Pretend No More - A Sermon on Prophecy
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 23 January 2011 00:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
{player 2011-01-23-9am-sermon.mp3}
This sermon began at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville, on one beautiful May afternoon in 2007, sitting with sixteen hundred other clergy from across the country, listening to the Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann. Eliz and I were in Nashville, attending the Festival of Homiletics, of Preaching, surrounded by Lutheran pastors, Methodist and Episcopal preachers, Presbyterian and United Church of Christ ministers; out of sixteen hundred or more clergy, a handful were Unitarian Universalist.
For five days, we listened to lectures and experienced worship, preaching, music and liturgy of the highest caliber. James Forbes, Barbara Brown Taylor, Fred Craddock, names of preachers who have inspired me, who have held my feet to the fire in this profession, in this discipline of trying to make worship worth it, make it worth it for you to get up on a Sunday morning and come here, given all else that beckons to you, more sleep after a late Red Sox game, soccer, the Sunday paper, extra alone time with family, I know them all, which is why sometimes I will sit up here before worship begins and look out at all of you, astonished that you have come.
I was on sabbatical leave that spring. Eliz and were in Nashville where we went to school and where we lived when we were first married, we had eaten a delicious lunch near the Vanderbilt campus, it is two o’clock, I am so sleepy (beer with lunch?), and Walter Brueggemann is speaking. This is the first time I’ve met him in person. I have read what he writes and I have never been able to make my way through his words and ideas, they are so dense on the written page.
But he is speaking on the topic of Prophetic Preaching, and he is gradually drawing me in, and then he reads words from the prophet Jeremiah. The leaders of his day, more than twenty-five hundred years ago, now in Jeremiah’s words, “treat the wounds of my people carelessly, saying, ‘peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. They acted shamelessly, they committed abomination; yet they were not ashamed, they did not know how to blush.”
And I am awake, and there is Brueggmann, an old man, slight in build, wild, white hair, holding on to the pulpit for dear life, a cadence to his voice that mixes anger and incredulity and passion into a fever. “Have you ever read this before?” he screams. “Do you read the Bible? Do you own a Bible? Check into a hotel, and STEAL ONE!” I’m wide awake now.
When I say prophet, please tell me you know it’s spelled with a “ph” and that it might trigger names like Micah and Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Elisha and Hosea, and many other men and women throughout the centuries who have pointed to injustice and absurdity and denial and wrongheadedness and extravagance and children shooting children and prisons too full and all these politicians posturing and fawning, these prophets pointed to injustice and named these things for what they are. “Prophet means spokesperson, not fortune-teller” says Frederick Buechner, a prophet himself.
This will easily become the kind of sermon I teach my students to avoid, one that tries to do too much, one that tries to tell you everything I know on the subject in fifteen minutes, in this case, everything Brueggemann knows on the subject. So, let me try to explain to you what it was that awakened me that May afternoon, a little bit of what I learned, and I can let the rest go.
With Jeremiah and Amos and the rest, we are there in the sixth century before the Christian era, and the people of Israel are in exile. They are refugees. They are, Brueggemann says, in the abyss. Imperial power, he says, creates refugees. And now I am thinking of immigration and refugees and the border lands between Mexico and the United States. Imperial power produces one abyss after another, says Brueggemann, abyss meaning something like deep, falling, when will we reach the bottom? And here, in the exile, how do people behave? As if nothing is wrong, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a state of denial, “eat, drink and be merry,” what can we do?
Just pretend. Just pretend, Brueggemann says, “just pretend the economy has bottomed out, just pretend the war has turned and we’re making progress, just pretend addiction can be controlled by discipline, just pretend the index of teenage suicide is statistically insignificant, just pretend date rape is just ‘boys will be boys’, just pretend generous gun laws will make us safer, just pretend that if ‘those’ people would only work harder they could be prosperous like us.”
Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, tells us that one American child is abused or neglected every thirty-six seconds. Every forty-two seconds a child is born without health care, eight gun deaths a day among children and teenagers, an infant mortality rate that is 24th among developed countries, teenage mothers having children at a rate every year to repopulate the city of Atlanta, Georgia, black males born in the last seven years having a one in three chance of going to prison in their lifetimes.
