Do you believe that God delivers on God’s promises? You should, after hearing today’s Scripture readings! Like “two sacred bookends,” as one writer calls them, our lessons from the book of Deuteronomy and from Mark’s Gospel complement each other. Together they remind us that God always fulfills God’s promises.
In the instructions of Moses in the lesson from Deuteronomy, we hear God’s promise to raise up from within the community another prophet like Moses himself. And God did just that! In the rest of the Hebrew Bible we hear the voices of many of those prophets sent by God to bring people back to God’s ways. In the words of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Elijah, Elisha, Nathan, and all the minor prophets, including Jonah, we hear God’s promise fulfilled, to send prophets like Moses.
God seems to have fallen silent – at least in Hebrew – in the fourth century BC. The last books in the Christian Bible are the minor prophets Zechariah and Malachi. (Jews order the Hebrew Bible differently.) Zechariah and Malachi were the last to speak authoritatively for God as prophets. So when Jesus appeared in Jerusalem, people were expectantly waiting for another prophet to reclaim Moses’ mantle. At first they thought that perhaps John the Baptizer might be that prophet. Do you remember the questions the priests and Levites from Jerusalem put to him in the Gospel of John? “Are you Elijah,” they asked. “Are you the prophet, the one promised by Moses?” John of course categorically denied that he was Elijah, the prophet, or the Messiah. However, when Jesus began his public ministry in the synagogue at Capernaum, some of those who heard him and witnessed what he did remembered John’s proclamation. They may have sensed that Jesus might be the one empowered to speak authoritatively for God. In fact, he spoke so authoritatively that even the evil spirits recognized him as the one charged by God with initiating God’s reign. Those people who recognized him also realized that God had indeed fulfilled God’s promise to Moses, that God had anointed Jesus and empowered him to speak for God.
Throughout the centuries following Jesus, God has continued to fulfill God’s promise to send prophets to us. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, countless men and women have spoken God’s truth. As the Book of Acts tells us, Stephen spoke boldly for God’s new order. In the third century of our era the Roman noblewoman Perpetua and her servant Felicity resolutely proclaimed their identity as Christians, despite the pressure of Perpetua’s family to renounce their faith. Thomas à Becket, twelfth-century archbishop of Canterbury, declared that his allegiance to Christ lay above that of his allegiance to King Henry II. Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century and Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century proclaimed through their visions God’s unfathomable love for humanity.
Closer to our time, African-American preacher Sojourner Truth galvanized her hearers with her sermons against racial inequality. One of her most famous speeches, entitled “Ain’t I a Woman?”, still moves us today. As the Nazis engulfed Germany, Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer declared his solidarity with the victims of Nazi oppression and actively worked to keep alive his vision of true Christian community. Even when he was imprisoned by the Nazis, he continued to warn his followers of the need to resist evil. In India Mohandas Gandhi championed the rights of those at the bottom of the caste system. While the higher castes called them Untouchables Gandhi proclaimed that they were Harijans, Children of God. In El Salvador, Archbishop Oscar Romero joined many others in defending the poor. In 1964, three young civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were white, and James Chaney, who was black, helped black Mississippians to claim their right to vote. In 1972 Lutheran Pastor Arthur Simon gathered together a group of Catholics and Protestants to explore how people of faith could influence government policies concerning hunger. The result: Bread for the World, a Christian voice that urges our governments to end hunger both in this country and abroad.
At this point you might be thinking, “This is a really diverse group of people. So what are prophets?” The Hebrew and Greek words for “prophet,” nabi and prophetes, respectively, both mean someone who announces a message from God, someone who is divinely empowered to speak for God. Prophets are not magicians, sorcerers, or fortune-tellers. Prophets do not engage in elaborate rituals to tease God into speaking or speak in strange ecstatic utterances. Rather, as Moses reminded his hearers, and us who hear his words, prophets are people whom we already know and trust. Prophets are those who can speak God’s word clearly to us in our own language, yet they who also ask us to look at our own context through new lenses. In their proclamations, prophets always proclaim God’s righteousness, God’s peace, God’s care for the least of these, and God’s fervent desire for justice. And prophets do more than speak. As Jesus, after his sermon at Capernaum, drove out the unclean spirit from the heckler, so prophets act on their proclamation. And finally, just as Jesus was ultimately rejected, condemned, and executed, prophets unflinchingly accept the possibility that they too will follow Jesus to the Cross. Of the prophets following Jesus whom I mentioned, only Hildegard, Julian, Sojourner Truth, and Art Simon, escaped martyrdom.
So how do we respond to prophets? Were there prophets in the past among the community of St. Peter’s? Are there prophets among us now? When we first hear prophets we might be like those who first heard Jesus preach. We might respond with wonder and awe, mesmerized by the prophet’s message. Yet we are challenged by God to do more than just stand paralyzed and agape. Can we make room in our heads for the word of God? God’s word is often a disruptive presence among us, as prophets challenge us to hear God’s word in new and fresh ways or to apply God’s word to issues and needs in our communities. Are we willing to hear God’s word – and act on it?
And here’s the hardest question of all: do we dare to assume the prophetic role for ourselves? Jesus began his public ministry after his anointing by the Holy Spirit in his baptism. We too have been baptized. We too have been empowered by the Holy Spirit to speak – and act – in God’s name as disciples of Jesus. We too have been trusted to proclaim God’s reign and to partner with God to bring that reign closer. We too have been charged by God to challenge each other to see where and how God is doing a new thing in the world.
This past week the church remembered the ordination of Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first woman to be ordained priest in the Anglican Communion. The time was 1944. Tim-Oi was a deacon serving in the colony of Macau at the Macau Protestant Chapel. With the Japanese occupation of China, male priests were unable to come to Macau to preside at the Eucharist. Taking a bold step, Bishop Ronald Hall of Victoria ordained her ''a priest in the Church of God.” Since Tim-Oi was ordained thirty years before any Anglican church regularized the ordination of women, she was forced to resign her license to officiate (though not her priestly orders) after the end of the war. When Hong Kong ordained two further women priests in 1971, she was officially recognized as a priest in the diocese. After emigrating to Canada, she was appointed an assistant priest in Toronto in 1983, where she served until her death in 1992. In ordaining Tim-Oi in 1944, Bishop Hall knew that he was taking as momentous a step as Peter had taken when he baptized the gentile Cornelius. Yet he boldly proclaimed, that like St Peter, who had recognized that God had already given Cornelius the gift of the Holy Spirit, as bishop he was merely confirming that God had already given Tim-Oi the gift of priestly ministry. In living out that ministry, despite numerous hardships, Tim-Oi proclaimed again to the Anglican communion that, for those baptized into Christ, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Asking the church to hear God’s word afresh, to see that God is always doing a new thing, Bishop Hall and Li Tim-Oi taught us that all us are called to speak God’s word and be Christ for others in our own time.
And so when God calls us to speak for God, when God calls us to assume the prophetic role, can we boldly follow the lead of the prophets who have gone ahead of us? Can we trust God to enable us to speak God’s word clearly and courageously, even as we follow him who leads us to the Cross?
No comments:
Post a Comment