Let us pray. You are here, Lord Jesus, within us and amongst us as we gather together. And I pray you will be here in these words I speak this morning.
As most of you know the Revised Common Lectionary follows a three year cycle – creatively named, year A, B and C.
In Year A, the gospel readings mostly come from Matthew and the readings from the Hebrew Scriptures tell the story of the Patriarchs and the Exodus.
In Year B, the gospel readings mostly come from Mark and the readings from the Hebrew Scriptures tell the story of the monarchy.
And in year C, the gospel readings mostly come from Luke and the readings from the Hebrew Scriptures from the Prophets.
Over the last 4 years we have mostly read from the gospels from Advent to Pentecost and then in ordinary time we do a series on the Hebrew Scriptures and then an Epistle. I do not always follow the exact readings given by the lectionary but try to at least stick with the book or the themes.
So as this is the Year C, we will be doing a series on the prophets. The RCL mostly gives readings from Jeremiah but there are also a couple from some of the minor prophets. As we did quite a long series on Jeremiah three years ago, I thought this year we might focus on these minor prophets.
But before that today I will just give a little overview of the prophets and the prophetic literature.
I wanted to begin with a little story from my own life, you know something to make this a bit more memorable and relatable. I was thinking about this on our recent drive from Adelaide to Sydney. It’s a long drive so one would think surely I could have thought of something. But no nothing. So I asked Nina and Martin.
Nina, my 14-year-old, said, “you should tell a story about a time that someone told you one of your sermons really sucked.”
Why’s that?” I asked.
“You know because that’s what the prophets do, tell everyone what they are doing are wrong all the time,” she responded.
I thought about it briefly but couldn’t really think of a time that had happened, which I told her.
And so she said, “yeah your sermons are mostly ok but I didn’t really like that one in which you just quoted Debie Thomas for a really long time.”
“Mmm” – I said, “that could actually be quite a few of my sermons.”
“Well,” she said, “I guess that’s feedback for quite a few of your sermons.”
Gosh. Who needs a prophet, when they have a 14 year old in their life.
Anyway, clearly, there will be no Debie Thomas in this sermon.
Although perhaps Nina was making a comment about long quotes in general. Which of course this sermon was originally full of. It is not now. Well not as many. But while on leave I read Walter Brueggemann’s the Prophetic Imagination and Ellen Davis’ Biblical Prophecy to prepare for this series and so you should know I will be drawing heavily on them. I do take the feedback but I feel that as a preacher who is able to read much excellent theology it is important to share it.
So who are the prophets and what are they about?
For Nina, and perhaps some of you they are about “telling everyone what they are doing are wrong all the time.” It is true, judgement and social critique are part of the prophet’s message, but it mostly not to individuals but to the society as whole and they always combine this with a message of hope and in Brueggemann’s word imagination, which he defines, “as the capacity to host a world other than the one that is in front of us.”
In place of oppression, greed and injustice the prophets proclaimed the faithfulness, law and justice of God.
Brueggemann characteristically describes the prophets as poets, people who are able to see and describe the world differently. And, of course, in their own time and every time since, the people that control the power structure do not know what to make of them, so they try to silence them. But what power people always discover is that you cannot silence poets.
Brueggemann describes our current reality as, living in a totalism of market ideology in which nothing is thinkable, imaginable or doable outside the reach of the market’s ideology.
By this he is referring to the way that our economic system has come to influence not just the economy but also our values, our desires, our relationships. To always be growing this system has to evoke ongoing yearnings for products such as computers, phones, cars, clothes, cosmetics, holidays, to keep us consuming.
The belief that drives this, though mostly unconscious, is a conviction of scarcity. That is the belief that we do not have enough, that if we are to be truly happy and fulfilled we need something more than what we have and we need to compete with others to get it.
And God’s role in this is to bless us with whatever it is we think we need to make us happy. His role most certainly is never to challenge this notion of scarcity or suggest that perhaps these are not the real desires of our hearts because we are in fact made for other desires.
To be honest this God sounds like the idols in Psalm 115. “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of our hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk. And then the Psalm says, ‘and those who make them are like them.’
The God of the prophets on the other hand is not defined by scarcity but abundance. He is not wedded to human ideologies or social institutions but regularly surprises the human community with new meaning, unforeseen possibilities, and unconscious truths that the prophets voice in His name.
