The Prophet Tradition

02/08/12 Jeremiah 20:7-12 GUMC Youth

Do you know what a prophet is? In our society today, we don't tend to take prophets all that seriously. Prophets are seen as somewhat primitive, oftentimes crazy people, who talk nonsensically about stuff that might happen in the future but also very well may not happen. On the other hand, I suppose that there are times that our society takes prophets incredibly seriously, though we sometimes wonder why we do. After all, it is 2012 isn't it? How much of America has spent time worrying about whether or not the world will end this year? Many would say far too much, myself included.

I think that we have a tendency to misunderstand just who the prophets were and what prophecy really is in the Bible and in our world as Christians. For example, we often think of prophets, when acting as prophets, kind of going into some kind of trance, where they stop being themselves and simply become a mouthpiece for God to speak through. That way, when we hear that a prophet said something, we should think that it is God and God alone who is speaking and everything that is said takes on a very mysterious quality. While it is true that there is a passage in the Old Testament that portrays prophets in this way, you really can't say that this is what the Old Testament prophets were really like. It is, however, exactly what the ancient Greek oracle of Delphi was supposed to be like. The oracle would breathe in these mystic vapors and then start speaking mysteries that were often incredibly difficult to make any real sense out of.

The other thing we tend to think of when we think of prophets are that they are people who give elaborate and deeply symbolic descriptions of future events. Again, though there are certainly places in the Bible where this is the case, most of the time, the symbolism wasn't so much intended to obscure what was going to happen as much as it was an attempt to adequately communicate what God was doing. The fact of the matter is that, when you try to explain what God has done and is doing, and if you don't want people to try to understand God as if he is just like everything else in our lives (which is something we do all the time), then you sometimes need to develop a completely new way of talking about things. The goal isn't to confuse people, it is to try to explain something absolutely new, so new that we simply don't have the words to describe it. It is not altogether unlike trying to explain color to someone who has been blind all their lives.

Before I get to what exactly prophets actually are in the Bible, I want to point out one more thing that they are not, a big difference between how prophets function in the history of Israel and the Old Testament and how we hear about them in other contexts. If you read stories that come from ancient Greece, you will notice that prophecy in the sense of telling the future is kind of a joke. What I mean is that you have all these heroes and kings who go to the prophets to try to find out what is going to happen in the future so they can prepare and act accordingly. That makes a lot of sense, right? You want to make decisions based on the best information you can get. But when they go, they get a prediction in the form of a riddle or something that is so incredibly vague, so amazingly unclear that it is a miracle if they can make any real sense out of it or, more often than not, the person who hears the prediction interprets it in a radically inappropriate way, going off in confidence when they should be preparing for defeat. Outside of the Israelite tradition, prophets are less people who give good information and more instruments of fate, telling people what they want to hear to make sure that everything happens in the way that has been foretold and there can be no change in the future.

By contrast, the Israelite prophets were always about telling people what God was up to, not to confuse them or to lead them down the wrong path, but to encourage them to do what was right. We have this wonderful passage in the book of the prophet Ezekiel (33:11-20), where we read, "As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel. And you, mortal, say to the people, The righteousness of the righteous shall not save them when they transgress; and as for the wickedness of the wicked, it shall not make them stumble when they turn from their wickedness; and the righteous shall not be able to live by their righteousness when they sin. Though I say to the righteous that they shall surely live, yet if they trust in their righteousness and commit iniquity, none of their righteous deeds shall be remembered; but in the iniquity that they have committed they shall die. Again, though I say to the wicked, 'You shall surely die,' yet if they turn from their sin and do what is lawful and right - if the wicked restore the pledge, give back what they have taken by robbery, and walk in the statutes of life, committing no iniquity -they shall surely live, they shall not die. None of the sins that they have committed shall be remembered against them; they have done what is lawful and right, they shall surely live."

The whole point of prophecy was to bring about change. Do you remember the story of the prophet Jonah, who was told to preach to the people of Nineveh, a city that hated God and he didn't want to go. We find out in the story that the reason he didn't want to go was not because he was afraid of being mistreated but because he was certain that the people would actually listen and if they listened, they wouldn't be destroyed and he wanted them to be destroyed! God sends prophets because he wants the best for us, even when we don't, and even when the prophets themselves don't.

