"How A Kingdom Forgets" (August 16, 2026 Sermon)

Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing

Text: 2 Kings 17:1-23

One bad day rarely explains a collapse. We start with a real-world glitch, a Sunday livestream where the audio fails, then move into a far heavier breakdown: the fall of Israel to Assyria in 722 BCE as told in 2 Kings 17. The text is long, sharp, and uncomfortable, and we do not rush past that discomfort. We read it as both history and diagnosis: political instability, pressure from empire, and a spiritual drift that compounds until exile becomes inevitable. If you have ever looked back at a painful season and wondered where things started to unravel, this message meets you right there.

We trace the bigger story behind the moment, from Israel’s demand for a king to the division after Solomon and the chaotic churn of rulers in the northern kingdom. Then we name the core claim of 2 Kings 17: Israel does not fall because of one sudden mistake, but because of generations of unfaithfulness, idolatry, and the refusal to listen to repeated warnings. It is a mirror for modern life, where our values can shift slowly toward image, comfort, or “national glory” while the vulnerable get ignored. Along the way we ask: what do we worship without noticing, and what habits are shaping us when we think nothing is happening?

The surprising turn is hope through practice. If things do not go bad because of one bad Sunday, they also do not get healed by one good Sunday. We talk about Christian worship and long-term spiritual formation in a Reformed worship tradition: passing the peace even when it is awkward, confessing what we have done, singing our faith into our bones, and receiving a benediction that reminds us this race is a marathon. The sermon title is “How a Kingdom Forgets,” and the invitation is to let weekly worship become how a church remembers. If this resonates, subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the conversation.

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Transcript

Livestream Audio Issue And Apology

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey neighbors, Pastor Steven here. If you watch our live stream this morning on Sunday, August 16th, you may have noticed that we had some technical difficulties and the audio is not working on our live stream. We apologize for that. We have found the issue and we have fixed it, and we trust that it will not be an issue next week.

Scripture Reading From 2 Kings 17

SPEAKER_01 0:18

So what I'm going to read for us here today is the passage that Catherine Glasgow read in today's service that was the uh that that today's sermon was on. So let us hear this reading from 2 Kings 17, 1 through 23. In the twelfth year of King Ahaz of Judah, Hoshea son of Elah began to reign in Samaria over Israel. He reigned nine years. He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, yet not like the kings of Israel who were before him. King Shalmanazor of Assyria came up against him. Hoshea became his vassal and paid him tribute. But the king of Assyria found treachery in Hoshea, for he had sent messengers to King So of Egypt and offered no tribute to the king of Assyria, as he had done year by year. Therefore the king of Assyria confined him and imprisoned him. Then the king of Assyria invaded all the land and came to Samaria. For three years he besieged it. In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria. He carried the Israelites away to Assyria. He placed them in Halah on the harbor on the river of Gozem and in the cities of the Medis. This occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. They had worshipped other gods and walked in the customs of the nations whom the Lord had driven out before the people of Israel, and in the customs that the kings of Israel had introduced. The people of Israel did things that were not right against the Lord their God. They built for themselves high places at all their towns, from watchtower to fortified city. They set up for themselves pillars and sacred holes on every high hill and under every green tree. There they made offerings on all the high places, as the nations did whom the Lord had carried away before them. They did wicked things, provoking the Lord to anger. They served idols, of which the Lord had said to them, You shall not do this. Yet the Lord warned Israel and Judah by every prophet and every seer, saying, Turn from your evil ways and keep my commandments and my statutes, in accordance with all the law that I have commanded your ancestors, and that I sent to you by my servants and the prophets. They would not listen but were stubborn, as their ancestors had been, who did not believe in the Lord their God. They despised his statutes and his covenants that he made with their ancestors and the warnings that he had given them. They went after false idols and became false. They followed the nations that were around them, concerning whom the Lord had commanded them that they should not do as they did. They rejected all the commandments of the Lord their God, and made for themselves cast images of two calves. They made a sacred hole, worshipped all the hosts of heaven, and served Baal. They made their sons and their daughters pass through fire, used divination and augery, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger. Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of his sight, and none was left but the tribe of Judah alone. Judah also did not keep the commandments of the Lord their God, but walked in the customs that Israel had introduced. The Lord rejected all the descendants of Israel. He punished them and gave them into the hands of plunderers until he had banished them from his presence. When he had torn Israel from the house of David, and he made Jeroboam a son of Nabat a king. Jeroboam drove Israel from following the Lord and made them commit great sin. The people of Israel continued in all the sins that Jeroboam committed. So Israel was exiled from their own land to Assyria until this day. Holy wisdom, holy word. Thanks be to God. Our rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

