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“Spoken Like a True Prophet” |
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Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin Jeremiah 1: 4–10 Luke 4: 21–30 |
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When I was in seminary I was taught that my role as a minister was threefold: pastor, priest, and prophet. The first two fit into popular notions of what a minister should be about: as pastor, make sure that the community of faith is finding ways to care for each other, as a priest, preside over the sacraments – communion and baptism. It’s the last one, however, that surprises most people.
The prophet, like Jeremiah and Jesus of Nazareth, is called to “pluck up and pull down, destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant”, in the words that the writer of Jeremiah puts in the mouth of God (Jeremiah 1:10). We don’t have much problem with “building and planting”; these seem like good, healthy positive enterprises. But “plucking up and pulling down? Destroying and overthrowing?” What’s up with that?!
It gets even more challenging because the prophet is called to do this with “nations” and “kingdoms” (1:10). In other words, this prophetic identity introduces a political dimension to the mix, and that’s where it begins to stick in the craw of those who want their religion straight up. I understand wanting our spirituality unsullied by politics. Politic realities rarely lead to the state of inner calm and tranquility that most of us associate with spirituality. It brings up differences between people and puts us on edge.
But what are we supposed to make of this story of Jeremiah, being called from his mother’s womb to pull down and destroy as well as build and plant? And what about the story from Luke’s gospel today? Jesus’ own people – the hometown crowd – tried to throw Jesus off a cliff. It wasn’t because he was teaching them how to meditate. Do you see what he was doing? He’s teaching in the synagogue. The text he’s using comes from another prophet, Isaiah. In this reading, Isaiah is saying that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him to proclaim good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, release to the captives, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Jubilee. Each of those would require a reversal of the status quo, a reorganization of the society around the left-behinds. The last one, the year of the Jubilee meant returning ancestral land that had expropriated because the owners had fallen on bad times – and doing so every 50 years.
In other words, friends, this was the politics of Jesus. Not that he took out a membership in a political party. It was God’s politics. It matters to God how power is distributed and exercised among the people. When Jesus finished reading from Isaiah he sat down and told them that they could pretty much assume these things were a fait accompli – fulfilled – in his own being.
Then came the snickers, followed by the derisive murmurs. He felt the fear growing in the crowd. You see, they knew that what he was saying had political implications – he was advocating for a new kingdom – God’s! And it would involve tearing down Caesar’s kingdom, and while no one liked the new Roman occupiers of their holy land – each of them knew friends who had lost their land to Roman aristocrats – neither did they want any trouble. And right now, Jesus’ middle name was “trouble”. Can you see that at that moment they had visions of the 12th legion of the Roman army descending upon their peaceful village?
If that weren’t enough, Jesus isn’t finished. The Spirit of the Lord, you see, had anointed him. He knows what they’re thinking and so he tells them a couple of stories from their own Scriptures about home-town boys who expanded their circle of concern beyond their village – Elijah, yet another prophet, left the safety of the village to heal an outsider, a widow. Elisha, Elijah’s student, made it his concern to heal a non-Israelite leper, a commander in a foreign army no less. God’s love extended Jesus said beyond the hometown crowd and the hometown religion – again his spirituality had a political dimension.
At this point, they try to throw Jesus off a cliff. This is risky business, being a prophet. Do you see what Jesus was doing? He was challenging them to evolve into a larger worldview – to grow from an “us” mentality, my family, my nation, my religion, my tribe, to an “all-of-us” mentality that expanded God’s circle of concern. He was plucking up and pulling down their value system that they confused with the truth about the world.
He was being a prophet. Being prophetic is not about foretelling the future – it’s about discerning the times we are living in and challenging the inhabitants of this age to evolve in the direction of a larger, more inclusive worldview and value system. It is speaking truth to power, whether those power systems are running the country or the local village. “The truth is”, says Jesus, before dropping the bomb on them. Perhaps now we can appreciate why the Lord, after calling Jeremiah to be a prophet, tells him “not to be afraid of them.” (Jeremiah 1:8) Well, who’s “them”? Those who would rather throw you off a cliff than hear a word of truth and risk having the status quo destroyed.
