PEOPLE WHO SAY NO
Amos 3:1-8, Hosea 11:1-11, Luke 13:31-35
[Since spoken communication differs from written, some of the grammar and syntax of this transcript may seem awkward in written form. To keep integrity with the spirit of the original delivery, the transcript seeks to stay close to the exact words spoken.]
This morning's sermon is the final installment of what I've been billing as a three part series on the Minor Prophets--the 12 prophets in the Old Testament whose books are relatively short, and they would have fit onto one scroll in the synagogue. The first week I preached about Amos, and last week on Hosea. I focused on a single word last week--the word "to know" in Hebrew, as a way to help us reflect on the whole message of Hosea. Today I'm going to go the complete opposite route. I'm going to cover the landscape in my sermon today. I'm going to preach on both Amos and Hosea…and all the Minor Prophets, and Major Prophets. I'm going to talk about: What is a prophet? What kind of person was a prophet in the Old Testament times? And what does that matter for us today? So I'd invite us to reflect on that together this morning. And as we go about that task, let's take a moment to turn our hearts and minds to God in prayer.
Let us pray. Oh come Holy Spirit, come as the fire and burn. Come as the wind and cleanse. Come as the light and reveal. Come as the water and refresh. Oh Holy and loving God, convict us and convert us and consecrate us until we are wholly yours. Amen.
I want to begin this sermon with a bit of a, what we call "guided meditation." Usually when people do that, they might close their eyes. It's an invitation to kick-start your imagination for a moment. And I'm going to ask some questions and invite you to imagine either a real situation in your life, or imagine what a situation like the one I'm describing, using your imagination.
I'd invite you to think about a time in your life, a situation…or imagine a situation…when you had to say the hard thing. A time when you had to say, "no" when everyone else was saying, "yes." Or maybe more likely, when no one was saying much of anything, but just going along with the program. Can you think of a situation like that in your life, when you had to say or do the hard thing--the unpopular thing? As you think about that situation, as you call it to mind, ask yourself the question: What motivated you to do what you did, or say what you said? Was it out of a deep inner conviction about what was right? Was it something that welled up in you, and seemed in some sense involuntary? Would you have felt "chicken" if you hadn't done it? Would you have felt moral cowardice if you had failed to act?
And then think with me, just for a moment, what the consequence of that was. Did people not like you because of it? Did you have to suffer the scorn of the crowd? Did you perhaps take some comfort in the rightness of your cause and your motivation?
One of these days, I'm going to come out of this pulpit and come down and talk. And we're going to have a conversation for the sermon. Because I'd love to know if anything came up for you in that exercise. I'm sure that, for many of us, it's hard to imagine a circumstance in your life that might fit those categories. But if there is one that you thought of, I'd love to hear about it. But I'll spare you this morning, putting you on the spot. I'm going to talk up here. But someday, I promise, I'm coming down there.
But I think that's a good exercise for us, to use the 12 inches between our ears to imagine a little bit about what it might have felt like to be a prophet. And anybody can be a prophet--I don't mean necessarily that that's a special role. But in some sense it was a very particular role in the ancient world--in the world of the Hebrew Scriptures. And those questions I just asked might help us imagine what it might have been like to be a prophet in that time.
Today we're going to consider the role of prophet as someone who says, "no" when everyone else is saying, "yes," or is just going along with the program. Someone who says, "no" to the death-dealing dominant culture on behalf of God. So that's the handle that we're going to use in our exploration. But before we go down that road, I just want to offer some very basic stuff about what a prophet was in the Hebrew scriptures--just some basic definitions and understandings.
The original word for "prophet" in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Hebrew, meant something like "seer." Someone who sees, or seeks to see, into the future. Someone who's able to be in touch with the divine realm, and see what might be happening with the gods. And if you have this skill, in the ancient world, you were quite a valuable person. Especially to those in power. You see?
