"Lost and Found" (August 23, 2026 Sermon)

Preaching: Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing

Text: 2 Kings 22:1-13; 23:1-4, 24-27

A book goes missing in God’s own house and when it turns up, it changes everything. We sit with the story of King Josiah from 2 Kings 22–23, where a routine temple cleanup turns into a spiritual reckoning: the book of the law is found, read aloud, and the king responds not with excuses, but with grief, honesty, and reform. That rediscovery becomes a clear metaphor for any church or believer who has drifted from the heart of the covenant and needs a reset grounded in Scripture, repentance, and public recommitment. 

We also name a tough truth that the text refuses to soften: sometimes doing the right thing does not change the outcome. Judah still heads toward exile, yet Josiah chooses faithfulness anyway. We talk about what leadership looks like when it is not driven by optics, quick wins, or control, but by integrity and a simple question: what does faithfulness look like right now? For anyone worn down by slow progress in ministry, justice work, or everyday discipleship, this is a steadier way to measure a life. 

Then we challenge the “hero narrative” we have been trained to expect from politics, movies, and even church life. Real change rarely arrives through a single savior figure. Drawing on the movement narrative highlighted by David LaMotte, we connect Josiah’s story to the kind of long-term organizing that actually sustains social change. Yes, leadership matters, but movements matter more and committees are often the unglamorous engine that keeps courage alive over time. 

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Transcript

Prayer For Illumination

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The prayer for illumination. Lord, our God, your name and your word are exalted above everything. We are listening for your word. We are looking for your light. By the power of the Holy Spirit, renew our minds and hearts so we may discern your will and respond in faith. We pray in the name of your Son, our Savior. Amen.

Scripture: Josiah Hears The Law

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Today's scripture reading is 2 Kings 22, verses 1 through 13. Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign. He ran reigned 31 years in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Jededah, daughter of Adeah of Bosco. He did what was right in the sight of the Lord and walked in all the ways of his father David. He did not turn aside to the right or to the left. In the eighteenth year of King Josiah, the king sent Chaphon, the son of Azalea, son of Meshullah, the secretary, to the house of the Lord, saying, Go up to the high priest, Hilkaiah, and have him add up the entire sum of the silver that has been brought into the house of the Lord that the keepers of the threshold have collected from the people. Let it be given to the hand of the workers who have oversight of the house of the Lord. And let them give, sorry, let them give to the workers who are at the house of the Lord repairing the house. That is, to the carpenters, to the builders, to the masons, and let them use it to buy timber and quarried stone to repair the house. But no accounting shall be asked from them for the silver that is delivered into their hand, for they deal honestly. The high priest, Hilkiah, said to Chafon, the secretary, I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord. When Hilkiah gave the book to Chafon, he read it. Then Shafon, the secretary, came to the king and reported to the king, Your servants have melted down the silver that was found in the house and have delivered it to the hand of the workers who have oversight of the house of the Lord. Shaphan, the secretary, informed the king. The priest Hilkiah has given me a book. For great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our ancestors did not obey the words of this book to do according to all that is written concerning us. Holy wisdom, holy word. Thanks be to God.

A Kingdom Falls Through Small Drifts

SPEAKER_01 3:08

All right, friends, we come to our second to last stop on our journey through 1st and 2nd Kings. It's been a little bit of a different sermon series. I hope that you, like me, have learned more about these two books of the Bible. And last week we journeyed through the collapse of the northern kingdom of Israel. And we were reminded that there really wasn't one big great mistake moment that kind of led to the downfall of the nation of Israel, but rather a long series of missed opportunities to be faithful. And we found the good news in that passage, and that what you and I do each and every week is kind of a counterbalance to that. It is a long, lifelong time of faith formation in which you and I gather to be reminded who we are and whose we are. So that's what we journeyed through last week, and this week we turn our attention to the southern kingdom of Judah. So here are these words from 2 Kings 23, verses 1 through 4 and 24 through 27. Then the king, we're talking about Josiah here, directed all that 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 went with him, 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. And all the people joined in the covenant. 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. Friends, holy wisdom, holy word. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Amen.

Meeting Josiah The Boy King

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So, friends, as we mentioned last week, the end of 2 Kings begins in a much darker place than the beginning of 1 Kings. As we get to last week, the destruction of Israel and the exile to the Assyrians of the northern kingdom of Israel. And now we we see the beginning of the end of the southern kingdom in Judah, which will fall next week to the Babylonians. Okay, so last week's events happened around 325 to 725 to 722 BCE. And the southern kingdom hung on for another hundred years or two and didn't really fall until about 587. But before that, we have a king that we're introduced to by the name Josiah. Everybody say Josiah. Alright, so he was one of the kings of the southern kingdom of Judah. And did anybody pay attention to how old he was when he began his reign? Eight years old. Last time I remember a king that young was King Joffrey in the Game of Thrones. And that did not end very well. King Joffrey was not a very nice human being. But Josiah was. He of all of all the kings that we hear about in 1 and 2 Kings. Remember, we started off with Saul and David in the books of 1st and 2 Samuel, and then we get to Solomon and Kings. And all of the kings had their ups, but they most certainly also had their what? Downs. They had a lot of them, except for Josiah. Josiah is like the only king in all of the book of 1 and Kings that gets a glowing five-star review.