Which is to say “them” are us. If you haven’t felt challenged by the world-destroying wisdom of Jesus of Nazareth, you haven’t been listening very carefully. Before we start pointing fingers at all the bad people out there, can we agree that we too feel challenged by the prophetic voice of Christ? Let’s keep in mind that we participate in and benefit from all the self-serving political and economic systems that Jesus challenges. The only difference is that we choose to be challenged or we wouldn’t be here week after week. There are people out there, and the systems they serve, that are not so open to the challenge of Christ.
So, who are our modern-day prophets? They’re not all in the church. Take for example how George Monbiot, prophet of global warming, calls the Denial Industry to the carpet. First off, he has a few things to say to Canadians in his introduction of Heat, his best-selling book on global warming:
Do you feel just a little uncomfortable? That’s because you’ve just heard someone speak out of the tradition of the Jewish prophet. He’s been “appointed over nations and kingdoms to pluck up and pull down. We should be squirming a little. Canada has just been on the receiving end of some truth we may not want to hear.
He takes on, not only nations, but corporations responsible for what he calls the Denial Industry. Monbiot blows the whistle on Exxon Mobil Corporation and Phillip Morris Tobacco Corp. for funding scientists of questionable credentials to intentionally create public doubt about the science of global warming. It began with Phillip Morris trying to deny the dangers of second-hand smoke. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars manipulating research and the media. Exxon simply adopted their methods. Still today, we can read articles in our leading newspapers, paid for in no small part by the advertising dollars of automobile companies, making it sound as though scientists are divided on the topic of global warming. They are not. There is practically unanimous consensus that global warming is a real and present danger. But the likes of Rex Murphy, Margaret Wente, and Michael Campbell, all good people and fine columnists, continue to perpetuate the myth of scientific doubt. By the way, Exxon has very recently pulled its funding for this project. This may be the flip-flop of the decade:
Kenneth Cohen, Exxon’s vice president for public affairs, acknowledged: “We know enough now—or, society knows enough now—that the risk is serious and action should be taken.” Exxon also took the opportunity to publicly announce that it was cutting support to such notorious climate-change deniers as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and “five or six” other groups active in the so-called climate-science debate. According to Cohen, “The issue has evolved.” ( Mitchell Anderson, Trust Us, We’re the Media, Georgia Straight, January 25, 2007).
Now, here’s the point. Monbiot was on to these companies. David Suzuki was on to them as well, for years. And they weren’t afraid to speak truth to power. They were plucked up and pulled down.
So I ask you? Are the prophetic words of the likes of Monbiot and Suzuki “spiritual”? They are, if we’re willing to expand our definition of spirituality to include a conversation about how power is exercised in our political, economic, and religious system. This is the deeper meaning of political – not who you vote for but how power is exercised between human beings. Jesus is quite clear that God wants it exercised honestly, with a core concern for justice, and an ethical bias toward “all-of-us” not just “us”.
There’s no way around it I’m afraid. The choice to not speak about such matters, to refuse to speak truth to power, is itself a political choice. It’s a choice of the status quo. The churches that remained silent while the President and his backers enacted their war on Iraq – or indeed prayed for success – were acting politically.
Prophetic ministry is not just for the paid staff of a church. It’s for all of us. When you hear a sexist joke, a homophobic comment, or a racist slur, can you sense God reaching out to touch your lips – to put the words in your mouth as God did with Jeremiah? No, prophetic ministry is for all of Christ’s disciples.
But the goal is not simply to pull down and destroy. Anybody can do that. The prophet’s ultimate goal is to “build up and to plant”. To be committed to a prophetic ministry - whether you're paid for it or not – is to commit oneself to be the change you want to see in the world. It’s not enough to point fingers and wave fists in the air. If we’re going to risk the prophetic dimension of Christ’s calling, then we also must drink from the same cup from which he drinks. We must ask for the grace to be transformed in Christ if we want to be for Christ. And let’s remember, when Jesus was stretched out upon the cross, put there by those who couldn’t bear the truth, his wide-open heart loved those who put him there. This is what makes prophetic ministry difficult – loving the very people and the very systems that are acting against Spirit’s intention while continuing to love them with all our heart and soul. No one said it would be easy. |
