The Reluctant Prophet

The Reluctant Prophet

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

Scripture: Exodus 3:1-4:17 Isaiah 6:1-8, Jeremiah 1:4-10

What is a prophet? We’ve all heard of such a thing, haven’t we? There are prophets mostly in the Old Testament. Some of them have books named after them—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Micah, and others. We’ve heard of them, but do we really know what a prophet is? Frankly, I don’t think so. See, prophet today has come to mean someone who predicts the future. If we say someone has been prophetic we probably mean that she or he has correctly predicted some future event. Maybe we even think that that’s what those Old Testament prophets were mostly about. Jeremiah, for example, prophesied that the Babylonians would conquer Jerusalem and Judah. The Babylonians did precisely that. So Jeremiah is a prophet because he predicted that that would happen. Right? Well no actually, not right. Correctly predicting the future is not what those Old Testament prophets, or any true prophets for that matter, are primarily about. We can get a glimpse of what they are primarily about by looking at how three of the greatest of those Old Testament prophets tried so hard to get out of God’s call to them to become prophets. We’ll look at the call stories of Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. I think those stories will tell us a lot about what it really means to be a prophet.

I’ll start with Moses. In chapter 3 of Exodus Moses is tending his father-in-law’s sheep out in the Sinai desert. He comes to Mt. Sinai, except that Exodus here calls it Mount Horeb. Same thing. Just why Moses would drive his father-in-law’s sheep deep into the desert of Sinai isn’t clear, but never mind. Moses sees a bush that is burning but is not burned up. Weird, right? Moses goes over to check it out. Then things get even weirder for poor old Moses. God speaks to him out of the burning bush. Moses, God says, go to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go. I can easily imagine a standup comedian having fun with that one. I imagine that comedian having Moses say “Yeah. Sure. Right. You’re kidding right? You can’t be serious. Knock off the practical joke. There’s no way I’m going to Pharaoh to tell him to let your people go or anything else for the matter.” Actually all Exodus has Moses say is “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Exodus 3:11 Maybe Moses was thinking I can’t go to Egypt. I killed an Egyptian who was abusing Hebrew slaves and had to flee the place. See Exodus 2:11-15. If I go back they’ll arrest me for murder and execute me. Or maybe he just didn’t think he was up to the task somehow. Whatever. Moses tries to get out of God’s call to him by minimizing himself: “Who am I…?” God’s having none of it. So Moses tries again. What am I to say if the Israelites there ask me the name of the God who supposedly sent me? That’s when the divine name if revealed: I am who I am, or simply I am. God still isn’t having any of Moses’ attempts to get out of this go to Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go business. So Moses tries again. I’ve never been eloquent, he says. I am slow of speech he says. God brushes this attempt of Moses’ off with assurances that God will help him speak. Or that God will send Moses’ brother Aaron with him and Aaron can do the talking. Eventually Moses gives up and accepts God’s call to be the prophet who would bring the Israelites out of Egypt.

Then we come to Isaiah. His call story is in chapter 6 of the book with his name. There Isaiah reports having had a vision of being in the throne room of God. It’s a terrifying scene. Flying beasts called seraphs. Smoke. The building shaking. Isaiah is terrified. He says Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, but I’ve seen God. He meant by that “now I’m going to die” because the ancient Israelites believed that no human could see God and live. Isaiah wants none of this immediate contact with God because he considers himself a sinner. That’s what “a man of unclean lips” means. Again, God’s having none of it. God sends one of those seraphs to touch Isaiah’s lips with a hot coal. That, it seems, purified Isaiah of his sin. God says “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Isaiah answers: “Here I am. Send me.” He tried to get out of being a prophet, and again God was having none of it. So Isaiah gave in and became one of the greatest of the Hebrew prophets.

Then there’s Jeremiah. He reports God coming to him and saying that before Jeremiah was born God had anointed him to be God’s prophet. Like the other two prophets we’ve looked at, Jeremiah tries to get out of it. He says surely you don’t mean me for “I am only a boy.” And again like with those other two prophets God is having none of it. God says Do not say I’m only a boy. You must do what I tell you to do. And God says that God will be with Jeremiah and will protect him. So like the others Jeremiah gives in and becomes one of the greatest of the Hebrew prophets.

