This is what I hear in today’s OT reading. That, while sifting through the temple’s riches, Hilkiah finds the book of God’s Law, shoved in a corner, apparently just lost under all the piles of gold/silver, and with all the apparent excitement of someone who’s just discovered lint in their pockets, Hilkiah and the king’s secretary bring the book before Josiah, as if nothing out of the ordinary has occurred. So, they just go through their normal assortment of agenda items, temple construction is going well. Everything is on schedule, everyone is getting paid, and uh One, uh, minor note here… we’ve discovered this odd little book and we think you should take a look.

Josiah has an immediate adverse reaction. Because in being confronted with this book of God’s Law all that he sees, hears, feels and tastes is the destruction of Judah . For Josiah its as if he’s been handed a grenade with the pin pulled. So he makes a choice that is intended for the continued survival of his people. It’s a choice that does make some sense living in the world that he does, being the person that he is. It’s the desperate choice of a king who sees no other way, and that choice leads to an act, reminiscent of our current war on terrorism, in which Josiah identifies those who are against him because they are not for YHWH. He initiates his own kingdom wide pre-emptive strike in which altars and buildings and anything else that gives the appearance of false worship are all defiled and destroyed.

Ultimately Josiah’s choice is to respond to the renewed presence of God’s Law with despair and violence.

Psychiatrist Victor Frankl, was another Jew, in another time and another place who, unlike Josiah, was not blessed to die before he witnessed the death and destruction of his world. He was instead blessed to live, and witness the death of so many others in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes in a candid manner of the premeditated and systematic process by which a people were deprived of everything including their existence.

Distilled from his own reflections and experiences, Dr. Frankl places before us this bit of truth – that even when all else has been stripped away, there is one thing which remains. The freedom one has to choose one’s attitude no matter the circumstances. We are free to choose our own way. Throughout Dr. Frankl’s book he shares many examples of how people’s choices affected whether they lived or died. I had difficulty reading about a certain kind prisoners, called Capos. These prisoners set themselves apart because of they choices they made to gain special privileges for themselves, by betraying their fellow prisoners and becoming the brutal henchmen for the SS soldiers. These Capos were despised as traitors. in the time of Jesus the despicable traitors were called Tax Collectors.

Both Tax Collectors and Capos were regarded in much the same way, so I don’t think it is much of a stretch to understand the Pharisees feelings of disgust and disbelief when Jesus called Matthew to be one of his followers. I tell you this so we can read today’s Gospel and understand that this story is not about evil Pharisees being ugly to innocent tax collectors. Nor is it about Jesus just trying to be controversial, or playing a game of one-upmanship with John’s Disciples. If we are to understand this story we need to see it in its narrative context, placed carefully and intentionally between several other stories of healing. Healing is at the heart of this story’s message captured enigmatically in the last two statements Jesus makes. These are statements that make sense to a people who live in a world which does not recognize health and wholeness and whose lives have been formed by the tearing of clothes throughout ages past. Jesus says – you don’t sew new cloth onto an old cloak and you don’t put new wine into an old wineskin. When you try to do these things the result is the same…the tearing apart of what should be whole. You don’t do these things because you can’t. You can’t but I can. God can and God does heal and make whole that which has been torn apart because that is the nature of God who we worship. The God who saw possibilities where nothing existed and created it. A god who in creating us, did so bestowing upon us the freedom to see possibilities and to choose our own way. A God who chose us so that we could choose him, and who has the patience to love us even while we don’t.

The story of our lives is filled with times where we don’t choose God. This was true for Josiah, true for the Pharisees and it is true for us here today. It’s easy to become blinded by the despair that TARES at our senses until all we know is darkness. But What the Tax collector was able to recognize and what Jesus places before us, is that even in the depths of our despair and division,

Even in lives that are made dark by our lack of creativity, our inability to see other possibilities, God is with us and we need not be starved by his absence. God is with us and if we chose him he will fill us with the wine of new life, mending what has been torn apart, making us whole. And now, my brothers and sisters, I leave you with this simple question. How might Josiah’s story have ended differently, if like the Matthew, instead of Oh, Crap, he had chosen to proclaim by his words and actions “ Oh, Wow” and how will our stories be changed when we do the same?