Prophets Awake!

Texts: Jeremiah 1.4-10; Psalm 71.1-6; Hebrews 12.18-29; Luke 13.10-17.

In 1988 I was privileged to meet a remarkable woman.  Her name is Rose Ruiz Durendez, and she is a Filipino from the island province of Mindinao.  I had opportunity to speak with Rose because she was one of the speakers at a conference on Phillip Island, and I'd somehow scored the job of driving her there from Melbourne.  She told me about life in the Philippines under the political leadership of 'the people's president', Corazon Aquino.  Though Aquino had been swept to power on a wave of 'people power' and of democratic protest at the martial rule of President Marcos, Rose reported that very little had changed in the Philippines since the changeover.  While Western governments were congratulating each other on yet another victory for 'democracy', the people of the Philippines were still being repressed by a fundamentally corrupt and cruel regime.  Most of the region's arable land was stilled owned by a few aristocratic families, of which the Aquino family was one.  Most of the people were still desperately poor, and their labour was still being exploited to boost the profits of unscrupulous multinational companies.  The Filipino army was still waging a war against any who questioned government policy.  And privately hired 'death squads' still roamed the countryside, killing and raping anyone who tried to organise the people to resist the rich oligarchies, the multinationals or the government.

Rose is a Christian teacher and theologian from the United Church of Christ.  Her husband is a Christian also, a lawyer specializing in the defence of human rights.  As we drove down the Princes Highway, I learned that Rose's husband was in prison for speaking out against the human rights abuses of Aquino's army.  I learned that Rose herself was accustomed to receiving daily threats on her life.  I learned of her friends and colleagues who had been arrested and tortured.  Or captured, raped and murdered by death squads in the dead of night.  All because of their Christian belief that the poor were beloved of God, and deserved a better deal.  In listening to Rose Ruiz Durendes, in witnessing her tears and her passion, I became aware that I was in the presence of one of God's holy prophets.  She had been given a word from the Lord, and she was willing to speak that word even though doing so put her very life in danger.

Jeremiah, too, was one of God's holy prophets.  He was consecrated for the task before his birth - so says our text for today.  Now Jeremiah knew very well what a prophet was called to do:  to stand before rulers and authorities and kings and call their self-serving policies into question; to critique the ethical practices of Hebrew society in the light of the covenant made with them by God; to call its priests and rulers to account for their treatment of the widow, the orphan and the refugee.  Not surprisingly, Jeremiah was not too keen on the job when the Lord called him.  He'd seen what Hebrew kings and landowners had done to other prophets.  Besides, he was set for a comfortable career amongst the prestigious priestly classes of Jerusalem.  Why would he want to exchange certainty and security for uncertainty and danger?  In the end, it seems, Jeremiah had very little choice.  He loved Yahweh, his God, and Yahweh had asked him to be a prophet.  His excuses about being too young for the job were never really going to cut it with God.  That was never the real issue.  In his heart of hearts, he was just afraid.  Afraid of what God's enemies might do to him.  Afraid of losing his life.  Afraid of being ignored.  But God knows his fear and gives him this assurance:  'Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you'.

What is it that changes an ordinary person into a Jeremiah?  How is that deep down fear of losing one's life overcome?  That's a question I've been asking myself for years.  How does a school teacher become a prophet who is willing to lay her life on the line?  How does the average pew-sitter become a disciple?  Well, I suspect the answer has something to do with little word which signifies a big revolution:  and that word is compassion. Compassion is what Jesus has plenty of when he cures a crippled woman on the Sabbath.  Imagine this woman's life.  For 18 years she has been bent and misshapen.  We are not told why, except that it was a 'spirit'.  'Spirit' or 'demon' is first-century shorthand for some kind of oppression.  Perhaps she was a woman under the heavy yoke of a cruel husband, or a slave-master.  Perhaps she had been forced to work with broom or needle until her spine would no longer straighten?  Whatever the cause, it seems that Jesus was sufficiently moved by the misery of her condition to put himself in danger.

For Jesus indeed had everything to lose in healing this woman.  He was a promising and innovative young rabbi.  That's why he'd got the gig in the Synagogue.  If he'd stuck to his guns there could have been a very rewarding career ahead.  Social prestige, comfortable living, moral security.  But no, when Jesus saw this woman all of that was put away for good.  So moved was he, that Jesus broke the rabbi code of ethics in order to heal her.  He interrupted his sermon mid-way through.  He touched a woman who was clearly ill, which made him ritually unclean.  He healed her on the Sabbath day, which was a big no-no at the time.  Jesus, it seems, allowed his com/passion (literally, 'suffering-with') to take the reigns.  Fear, no doubt was strongly present at that moment:  the fear of being censured by the Synagogue authorities; the fear of losing his future.  But compassion took the reigns.  For Jesus, it seems, loving someone is far more important that keeping yourself nice.  That's what makes the difference.  A prophet is an ordinary person who has been moved by love to give themselves away.  To take up their cross and follow the way of the crucified one.  To love, and not count the cost.  To love prophetically.

