Prophets.

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

I.
The situation of the book of Deuteronomy is that the children of Israel are gathered on the east side of the Jordan.  They have come out of the wilderness where they have been wandering for forty years after having escaped from slavery in Egypt.  And their leader, Moses, gives them one last, long teaching.  He knows that he will not be going with them, that he is about to die.  So the book of Deuteronomy is his instructions and advice, warnings and reflections, to guide them as they move into the land that God has promised the people.
One of the questions they have now is: What are they going to do for leadership once Moses is gone?  Who will be the one who delivers the Word of God to them?  How will they know God’s will for their lives?  How will they make sense of the world and of unfolding history?
Just before this passage, God, through Moses, has forbidden them from turning to occult practices like divination, sooth-saying, augury, sorcery, spell-casting, or the consultation of ghosts or the dead. These were all ways that people used, and sometimes and in some ways still do use, to determine God’s will.  God says that these methods are abhorrent and disloyal.  The nations they will be displacing in Canaan use them.  But these are not how God’s people discern God’s will.  So rule that out.
The people are also deeply conscious that they do not have, and could not possibly survive, the intimacy with God that Moses has.  They know that direct contact with God, even hearing God’s  voice first-hand, or feeling God’s fire, would be lethal to them.  This they learned on Mt. Horeb when Moses climbed right up into the clouds and lightning, which scared the living daylights out of the people.  At that point the people were quite content to receive God’s Word second hand, through Moses.  As long as they didn’t have to get any closer to this awesome God of fire and thunder.
But they are also still very conscious that, without Moses, they have no access to God’s Word at all.  They had become dependent upon him.  And they worry about who would lead them once Moses’ time with them was over.
How do we know God’s will?  How do we know what God wants, as opposed to what we want for ourselves, or what others want?  How do we distinguish the voice of God in our lives from all the other voices that are always yammering at us from the world, or even from inside our own heads?
This is an important question because sometimes we go off very enthusiastically on a course of action we are convinced is God’s will, when it really isn’t.  Other times God is practically yelling in our ears what we are supposed to do and we don’t hear it.

II.
The answer is that God will “raise up for them a prophet” like Moses “from among their own people.”  That prophet will communicate God’s Word to the people.  So God establishes this institution of prophecy.  The implication is that in every generation, God will chose someone as the mediator of God’s Word.
A prophet is chosen by God.  No one decides to take up this career.  You could not send your son or daughter to prophet school.  One does not choose to be a prophet.  God chooses prophets.  The prophets who followed Moses had no credentials.  They do not get this job by taking over their father’s position.  Prophets are not elected by the people.  Neither would the King, even one of the relatively good kings, select true prophets.  A prophet is not necessarily a wealthy or powerful person; just the opposite.  Sometimes God calls a priest like Ezekiel, and sometimes it is a shepherd like Amos.  God calls whom God wants to call to this unique line of work.    
The reason that those other occult methods of divination are rejected by God is that they involve human initiative.  They try and force information out of God by throwing dice, or cutting open an animal and reading the entrails, or trying to open a line of communication with the dead.  They use methods and techniques to compel God to divulge something.
But prophecy, like God, is totally free.  It exists over-against all the official institutions of the society, and calls them and their agendas into question.  All of them.
I recently heard an interview with Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann in which he said that the prophets were universally critical of all power; there was not some specific ideology or political/economic philosophy they advocated.  They pointed out how all of them fell short of God’s will.  Their job was to be the critics who knew that any system will fall into idolatry if we do not exercise constant vigilance and perpetual reform.
So the prophets function as a brake against the idolatry that always takes root when the people are left to themselves.  Without God’s Word, expressed through the mouth of a prophet, the nation will succumb to idolatry and injustice.  And injustice is always punished by God.
The Word that prophets communicate to the people is invariably critical of human institutions, while ever hopeful about the future God has promised.  Basically we could sum up the prophet’s message as: “What you’re doing is wrong, and will attract God’s wrath; but in the end God is faithful and will forgive and deliver us.”

