Prophets from Anywhere--January 5, 2025

Prophets from Anywhere--January 5, 2025

"Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, 'Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant'." (Jeremiah 1:9-10)

Prophets--at least the genuine ones--don't need to carry weapons or make threats to get their point across.  They don't have political power or official positions in the government, and they don't get special accommodations in the palace, either.  In fact, to most casual observers, the authentic prophets of ancient Israel's memory looked utterly powerless on their own.  All they have in their hands is the truth... and the willingness to use their voices to speak it. But they can come from anywhere.

And yet, impossibly, those prophets--ones like Jeremiah, whose words many of us heard this past Sunday in worship--are regarded by God as standing "over nations and kingdoms."  Jeremiah and those like him don't wield official titles or get specially-appointed status from the king to let them boss people around. But they do have the authority--because of God's message on their lips--to speak up against the powers of the day, and to offer an alternative rooted in God's mercy and justice. A prophet can be any of us. Even you or me.

These words that conclude the scene we looked at in yesterday's devotion give us God's commissioning of Jeremiah, and here God makes it clear that this not going to be a cakewalk for the newly-called prophet.  He had protested at first that he was too young and didn't know what to say or how to say it. But God responds here in today's verses, with the promise that God would provide the words. God would enable him to speak up even to the powerful, and to tell the truth when the proverbial emperor was wearing no clothes.

All too often, I think we hear the word "prophet" and picture some mystic in hippie clothes making obscure and ambiguous predictions about events so far in the distant future that nobody can get upset with their prognostications.  If you're talking about something that will happen in a thousand years, the people in the present moment will think they can safely ignore you because your message won't affect them.  If it's so vague and nebulous (like those Nostradamus-style predictions that could mean anything or nothing) that no one can decipher it, you can make your prophecy mean whatever you want, and therefore nobody will see you as a troublemaker--just a sideshow novelty or a traveling huckster.  

But the prophets of ancient Israel and Judah weren't like that. You couldn't dismiss them as irrelevant or ignore them for being vague, because they were willing to speak up to kings, to high priests, as well as to the crowds of their own people, and to call them out for the specific things they were doing, in the present moment, that ran counter to God's ways of mercy and justice.  They called out the daily practices in the local marketplace that cheated the poor, as well as the greed of the folks in the capital who lived in luxury while others starved or worked themselves to death.  They spoke up against the lure of military alliances or putting trust in the power of their armies, and they called out the empty show of religiosity in the places of public worship.  All of that is to say, the prophets of ancient Israel and Judah understood that being called by God would most certainly take them out of their comfort zones.

And yet, the wonder is that they answered "Yes" to God's call.  As frightening as it must have been to show up in the presence of the king and say, "No, you are wrong!" the prophets did just that on a regular basis.  As dangerous as it surely was to say to the Leaders of Respectable Religion, "Come back to justice, mercy, and faithfulness, and not your empty shows!" the prophets were given the courage to speak that message as often as it needed to be said.  And, as Jeremiah's story most definitely reminds us, God raised them up from among anybodies and nobodies.  The prophets were sometimes farmers and sometimes shepherds. Some were residents of the big city, and some came from the back country. Some were polished poets and others haven't left us a single trace of a written word from their own hand.  But what they had in common was the Word from God (pent up inside, Jeremiah would say at one point, like "a fire in the bones") that spurred them on to speak--simply to speak--without needing to threaten, to bully, or to rattle sabers, and to trust in the power of the word itself to make the necessary difference.

To be a prophet in the biblical sense is to bring, over against the dominant messaging of the day, an alternative word which comes from the God of mercy and justice.  It is to believe in the power of the truth (what Gandhi called "sataygraha," the nonviolent holding onto truth, or soul-power) even in the face of kings with swords pointed at you.  It is the willingness to use your faithful imagination to look at the crooked meanness of the world around and say, "But it doesn't have to be this way. God has a better vision."

And in that sense, any one of us might find ourselves called, like Jeremiah, to speak up. It might be for one moment on one day when everyone else is silently staring at their shoes, or it might be a lifetime's work.  It might mean a phone call to your representatives and senators, or it might mean an honest conversation over coffee with a friend.  It might mean marching in a protest like Dr. King, Bayard Rustin, and John Lewis, or it might mean being the lone voice among your friend-group asking questions like, "What does the way of Jesus look like in our situation?"  You don't have to threaten fire and brimstone or preach a wearyingly long sermon. You just might need to be the voice that makes people stop and think rather than nodding their heads along with the status quo uncritically.  You might just need to make the noise that will lift folks' heads up from their doom-scrolling screen-induced trances for a minute. Any of us might do that.  Maybe it will even happen today.

Lord God, give us the courage to speak with your hopeful vision and our faithful imaginations the word you give us tell to the ears around us today.