Of course this definition of prophet is common parlance today, isn't it? In our business language, a "prophet" is simply somebody who can foretell the trend before anyone else can see it. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are prophets in their realm. But in the ancient world, if you were in touch with the divine realm, and knew the intention of God or the gods, you were especially valuable to the leader--the king. And so there was this office that developed--people who were "professional seers," either on behalf of people or leaders. And this business isn't unique to Hebrew culture--it was very common in ancient cultures to do this, to consult the oracle, for example. The Greeks would consult the Oracle at Delphi to determine whether to go to war or not, and so forth.
But you see, the challenge, and the danger, in this kind of arrangement is if you are that kind of prophet--it's not really a prophet, but if you're a "seer"--the danger is that the employment arrangement you have, if you're a seer for the king, might cloud the words you speak. You know? You might get into the business of being a "for-profit" prophet, so to speak--to use a bad pun. And if you read the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures--you know that that dynamic is going on all the time. There are the false prophets, who simply say what people want to hear, especially the king. So our first understanding of early prophecy came from this business of "seer," of seeking to see into the future. But that's not really what a prophet is.
Another way of understanding a prophet--and by the way, the word in English, "prophet" is from "pro" or "fore" (F-O-R-E); and "phetes," a Greek word meaning "speaker." So a prophet is a "fore" (before) "speaker"--someone who can say what will happen before it happens. But another way of understanding the role of prophet is as a "for speaker." (F-O-R speaker). Someone who speaks for. And that is the kind of prophet that we meet in the Hebrew Scriptures. Someone who speaks for the divine. Someone who speaks for God and speaks the words of God. The word for prophet in Hebrew, "nevi," some think comes from a word that is related to "mouth"; some think it might also be associated with the word for "empty." So we get the image of an empty vessel into which God pours God's words. It's important to know that when we read the prophets. The most common refrain that you'll read as you read the prophets is this: "Hear the word of the Lord!"
In other words, the prophet says, "God gave me these words. They're not my words--in fact, I wish I didn't have to be the one who says them!" That's another thing that we should know about the prophets. How does one get to be a prophet, in this sense? Not a professional prophet (a "for-profit" prophet), but the real deal. It's not a job you apply for, you know? "Johnny what do you want to be when you grow up?" "I want to be a prophet." No, it doesn't work that way. You are called to be a prophet. God calls you, maybe mid-plow, to a task. And one of the marks of a true prophet is, in fact, not wanting to do the job. Being reluctant. Being this kind of prophet is not a popular job.
Perhaps you remember Moses, on that mountain? "Go speak to Pharaoh." And Moses says, "I can't--I don't speak well; I don't speak good." He was reluctant to do the job God asked him to do. Jonah is maybe the quintessential reluctant prophet, if you remember Jonah from your Sunday school lessons. God says, "Go to Nineveh" and Jonah hops on a boat to Tarshish, going the opposite direction. I'm getting the heck out of Dodge. And for the prophet, it's the case that you can't really avoid this call, if you are called by God. Jonah finds himself in Ninevah, despite his desires. And it's a hard job; it's a hard job to say, "no" to people choosing death. But that's what a prophet does. A person who says, "no" to the death-dealing elements of the dominant culture.
So here's what we know: a prophet isn't necessarily a seer, who's just telling the future; he's not doing it "for-profit,"--not getting paid for it; and he's a person who speaks for the divine; one who's generally not a popular guy--in fact, he's going to be very unpopular with the people. Abraham Joshua Heschel in his book, The Prophets (I'll quote him later on too), says, "It's a wonder that prophets ever were tolerated in ancient Israel at all, because of their utter insistence on justice, and holding people to the values that God called them to."
What else can we say then about the message of the prophets? This is a very broad sermon. And each prophet, of course, has a message that is keyed to his own context (and in the fall we're going to be looking at Jeremiah, and his specific context and message.) But there are a few things that we can sort of generalize about the message that they all speak.