The Book Found In A Closet

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And that was because when he was reigning, I don't think this happened when he was eight years old, but sometime later on, they're doing some housekeeping in the temple, and a priest finds this thing as the priest is going around. See if we got one here. What is found? The Bible, the Torah, the Book of the Covenant, the law. That was the whole reason that God called God's people together. It was the whole reason that the temple was built by Solomon in the first place was to protect the law of God, to honor the law of God, and to follow the heart of the law, to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly, to love God with all of our body, our mind, and our strength. And this all-important document is found where? It's found in a closet somewhere. Dust, covered in dust. And it is found, and the priest goes to Josiah and says, hey, look, look what we found. We found the holy scriptures. This is what God has been calling us to do all along. I think this is a really ironic and beautiful picture, even as heartbreaking as it is, that sometimes institutions like the church, we're sometimes guilty of forgetting why it is that we were founded in the first place. Right? We're all guilty of that from time to time. We forget that we are not called to go out and maintain buildings. That's not in the great, that's not in the Great Commandment. That's not in what Jesus calls us to go do is not to go out and have committees, although committees can be really important things. We're going to get to that here in a second. But that God calls us to do justice, to love kindness, and walk humbly. That's the core of what we're called to do. So Josiah happens to be, find his reign at a time when this really important part of the bylaws, you should say, is found that remind the Israelites of who they're called to be. And rather than an act from a place of defensiveness, Josiah says, everybody needs to hear about this. We've forgotten about this. Let's have this be an opportunity to get together and remind ourselves why we exist. So he calls everyone together and says, Y'all, let us read this together. Let us recommit ourselves to what God has been calling us to do all along. So he gets everybody together and they read the scroll. The people weep, the people recommit themselves to God, and Josiah has all of those idols of Baal thrown out and burned and destroyed. So that is what Josiah is remembered for. So there's a couple things that I was thinking about this

Remembering Why The Church Exists

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week. One, I thought what I already mentioned, that sometimes we all need to be reminded of why it is that God has called us together as Guildford Park Presbyterian Church founded in 1948 to serve our neighbors. It's something that we do really well here at Guildford Park, and we must never, ever, ever allow ourselves to forget that that's why we exist.

Doing Right Without Control

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The other thing that this text reminds me is that sometimes it's really important to do the right thing even when it doesn't change the outcome. What we'll find next week is that the kingdom of Judah still falls after Josiah found, they found the scroll and they recommit themselves, but Josiah has already heard an oracle by a prophet saying that Judah will fall. And yet Josiah still does the right thing and still says, you know what? Nevertheless, this is who we are, so we're going to recommit ourselves to God's law. So that to me is a really important thing about leadership is doing the right thing, even when it doesn't change the

Replacing Heroes With Movements

SPEAKER_01 12:08

outcome. But what I really want to focus on on this brief sermon today is a reminder of what David Lamont calls the hero narrative. I'm trying to plug this because you all know that David Lamont is going to be joining us in about a month, and I hope, I know that some of y'all have started to work your way through this book. You are changing the world whether you like it or not. And one of the core premises in this book is David pushes back on the hero narrative, this lie that you and I have been taught to believe, that social change happens when who shows up? A hero, right? Think about most of the big superhero or adventure action movies that you go see, and the plot is pretty similar. There's some great cataclysmic threat or event or danger, and a hero just sort of appears out of nowhere. Everybody goes, yay, they clap along while the hero fixes everything magically, and then the curtain falls, and then that's that. Well, that may make a good movie in Hollywood. But David Lamont makes the case that nowhere in the history of movements of social change has that been the way things have happened. Heroes do not promote positive social change. Do you know what does promote positive social change? Committees. I know. Presbyterians, this is our moment that we've been waiting for this whole time. David Lamont says that it's not heroes that make changes, it's movements that make changes and committees that keep those movements going. He talks about Rosa Parks and how we have been taught that story about how Rosa bravely refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery. And for most of us growing up, that was kind of the extent to that story that we were told. Now, to be sure, that was an absolutely courageous thing, and nonviolent movements such as the civil rights movements need those big moments that galvanize the public, right? But those moments are not what sustain change. Instead, what a lot of us weren't talked about is that before Rosa Parks ever refused to give up her seat on the bus, she had already been working in nonviolence organizing for over a dozen years before that moment ever happened. And she had that big moment in the spotlight, but as soon as that moment happened, she got right back to organizing the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted for over a year. So she helped get a lot of people together, and they basically created Uber back in the 1950s, right? They all had to work together to get people from point A to point B to keep this movement going. So I just bring this up because we have these characters like Josiah who are lifted up as heroes, and yes, leadership is important. I will never suggest that leadership is not important. But I think that the story of Josiah is a reminder that sometimes we are all guilty, me too, of waiting for the next presidents to come and save us, right? The next pastor to come and save us, the right CEO or teacher or whoever to come and save us. And David LaRamont reminds us that while individual piety like Josiah's is important, what's more important is that you and I realize that we are all responsible for each other. And that we are all part of this movement. And dare I say, we are all part of this committee called Guildford Park Presbyterian Church that has been called to love our neighbors. So thanks be to God for the Josiahs amongst us, that is important. But more importantly, thanks be to God for the people who organize us together to make long-term positive social change. If you want to learn more about that, read this book and join us next month for our Ruth Lamb weekend. Alright? Friends, in the name of God, the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, may all of us God's beloved children, say. Amen.

