A reading from the book of the prophet Jeremiah, chapter thirty-six.
The text tells us that it was winter, and the king sat in his winter house, with a fire burning on the hearth before him. A man named Jehudi read the scroll aloud. And when he had read three or four leaves, the roll was cut with the penknife and cast into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed. And then this: "Yet they were not afraid, nor rent their garments, neither the king, nor any of his servants that heard all these words."
And then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: "Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned."
And from the Gospel according to Luke, chapter nineteen, one sentence from Jesus: "I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out."
Sit with that room for a moment. It is cold outside. The king is warm. Somebody has brought him a scroll, and the scroll says things he does not want to be true. It was not written quickly. Jeremiah spoke it, and a scribe named Baruch wrote it down with ink, word after word. Jeremiah himself was shut up, the text tells us, and could not go into the house of the Lord. So the words went where the man could not go.
And the king does not argue with them. He does not answer them. He listens to a few columns, and then the knife comes out. A penknife. A small blade, the kind a scribe used to trim a pen. The tool for making writing is used to unmake it. Strip by strip, into the fire.
Notice how calm it is. Nobody shouts. Three men in the room beg the king not to burn it, and he will not hear them. The rest stand there. They were not afraid, the text says. That is the part that chills me. Not the fire. The calm.
Some of you know that calm. You know what it is to say the truest thing you have, and to watch someone cut it up quietly, without even raising their voice. A letter you wrote that was never answered. A testimony that was heard in a small room and then filed away. A story about your own life that somebody else decided was not to be told. Some of you were not thrown out of your church with shouting. You were trimmed away, a strip at a time, by warm people in a warm room.
So hear what happens next.
The king sends men to seize Baruch and Jeremiah. And the text gives us five words I love: "but the Lord hid them." The scroll burns. The writers do not.
And then God does not say, mourn for the scroll. God does not say, it is over. God says, take another roll. Write it again. All the former words.
So they do. Jeremiah speaks, and Baruch writes, the same slow work a second time. And the chapter ends like this: "and there were added besides unto them many like words."
Many like words. The second scroll is longer than the first. The king went to the trouble of the knife and the fire, and all he made was a bigger book. The words he burned are the ones we just read tonight. His fire is only remembered because it is written down in the scroll he tried to destroy.
Why could he not win? Because the scroll was not the first place those words lived. They were in Jeremiah's mouth before they were on the page. They were in Baruch's ear, and in his hand. They had been read aloud in the temple. They had been read to the princes. By the time the king got his knife out, it was too late. You cannot burn a word that somebody has already heard.
Now I want to tell you about a jar. And I want to tell it carefully, because we do not need to make it bigger than it is.
In the year nineteen forty-five, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Egypt, farmers digging at the foot of a cliff found a sealed clay jar. Inside were old books, bound in leather, written in Coptic, the language of Egyptian Christians. Scholars count thirteen of them. Among the writings inside were the ones we call the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip, along with many others.
Let me be plain about what these are. They are later texts, outside the Bible. The copies in the jar were made some three hundred years after Jesus walked in Galilee. They are not scripture, and we do not set them beside scripture as equals. We read them as witnesses. They tell us what some Christians, long ago, believed and prayed and argued about.
Nobody knows for certain who buried that jar, or why. Many scholars think these books had fallen out of favour with church leaders, and that someone hid them rather than see them destroyed. That is a reasonable guess. It is still a guess. What we know is this. Somebody held those books, and could not bring themselves to let them be lost. So they sealed them in a jar and put them in the ground. And the ground kept them for about sixteen hundred years.
There is another book, found separately. A different old volume, bought in Cairo in eighteen ninety-six, and now kept in Berlin. It holds what is called the Gospel of Mary. This too is a later text, outside the Bible, written, scholars think, more than a century after the events it imagines. And it comes to us wounded. The first six pages are gone. Four more are gone from the middle. More than half the book is missing, and no one knows how it was lost. Not burned, as far as anyone can tell. Just lost, the way things are when nobody thinks they matter.
In what remains, this later text shows a Mary whom the disciples ask to tell them what she remembers of the Saviour's words. She tells them. And then two of the men doubt her. One of them asks, in effect, whether the Saviour would really have spoken privately with a woman and not with them. And she weeps. And another disciple stands up for her.
I cannot tell you that happened. The text is too late for that, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I can tell you that someone, in the early centuries, remembered a woman whose word was doubted because of who she was. And someone thought that memory was worth copying out by hand.
In this church we go further, and I will say plainly that it is our reading and not the plain sense of the page. We read the Scarlet Woman of Revelation as Mary Magdalene, given a wrong name by a frightened age. The Bible does not say that. We say it, because we know what it is to be handed a name that is not ours.
What the Bible does say is enough. The Gospel according to John tells us that Mary Magdalene came to the disciples and told them she had seen the Lord. She was the one who heard first. And you cannot burn a word that somebody has already heard.
So here is what I want to give you tonight.
What was said over you in a warm room is not the last scroll. The people who cut you out were calm, and they were wrong, and calm does not make anyone right.
What you know is true is kept in more places than paper. It is kept in you. It is kept in whoever heard you. It is kept by God, who hid the prophet and the scribe when the king came looking.
And you are allowed to take another roll. You are allowed to write it again. Slowly. With pages missing, if pages are missing. A book with holes in it is still a book. A life with holes in it is still a life. It may even come out longer the second time, with many like words added.
And if you have no strength to speak tonight, then rest. Jesus said that if these should hold their peace, the stones would cry out. The truth does not depend on your voice alone. The ground itself keeps what it is given. A jar can wait a very long time.
Let us pray.
Lord, you hid Jeremiah and Baruch when the fire was burning. Hide the ones tonight who are tired and afraid. Where our words were cut away, give us another roll. Where our pages are missing, hold what we cannot. Teach us to hear one another, so that nothing true is lost. And keep us through this Sabbath, until morning. Amen.