III.
What God is doing here is embedding what we might call a kind of charismatic element into Israel, almost as a counterweight to other, more conventional and stabilizing institutions, like the priesthood and the monarchy, that would also develop.  God wants to make sure that there is always this free voice, accountable solely to God, who speaks God’s Word to the people unencumbered by allegiances to any other power.
God’s free Word, then, is what is spoken by the prophets.  They are the vessels, the conduits, the vehicles of God’s Word. The Word of the Lord comes over them and they speak this Word to the people.
Then, hearing the words of God through the prophet, it is up to the people to obey.  Once they have heard, it is on their own heads whatever happens as a consequence of their disobedience.
God then tells Moses that a true prophet will not speak in the name of other gods.  In other words, God’s prophet will not look to other authorities, “other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”  If a prophet is appealing to any other source, he or she is a false prophet.  If they appeal to history or tradition, if they appeal to pragmatism or popular opinion, if they appeal to a particular philosophy or theology, if they appeal to the hierarchy of the church or the government of the state, if they appeal to the dogmas of a particular economic theory, if they appeal to nationalism or some mythic story of a people… then they are not God’s prophets.  Even if they speak for a certain religion or spirituality, liturgical practices or missional strategies, they are not God’s prophets.
Those prophets, God tells them, “will die.”  They may not drop dead right there on the spot.  But they do not participate in God’s life.  Their words are merely human words and they do nothing but reinforce the bondage of various forms of sinfulness that bind us.  Their words lead to death.
Make no mistake.  The true prophet of God is responsible and accountable to God alone.  The true prophet will be critical of all those things I just mentioned.  The true prophet will almost always be unpopular.  Prophets do not win elections.  They don’t get invited to give the invocation at the inauguration of the President.  They don’t sell a lot of books.  They are often dismissed as traitors and enemies because they rarely have anything good to say about those in charge or the prevalent institutions.
God insists that this kind of figure be authorized.  It is an essential component of God’s people, along with priests, judges, and, eventually, kings.  Against all these powers trying to spin things to their own advantage, God places this other figure to stand up to them and tell them, in the name of God, “NO!”

IV.
In a sense, the prophet is an engine of progress because they are never satisfied with where the people are.  They are always calling the people beyond the status quo, they are always calling for improvements in the way people live, they are always placing before the people the vision and promise of God and God’s Kingdom of justice.  They constantly sow dissatisfaction and a sense of yearning for a better world.  They are always calling for the people to live up to God’s Word.
And God’s Word does not just refer to the Scriptures.  It does not say here that prophets should read this book that Moses is writing, and teach the people what it says.  No.  To prophets, God’s Word comes directly.  Not only that, but prophets were universally unafraid to contradict the written text if that’s what God was telling them to do.  Because from Amos and Hosea to Jesus and Paul they knew that the text could become an idol like anything else.  So they criticize even perfectly biblical practices, like sacrifices, holidays, the monarchy, and various purity laws.
In the end, the Word of God is Jesus Christ.  He is “the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”  We know that a prophet’s words are from the Lord when they not only express criticism of our human institutions, but when they express the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  If a prophet says something you can’t imagine Jesus saying, they’re not a prophet of God.  If a prophet says something that would make the rich richer and the strong more powerful, they’re not a prophet of God.
That is how we know whether a prophet is giving us words that God has commanded.  They don’t refer us to other gods or powers; they only refer us to Jesus.  He is the Word; he gives us the words.  All other words lead inexorably to death.
In the gospel reading for today, we see that even the unclean spirits, even evil demons, recognized Jesus as “the Holy One of God.”  They recognized him because they understood that he was a threat to them.  As prophets are always threats to the forces, ideologies, traditions, and structures that possess, and bind, and strangle us.  That’s how they know that he is the prophet that is to come into the world.

V.
I think that God’s people continue to be driven by the Spirit of prophecy when we also make it clear that we are bound to no one and nothing but God.  It becomes our role as well to cast out demons in the sense of help people find freedom from the many forces that would keep them bound and crippled.  This could be obvious things like addiction and destructive habits.  But it could also be more subtle ways we are possessed by forces that we might normally think of as good.  The “other gods” and the “unclean spirits” in our lives are frequently things that society has decided are beneficial.  The prophets were critical of everything, because anything can become an idol.
We too must have disciplines in which we separate ourselves from whatever possesses us and gets in the way of our relationship with God.  For an idol is usually a good thing that we have made into the highest and only thing.  And it can be any number of good things, like food or success, family or nation, health and security.  it can be the way we have learned to cope with the world, which might have worked when we were little but now doesn’t work at all but we don’t know how to behave any differently.
When we turn away from idols we do not turn to a cynical worship of nothingness.  God gives us the Word, that is, God gives us Jesus Christ.  He is the one who emerges when all our idols have been revealed as empty, bankrupt, toxic, and crippling.
Above all we are prophets when we in our lives reflect him.  Idols are all false and illusory; Jesus Christ is real.  And when he becomes the center of our life we are real as well.  Saying no to our idols means saying yes to Jesus, and devoting our lives to following him.