You and I are called to love like this as well!  The prophetic vocation is not just for the Jeremiah's and the Jesus's and the Rose's of this world.  It's for all of us.  To be a prophet, to follow after the way of Jesus, is fundamentally about giving yourself away for the sake of love.  It's about loving another so much that nothing else, not even one's own life, really matters anymore.  There is a story from Auchwitz about a young woman who was chosen one day for the gas chambers.  As her name was read out, she broke down before the whole company of assembled prisoners, sobbing and shrieking with fear.  But a young nun, a Russian woman named Elizabeth Pilenko, stepped forward to comfort her.  'Don't be afraid', she said, 'I'll take your place'.  Stories like that shake me to the very core.  They pull apart the fabric of my mediocrity and remind me that I belong to God, not to myself.  And God has called me to love.

What will you do with this call of God?  Will you clamber into your cocoon of fears and pray that the urge will pass?  I'm afraid that will never do.  For God has said that only those willing to lose their lives for the sake of the gospel will save it.  In the end, the cocoon of fear becomes a tomb from which there is no escape.  The one who clings to their fears is eventually strangled by them.  But I promise you this:  the one who makes the brave journey out from themselves into love, the one who is willing to suffer for another's liberation, will discover a kingdom that cannot be shaken.  And there you will meet a God who has, himself, loved - even unto death; a crucified God, who bears in his body the unspeakable crimes of humanity.  A God scarred . . .  by love.

This homily was first preached at Devonport Uniting Church in September 1998.

The Path of Prophets

Jeremiah 1.4-10; Psalm 71.1-6; 1 Corinthians 13; Luke 4.21-30

The path of the prophet of Yahweh is a difficult one.  Called by God in an irresistible fashion, the prophet is usually snatched away from what might be called a steady, secure job, and sent off to get him or herself into trouble with whatever religious and/or political authorities are in power at the time.  Take Jeremiah as an example.  According to the account in the book that bears his name, Jeremiah was little more than a boy when he was called, having just finished his apprenticeship to become a priest at the shrine in Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin.  In those days, being a priest was about as steady a job as one could get.  It was like being a public servant today.  For priests provided not only what our own government would call strictly ‘religious’ services – daily and weekly rituals, funerals, weddings and the like.  They also provided the literary, mathematical and administrative skills that kept the public sector going.  They represented the repository of the nation’s history and the main intellectual pool from which advisors to government on all kinds of issues of policy were drawn.  There was no safer job in the country, therefore, than that of a priest.

In this context it is understandable, is it not, that Jeremiah is fairly unhappy about being called to be a prophet?  ‘Ah, sovereign Lord’ he says to God, ‘I am only a child; I don’t know how to preach’.   Priests, of course, were rarely preachers.  They were administrators and liturgists, primarily.  Prophets, on the other hand, were preachers through and through.  So Jeremiah was probably right, technically, to mention these things.  Yet I doubt very much if Jeremiah’s youthful lack of experience with preaching were at the heart of his wariness.  For when the Lord replies to his excuses, he does so with these words:  ‘You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command.  Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you’.  So here is the more substantial source of Jeremiah’s concerns: prophets get into trouble.  Prophets are seized by the word of the Lord that is able – now as much as then – to uncover the secret motivations of the hearer’s hearts.  Jeremiah knew very well that preaching like this tended to be very unpopular with the people in charge.  He knew that the path of the prophet was therefore a lonely one, a dangerous one, and very often a hungry one.  For who would pay a prophet to tell them the truth?