What’s going on here? Why do these guys try so hard to get out of God’s call to them to be prophets? I mean, wouldn’t it be a great honor if God came to you and said be my prophet? After all, being one of God’s prophets is a pretty big deal. Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah lived many, many centuries ago, but we still respect and even revere them as true men of God. We still read the books with their names on them and find some great wisdom there. We think of true prophets as great people, don’t we? So why do these guys try so hard to get out of being a prophet of God?

The answer to that question lies in what it actually means to be God’s prophet. God did not call Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah to predict the future. God called them to speak God’s truth to the powers of the world. That’s explicit in the case of Moses. God says Go to Pharaoh and tell him…. Go speak truth to power. It’s less explicit with Isaiah and Jeremiah, but look at what those two actually did. Isaiah went into the northern kingdom of Israel and preached judgment against the kingdom and its rules because of their faithlessness. Jeremiah preached a coming destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians as God’s judgment of the people’s faithlessness. The king didn’t kill Jeremiah, but he locked him up in a guardhouse and threw him into a dry cistern. All three of these great prophets were called to be prophets by speaking God’s truth to power. That’s what they all did. That’s what a prophet really is, someone God has called to speak God’s truth to power.

And no wonder prophets usually try to get out of it. The powers of the world in ancient times didn’t want to hear God’s truth. God’s truth was always a judgment against them. The true prophet calls them out for oppressing people, for worship false gods, for leading immoral lives, for whatever it is that the powers are doing that is wrong. Worldly powers are always doing something wrong, and worldly powers never like to be told they’re doing something wrong. They always fight back. I mean, Pharaoh came after Moses and his people with his whole army. Trust me, being chased by Pharaoh’s army is not where you want to be. Being a true prophet of God is dangerous business. It was dangerous in the ancient world. It got Jesus crucified. It is dangerous business in our world too. It gets people like Saint Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy murdered. It’s gotten lots of other people killed too. That’s why the prophets so often try so hard to get out of being a prophet. Being one might be an honor, but it is an honor that might well get you killed.

But of course if the only truth here were that some true prophets get killed it wouldn’t mean that much to most of us. Most of aren’t MLK, Jr. None of us is Moses. But the truth is that even being a much less prominent prophet than that is dangerous business too. Take being a local church pastor for example. The role of a pastor has traditionally been defined with three ps. The pastor is called to be priest, pastor, and prophet. The priestly role is leading worship and presiding at the sacraments. The pastoral role is caring for the people of the church. Most church people don’t have too much problem with their pastor filling those roles. They may complain about one thing or another, but it is rarely those roles that gets a local church pastor in trouble with her or his congregation. But then there’s the prophetic role. Every pastor is called to speak God’s truth to the congregation, and time and time again pastors get in a world of hurt when they do.

See, people in power don’t much like to hear God’s truth, but far too often the people in the pews don’t either. God’s truth so often contradicts people’s long-held beliefs and prejudices. God’s truth so often challenges them. It upends their world. It threatens to change their lives. People don’t like that. People outside the church don’t like that, but neither do most people in the church. So they accuse the pastor of “preaching politics,” as if the Gospel of Jesus Christ weren’t political. Like people in one church I served, they may go so far as to say “we don’t want the world coming into the church.” Well, the only way a preacher can never say anything political, can never bring the world into the church, is never to preach the full Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is never to be prophetic, and when a pastor isn’t prophetic that pastor is failing to carry out one of his or her primary functions. Truly being prophetic, truly speaking God’s truth, sometimes gets pastors fired. Or maybe it just gives them no choice but to resign. Getting fired or forced to resign of course is nothing like being killed; but it’s no fun, and it can cause significant difficulties in the pastor’s life. So even at the level of a modest local church pastor being a prophet is a dangerous business.