First of all it's important to say that the message of the prophets is not about individual morality. A very different kind of culture existed in that time. The message of the prophets was aimed at the nation. The people. It's not about getting individual people right with God. It's not about me and God, it's about the nation and God. Moral danger was not an individual problem; it was a national problem. So to the extent individual morality comes into play…if I am dealing falsely with our neighbor, that's not a danger just for me, that's a danger for the whole nation. The moral life of a community was a matter of life and death for the prophets. And what the individual did was seen as affecting the fabric of the whole people.
Now here's a question to ponder, and this is really the "dead center" of my sermon this morning. So I invite you to try and remember this--I'm going to emphasize it. This is a question that I think really preoccupies most all of the prophets. And it's a question that's as relevant today as it was 2700 years ago. Here it is, are you ready? In what is our strength as a people? In what consists our strength, and in what do we find our security? Does our strength lie in our military superiority? Does it lie in the savvy political alliances we may make with other nations--does our security in America depend on our political alliances with Saudi Arabia, and Israel?
These are questions that the prophets deal with, and they're as alive today as they were then. And over and over the prophets speak the word of the Lord thus, saying, "Our strength in not in military power. Our strength is in the values that we practice. They are values that were given to us by God, and we agreed to practice those values. We promised, as a people, to choose life. And in fact we choose death, and call it life…." The prophets saw that the strength of the people lies in their practice of justice--"tzedakah" in Hebrew. That is the means by which we find life and security. Not the thin blue line of force. The prophets are often the ones who literally--if you talk about Habakkuk, for example--see the writing on the wall, when they see the national immorality in their midst, the apostasy, and the lack of justice and righteousness in the nation, they see the roots of the nation's destruction.
Now it's popular, I think, to talk about Rome and the destruction of Rome as, not a consequence of any military weakness, but as a lack of moral clarity, and as a result of moral complacency and a lack of values. The question, I think, for America, if Amos were up here today, is: Do we care about the great moral problems of our time? Or are we too busy going to Target, and protecting our income, and our security?
Tom Long, who is a great preacher--I listen to his sermons on my iPod; I think, by the way, the internet is a wonderful invention, because we preachers can listen to other preachers. So I download these things, and I listened to one of Tom Long's sermons the other day. And one of the points he makes in his sermons is this--he says, "The biggest moral problem in America is not unbelief--we've got lot's of believers. The biggest moral problem in America today is superficiality. It is a shallow religion that allows us to feel good, and enables us to avoid any real and difficult moral and spiritual examination." I think that's what Amos would say as well--or Hosea. The prophets are the ones who call us from our complacency and say the hard thing. Those who say, "no" when everyone else is just going with the program. Abraham Joshua Heschel says this: "Reading the words of the prophets is a strain on the emotions, wrenching one's conscience from the state of suspended animation." We need to hear the "no" to shock us into paying attention.
But that's not where I want to end this morning. I think that we're irresponsible as preachers if we ever end on a "no"--because that's not the intention of God's "no." We need to understand that God says, "no" so that we can hear, "yes." This is what Walter Brueggemann has to say--another great scholar of the prophets, and a Presbyterian, by the way, one of my theological heroes. This is what he writes--he says, "The task of the prophets is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a conscious…." (Stay with this one, OK? It's good). "The task of the prophet is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us."
So the purpose of saying, "no" is to give us an alternative--is to say, "yes" to something else. We're choosing death, but there's life. Choose life, and you'll live! In that scene that Mary Alice read from the gospel, Jesus is looking on Jerusalem thinking of all the prophets it has killed--and says, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, stoning the prophets and killing those sent to you. How often would I have gathered your children like a mother hen gathers her chicks, but you would not." And we understand that it's God saying over the people, brokenhearted, lamenting, "I sent you these messengers and you killed them. The only way you're going to get the message is if I go myself." And that is ultimately what God does, through the one who is not just a messenger, but the message itself. Whose "no" was heard on a cross, and whose "yes" is God's biggest invitation to live a different life, centered in Jesus Christ. Choose life, that you may live.
And as we explore further these prophets, let us hear God's "no" as an invitation to God's great "yes" in Jesus Christ. In his great name, we offer these words.
Amen.
August 5 , 2007
Jeffery Vamos
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