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From December 10, 2006 Maybe it's his unconventional clothing. Maybe it's his diet; locusts and honey are unusual fare. Maybe it's the passionate glint in John's eyes or that raspy voice of his. I'm not sure. But whenever John's doing the preaching I want one of the pews in the back. Even if he is one of God's main men. John unnerves me. Partly because we're so unalike. He's rugged, strong in spirit and a hard-core wilderness man. He's an in-your-face kind of guy. He unnerves me for other reasons, too. He's heard the voice of God and what he's heard has led him to go all over the Jordan area preaching. Preaching a message as hard-core as he is: repent, repent, repent. If prophets are in the business of unnerving us, as John did and does, we need to understand this: prophets do this not because they want to but because they must. God calls prophets to be proclaimers of the truth, troublers of the status quo, provokers of change. And all that can be pretty unnerving to the rest of us. Prophets speak out like they do not because they want to but because they must. No prophet asks for the job. Isaiah's response to his calling was to ask: How long, O Lord? When God knocked on Jeremiah's door, Jeremiah argued that he was too young for such a significant calling. No prophet ordains himself or herself--that's God's doing. New Testament scholar Joel Green reminds us that "prophets become prophets through God's initiative. God chooses whomever [God] will, calling those who are ill-prepared and unworthy (sinners, that is) and by an act of grace appoints them as bearers of [God's] word." (How to Read Prophecy, p.52) If prophets are hand-picked by God, so is their message. It is of God's design, not their own. Prophets simply repeat to us what they have heard God say to them. They don't hammer out a vision; God gives to them and they pass it along. Prophets cry out and unsettle us not to advance their own agendas but to further God's. Prophets speak with urgency. They often disturb us. Not because they want to but because they must. Why? Because they are filled up with God, that's why. It's being filled with God that gives them the clarity, the moxie, the authority to say what needs saying, to point out what no one else will, to stand up for what the rest of us have fallen away from. This is why they implore us to repent, even if they don't use the "R" word. For only our willingness to repent can alter the momentum of our failures in love. Our turning around enables God to enact a greater turning around, one that can turn whole societies back toward what God intends. Not everyone with a difficult or unsettling message is a prophet, though. An experienced minister once shared that more than once a difficult parishioner justified his or her behavior by calling himself or herself a prophet. This prompted my colleague to invent this little ditty of faulty reasoning: All prophets are difficult people. I am a difficult person. Therefore, I am a prophet. Not everyone who claims to be a prophet is. And the one who'd rather not be, may very well be one. God does the appointing, not us. And God determines the message, not us. It's a message that is hard to speak and hard to hear, because it is a criticism of the way things are. A critique of what a people, a society has created, grown accustomed to or invested in. If this sounds like a judgment, it is: not a mean-spirited one but certainly a Spirited one. A prophet's proclamation is God's judgment on what a community or society has elected to do or not do. But the prophet's proclamation is more than harsh critique. At the very same time, it's a message of hope in the midst of numbness and death. It's a heralding of God's desire that we turn from what we have become to embrace what we were born for: freedom, compassion, justice, peace, deep relationship with each other, creation, and our Maker. We know we are hearing the words of a prophet when we are at once troubled and touched. We've heard the words of a prophet when we are confronted with achingly plain truth about the present and yet are also surprised by a feeling deep in our bellies or in our souls that leaps up to tell us something very much alive and beautiful and wholesome lies on the other side of the mess we find ourselves in. A prophet does that: gives us the straight dope on the now of things and simultaneously gives us energized hope for new, vigorous life. Certainly Martin Luther King, Jr., did that. He was a prophet par excellence. I think with his message of concern about global warming, former Vice President Al Gore qualifies as a prophet who is working hard to help us remember again how precious this planet is and how in need of repentance, redirection we earthlings are. Sometimes God uses other kinds of voices to sound a prophetic word. Certainly cancer did that in my life. That diagnosis asked me to think again about what I thought was important and invited me to make new choices. For another person, the voice of the prophet might be heard in a DUI or a failed marriage. God is infinitely creative when it comes to giving us a word that can turn us back toward God, which is what "repent" actually means. It means turning around, turning back to, turning toward God once again. Although we might be inclined to think in terms of the dramatic person, the dramatic circumstance that sounds out the prophet's message, even the ordinary, the ordinary person or the ordinary happening can be, in God's hands, prophetic. I remember being deeply moved by the efforts of a man in Utah who felt compelled to help citizens there take responsibility for the considerable environmental jeopardy they were in because of hazardous waste disposal, chemical weapons incineration, industrial pollution, and nuclear waste storage run amok in that part of the country. Chip Ward is a humble and unassuming man who only reluctantly became a prophet and a proclaimer in his part of the world. In a book he wrote outlining his concerns, Ward describes himself this way:
Ward tells of standing on his front porch in his rural community and being able to point to three houses where children were in wheelchairs, one where a child had a shunt, and another where a child was missing a kidney. He could point to two homes where kids had died of cancer. One woman he knew had buried her mother, who was only in her early 50s, and then half a year later buried her toddler daughter. After years of watching his community suffer, after waiting endlessly for someone to take decisive action, Chip had to admit to himself that he was the someone he'd been waiting for. It was then that he accepted his calling as a prophet and a proclaimer. Once he got clear about this calling, he helped create three vital eco-human-health organizations and won many hard-fought victories in the struggle to make Utah a safer place to eat, breathe, live, and raise families. Chip Ward is--for me, at least--a modern voice crying out in the wilderness, a man who resisted becoming a proclaimer of truth but whose passion for the integrity of God's creation prodded him into doing what he did not want to do: speaking the hard and painful truth, and working diligently and passionately to bring life-giving change even in the midst of circumstances that surely felt as bleak and oppressive as those in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. Who for you is a prophet? Where do you hear a prophet proclaiming? It's important to listen. Of course, not answering those question has its advantages. If we keep our prophets at a distance, we can't hear what they're saying to us. And if we cannot hear them, then we are not challenged with the matter of repentance. But if we do not repent, then we won't find ourselves turning around, turning around to find forgiveness and new ways of being. And if we do not know forgiveness, if we don't find those new ways, then we wind up living outside God's loving dream for us. Not outside of God's love, but certainly outside God's dream. When God gives us prophets, when God asks us to repent, God has glorious things in mind for us. In this Advent season, you and I prepare to receive a most glorious gift--the birth of love; the surprise of God's presence among us as one of us; the living, breathing answer to our hungers, questions, and needs. In these weeks of Advent, we are readying ourselves to take into our very hearts the most glorious of gifts--Jesus, Messiah, Prince of Peace, Wonderful Counselor, Abiding Friend. God will lead us with joy, mercy and righteousness. Let us be faithful, then. Prophets are speaking; it is time to repent. What do you hear... and what will you say? God will lead us. Let us be faithful. Let us prepare. Amen. © Rev. Karen Winkel Chip Ward's book, Canaries on the Rim, is a thoughtful and important one; I recommend it. |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen
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