Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 9, 2006

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

One of the characteristic things about the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, is the central role that prophets and prophecy play in its story of the interactions between God and God’s people. Indeed in Judaism what we call the Old Testament is divided into three parts--the Law, known in Hebrew as Torah, the Writings, known in Hebrew as Kethuvim, and the Prophets, known as Nevi’im. Prophecy is so central to the Jewish tradition that in addition to the three major and twelve so-called minor prophets who have their names on books of the Bible, Jews consider the books we call historical--Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings--to be books of prophecy and include them among the Nevi’im, the Prophets. But prophecy isn’t restricted to the Old Testament. It plays a central role in the New Testament as well; for whatever else Jesus may have been, he was at the very least a great prophet in the tradition of Isaiah, Amos, Micah, Hosea, and many of the others. Prophecy is a big deal with us.

It’s a big deal, but how well do we really understand it? A great many people in the Christian tradition seem to believe that a prophet is someone who foretells the future. We think of the prophet as a seer, as one who can tell us what’s going to happen tomorrow, next month, next year. In the Christian tradition this understanding of prophecy often takes a specific form. From the very beginning Christians have read the Hebrew prophets, especially Isaiah, as predicting the coming of Jesus. Thus, Christians have read the passage in Isaiah about a young woman--mistranslated into Greek as a virgin--giving birth and other passages in Isaiah as foretelling the birth, life, and death of Jesus some 600 years after those passages were written. Prophecy for us is probably all about predicting the future.

The thing is, however, that in the Bible predicting the future is not primarily what prophecy is all about. True, some of the Old Testament prophets talk about things that they think are going to happen in the future. In particular they talk a lot about how the kingdoms of Israel and Judah are going to be destroyed by various foreign powers as God’s punishment for their faithlessness; and in fact those Hebrew kingdoms were destroyed by foreign powers, Israel by Assyria in 722 BCE and Judah by Babylon in 586 BCE. Indeed, one of the reasons these particular prophets are considered prophets is that their predictions of destruction came true.

Still, predicting the future was never primarily what the Hebrew prophets were about. They never predicted the future merely for the sake of predicting the future. Their predictions of the future destruction of the nations are always a part of a larger message. The prediction of a future punishment always functions to reinforce the prophet’s call to the people to return to the ways of the Lord their God. That call to return to God is always the prophet’s central theme, not some idle prediction of future events for fun and prophet. These guys weren’t seers in a carnival side show. They were speaking for God, and predicting God’s punishment was only part of their message. They were speaking God’s word in response to a call from God to do exactly that. Thus a prophet is not so much someone who foretells the future but is someone who tells forth the word of God.

We see this characteristic of true prophecy in today’s reading from Ezekiel. It begins with the line: "He said to me: O mortal, stand up on your feet, and I will speak with you." Ezekiel 2:1 In the verses included in the lectionary passage it isn’t clear who "he" is, but take my word for it, the "he" in question is God. So these verses are the story of God’s call to Ezekiel to be a prophet.

The voice tells Ezekiel that God is sending him to the people of Israel, who have rebelled against the Lord their God. This detail about the people having rebelled tells us something else about the nature of prophecy. In the Hebrew tradition, God sends prophets when God’s people have rebelled against or at least have fallen away from God’s ways, from God’s laws and from the true worship of God. The function of the prophet is to call the people back to God. So a prophet is someone God has called to speak in God’s name and to call the people to return to God’s ways. That’s what prophecy looks like from the prophet’s side.

The prophet, however, is only one side of the equation. God sends the prophet to speak God’s word in God’s name; but God sends the prophet to God’s people, and they--we--are the other side of the equation. The Bible fully recognizes that the people to whom the prophet speaks God’s word may not listen. Our Scripture readings this morning recognize that fact very well. In sending Ezekiel to the people of Israel God says: "Whether they hear or refuse to hear..., they shall know that there has been a prophet among them." Ezekiel 2:5 God clearly knew that the people might not listen to God’s prophet. Jesus knew it too. In our passage from Mark, we hear that Jesus’ own people in his home town of Nazareth would not listen to him. They could not see him as a prophet because he was so ordinary. He was just one of them, the son (as far as they knew) of a working man with brothers and sisters just like the rest of them. How could he be a prophet? Maybe that’s why when, in the second part of our reading from Mark, Jesus sends out prophets of his own--his twelve Disciples--he recognizes that people might not listen to them either. He tried to prepare them for that eventuality. He said: "If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you as your leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them." Mark 6:11 The lesson is clear. God sends prophets to God’s people, but God doesn’t force the people to listen. Whether we listen or do not listen is entirely up to us.

Which means that whether or not God’s prophecy has any effect is up to us. In our Mark passage this morning we read that when the people of Nazareth refused to hear Jesus as a prophet the power of the word of God that he was and that he spoke was greatly reduced. Mark says: "And he could do no deeds of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them." Mark 6:5 Little or nothing happens as a result of a prophet’s words unless the people to whom those words are directed hear them and respond to them.

At this point I imagine you’re thinking: Well, that’s all very fine I suppose, but what does it have to do with me, with us? Or maybe you’re already decided that all of this has nothing to do with you or with us. After all, you’re probably thinking, I’m not a prophet. Sorenson’s not a prophet. I’ve never even seen a prophet. And I’ll grant you that all of that is true, but I still think there’s an important lesson for us in these readings about the call of the prophet.

You see, you may not have seen a prophet in person, but you have heard prophets; and so have I. There are prophets in the world today, and there have been others who have died but who spoke during most of our lifetimes and who have helped shape the world in which we live. Mahatma Gandhi preached and lived Jesus’ Gospel of nonviolence and brought down an empire. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached and lived Jesus’ Gospel of nonviolence and of justice and changed a society. Less well-known teaching prophets, like Walter Wink whom those of you in the adult education group may remember, have picked up Christ’s call to nonviolence and call us to follow Christ’s way. Activist prophets like the Rev. Jim Wallis and Rabbi Michael Lerner have picked up the Hebrew prophets’ call for social and economic justice and call us to change the world. The prophets of the Open and Affirming movement have heard God’s word of the equal dignity of all people and call us to be a welcoming people resisting hatred and bigotry by our very presence in this community. There are prophets in the world today. We have heard their voices. They say: "Thus says the Lord your God: My way is the way of peace. Return to it. My way is the way of justice. Work for it. My way is the way of inclusion. Embrace it."

They say it. We believe that we have heard it, yet our Scripture lessons this morning lead us to ask: Have we really heard? Have we truly accepted what God is saying through the prophets both ancient and contemporary? I know that we have heard and accepted a lot of it. Together we are living the prophetic message of God’s acceptance of all people in our commitment to being a welcoming, Open and Affirming community of faith. Together we are living and witnessing to the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ understood not as a new set of laws, of mandatory dos and don’ts but as the living, breathing still-speaking Word of God’s love for all people. We are modeling for this community the power of Scripture understood not as a fixed and static word but as a living witness to the love of God for all creation.

And so the question for us is: What have we not heard? Is there more that the prophets are saying that we need to hear? Have we truly heard the prophets saying that God’s way is the way of peace and nonviolence? Have we plumbed the depth of the prophet’s call to do God’s justice? My point in asking these questions is only this. We are all fallible humans, therefore there is always more for us to hear, new depths of understanding to reach, new frontiers of God’s love to explore. God calls the prophets to speak God’s word of truth, the truth of God’s love and of God’s peace. The prophets call us to hear and to respond. The prophets are calling. Let us continue to listen together, to discern together, to pray together that God’s word may indeed be heard in our time and in our place. If not us, who? If not now, when? Amen.