No wonder so many of the great prophets of the Bible tried to hard to get out of it. A lot of us who have experienced a call to pastoral ministry tried to get out of it at first too. I know I did, and I know that many of my colleagues did too. Yet for all that the truth remains: If we mere mortals don’t speak God’s truth to power, or even to the people of our congregations, that truth just won’t get spoken. And just as God would have none of Moses’, Isaiah’s, or Jeremiah’s excuses for avoiding their calling, God will have none of any of us avoiding God’s call to us to speak God’s truth in the world either. Doing so can be exhilarating, but it can also be dangerous. Like those great prophets of scripture we may be reluctant prophets, but we must be prophets none the less. We must speak God’s word of peace and justice to a violent and unjust world. Yes, that’s dangerous. We need to do it anyway. So let’s get on with it. Amen.

With Interpretation

I've been retired from active parish ministry for over a year now. Several times in the past year I have thought that it might be good for me to continue writing sermons even though I would never deliver most of them to any congregation. For all of my years of parish ministry I understood the weekly practice of designing a worship service and writing a sermon to be my primary personal spiritual discipline. Although I don't want to go back into active parish ministry I miss that weekly practice. So I've decided to write sermons again at least from time to time though I will never preach most of them. Here's the first of them:

With Interpretation

Scripture: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10.

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.

Back in the days when I was serving as the pastor of a parish I had this experience more than once. I suspect most every Christian pastor has had it. More than once people said to me that they wanted their scripture straight, by which they would say they meant without interpretation. Just give the words, they said or at least implied. I guess I can respect these good folks and their desire just to have the Bible read to them without somebody trying to explain to them what any particular passage means. I take it that they either want to apply their own interpretation to the text or, more likely, that they don’t think that they interpret the text because the text doesn’t need interpreting. For them any biblical text just says what it says and means what it means, that meaning being obvious to anyone who reads or hears the text. And of course they would understand that the text has only one meaning that is universally true for everyone. I think I get it. People want the Bible to be simple. They want its translations to be perfect and its meaning obvious to everyone.

Well, as easy to understand as that approach to the Bible may be, I’m afraid that we simply can’t accept it. We can’t go along with it. We can’t tell these good but probably biblically uneducated folks that they’re right. That the Bible is simple. That its meaning is obvious. That everything in it means the same thing to everyone everywhere at any time. You see, all that just isn’t true. In this sermon I want to talk about why it isn’t true and what we do about it not being true. And I’ll start with the passage from Nehemiah listed above.

The book of Nehemiah is one of the post-exilic books of the Old Testament. It was written some time around the change from the sixth to the fifth centuries BCE. Many of the Jewish people whom the Babylonians had hauled off to exile in Babylon around the year 586 BCE had returned under the protection of the Persians, who had conquered Babylon in the 530s BCE. Those years after the return from Babylon were not easy ones for these folks. They were poor. They had to appease the Persians and pay them tribute. They had before them the daunting tasks of rebuilding Jerusalem, especially its outer wall that the Babylonians had breached and destroyed. They had to rebuild the temple. Tradition said, and says, that King Solomon had built a temple on a hill in Jerusalem called Zion in the tenth century BCE. The Babylonians destroyed that temple, and the people were determined to build a new one on the same site after they came back from Babylon. Yet they found that they didn’t have the resources to build anything like what Solomon’s temple had been. They complained about how poor and unimposing their new temple was. The prophets who had come before them had said that the time of return would be glorious. It wasn’t. It was hard and discouraging.

The book of Nehemiah sets its story of the reading of the law against that backdrop. It tells of Ezra, whom it describes as both a priest and a scribe, gathering all the people together in a public square and reading a scroll of the law of Moses to them. By the law of Moses it surely means the entire Torah, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. All of those books or at least most of the stories in them existed in one form or another at the time this story is set. Those books were traditionally known as the books of Moses. That’s what Ezra read to the people that day in post-exilic Jerusalem.

