Re-Formed

My kids are like really into play-doh right now — which is something that I have a range of opinions about. The creative part of me thinks its great. The part of me that likes order and not spending my saturday afternoons trying to peel and scrub a spectrum of colors off of the textured walls of the house is not as thrilled. And the sensible health conscious part of me is like hey you guys really shouldn’t be eating that…

But anyway that’s all beside the point. One of the great things about play-doh is that its easily molded and remolded and smashed up and squeezed through whatever contraption you buy to create beautiful works of strange smelling art. The possibilities are endless — hence the reason that all of you bought play-doh for your kids and I’m buying play-doh for my kids and I’m 99% confident that my kids will be buying play-doh for their kids. Its an American Tradition.

But play-doh doesn’t only teach kids how to be creative and squish this messy stuff between their fingers. Play-doh also teaches kids a really tough lesson. Because when you leave play-doh out of its little container for too long… guess what happens.

It gets hard as a rock. It’s not moldable any more. It’s crumbly and breakable and basically useless. And that makes any kid in this world sad.

It gets dried out because it is missing one essential element — one thing that it can’t survive and fulfill its purpose without.

We are in the 4th and final week of our Advent sermon series “The Crown” where we are looking at the themes of Advent and how different kings of Israel embodied them, how Jesus Christ fulfilled them, and how we are called to allow them to shape us as followers of Jesus. So we have talked about hope, peace, and joy and today we will finish this party by talking about Love.

And to get there we are going to jump really far ahead in time to a King named Josiah.

Now what has happened in Israel is that things have gone really poorly. We’ve talked about how Israel went through a really wonderful period of peace and prosperity that began with King Saul and was seen to its fullness in Kings David and Solomon. But things don’t stay well.

After Solomon’s reign (970–931 BC), the united kingdom of Israel split into two separate kingdoms due to Solomon's idolatry and oppressive policies. His son, Rehoboam, refused to ease the burden of heavy taxes and forced labor, leading to the northern tribes rebelling and forming the Kingdom of Israel under Jeroboam I. The southern tribes remained loyal to Rehoboam and formed the Kingdom of Judah.

Northern Kingdom of Israel

The northern kingdom quickly fell into idolatry, starting with Jeroboam I’s establishment of golden calves at Bethel and Dan. A series of corrupt and unstable kings followed, characterized by political turmoil, assassinations, and spiritual apostasy. Prophets like Elijah, Elisha, Amos, and Hosea warned the northern kingdom to repent, but their warnings went unheeded. In 722 BC, the Assyrian Empire conquered Israel, destroying Samaria and exiling its people, effectively ending the northern kingdom.

Southern Kingdom of Judah

Judah maintained the Davidic line of kings, but its faithfulness to God was inconsistent. Some kings, like Asa, Jehoshaphat, and Hezekiah, led spiritual reforms and sought to honor God. Others, like Manasseh and Amon, embraced idolatry and wickedness, leading Judah into moral and spiritual decline. Manasseh (687–642 BC) was particularly notorious for his idolatry, even instituting child sacrifice and defiling the temple. This era marked a low point in Judah's spiritual life.

This is the scene. In the 300 years since Solomon’s construction of the Temple and the joyful response of the people to having a centralized place to practice their religion things have crumbled for God’s people. They lost their way, their religion had been crippled by idolatry and malpractice to the point that it hardly resembled the gift that God had given to them through Moses — the gift that they were given the ability to practice at the Temple in Jerusalem.

Things were really bad, but something amazing was about to happen.

A boy named Josiah became the king of Israel and during his reign he sent his secretary to the temple to have the high priest count all of the money that had been collected in order to distribute it to the temple workers as payment for their services. While the secretary is there, the High Priest says “hey I found something here in the temple. It’s the book of the law that God gave to Moses.” So the secretary brought the book to King Josiah and as it was read to him the king is just wrecked to the point that he tears his clothing out of anguish for how far the people have strayed from the heart of their religion that God had given to them.

