Dust on the Scroll: What Josiah Can (and Can't) Teach Us About Change
What happens when a whole community forgets why it exists — and then, quite by accident, rediscovers it under a layer of dust? That's the question at the heart of King Josiah's story, and it's a question worth sitting with as we near the end of our long journey through 1 and 2 Kings. This week we leave the fallen northern kingdom of Israel behind and turn south, to Judah, where a boy-king and a forgotten scroll set the stage for one of the more surprising reflections in this whole series: that the heroes we love to celebrate aren't usually the ones who change the world.
A King Worth Rooting For
Josiah began his reign at eight years old — a detail that tends to raise eyebrows, given how badly young rulers usually fare in stories both ancient and modern. But Josiah is different. Of every king chronicled across 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings, he is the only one who receives an unqualified, glowing review. Every other ruler in this long royal history has ups and downs, often more downs than ups. Josiah alone turns to the Lord with his whole heart, soul, and might.
The turning point comes almost by accident. During routine repairs to the temple, a priest stumbles across something that had been lost — the Book of the Covenant, the Torah itself, sitting forgotten and dust-covered in a closet. The very document that explained why the temple existed in the first place had been buried under the temple's own maintenance.
Forgetting Why We Exist
There's something both ironic and heartbreaking in that image. Institutions — including churches — have a way of losing track of their founding purpose. We're not called to maintain buildings or fill committees, important as that work sometimes is. We're called to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly. That's the core of it, and it's easy to bury under the ordinary business of keeping an institution running.
We must never, ever, ever allow ourselves to forget that's why we exist.
Rather than responding defensively when the scroll was found, Josiah did something remarkable: he gathered the whole community together, read the law aloud, and invited everyone to recommit themselves to it. The people wept. They renewed their covenant. The idols came down. It's a genuine moment of collective repentance and renewal — and it's worth naming as such.
Doing Right Even When It Doesn't Change the Outcome
But Josiah's story carries a harder truth too. He had already heard the prophecy that Judah would fall regardless of what he did. Next week's text will bear that out — the fall to Babylon comes anyway. And still, Josiah leads the people in recommitting to God's law. That's a striking picture of leadership: doing the right thing not because it guarantees a happy ending, but because it's right.
The Trouble with Hero Stories
This is where the sermon turns toward a theme close to home this season, as Guilford Park prepares to welcome David LaMotte for the Ruth Lamb weekend next month. In his book You Are Changing the World Whether You Like It or Not, LaMotte pushes back hard against what he calls the hero narrative — the cultural myth that social change happens when the right individual shows up to save the day, Hollywood-style.
History tells a different story. Take Rosa Parks. Most of us learned a shorthand version: a tired woman refuses to give up her bus seat, and a movement is born. What often gets left out is that Parks had already spent more than a decade organizing nonviolently before that day, and that after her arrest she went right back to the unglamorous work of sustaining the Montgomery bus boycott for over a year. The moment mattered. But it was the ongoing, collective labor — the committees, the carpools, the meetings — that actually carried the movement.
It's not heroes that make change, but movements that make change, and committees that keep those movements going.
We Are All Part of the Committee
Josiah's individual faithfulness matters — leadership genuinely matters. But the deeper temptation this text exposes is our habit of waiting for someone else to save us: the next president, the next pastor, the right CEO. LaMotte's insight, paired with Josiah's story, points somewhere else entirely — toward the shared, ongoing responsibility we all carry for one another. We are all part of the movement. We are all part of the committee called Guilford Park Presbyterian Church, called together since 1948 to love our neighbors, one unglamorous, faithful act at a time.
Questions for Reflection
- What might be "buried under the dust" in your own life or community right now — a purpose or calling you've quietly lost track of?
- Josiah did the right thing even knowing it wouldn't change the ultimate outcome. Where in your own life might faithfulness matter more than results?
- Where have you caught yourself waiting for a "hero" to fix a problem instead of joining the slow, collective work of change?
- Who are the "Rosa Parkses" in your own life — people whose quiet, long-term organizing rarely gets the credit the single dramatic moment does?
- What would it look like for you to see yourself not as a hero-in-waiting, but as part of a committee — a community carrying shared responsibility for the work ahead?
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