Damn It! I May Be a Prophet

Damn It! I May be a Prophet!

September 24, 2025

There’s something I’ve known about myself for a long time. It’s something I have to confess myself to be and something I need to be a peace with. It is the truth that I am a prophet. I’m a prophet in the way most of the Old Testament prophets were prophets, though I don’t expect to have anywhere near the impact they had and still have, nor do I expect my words to be preserved for millennia the way theirs have been. Here’s the story of how I came to realize that prophet is what I am. Or at least that a prophet is what I may be. But first I need to discuss just what a prophet is.

Most people, I think, have the wrong idea of what the Old Testament prophets were all about. They think their primary function was to predict the future. And it is true that the Old Testament prophets did predict the future, or at least many of them did. The future that prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Micah predicted was one of death and destruction for the two Hebrew kingdoms before 722 BCE and for the one, Judah, that remained after 722 BCE. They said that the Hebrew kingdoms would be destroyed and the people either dispersed or driven into exile because that was God’s punishment for the faithlessness of the people’s rulers and, at times at least, of the people themselves. Both Hebrew kingdoms were destroyed by foreign powers. The people of the northern kingdom of Israel were dispersed, and there wasn’t another Jewish state where that Israel had been for millennia. The southern kingdom of Judah was conquered, and its people were marched off into exile in Babylon. Jerusalem, the capital city of Judah, would, however, remain a center of Jewish life to this day. That these predictions turned out to be correct is, no doubt, part of the reason why they have been preserved in Hebrew scripture.

Yet a true prophet is not one who correctly predicts the future. Rather, a prophet is one who speaks God’s truth in the world. The Hebrew prophets often begin their prophecies by saying something like, “The word of the Lord came to me.” That means that the prophet was convinced that he (almost all of the Hebrew prophets were men though Exodus does call Miriam a prophet ) had received a message from Yahweh, the one god the prophets were all convinced the Hebrew people were to worship. The prophets believed that God was calling them to convey that message to the people and, most especially, to the people’s leaders.

The Hebrew prophets believed that God had given them two things for which to condemn the people and  their rulers. One was their idolatry. To these prophets, idolatry meant worshiping a god other than the god Yahweh. Before the mid-sixth century BCE, Hebrew religion was not really monotheistic. It was henotheistic. That means the people believed that there was more than one god, but the Hebrew people were to worship and seek to follow only one god, the god they named Yahweh. The prophets condemned the people for falling away from Yahweh worship and worshiping other gods instead, in particular the Canaanite god Baal.

It’s not hard to understand why the people did that. Yahweh was primarily a war god. They called him the “Lord of hosts,” which means the god of armies. The people were to worship Yahweh primarily because he had freed them from slavery in Egypt, something that was a military act because in involved drowning the entire Egyptian army in the Red Sea. The first prayer the people said after they were safely out of Egypt was: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” Exodus 15:21. (This is the passage is which the text calls Miriam a prophet). The people’s understanding of Yahweh would evolve into seeing Yahweh as the one true God of all creation, but their understanding of Yahweh didn’t begin that way.

Baal, on the other hand, was not a war god, or at least Baal was not only a war god. Baal worshipers believed that Baal controlled the weather. Baal brought rain. Israel was, and is, quite an arid place. In ancient times, the people relied entirely on rain coming at the right times and in the right amounts for their agriculture to produce what the people needed to survive. Baal could give them that rain, Yahweh couldn’t. Like I said, that understanding of Yahweh would change, but the Hebrew prophets were nearly all active between the eighth century BCE and the early fifth century BCE. Most of them were active, that is, before the people’s faith had become truly monotheistic. So many of the Hebrew people and their leaders worshipped Baal rather than Yahweh. The Hebrew prophets said God was angry and was going to punish them for doing so.

The other charge against the people and their leaders that the prophets brought from God was that they had oppressed and failed to care for the most vulnerable people in their midst. They sometimes referred to these people as “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.” The prophets condemned the people’s rulers for oppressing rather than providing for the people among them who were not really able to provide for themselves. They sometimes had God rejecting the people’s sacrificial worship, but they said that Yahweh rejected that worship not because it was wrong worship but because it did not lead the people to lives of justice for the poor. Yahweh, they said, was going to punish them severely for this failure to follow Yahweh’s way.