Jonah.

Jonah 3:1-5, 10

I.

            To recap: The basic story of Jonah is that God calls him to go and preach to the city of Nineveh.  But he attempts to escape from God’s call by getting on a ship headed for Tarshish, which is in Spain.  But God sends a terrific storm from which Jonah saves the ship’s crew by volunteering to be thrown overboard.  As soon as he is in the water the storm stops.  Then he is swallowed by a big fish and lives in the fish’s belly for three days until the fish vomits him out onto the beach, back in Israel.  That’s where we pick up the story this morning.  Jonah is laid out on the beach, covered in whatever extremely aromatic slime was in the guts of that fish.

            Then God, in effect says, “Alrighty then, let’s try this again.”  And we read that, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, “‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’”  This time, Jonah picks his sorry butt off the sand and starts on his way to Nineveh.  (Presumably he takes a bath at some point.)

        Now, Jonah does not want to go to Nineveh.  The Ninevites were not nice people.  Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, the nation that attacked, conquered, and destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, dispersing 10 of the 12 Israelite tribes, which are basically never heard from again (unless you’re a Mormon).  The Assyrian army was infamous for its excessive brutality.  They practically set the standard for barbaric atrocity that was imitated by subsequent empires.  Violence like that perpetrated by the Assyrians had really never been seen before.  They all but invented genocide and gratuitous mass slaughter. 

            Jonah probably hated them, with justification.  Later he says that the reason he does not want to go to Nineveh is that he is afraid God would be merciful and not punish them.  But at this point he has learned through bitter experience that he cannot escape from God’s call.  Either you will do what God wants, or God will make your life miserable until you do.

            We too board “ships to Tarshish,” as it were.  We too try to escape from the demands of God in our life.  And if we’re blessed we find ourselves puked onto a beach with another chance.

            One of those ways we run away from God is addiction.  In Twelve-Step groups for people recovering from addiction, many do not realize their need for healing until they “hit bottom,” as they say.  Until you regain consciousness on a deserted beach, or literally in the gutter, having spent the last three days in the belly of a giant fish, or you might say, in the depths of depravity, debasement, destitution, and debilitation, can you really affirm the words of those first three steps: “We admitted we were powerless… [and] - that our lives had become unmanageable.  We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us.  We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.”

            Jonah, had to admit something like this.  He was powerless.  His life had become unmanageable.  He has no choice but to turn his life over to God in obedience.

II.

            Jonah hikes to Nineveh, which is in present day Iraq.  It is such a large city that it takes three days to walk from one side to the other.  He gets a third of the way inside this metropolis and announces a very simple and direct message: “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” 

            The message is one of destruction, retribution, punishment, disaster, and defeat.  Nineveh is in for it, says Jonah.  He communicates no hope, no way out, no opportunity for repentance, no possibility of reprieve.  He just flatly states that Nineveh will be destroyed, or perhaps conquered by come other power, in 40 days.  He probably feels pretty good about it, too.

            He doesn’t say why this is going to happen.  He doesn’t list their many grievous sins, war crimes, economic injustices.  He doesn’t list all the people they have killed, raped, or stolen from, or the whole nations they have destroyed forever.  He just goes into the city and announces, “God says you’re all toast!  Deal with it.”

            Then comes the miracle.  The people repent.  We expect something to happen between verse four and verse five.  But, with classic biblical understatement, the story gives us nothing.  We are simply told, “And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.”  Word apparently spread like wildfire through the city.  We are about to be destroyed!  Quick, proclaim a fast!

