Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 4, 2007

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.

In a series of sermons a while back I tried to convince you that we’re all prophets. I said it doesn’t matter that we’re just ordinary people and that we aren’t worthy of the high calling of prophet. We’re precisely the kind of people God calls as prophets, so we can’t get out of it by pleading inability or unworthiness. In this little corner of God’s creation we are the prophets of an emerging Christianity, a progressive, Open and Affirming Christianity, a liberated Christianity that is not bogged down in an untenable Biblical literalism. A Christianity that welcomes the discoveries of science, the accomplishments of the human mind and the human spirit and that knows that no finding of mere science, history, or archeology can shake our faith, for that faith is grounded not in mere fact but in our undeniable experience of the living Christ among us, connecting us to God and God to us. We are the prophets of that emerging Christianity, for if Christianity has a future it lies in that emerging paradigm; and in this place if we are not its prophets no one is.

Being a prophet can be really exciting. Being on the cutting edge of a movement that has the potential to revive the faith and bring the Good News of God’s love for all people to hosts of people who have never heard it in a way that makes sense to them—and that includes them—is a real rush. It’s heady stuff. It’s easy to get carried away and to think that our movement is unstoppable, that our message is so compelling that the world will receive it with open arms and shower us with praise and honor for bringing it.

It’s easy to think that, but if we think that we’re in for a rude awakening. You see, the world never welcomes God’s prophets with open arms. It never showers them with praise and honor for bringing God’s word, or at least it never does that during the prophet’s lifetime. What the world actually does to God’s prophets of peace and just is—kill them. The true word of God is a challenge to the world, and the world always sees it as an affront. The world always reacts defensively. It denies the truth of the prophet’s message, but it is rarely satisfied with that. It fears the message, so it kills the messenger. A great many of God’s true prophets have in fact been murdered for their effort.

Jesus knew that. He knew that the world would kill him. We see that he knew it in this morning’s Gospel lesson. There some Pharisees, here befriending Jesus although the Gospels usually depict them as his enemies, come to warn him about Herod’s desire to kill him. They want Jesus to flee so that he will not be killed. Jesus responds by describing his prophetic ministry, or at least the healing part of it. He then says: “Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, for it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside Jerusalem.” Luke 13:33 NRSV He is going to Jerusalem; and he knows that Jerusalem, the seat of the religious and political powers of the day, will kill him. He laments: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets….” Luke 13:34 NRSV He knows that he goes to Jerusalem to die, but he goes nonetheless.

Why? Why does he go nonetheless? Many Christians might answer “because dying was his reason for living,” echoing the promotional materials for Mel Gibson’s movie. Yet that surely is not why he went nonetheless. That is not the lesson we are to take from his going nonetheless. He went nonetheless precisely because he was a prophet. He went nonetheless because not to go would be to abandon his prophetic mission, to betray his prophetic calling. He went because he had prophetic work to do, and the risk didn’t matter. What mattered was the mission.

So we need to ask: Is there a lesson for us in Jesus going to Jerusalem nonetheless, despite the danger, indeed despite the virtual certainty that going there would get him killed? Not surprisingly, I suppose, I think that there is. We are prophets in this place. I don’t think anyone is going to kill us, but the fact remains that the world resists our message of God’s unconditional grace for all people. Most of all, the worldly values that have so infiltrated most Christian churches resist that message. The world in which we live is not going to receive our message with open arms and shower us with praise and honor for bringing it to them. Ours is not a way of earthly glory. It is a way of standing firm against the pressures of the world and of worldly values that resist and will always resist the prophetic message that we bring. It is the way of the prophet. It is our way.

What does that way mean for us? It means, I think, that we will never be a large church. Pastor Nate of Cascade Community Church will always be able to brag, as he did in the Monroe Monitor a few years ago, that he preaches to a whole lot more people on Sunday morning than I do. Yet any Christian must know at some level that popularity is not the measure of faithfulness. The world kills God’s prophets, it does not welcome them. We will never be a church for masses of people.

If we nonetheless remain true to our prophetic mission, I know that we will continue to be what we are—a lively, vital small church of those people who embrace the word of God’s unconditional love for all. The world will never like it, but we’ll keep doing it—nonetheless. Amen.