And here’s what I think is the most important part of this passage. It says: “So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” Nehemiah 8:8. Verse 7, which for some reason the Revised Common Lectionary leaves out of the reading for this Sunday, says that a number of named people and the Levites “helped the people to understand the law….” Apparently Nehemiah, who was the governor appointed by the Persians, wanted the people to hear the Torah law, and he got the priest Ezra and perhaps others to read it to them. But they didn’t just read it. They interpreted it. They helped the people understand it. Our text doesn’t tell us how they interpreted the text. We don’t know what these interpreters said to the people about what the text meant. It is however striking and important that our passage stresses how the religious leaders of the day didn’t just read the text to the people and leave it at that. They interpreted. They helped the people understand. Assuming for the moment that they did that well and in good faith, God bless them for it. Clearly we have here the Bible telling us that at least a significant part of the Bible, namely, the law of Moses, needs interpretation if people are to understand it.

That lesson about the Bible, I am convinced, applies to the whole book, not just the Mosaic law found in the Torah. Why is that? Why isn’t the Bible simple? Why does it need all that interpretation that many people today don’t want? There are lots of reasons why that is so. Some of them are quite academic and perhaps hard for people to understand who haven’t studied the matter in some depth. For example, there is a whole science of interpretation called hermeneutics. Today’s hermeneutics says that meaning never resides in a text alone but arises from the encounter of a reader with the text. Because that’s where meaning arises it follows that the meaning of a text, any text, depends to some extent on who’s reading it. If you want to know more about hermeneutics you can read Stop 3 of my Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume One, Approaching the Bible, Coffee Press, 2018. But for now I’ll move on to reasons why the Bible needs interpretation that are perhaps a bit easier to grasp.

The Bible is a collection of ancient texts. Many of its passages go back to oral tradition that is over three thousand years old. It’s newest text is still something like eighteen or nineteen thousand years old. All of the texts of the Bible were written in and for worlds that were very different from ours. We live in a world dominated by science. The worlds of the Bible were all prescientific. We are products of Enlightenment rationalism that reduces truth to fact. The worlds of the Bible were all prerational. That doesn’t mean they were irrational. It means they didn’t see human reason as the source of all knowledge the way most western people have since the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in western Europe. It means that in the worlds of the Bible people understood better than people today that there is truth that is much deeper than mere factual truth. They understood the power of mythic and symbolic truth much better than most of us do today. Yes, western culture is finally moving beyond its faulty belief that only facts are true, but most western people have a long way to go before they accept that insight and live into its power to transform lives. We moderns tend to communicate truth, or at least try to, by writing directly about what we consider to be truth. We write journalism, or we write essays or books. The worlds of the Bible communicated truth not by writing modern journalism, essays, or books but by telling stories. The people who first heard those stories may or may not have understood them as factually true. The important point is that even if they did understand them as factually true they also understood that they had far deeper truth in them than mere fact. The worlds of the Bible didn’t understand what it is to be human the way we do. They didn’t understand human sexuality the way we do. They didn’t understand the structure of the universe the way we do. The list of differences between the worlds of the Bible and our world could go on and on, but I trust the point is made. Every word in the Bible comes from a world so radically different from ours that understanding even the basics of that world takes a lot of work. Some people today have done that work. Most haven’t.

Which means that most people who read the Bible today commit the error of anachronism. They read the Bible through the lenses of their own culture rather than attempting first of all to understand the Bible on its own terms. That means they often, perhaps usually, misunderstand the Bible. I’ll cite just one important example here. Most people today, both Christians and non-Christians, believe that the Bible condemns homosexuality. That’s because they read verses like Leviticus 18:22, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination,” as referencing a modern understanding of human sexuality. It doesn’t. It says nothing at all about homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality because in the ancient world from which Leviticus comes people had no such understanding. They assumed that everyone was what we call straight. When we take a verse from that world and bring it into our world as biblical truth we’re elevating an ancient understanding of human sexuality to the level of divine truth. It isn’t, but we can’t understand that it isn’t without the explanation that I just gave. That explanation isn’t apparent on the face of the text. It is interpretation of the text, but it is crucially important if we are to avoid a grave mistake in our use of the Bible.