The ancient Hebrew prophets didn’t have it easy. The worlds to which they prophesied mostly rejected what they had to say. Sometimes the rulers against whom they prophesied locked them up. Sometimes they sent armed forces after them to kill them. That happened to the prophet Elijah after he angered King Ahab with his prophesy. The world, mostly, does not want to hear God’s truth. God’s truth calls people to change, and people don’t like to change. God’s truth calls those with power to give up their power or at least radically to change the way they use it. People with power don’t like giving up power or changing how they use it. Being a prophet will always prompt resistance. Sometimes that resistance is violent. So be it.

OK. So that’s what an ancient Hebrew prophet was, but I must now ask two questions. First, how in God’s name did I come to believe that God may have called me to be a prophet in today’s world? Second, what does it mean to be a prophet in today’s world. I’ll consider those two questions in that order.

I’ve told this story many times before, but I’ll tell it again here. Way back in 1994, some thirty-one years ago, I was an attorney-at-law. I was trying to run my own law practice, and I had a law office. I was starting to burn out on law, thought I didn’t fully realize at that time that I was. I just knew that I was having a hard time making myself actually do legal work. So I did a Jungian psychological exercise I had learned of called active imagination. I sat down, tried to calm myself and clear my mind, and asked myself why I was having that hard time. Immediately, and I mean with no time having elapsed at all and without my consciously having had this thought at all, from deep within me an answer came booming: “You’re not a lawyer!” I was shocked. Of course I was a lawyer. I said to myself you’re sitting in a law office. There’s a sign on the front door that says “Thomas C. Sorenson, Attorney-at-Law.” My Washington State Bar Association number is 11977. Of course I’m a lawyer! Whereupon the answer came booming back again: “You’re not a lawyer!”

So I asked this voice, whatever it was and wherever it was coming from: “OK. So what am I?” Again with no time having elapsed at all came the answer: “You’re a preacher!” Talk about being shocked! A preacher? “Preacher” wasn’t even a word I used. I might refer to my pastor, or to my minister, but not to my preacher. This answer was patently absurd, or so I thought at the time. So I ended the exercise and went on for several more years practicing or attempting to practice law.

Eventually, I went to seminary, something that I had never thought I would ever do. At the time, I didn’t know why I was going to seminary. I just knew I had to do it. Eventually, I became an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, something it had never occurred to me that I would ever be. Eventually, I served a congregation in that denomination as its pastor, something it had never occurred to me that I would ever do.

But here’s the thing. Leaving the practice of law and becoming an ordained minister saved my life. My beloved wife at the time, Francie, was dying of breast cancer. Before she became too ill to say much of anything she said to me: “I am so glad you finally are who you really are.” She was right. I finally was who I really am. I’ll never forget walking into my office at the church I was to serve as its pastor for the first time and knowing beyond a doubt that I already was a better pastor than I had ever been a lawyer.

OK, but that’s pastor not prophet. Well, once again, here’s the thing. Ordained parish ministry has three primary functions. We call them the three Ps. They are the priestly, the pastoral, and the prophetic. The priestly function is to lead worship and preside at the sacraments. The pastoral function is to care about and for the people you serve as pastor. These are important and rewarding aspects of being an ordained parish pastor. Doing both of them filled my soul with faith and a satisfaction I had never felt before.

And suddenly I really was a preacher. I preached to that congregation fifty or more times a year for nearly thirteen years. I preached to a second church that I served for three years after that. Not to be immodest, but I’m a really good preacher. I have my own style, as I suppose all preachers do. I’ve been told that my preaching has a lot of teaching in it, which I take to be a good thing not a bad thing.

And my preaching, and the teaching I did during my years as a parish pastor, both had prophecy in them. What does that mean? In other words, what does it mean to be a prophet in today’s world? It means basically the same thing that it meant to be a prophet in ancient Israel. It means to speak God’s truth to the people and those with power over them. Which, of course, requires a couple of basic things. One is to have a way to speak to people. More importantly, the other is to believe that you know what God’s truth is.

Now, a caveat is necessary here. We mortals can never fully know what God’s truth is. I once saw a Peanuts cartoon that states it well: Snoopy is sitting on top of his dog house typing. Charlie Brown comes by and says: “I see you’re writing a book. What sort of book is it?” Snoopy replies, “It’s a theology book.” Charlie Brown asks: “Do you have a title?” Snoopy says,” Yes, Has It Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong?” That is a caveat everyone who writes theology must always have in mind. Everything we think we know about God might be wrong. Even if some of what we think we know is right, we can never fully know God or God’s will. God transcends us humans infinitely, and we are not capable of understanding the infinity of God. So yes, it has occurred to me that I might be wrong. I rely on God’s grace to accept me even if everything I say about God is wrong.