The Fall Of Israel And Samaria

SPEAKER_01 4:42

Have you ever had a moment when everything seems to just fall apart? And you look back and you try to pinpoint the exact moment when it happened. My guess is that you know what that feeling is. And today, in the passage that Catherine read for us, a quite lengthy and difficult and harsh passage. Not a whole lot of grades in that passage. I imagine that the Israelites probably felt pretty similar. This is the low point in the entirety of 1st and 2nd Kings that we've been journeying through the past few months. This is the moment in 722 BCE when the nation of Israel falls to the Assyrians. You may remember that the kingdom had been split after Solomon's reign. And if we try to rewind back even several more hundreds of years, this all began in the time of Joshua and Judges when the Israelites came to God and said, God, all these nations around us have kings. We want one of those for ourselves. And God said to them, No, you don't. And they said, No, we really, really do. And God said, No, you really, really don't. It's going to be more trouble than you realize. And the Israelites say, No, we want a king, and finally God says, okay, have it your way. And that's how we started with those first three big kings that we walked through, with David, excuse me, Saul, and then David, and then finally Solomon. And there were high points and low points upon that whole journey, but then you may remember that Solomon started worrying a little bit too much about national glory and his own reputation, then about whether people could eat or whether people were fed or housed, and the people somewhat rebelled, and that's really what caused the split between the southern kingdom of Judah and then the northern kingdom of Israel. And what happens after Solomon's time ended is we have this slew of kings, some of whose reign only lasted a couple years, who I cannot keep track of. Actually, if you read 2 Kings, it's hard to keep track of, and that might be the very point that the author of 2 Kings is trying to make, that there really was no political stability at all, and that things were getting worse and worse and worse. And then to make matters worse, the Assyrians were starting to encroach on Israel's sovereignty. They wanted to control the Mediterranean Sea, and so to try to keep them at bay, Israel was paying tribute to the Assyrians, but we all know that that only lasts for so long. Long story short, in 725 BCE, the Assyrians sieged Samaria, which was the capital of the nation of Israel. And Israel fell three years later in the year 722. And the passage that Catherine read for us today is a very long theological indictment that explains why this happens.

Unfaithfulness That Builds Over Centuries

SPEAKER_01 7:59

And if I were to summarize what it was that that long passage says, is that the reason that Israel fell was because of their unfaithfulness to God. And if there's one thing I want you to remember from today's sermon, is that this was not a sudden occurrence. In fact, that really lengthy passage that Catherine read for us today was really a way, it sounds harsh, but it is harsh, of God kind of showing the receipts and saying, here are the multiple times over hundreds of years that I sent prophets to try to remind you all that you all belong to the God who calls you to neighborliness. And there's all these times over hundreds and hundreds of years in which there was no one big monumental mistake, that over years and years and years, the Israelites forgot that they belonged to God. And they forgot that they belonged to each other. And they forgot that what the most important thing was not national glory, that the most important thing is how they treated the most vulnerable among us. And so I would love for there to be a bit of grace at the end of this passage. I would love to send us all off with a hopeful word, but unfortunately that's really not in today's passage. So I'm hoping that maybe we can just kind of sit in the uncomfortableness for a moment. There will be grace, there will be a silver lining that we will come to in the next two weeks as we wrap up our sermon series on 2 Kings. But for now, I want us to rest in this good news. I have to send this off with some good news, right? I'm not going to send this off on a down. And that good news is this. If it is true that this moment of calamity and trauma and disaster came along after hundreds of years of missed opportunities to do a course correction, maybe we can rest in the fact that our worship, the way that we order our worship together, is likewise a practice of long-term spiritual formation that is meant to week after week and month after month and year after year, decade after decade, even for many of

Worship As Long Term Course Correction

SPEAKER_01 10:34

us, reminds us of who we are and who we are. Because the good news of this passage, if there is any, is that things didn't go bad because of one bad Sunday, and likewise things cannot be turned around by one good Sunday, and yet you and I get together, and week after week we remind ourselves, and I am reminded too as a pastor, that we are called, first and foremost, to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God. And so, though today's story is quite dismal, and it's quite depressing, and it's quite harsh, it is not the end of the Israelite story, and thanks be to God, it is not the end of our home. For you and I will get together this week, and guess what we're gonna do next week? We're gonna get back together. We're gonna worship the week after that, and we're gonna remind ourselves what it means to be neighborly towards one another in a culture that doesn't seem to be prioritizing that right now in the way that it should. So I wanted to lift up in closing just a few examples of ways that worship forms us over the long term in ways that changes us as disciples. And

Passing The Peace As Practice

SPEAKER_01 11:47

the first thing that came to my mind was the passing of the peace. And as an introvert, I must admit the passing of the peace has never been my favorite part of a reformed worship service. And yet, there are days that I think it might just be the most important part of the entire Sunday morning. Because over 38 years that I've been on this earth, I've been passing the peace with a lot of people who I'm life. And I've also been passing the peace with a lot of people who drive me crazy. And guess what? I'm sure that other people have passed the peace with me, and I've done things that have driven them crazy too as well.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Every week we do this thing of sharing the peace of price with one another across our divisions, across our differences.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

And we may think that's a little thing, but trust me, over years and decades and decades, it's not a small thing. In fact, do we have any Chicago White Sox fans here in the congregation? Jim? Kind of? Huh? And actually on North Side. You're a North fan. Alright, you're a Cubs fan, so the reason I brought it up is because I saw that at a Chicago White Sox uh game last week, they passed the piece at the baseball game. Did y'all know this? Did y'all see this? They had Pope night at uh at the White Sox game because the current Pope Leo, of course, is a Chicago native. So everybody wore Pope hats. And then the bishop of Chicago made a guest appearance and invited the 45,000 people in that stadium to pass the peace with one another. And that's what they did.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

Google that when we get home. White Sox passing the peace. And you will see 45,000 people do exactly what you and I did a few minutes ago. And I thought it was a wonderfully beautiful thing.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

And all the other things also, all the other things that we do in worship make a difference

Songs Confession Benediction And Closing

SPEAKER_01 13:42

too. The songs that we sing form us, the confessions that we confess, starting off every week by admitting the ways that we screwed up and that God has not given up on us, that makes a difference. Our benediction response today when we sing, God my feet, while I run this phrase, we are acknowledging that this race of faith is a marathon in our stress. Every week we come here and ask God to guide our feet, knowing we're not going to bat a thousand, if I'm going to stay with the baseball metaphor here for a second. But that we come week after week after week to remind ourselves of who we are and whose we are. So I want you to remember that the title of this sermon is How a Kingdom Forgets. And if that's true, then I would also remind ourselves that when we get together for worship every week, we might call that How a Church Remembers. In the name of God, the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, may all of us God's beloved children say. Amen.