Now, it is well-recognised in the Jewish and Christian traditions that prophets perform a very important role.  Their task, as the text from Jeremiah succinctly puts it, is to ‘uproot and to tear down’ corrupted governments and religious institutions so that more just and godly forms of human society can be built or planted in their place.   The prophet reminds those who run both nations and churches that they are straying from the blueprint for truth and goodness that is the word of Yahweh.  The prophet deconstructs the propaganda of corruption and injustice, if you like, in order to reconstruct the good, the noble and the true in the image of the word of God, which the prophet never ceases to embody both in word and in deed.  Of course, in order to fulfil this vocation, the prophet must place his or herself in a place of risk.  Prophets must tell the truth, a truth given them by God, even when it marginalises them from the ‘main game’, the ‘business as usual’ of churches, governments, or communities.  Prophets are never welcome, therefore, in their ‘home town’, as the text from Luke points out.  For the prophet knows the sins and weaknesses of his or her home town very well.  It is likely that the prophet has even participated in those sins.  It would be difficult not to, for sin is systemic and communal before it is individual and voluntary.  But the prophet is pulled away from the fabric of a sinful community by the word of God, which seizes him or her from the outside and grants him or her such a radiant vision of what the community could be in God, that its current form will no longer satisfy.  The prophet is pulled away from the community, in other words, in order to see it more clearly – pulled away in order to speak as from another place, the place of God.  That is how the priest, Jeremiah, ended up preaching against the very system that had nurtured him, the system of the temple and its priestly administrators.  

This is how it was for Jesus as well.  In order to speak the very words of God to his Jewish brothers and sisters, God had to pull him away from the finely textured fabric of what he, along with his community, had always believed.  That is how Luke would have it, anyway.  Having always believed that the people of God were the Jews, that God had no interest in anyone else, Jesus was seized by the Spirit of God at baptism.  Driven into the wilderness, he was shown that God’s love was far more universal than tribal Israel would allow.  By reflecting upon the preaching of the prophets of days gone by, it occurred to Jesus that God had very often, in Israel’s history, chosen to heal and honour people who were not members of the covenant God has made with Israel.  By this, Jesus became convinced that ‘Israel’ could no longer be thought about in biological or even geo-political terms.  For the Jesus of Luke’s gospel, ‘Israel’ was no longer a nation-state or a biological tribe.  Israel was the company of those who were grasped by God’s love, whatever their country or ethnicity, so that their lives were covenanted to God through their obedience to the call of love.  Of course, when Jesus returned from the desert to share what he had learned, when he stood among his own people to speak the new word he had received from God, they were not particularly impressed.  Indeed, as Luke tells it, they became so angry that they drove him to the brow of the hill overlooking the town, and threatened to throw him over.  Jesus was able to walk away, on this occasion, but we know that he eventually died for his cause.  Not in vain, of course.  But the cost of reform was his very life.

This prophetic pattern of being torn away from the community in order to reform the community in the image of its maker is repeated over and over again in the history of the church.  It begins with Jesus and his followers, but continues in the desert fathers of the Constininian era, who left the increasingly wealthy and powerful church of the Roman Empire in order to protest its forgetting of simplicity, poverty and compassion.  It continued in the founding of monastic communities by Pachomius and Benedict.  It continued in the resistance of the Celtic churches to Roman authority and the Franciscan reforms of the 13th century.  It continued in the protestant reformers, and in Wesley’s re-introduction of primitive Christian evangelism and discipleship into the Anglican Church.  It continued in the liberation movements within South-American Catholicism, in Vatican 2, in Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement, and even in the formation of the Uniting Church.

But where is the openness to prophecy in the church today?  We allow our prophets to critique government and the social organisation of the wider community (sometimes).  We allow them to be scathing about all that is going wrong in that sphere.  But what do we do when our prophets call the church to reform, to abandon (for example) its increasing comfort with the ideologies of secularism and consumerism and turn, again, to the covenant with a God of universal love?  Or how do we respond when the prophets call the church to abandon its oh-so-rational neo-liberalism and turn, again, to the wild and generous word of the gospel?  And which way do we look when the prophets call us to put way our many celebrity cults, with their Amway-like gathering around gurus and material success and turn, instead, to the simple poverty of the Christ who said that true life only came to those who were willing to let such things go?  I put it to you that the voices of the prophets are seldom heard or taken seriously where the most important decisions are being made.  At worst, they are branded heretics.  At best they are simply ignored, just as governments now ignore street protestors.   Sometimes the prophets are simply done away with, banished with guns or with bureaucratic machines, as in the Philippines at present.  Again, it seems, even in a church which formally honours the prophets, we are loath to hear what the prophets are trying to telling us right now.

I pray, with the Australian poet, James MacAuley, that God would raise up contemplatives and prophets to remind us of the pearl of great price that is the love of God, are pearl we are constantly in danger of putting aside.  Listen to MacAuley’s prayer:

Incarnate Word,in whom all nature lives,Cast flame upon the earth:raise up contemplativesAmong us, men whowalk within the fireof ceaseless prayerimpetuous desire.Set pools of silenceIn this thirsty land.

God grant that it may be so.