The author of the ancient book of Nehemiah knew that the Bible needs interpretation. He (the author was certainly a man given the androcentrism of ancient cultures) knew his people could and likely would misunderstand the biblical texts they heard if they heard them without interpretation. Many people today don’t understand that truth. Because they don’t, the Bible gets misused in ways that can be extremely damaging. The way Leviticus 18:22 that I just cited gets used to attack gay people is one example. The way some Christians use Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 as a reason for denying contemporary science is another. The book of Nehemiah has part of the Bible read to the people “with interpretation.” We would to well to follow Nehemiah’s example. Of course there is good interpretation of the Bible and bad interpretation of the Bible. That unfortunate truth is probably unavoidable. Yet the reality of bad interpretation doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t or mustn’t interpret the Bible. We must interpret the Bible, and do it well, if are truly to understand it and use it properly. It contains great wisdom and truth, but only good interpretation can unlock that wisdom and truth for us.

So let’s be done with “I want my Bible straight without interpretation.” It actually isn’t possible to read any text without interpreting it, but even if it were possible ancient documents like those that make up the Bible absolutely need interpreting if we are to avoid misusing them, and misusing them badly. The work of interpretation isn’t easy. Most of us need the assistance of trained professionals to do it well. So be it. May we all do that work well. Amen.

A Word of Warning

A Word of Warning

We live in a frightening time.Around the world fascism is once again on the rise. For decades the major political parties in Germany were the relatively conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the more progressive Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the successor of the old German socialists. Today it is the CDU and something called Alternative for Germany, a neo-fascist party that demonizes immigrants and advocates the supremacy of Germans and German culture. A similar thing has happened in Italy, where neo-fascists win elections and condemn immigrants. Hungary is ruled by a neo-fascist prime minister. So is Turkey. Other nations of central Europe are experiencing similar things. Russia is ruled by a reactionary authoritarian president who has severely restricted freedom of the press and centralized authority in the Kremlin in a way it had not been since the demise of communism in 1991. The list of examples could go on and on.

The same thing is happening here in the United States of America.In 2016 we Americans made the American fascist Donald Trump our president. (For a discussion of how Donald Trump is a fascist see the post "American Fascist" elsewhere on this blog.) In his campaign and in his term as president he has attacked the free press, even calling it the "enemy of the people," using Stalin's term for the people he murdered in enormous numbers. Every fascist has a target population on which he or she blames a country's problems though that target population isn't solely responsible for those problems or may not be responsible for them at all.For today's European fascists that target population is primarily immigrants or refugees from Africa or the Middle East. Trump has perhaps taken his cue from them, for his target population is immigrants coming across our southern border from Mexico or Central America. He has called them all murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and terrorists. Never mind that these is no evidence at all to support those specious claims. Every responsible, knowledgeable person who speaks to conditions on our border with Mexico today says there is no crisis there. The numbers of people coming across that border has been declining steadily for some time now. Under international law every person has a legal right to enter a country of which she is not a citizen to seek asylum. But there being no crisis on our southern border doesn't suit Trump's fascist political purposes, so he insists in the face of all the facts that there is one.

Trump's false attacks on immigrants remind me of something I experienced during the 1957-1958 academic year when I was eleven years old. My family and I lived in Berlin, Germany, that year. My father, a history professor, was doing historical research there that year. We rented rooms in a large apartment from a German woman named Annamarie. She was a widow, her husband having died before we met her. He had been a Nazi. The real thing. A member of the National Socialist Party of Germany. Annamarie still had his party uniform hanging in a closet in the apartment we shared with her. I don't remember how the subject came up. We really never discussed politics with her, but I will never forget the time when she said to us: "Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews, but then something did have to be done." That statement is of course factually false. Nothing had to be done about Germany's Jews. They weren't the problem Hitler made them out to be. Beyond that, it isn't that something "happened" to the Jews under the Nazis. German people like Annamarie or at least her deceased Nazi husband murdered them in their millions. As is so often the case, Annamarie's use of the passive voice in her statement ("what happened to the Jews") was a way of avoiding responsibility for what her nation had done. What the Germans did to the Jews (and not just the Jews but other people like homosexuals and the disabled that they hated as well) wasn't "too bad." It was one of the worst moral outrages of human history. Annamarie, of whom we were otherwise quite fond, like so many other Germans reduced the horrific moral atrocity they had perpetrated to being "too bad what happened to the Jews." There's the banality of evil we hear about coming from the mouth of an otherwise quite pleasant and interesting woman.