“We need to reset our moral compass,” she says. We are, Brueggemann says, out of sync. The world is out of sync. “Everyone is greedy for unjust gain,” says Jeremiah. “Everyone deals falsely. They treat the wounds of the people carelessly, saying, ‘peace, peace,’ when there is no peace… yet they were not ashamed, they did not know how to blush.”
Abraham Heschl, the great Jewish theologian of the mid-twentieth century, spoke of faith in terms of “ultimate embarrassment.” “I am afraid of people,” he said, “who are never embarrassed at their own pettiness, prejudices, envy and conceit, never embarrassed at the profanation of life… Embarrassment is meant to be productive; the end of embarrassment would be a callousness that would mark the end of humanity.”
“We need to reset our moral compass,” says Marian Wright Edelman. “We are out of sync,” says Brueggemann. Beware “a callousness that would mark the end of humanity,” says Heschl. This is a sermon celebrating the prophets, then and now. They were angry then. They are angry now. Buechner says “there is no evidence to suggest that anyone ever asked a prophet home for supper more than once.” They pushed the edges. They said and did things that were outrageous.
Buechner claims (in some dated language but you will get the point) that Amos told the people, “Your rock masses bore me just as stiff as your Billy Grahams, and your Encounter Groups and Sunday services at the White House cause me no less abdominal discomfort than your dashboard Virgins and Bingo games. JUSTICE is what I want, not California Syrup of Figs, and RIGHTEOUSNESS like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:21-24) Buechner says “Jeremiah was thrown down a well and the rumor is that Isaiah was sawed in half. It is not recorded how Amos got his.” Before I get mine, let me now two-step to the end.
Brueggemann says that for the prophets it was a matter of walking the talk, moving from what had been to the exile and the abyss into homecoming, and he says the Christians took this pattern, the vulnerability of Good Friday, to the Saturday of dread to the surprise of Easter. We move from exile to homecoming, from the abyss into newness, from death into life, from denial into owning the despair, from truth-telling to hope-telling. It is the last dichotomy that will carry us through.
Brueggemann had two top ten lists for us that day in May when I moved from sleep to attentiveness, from a little boredom and stupor to insight and renewal. The first list was the list of texts in the Old Testament books of the prophets that tell the truth, little known messages, he says, words hidden away, too painful.
Isaiah 5:20: “Ah, you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” And then Brueggemann lists those absurdities we’ve heard before: friendly fire, collateral damage, welfare reform, harm’s way, a missile in our armament called “Peace Keeper.” We’ve got to call things by their right name.
Amos 6: 4-6: “Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the stall, who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp… who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved…” Indulgent, entitled, that would be enough, but not grieved, not in touch with reality. One more, not enough time.
Micah 2: 1-2: “Alas for those who devise wickedness and evil deeds on their beds… It is in their power. They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away; they oppress householder and house, people and their inheritance.” Brueggemann says he thinks Micah is a small farmer, a Republican, a country guy, imagining all those rich folk in the city, staying in bed in the morning, then using their cell phones and Blackberries to buy and sell property, Countrywide foreclosing. And then two verses later, these devisers and coveters and seizers and oppressors, they say, “one should not preach of such things.” That’s mixing politics and religion! What do they have to do with each other?
Enough truth-telling, you are thinking. Brueggemann had a top ten list of hope-telling texts buried there in the books of the Prophets as well. He called them the “I have a dream” part of the Old Testament. With these, we will end.
Micah 4: 3: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
Amos 5: 14-15: “Seek good and not evil, that you may live… Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate.”
Hosea 2: 18: “I will make for you a covenant on that day with the wild animals, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground; and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land; and I will make you lie down in safety.”
Jeremiah 33: 10-11: “In the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem that are desolate, without inhabitants, human or animal, there shall once more be heard the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.” In Baghdad and Port au Prince and Tunisia and Tucson, there shall be weddings again, laughing and singing, drinking and dancing. One more.
Isaiah 43: 1 ff. “I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you… You are precious in my sight… Do not fear, for I am with you.”
We are a community of faith. We say that the living tradition we share draws from many sources, one of which is the “words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront the powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.” The powers name false promises, cultivate a pervasive anxiety, breed a certitude that is bound to be idolatrous. We say, that is a false world.
We choose life. We choose vulnerability. We choose surprise. This is the truth that makes us free. This is the hope that can heal us. We can walk into the abyss and out again. We can come home again. We can be made new.