Prayers For Courage And Justice

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Let us go to God in prayer. This will be a response to the prayers of the people. So when I pray, Lord in your mercy, I invite you to respond by saying, Hear our prayer. And so together, let us pray, saying, Lord in your mercy, hear our prayer. God of Josiah, God of the book that was lost and found again. We remember a king who was just a boy when he took the throne, and who years into his reign heard something he had never heard before. The words of your covenant, read aloud from a scroll pulled out of the rubble of the temple. And when he heard it, he didn't defend itself, didn't defend himself, he didn't explain it away. Instead, he tore his robes and he wept. He asked what it would take to make it right. So, God, give us that same honesty. When we hear your word and realize how far we've drifted from it, don't let us get defensive. Let us tear something open in ourselves instead. Our excuses, our comfort, our certainty that we're already doing enough. Show us where the scroll has been buried in our own lives, in our own church. And give us the courage to read it once we've found it. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer. We remember that Josiah gathered people, elders and priests and prophets, the whole city, great and small, and read the covenant out loud, and that the people stood and renewed it together. This wasn't a private reformation, it was communal and public. It was the whole community recommitting itself together to what it means to belong to you and to one another. So, God, we confess that we live in a world addicted to hero stories. One person who fixes everything, one leader who saves the day, one figure whose goodness is supposed to be enough to hold back the flood. But that was never the story you told. Even Josiah, as faithful as he was, could not undo generations of what had been broken. He was told plainly that the judgment was still coming. So teach us the difference between the hero narrative and the movement narrative. Teach us that we are not waiting for one good king, one good pastor, one good leader to save us, but that we together, the body of Christ, are the movement. It's our collective work, our shared repentance, our justice done together in the streets and the pews and the school board meetings and the picket lines that bends the world back toward you. Josiah's piety alone could not save Judah, but people who stand together and say, We will do justice together, that is how changes take root. Even when we don't live to see the harvest of it. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer. And God teaches to do right, even when it doesn't change the outcome. Josiah kept every ounce of his integrity, even knowing that exile was still coming. He didn't ask, will this fix everything? He decided to be faithful. He simply asked, What does faithfulness look like right now? And he did it. So when our work for justice feels small against the size of the world's brokenness, when we show up to feed people and hunger keeps coming, when we welcome people and walls keep rising, when we speak truth and the world keeps turning away from it, remind us that faithfulness was never contingent on winning. Let us keep tearing our robes, let us keep reading the book, let us keep gathering the people, let us keep doing the right thing. Not because we're certain it will work, but because it is right and because we are yours. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

Prayers For Healing And Grief

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And now, God, we bring before you the prayers of this congregation, spoken and unspoken, named and held quietly in our hearts. We pray for our next door neighbor, Helen Hester, who has recently completed her latest round of radiation. For others among us in various stages of cancer treatment, Michelle Lowe, Kay Cheshire, and Pat Weiner and others. For Cindy and Robert Webster with their health concerns, for A.B. Kimmel's brother, Gene, likewise, who has health concerns. We pray for our children and our youth as they start school. We are asking for prayers of comfort for the family and friends of Milligan University cycling team in Tennessee. Each one among us who is lifting up prayers for a family member undergoing fertility treatment. And finally, prayers are lifted up today for those suffering from dementia and other illnesses. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer Together

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And now hear us, O God, as we pray the prayer your risen Son Jesus taught us to pray, saying, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.