Alright, so what is the main thing that prophets do? It is true that, sometimes, the prophets go into this kind of ecstatic trance and it is true that, sometimes, the prophets tell about future events and acts of God that are far beyond the ability of normal human knowledge, but that is not what they do most of the time. While it is true that the prophets are often foretellers, they spend most of their time as what we could call forthtellers. More often than not, the prophets we read about in the Bible are people who end up as advisors to kings, not necessarily because the kings want to have the prophets around but because they can't seem to get away from them. The main way the prophets functioned was as someone who stood outside of the mainstream of the political world who looked at the same events that everyone else was looking at but, instead of asking first, "How can we win our battles and make our nation great," would ask, "What is God doing in the midst of all this? Are we being faithful? Are we really doing what the people of God should be doing? Are we listening to God at all?" It is interesting that the constant claims we hear about various politicians being an "outsider," whether it is true or not, is based on this idea that those in political power need to be reminded of other ways of looking at the world.

Now, when we look at things from our American point of view, where we see all kinds of people on TV and on the internet who criticize the government and point out their mistakes, and we ourselves even join in the blame placing and finger pointing, we might get the idea that this role of the prophet was something that everyone wanted to do. After all, it is kind of fun to get into an argument where we can show everyone how right we are and how wrong someone else is. And yet, however respected the prophets may or may not have been at any given time, when we actually read what they had to say, we find that they didn't always want to be a prophet. Perhaps the strongest example is the text we read at the beginning, where Jeremiah said that God tricked him into being a prophet and that he wishes that he could just keep his mouth shut and not have to talk about God and what God wants, but every time he does, he says, "then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot."

The prophets were constant messengers from God to call his people back to faithfulness. They were the concrete and physical reminders that God still loved his people and it that it breaks his heart when we forget him and live as if he didn't really exist. These were people who, because of their ministry, helped to mould and shape a whole community over hundreds of years. It seems pretty clear how, when Israel was faithful, they were bound all the more firmly to God, but the whole prophetic tradition shows us that the mistakes of the people did not stop God from claiming them and calling them his own. Every time a prophet spoke out against the people, it was a declaration of God's love and faithfulness. Even when it seemed harsh, it was truly an act of love. After all, God doesn't need any of us. If he decided that he had had enough of the Israelites, he could easily have just turned his back and rejected them. Nothing would have been simpler. The fact that God continued to reach out to his people after they rejected him over and over and over again shows just how much God truly loves us.

Not everyone loved the prophets, though. As you can imagine, you can only go up to powerful political leaders and tell them things they don't want to hear and tell them that they have abandoned God so many times before you start to get picked on. Remember, Israel was a nation that, by definition was bound to God. For the prophets to say that Israel had abandoned God, even though God had not abandoned them, was to say that the nation and its leaders have completely lost their way, are not who they ought to be, have committed a crime, not against the people, but against God. They were not very popular among the people they came to speak to. Though we do not hear many details in the Bible, we know that many of the prophets in the Bible came to tragic ends. Some were beheaded, others, according to the book of Hebrews (11:35-38), "were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented - of whom the world was not worthy."

The question I want to ask you tonight and I want you to think hard about it both tonight and in the days to come, is "Who are the prophets in your life today?" Who are the people you know who stand up for what is right, even when everyone else around hates them for it? Who are the people who care so much about you that they will tell you that you are doing something wrong when everyone else is too afraid of hurting your feelings to say anything? Who are the people who wish they weren't in the spotlight because of what they believe but keep getting pushed into it because they don't really have a choice? I'm not talking about people who want to beat people with their faith and set out to do so, I mean the people whose lives are maybe a bit odd, but completely sincere and marked by love, even if that love looks a bit different than our world wants it to. Are there any prophets like that around? Are there any in your life? Do you want God to speak into your life and tell you what he wants you to do, even if it means that you need to do something that you may not want to do?

Here's another question. "Are you a prophet?" Most of the time, when people are asked that question today, their first reaction is to say, "Of course not. I'm not a prophet." But when they are asked, they almost always are thinking of some great and holy leader who sits on a pedestal or wears a sign on the street corner and spouts off symbolic doomsday predictions or something like that. My question is not whether you are like that. My question is whether you are a person who is so concerned for what God has done, is doing and will do that you are willing to stand for God when everyone around is against him, even if they would never say they are against him? Are you willing to be faithful even when nobody else seems to see the need for it? If so, it probably feels like everyone around gets all worked up over things that don't matter and seem to not care at all about the things that do matter. It probably feels like you are the only one who cares about God (though you should know that it isn't true. Lots of people care about God, even if it doesn't always feel like it). If that is you, you probably don't understand what people are getting at when they say, "You need to bring your faith into every area of your life," because you can't understand how faith can really be faith if it isn't something that affects every area of life.

Our world is desperately in need of prophets, but I don't think that it is because God simply isn't calling people to be prophets. I think it is because the people who God has called to be prophets don't realize that is what it is that they have been called to be because they've gotten the wrong idea of what the prophetic ministry is. Here is something that we read in the first letter of Peter. "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light." Is God calling to be a prophet, to be a witness for what God has done and is doing in Spencer? Let us pray.

AMEN