2 Kings 23:1–3 NRSV

Then the king directed that all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem should be gathered to him. The king went up to the house of the Lord, and with him went all the people of Judah, all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the priests, the prophets, and all the people, both small and great; he 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 his commandments, his decrees, and his 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.

So Josiah is like oh man. We are so messed up right now and we need to make massive change. We need to recommit ourselves to the Lord. We’ve got our priorities all messed up. We are worshipping other Gods and have all these messed up idolatrous practices that need to go. So he and the people of Judah make a covenant with God to right the ship. And then Josiah sets off to do what must be done:

2 Kings 23:4–7 NRSV

The king commanded the high priest Hilkiah, the priests of the second order, and the guardians of the threshold, to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels made for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven; he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron, and carried their ashes to Bethel. He deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem; those also who made offerings to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations, and all the host of the heavens. He brought out the image of Asherah from the house of the Lord, outside Jerusalem, to the Wadi Kidron, burned it at the Wadi Kidron, beat it to dust and threw the dust of it upon the graves of the common people. He broke down the houses of the male temple prostitutes that were in the house of the Lord, where the women did weaving for Asherah.

And this goes on and on and on for verses. Josiah cleans house in Israel and his legacy became this:

2 Kings 23:25 NRSV

Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him.

What we find here is that Josiah brought the one thing that was missing in Judah’s religious life: a love for and dedication to God. This period of time is referred to as Josiah’s reform. And this would not be the only time that spiritual and communal reformation needed to come to God’s people. They would continue this cycle of religious de-formation and re-formation until the time of Jesus.

When Jesus began teaching, he found that the religious center of God’s people — his people — had its priorities all messed up. They were really good at following the law — quite the opposite of the situation in Josiah’s time. But they had turned following the law into a lifeless, dead, and dried up way of practicing their faith. Whereas Josiah found the law and had a deep change of heart caused by repentance and love for God and God’s people, the religious practice of Jesus’s time was focused on following the law out of obligation and fear that not following it would cause them to be punished.

These are two very different approaches, and Jesus was pretty clear where he stood. When Jesus was challenged and asked which law was the most important he said:

Matthew 22:37–39 NRSV

He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

You see a religion that places anything in front of these two commands — which are really one command — is always going to fall short. It is always going to crumble.

I believe that we are at a spiritual turning point in the spiritual life of our country and really the entire Christian world.

Every 500 years since Jesus, the church has gone through a major shift after building up immense power.

In the 300s Christianity became to official religion of the Roman Empire and thus experience immense influence, power, and prestige. In 476 the Roman Empire collapsed — as so did the influence of the Church.

It then regained power and spread across the world in an effort to convert all of the people that Rome had labeled Barbarians. And the church became the most power institution in the world.

Then in 1054 the church split in half — the Western church (aka the Roman Catholic Church) and the Eastern Church (also known as Orthodox Church).

The Roman Catholic church gained power in Europe and for 500 years dominated the political and religious life of the people. Until 1517 when the Protestant Revolution began with Martin Luther and the multiplicity of Christian expressions.

Today is 2024. It’s been 500 years. I don’t know what is next. But I do know that what’s next needs to follow the way of Josiah. The church has to clean house of the idols that we have built and rally around the thing that Jesus rallied around. Love.

It’s no secret that churches are generally not thriving. Sure we live in the age of the mega church — but that will likely be short lived. What people want — what people crave — is the intimacy of community that the church was created to be. They are missing the love that can be found inside of the local church because the church was founded on the idea that people can love God with all that they have and learn to love one another in ways that seem absurd to the rest of the world.

This love is the missing element. You see. Play-doh that is dried out and crumbly and rigid can become moldable and useful and relevant again. It just needs the infusion of what’s missing. Water. Living water if you will.

We are seeing this. We are living this. We are living out the Re-Formation. This is going to be the last Sunday morning sermon of 2024. And I want this message to stay with you as we move into 2025 as a people who embrace love as the source and driving influence of our existence, of our religion. We are people who love and follow Jesus with all that we have. And because of that, we are a people whose practice of religion is a practice of love. As the apostle John wrote:

1 John 4:19 NRSV

We love because he first loved us.