Ellen Davis describes the prophets as interpreters, she says, “People whom the Bible designates as prophets interpreted in word and deed the faith for their time, and equally, they interpreted the times for the faithful.”
In the Bible those engaged in prophetic work are learned and innovative interpreters of Israel’s scriptural traditions.”
This notion of the prophetic interpreter may help us think about the significance of a variety of leadership roles and modes of service performed in and for the church, including teaching, preaching, writing, art, community service and political work that is done in the service of the church and the wider community.
She speaks of the prophet Huldah, “as the first clear exemplar of the prophetic interpreter within the Bible itself” which is why I have chosen this reading from Kings to start our series on the prophets.
This story is the first account of someone who encounters God’s work in written form and recognizes how it speaks to current and emerging circumstances.
And Josiah models in this story the very rare ability to hear God’s word, spoken through the prophet, and act on it, even though it was against his interests.
Bonhoeffer, someone who has also been described as a prophet, maintains “that to hear God’s word as spoken against ourselves is what it means to read the Bible seriously, to prefer its thoughts to our own and thus find ourselves again.”
While the social critique of the prophets and their message of hope in times and places where it seemed to have dissipated remains contemporary, the settings of the prophets, the political situation and the people they are speaking to are specific and quite different to our own and so we do need to be careful about drawing a straight line from a word spoken by a particular prophet to our own lives.
On the other hand, we need to be careful to not just dismiss what they say because they lived before inclusive language was a thing and so we find their way of speaking jarring and uncomfortable. God has spoken through them across the ages. Not to mention I think that the ability to listen to someone who speaks differently to you is something that our divided world needs right now.
We also need to be discerning about whom and what we designate as prophetic. The world has never been short of self-proclaimed prophets, often charismatic people who believe they are uniquely gifted and chosen, and the world of social media has no doubt amplified this. While God does indeed continue to speak and act in the world through people and so we do need to be listening out for the prophetic, a lot of people claiming to be prophets are just lying and some of what is called prophesy is just crazy.
The prophets of the Bible do give us some models to help our discernment of what is true prophecy and what it probably not.
Firstly, Biblical prophecy is not self-serving. It seems to me that none of the Biblical prophets got wealthy. They did not usually have millions or thousands or even hundreds of followers.
I have a sense that most people have not and will not hear about most of God’s prophets. Most of them are seemingly ordinary people (although they are not) who are discerning God’s presence and interpreting God’s word within their own lives and communities. People like so many of you, faithfully serving and seeing God’s presence in our schools, land councils, hospitals and clinics, businesses, prisons, sporting clubs, families and communities.
People who in the words of the prophets Micah, act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God.
Secondly, Biblical prophecy is about judgement and hope. There is no doubt that the prophets of the bible are intense, passionate and angry. They are edgy and often lack tact and diplomacy. Their message is things are not ok, you are not ok, everything has to change (and that is pretty unlikely) and so this is going to end in disaster.
However, the message always comes with a word of hope. While in fact actions have consequences, God is faithful and merciful. His love is steadfast and unfailing. He will always make a way to restore his people and renew his relationship with them.
And so just because a person or movement is passionate, angry and/or edgy does not make it prophetic. There are plenty of those people around these days and they are not all prophets. However, this is also true on the other extreme. I am not convinced that all messages of peace, love and harmony, you do you, it’s all the same anyway should be considered prophetic.
Thirdly, Biblical prophecy is deeply rooted in tradition and imagination. The prophets of the Bible imagined their contemporary world differently but always according to that old tradition.
Martin Luther King someone who is always listed as a modern-day prophet, by Christians and secular people alike, was deeply rooted in Scripture and in the black church.
The Biblical prophets do not point to themselves and their new and super edgy movement but to the covenant, to the church, to God and His Kingdom.
I think prophetic imagination and prophetic interpretation is a good description of the work of the church today. Not just individuals within it, be that the ministers, musicians or other leaders, but the whole church. Together we interpret scripture and what it means in our time and place. Together we discern the work of the Spirit in our lives and in this community. Together we see and name and lament that which is not ok but also imagine that things can be better. Together we hold out hope (the hope Su Sze spoke about last week) that although things seem pretty dark right now, this darkness has not overcome the light. God will indeed make things new and we and all God’s people are called to be a part of that.