            Fasting, that is, not eating anything, and wearing the very coarse, itchy, ugly cloth that sacks were made of, basically burlap, was a way of visibly and tactilely demonstrating remorse, sorrow, grief, and repentance.  The Ninevites express abject sadness and guilt for what they have done.  They believe God.  They realize that what Jonah said is true, that the city will be overthrown – either by natural disaster or invading enemy – and they understand that they deserve it.

            In the verses we didn’t read (6-9), we hear about the reaction of the King of Nineveh.  He also proclaims a comprehensive, even ridiculously thorough fast that includes animals!  And he proclaims, “All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands.”  He identifies the issue as violence.  Then he adds sitting in dry dusty ashes to the regime of fasting and wearing sackcloth.

            Violence was Nineveh’s addiction.  They were masters at extreme violence.  This is precisely what the King has the people renounce.  And it was like renouncing their very identity, giving up the very approach that created and preserved their empire.  Assyria was synonymous with violence and mayhem.

III.    

            “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.”  God changes his mind.  God has mercy on the Ninevites, and forgives them.  Or at least God withholds the promised catastrophe and spares their city.

            In the book of Ezekiel, God says, “I take no pleasure in the death of anyone.”  We do not have a God who is always looking to expose our sin and punish it.  God is not about vindictiveness or retribution.  God loves us and will jump at any excuse to forgive and spare us.  If God can withhold punishment from the Ninevites, one of the most violent and murderous nations that ever lived, surely God is ready to forgive anyone.

            What God is looking for is humility, sorrow, remorse, grief, and penitence.  God is looking for people to set aside their hubris, self-righteousness, pride, violence, vindictiveness, hatred, superiority, and drive to dominate others.  God doesn’t want to hear our self-serving explanations and justifications for our bad behavior.  God doesn’t want to hear our lame, smug excuses.  These responses only indicate that we are blind and enslaved to our own sinfulness.  We are still addicts and continue to draw down upon ourselves and others the destructive consequences of our own actions.

            The Ninevites have some sense and presence of mind to realize their situation and respond with some integrity and authenticity to the news that the day of reckoning is coming.  They change their ways even though they have no hope of avoiding the punishment which God eventually does not administer.

            They do not dismiss Jonah’s message as crazy; they do not fall into denial about what was coming; they do not froth themselves up into a patriotic frenzy – Nin-e-veh!  Nin-e-veh! – drowning out the criticism of this unknown prophet from a small, conquered country.  They don’t tell him he is just envious of their success and he should go get a job. 

            Would we be so convicted and penitent, were someone to proclaim the imminent end of our systems and regimes?  If our great city faced being overthrown, would we look inward and change our ways, hoping that “God may relent and change his mind; … and turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish”?  Or would we claim to be the best and the strongest, and that nothing like that could ever happen to us?  Would we proclaim ourselves exceptions to God’s laws?

IV.

            I am a big fan of disaster movies.  Sometimes I think the role of the prophet today is sometimes taken up by disaster movies.  A lot of disaster movies have someone like Jonah, who announces that catastrophic destruction is imminent.  Usually it’s some kind of scientist.  The disaster could be anything: and asteroid hit, floods, volcanoes, super-storms, monsters, a shift in the Earth’s magnetic or gravitational field, earthquakes, disease, or alien invasion.  In the formula for these movies, the prophet is invariably ignored, dismissed, or persecuted.  I can’t think of a single disaster movie in which the people respond like the Ninevites, with immediate repentance and humility.

            Disaster movies are effective because, deep down, we know they are a faithful representation of our attitudes and likely responses.  We rarely listen to those who point out the coming disasters that we and our violence have brought upon ourselves.  We do not admit our injustices and atrocities.  We are much more concerned with sustaining and increasing economic growth – our main cultural addiction – than we are with hearing about its costs and consequences.

            What the Ninevites did in repenting in humility, sorrow, and remorse, is almost unimaginable for us.

            And yet it is the only way to avoid the coming catastrophe.  It is the only way to get out of suffering the consequences of our own violence and injustice.  It is the only way to show to God that we really have turned away from all that and chosen instead to live in peace and reconciliation.