And I forge ahead anyway. Anyone who writes theology knowing that they might be wrong forges ahead anyway. So how can I claim that what I say reflects God’s will and ways? I can say because I begin with Jesus Christ. We Christians confess that Jesus taught us God’s will and ways more fully and more truthfully than anyone else ever has or ever could. When we boil it down to its essentials, what Jesus taught us is love. That God is love, love that completely transcends our ability fully to understand it. He taught us that justice is love in action in the world, action toward true justice, and that we are called to work for such justice. He also taught us that God is radically nonviolent and that God calls us to be radically nonviolent too. God requires us to do whatever we do nonviolently.

Now, an awful lot of Christians think they know what Jesus was about. They think that Jesus was about how our souls get to heaven after we die. Folks, that absolutely is not what Jesus was about. He was about something he called the kingdom of God. Many of us today don’t much like the word “kingdom,” and sometimes we change it to “realm.” I’ll use “kingdom” here because that’s how our English translations usually render the Greek term in the ancient manuscripts that they translate.

Jesus’ kingdom of God is not something that exists in heaven or only in heaven (if you believe in heaven). It is rather God’s vision of how life on earth would be if we humans lived according to God’s will and ways, as best we are able to understand them, rather than by our own, flawed, selfish, and violent wills and ways. It is a vision of a world in which justice is fully realized. It is a world at peace brought about through justice achieved through nonviolent resistance to evil. It is a world in which our human ways are turned upside down. In which the last are first and the first are last. In which leadership is service not rule. In which the peacemakers not the warmakers are blessed and, indeed, in which there are no warmakers.

It is a world in which the poor are so blessed that there really would be no poor. And no ultrarich either, for people being ultrarich is one of the things that keep other people poor. A world in which everyone truly loves everyone else as they love themselves. Thus it is a world in which there is no racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, classism, nationalism, or anything else that separates people from people on the basis simply of who people are or what their station in life is.

Jesus teaches us that the best way to know God’s ways is to take the ways of the world and turn them upside down. Turn hatred into love. Turn violence into nonviolent action. Turn exclusion into inclusion. Turn nationalism into universalism. Turn oppression into freedom. Turn racism, classism, and all the other hateful, divisive things we humans so cherish into liberty and justice for all. Yes, the Bible, in both of its Testaments, has statements that confirm the ways of the world. However, it also has statements, lots and lots of them, that turn the ways of the world upside down. We know that those statements express the ways of God precisely because they reject the ways of the world.

So what is the call of the prophet today? It is the call to speak truth to power. It is the call to proclaim God’s truths to the world and, especially, to the powerful in the world. The politically powerful. The economically powerful. The religiously powerful. The socially powerful. The militarily powerful. To anyone and everyone who claims power over other people. Who defends the world’s destructive and oppressive ways. Who advocates violence and hatred against anyone. The prophet’s call is to proclaim those truths. To proclaim them loudly and often. To proclaim them in every way the prophet has available to her or him.

Now, the prophet has to realize that proclamation is not action. It intends to prompt action, but it is not itself the action that changes things. Yet prophecy is absolutely essential for any person or movement that seeks to bring about transformation in the ways of the world. The world desperately needs to hear God’s truth. The world desperately needs to hear God’s call to the transformation of the world. To the building of the realm of God. To an end to violence, oppression, discrimination, and all injustice. People say action is more important than ideas, but we cannot really separate actions from ideas. Actions arise from ideas. Thought is foundational for all human action. Theology is thought. Bad theology produces bad actions. Good theology produces good actions. That’s really how you tell good theology from bad theology. What does the theology lead people to do? If it leads them to lives of self-giving love, it is good theology. If it leads them to join in the building of the realm of God on earth, it is good theology.

And I believe that God may well have called me to be a prophet of these divine truths. To shout them as loudly as I can. To shout them every chance I get. To seek chances to shout them. To stick with them when the world resists them, which the world always does, sometimes violently. Never to compromise with the evil that prophecy seeks to overcome. Never to accept or respect evil opinion just because everyone has the right to their own opinion. No, my prophecy will not change the world, but I am not free to abandon it. I believe that God calls me to proclaim it. That’s something I have been trying to do for decades. It is something I will continue to do as long as I live.

I have already encountered resistance. I’ve been called un-Christian and even an apostate because I don’t hate gay people. I’ve been asked how I could be a Christian pastor if I proclaimed the things I have proclaimed. So be it. The ancient Hebrew prophets didn’t let resistance stop them, and neither will I. So damn it! I may indeed be a prophet. Whether I am a true prophet or not, I will continue to preach and proclaim what I understand to be God’s truth to a world that desperately needs to hear it. So be it.