings. Earlier in
chapter 22 we are told that king Josiah decided to do some remodeling of the
Temple. In the process of remodeling
they found a scroll. They brought the
book to the king and read it to him.
And when Josiah heard its Words he tore his clothes as a sign of grief
because he realized that this was not just any scroll, it was a book of the
law, the Torah. And he knew that not
only had everyone forgotten they had the book, but they had not been living by
the book.
Josiah immediately says to
his advisors, “Go, inquire of the Lord for me, for the people,
and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that has been
found.” So they seek out the prophetess
Huldah. Not only does she confirm the
words of the book that has been found, she delivers a new word of Yahweh. In true prophetic fashion she claims, “Ko
amar Yahweh—Thus says the Lord”
She prophesies that indeed
Yahweh will hold the people accountable for not following the law, and because
of his concern, Josiah will be spared witnessing the destruction of the nation.
The Hebrew prophets had a unique understanding of the
Word of God. The davar Yahweh. They did not see themselves as mere puppets, wooden mouthpieces
for God. They had a vital relationship to the Word they spoke and they took
that Word seriously.
They understood that to speak
a Word of the Lord was to release a
living thing into history. The Word
once spoken was set loose in the world to accomplish the thing for which it was
sent. Isaiah said it this way, “For as
the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they
have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the
sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” (55:10-11)
Often the prophets had a love/hate relationship with the Word. Jeremiah claims, “The Word of the Lord has
become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak his name,’ then
within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am
weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” (20:9)
As powerful as the Word was,
the prophet was still free to give shape
to that Word in unique ways, through the use of metaphor, symbol, parable,
naming, puns. It is no wonder that the
prophets are also known as poets. Not
only did they give shape to the Word, the Word shaped them. They did not deliver it as an uninterested
or unaffected party. Whether the Word
was one of judgment or promise, the prophet received the Word delivered
alongside the people. As members of the
community of Israel, the prophets received judgment and promise too.
We have seen from our story
in 2 Kings that it is possible to lose the Word of God. Amos himself has said “there is a famine in the
land, not of bread or water, but of hearing the Words of the Lord.”
Episcopal Priest, and
preacher extraordinaire, Barbara Brown Taylor has said that those of us living
in post-modern times are also experiencing a famine of the Word of God. Religious language has lost its meaning, but
more crucial is the fact that language itself is in crisis. She claims that consumerism forces words to
make promises they cannot keep. “Pressed into service on billboards, in newspaper
ads, on television, and on the telephone, words are chosen not for their
truthfulness but for their seductiveness.
What they mean is beside the point.
What they seem to mean is all that counts.”
Journalism has also taken its
toll on the language. Not so much on
the truthfulness of words but their longevity.
Taylor claims that week after week she discards pounds of unread words
from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. As she discards them with whole sections
unread she asks, “How did that community recover from the hurricane? What
happened to the children after their mother died of AIDS? Did the sheriff
really do it or did they arrest the wrong man?
Don’t ask. Just let it go. There will be more stories tomorrow that are
just as compelling. The word is
transitory, cheap.”
We have more words than we
know what to do with. It is estimated
that the English language has some six hundred thousand words compared to
Elizabethan English, which had about one hundred fifty thousand. We have words for things that were unheard
of a century ago: megabytes, quarks and
ecofeminism, to name a few.
In this land of plenty of
words, there is a famine of the Word.
In the midst of all these words we hunger and thirst for Words that
communicate, Words that are relational, Words that describe our understanding
of God. “The proof that we are in the
midst of a famine of the Word are the suffocating piles of our own dead words
that rise up around us on every side.
It is because they do not nourish us that we require so many of them.”
Huldah’s words,
when taken back to Josiah, prompted the king himself to gather all the people
of Jerusalem and to “read in their hearing all the words of the book of the
covenant that had been found in the house of the Lord. The king stood by the
pillar and made a covenant before the Lord, to follow the Lord , keeping the
commandments, the decrees, and the statutes, with all his heart and all his
soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this
book. All the people joined in the
covenant.”
The words of Huldah, and the
words of the book of the law, prompted a sweeping religious reform that would
make Josiah the most pious ruler in all of Judah. It is thought by scholars that the book of the law that was found
was the book of Deuteronomy and the words of that book shaped not only the life
of the people who heard them that day, but shaped the very contours of the
Hebrew Bible itself, producing what is called the Deuteronomic History which
spans from Deuteronomy through 2 Kings.
What is our relationship with
the davar Yahweh—the Word of the
Lord? How has the Word shaped us? Have we become so numb in our hearing and
our hearts that a Word of God cannot reach us—to convict us or to comfort us?
The good news of the Prophets
and the good news of the Gospel is that God is in the business of giving a
Word, and God is in the business of helping us find the Word which we have
lost. God is like a shepherd who leaves
the ninety-nine and goes out in search of the one. God is like a woman who
lights a lamp and sweeps the whole house—renovates it—in order to find the one
coin that has been lost.
In the beginning was the Word…and the
Word became flesh and pitched a tent among us…and those who receive this Word
become children of the Living God.