            Is this not the life that Jesus the Messiah comes to exemplify and give to us?  Does he not live in simplicity, walk lightly upon the Earth, reject violence, and practice forgiveness, welcoming inclusion, healing, and generosity?  Is this not the life he was calling his disciples to in today’s gospel reading?  The people that live like Jesus cannot commit heinous acts of mass murder, or pump poisons into the environment, or be content to see neighbors in abject poverty, or reduce everything to commodities to be bought and sold, or foreclose on people’s homes, or leave people without health care.

V.

            The Ninevites would not have fasted or worn sackcloth or sat in ashes forever.  Eventually they would have had to resume something like daily life.  One hopes that this daily life for them would have been newly informed by their preservation and forgiveness, that they would have gone forward deeply conscious of their responsibility to live very differently from the way they lived before, in violence and injustice.  One hopes they would have learned to live more like Jesus.

            And I have that hope for us as well.  That all may “turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands.  Who knows?  God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”

            That is the urgency of evangelism today.  Not so much that people might go to hell, but that we have to stop making the world a hell for so many people.  We must turn away from violence and live more like Jesus.  If we do not we will perish.  But if we do, we will have realized Jesus’ inaugural proclamation: “The time is fulfilled.  The Kingdom of God is at hand!  Repent, and believe the good news.”

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Junk History.

            I recently read an excellent book of poems by Susan Ludvigson, called Trinity.  She addresses spiritual themes, mainly through the eyes of Mary Magdalene and Emily Dickinson.  I enjoyed it.  She even tells the wildly apocryphal story that suggests that Jesus did not die on the cross but faked his death, and survived to go to France with Mary and raise a family.  That obviously isn’t part of the story as I know it.  But even if I have a different viewpoint, her excursus is not threatening to me and raises interesting possibilities and perspectives.  I know folks whom this would mortally offend.  But as an English major from way back, and an emergent – which is to say, open source – Christian today, I am able to listen to different stories and embellishments and sometimes glean something valuable from them.

            That being said, Ludvigson includes a “Note” at the end of her book, in which she briefly tells the Mary-Magdalene-and-Jesus-go-to-France-and-raise-a-family legend, I guess so we don’t think she just made all that up.  Then she adds a final sentence: “Some recent studies by scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to bear out the essential elements in the legend.”

            Now, the vast consensus of legitimate scholars date the Dead Sea Scrolls a couple of centuries before the common era.  Therefore, it is impossible for them to have anything to say about events that happened after that, like in the first century.  However, there are a few writers -- Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Robert Eisenman and others -- who have concocted a bizarre reading of the scrolls in which they are made refer to events around the time of Jesus and Paul.  In order to do this they have to attach secret meanings to the words (like: when it says “Damascus” it really means Qumran; that sort of thing) and hype up a lot of circumstantial and coincidental material.  (Baigent and Leigh are the guys who wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the book upon which The DaVinci Code is largely based.)

            They also attach dark conspiracies to the fact that the Scrolls were mostly suppressed and kept secret for decades, alleging that it was the Vatican preventing their subversive story from getting out.  Many of the Scrolls were in fact kept locked up for years, but this was a matter of disgraceful scholarly laziness, hubris, control-freakiness, and maybe greed, more than anything else.  It was reprehensible and quite un-scholarly, but not a vast conspiracy to suppress a “truth” that threatened the Catholic Church.  We can see this from the fact that anyone can now purchase a copy of the complete Scrolls and read them for themselves.  Yet still, only this bunch of writers, who approached the texts with a preconceived agenda, come up with their eccentric readings.  Presumably only they have the secret wisdom necessary to interpret these ancient writings correctly.  Right.

            Those readings would not bother me were they admittedly fiction or poetry.  But this group of writers apparently wants us to believe that they have exposed the actual historical truth.  And this claim is ridiculous.

            Why otherwise smart and intellectually responsible people get sucked into this kind of nonsense is beyond me.  Would Ms. Ludvigson tolerate someone who wrote a book claiming to “prove” that “Emily Dickinson” is really a secret code for Robert Frost?  I don’t think so.  It might be an interesting poem or novel.  But to claim it as historically true would be idiotic.  

           By allowing herself to succumb to this ideology she denigrates her otherwise fine work.  It may be wonderful and meaningful as poetry; but it’s not history, and to reduce it to history is to drain it of most of its value.  Her work rings far truer as poetry than when she tries to add value by pretending that it has some historical basis, especially when she relies upon dubious and second-rate scholarship.