I don't mean to suggest that Donald Trump is planning a new Holocaust. I don't believe that. Nonetheless Annamarie's "It's too bad what happened to the Jews, but something did have to be done" is nonetheless a real word of warning to us. The way Trump is using immigrants to our country as his target population on which to blame our country's problems is parallel to the way Hitler started the anti-Jewish policies of his government that culminated in the Holocaust. Desperate people fall for fascist lies like these far too easily. Many Americans are desperate today. The world is changing. Indeed, it has changed; and many people experience that change as negative, as disadvantageous to them and as frightening. Those people's feelings may be understandable, but they also make those people easy marks for charlatans like Donald Trump with his lies about a crisis on our southern border.Trump would never have become president if they were not such easy marks.

So take Annamarie's words to my family and me so many decades ago as a warning to us today. When our government tears apart families at the border. When young children die in our custody. When Trump and his Republican allies work to distract us from real solutions to real problems as they do, we can't just sit here, shrug our shoulders, and say "It's too bad what's happening at the southern border, but then something does has to be done." No it doesn't. Not about the nonexistent problem Trump dummies up to whip up his angry and desperate political base and put one over on the rest of us. What Trump is doing isn't just "too bad." It's immoral. It's frightening. He must be stopped, and we must use very legal, nonviolent means available to us to stop him.

A Reflection on the Human Spirit

Some years ago I wrote an autobiography, an act of pure hubris I admit but a very interesting exercise. In it I was talking about visiting the chapel of the monastery at Melk, Austria, one of the most breathtaking example of Rococo art and architecture there is anywhere. After I described that experience I wrote this meditation which I think is worth repeating here. I find it quite profound and powerful. Perhaps you will too.

This is perhaps a place for another meditative diversion. Back in the 1960s when I was living in Germany, during these years of 1964-65 that I'm describing and again in 1968-69, many American students of a liberal mindset objected mightily to the way the Europeans in previous centuries had spent such enormous amounts of money building extravagant churches, palaces, and other public buildings. I get that objection. The money spent on the gilding in the Melk monastery alone would have fed and housed a great many people for a very long time. I get that objection, but I don't share it. In the Bible, when the devil tempts Jesus to abuse his divine power by turning stones into bread only for his own use Jesus demurs, saying “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Matthew 4:4, quoting Deuteronomy 8:3. Whether you, dear reader, embrace the Judeo-Christian tradition from which this line comes or not, I think you might concede that it speaks a profound human truth. Human life consists of more than the physical, the material. Human life involves the spiritual, however one understands the concept “spiritual.” You don't have to understand it in any religious sense to see that humans have an innate drive to express beauty, to express profound truth through art, to let their spirits soar in works of beauty that speak to the soul at a level beyond words. To strive toward something higher than mere physical existence, however that something is understood. Yes, buildings like Melk were intended in part to impress, to show off, to show how rich the people building them were; but they were intended for something greater and deeper than that too. They were intended to, and they do, express the soaring and the yearning of the human spirit. They express a faith in something beyond the mere human. They have the power to relieve and even to transform the mundane dreariness of the ordinary life of most people. If the human spirit ever stops soaring, stops creating, stops reaching beyond the ordinary and the material we will have lost a great deal of what it means to be human. Melk, Chartres, Notre Dame, Saint Peter’s, the churches of the Moscow Kremlin, and so many, many other great achievements of the human spirit are testaments to the greatness of humanity. They are expressions of hope and of faith. Human life would be impoverished without them and other great human cultural achievements from different cultures all over the world.