The Prophet

The Prophet

Isaiah 58:6-12

These are hard times.  Millions of people are out of work and standing in lines to get food.  Have you seen the lines of cars that extend for miles all over the country?  Thousands of doctors and nurses and other medical workers are approaching the breaking point after months of caring for very sick people but the hospitals just get more full.  Sure, we can build field hospitals but, last I checked, it takes years to grow a good nurse or doctor.  We can’t pull them out of thin air.  In the meantime, in a complete bipartisan breakdown, the government seems ready to fail—utterly—to care for the people.  We’ve asked people to stay home but we haven’t provided real support for months now.  We’ve asked businesses to close temporarily but, again, we are not doing what we can as a society to share that burden.  We’re asking people to act for the public good but we as a society are not acting to help them.  What ever happened to the notion of the common good?

Again, I really want you to hear this clearly:  the point that I am trying to make is way deeper than partisan politics.  It is also way deeper than some parochial, theological/religious argument.  I’m talking about basic decency, here.  I’m talking about our fellow human beings.  Millions upon millions of our fellow human beings are suffering.  As human beings, we should feel compelled to respond without anyone having to tell us to feel that way.  As humans, we should be moved by the pain we see others going through to do what we can to relieve that pain.  This isn’t a matter of political persuasion or the result of some finely tuned theological argument.  This is what happens when faith moves us to compassionate action—to right what is wrong and is happening right in front of us.  In the prophet, Micah’s words, this is what it means to “do justice and to act with loving kindness and to walk humbly with our God.”  While there might be a whole host of ways to be moved to take such action, the bottom line for us is that a life of responding to the pain that others are enduring is simply how Christ taught us to live.  This is, “The Way.”

This point matters so much to me as we move further into Advent.  Who is this Messiah whom we are preparing to welcome?  Most people thought that he would be a great warrior/king like David.  After all, literally for hundreds of years, our ancestors in faith had been in exile or in occupation.  Even prior to that, they had a host of lousy kings of their own.  What was wrong in their world (so they thought) was the way that things were ordered politically.  The first order of business in correcting this would be to get rid of the Roman occupiers.  So…it just made sense…that God would provide them with a leader who was capable of righting this wrong.  Of course, the odds would be tough when it came to battling the most powerful empire in the world.  But, hey, it was David who squared up and pinged Goliath right between the eyes!  The answer was going to be political. The Messiah would be the one to lead them.

Of course, the irony was that the people cried out to God for a king centuries earlier because they wanted to be like everyone else. Every great nation had a king to rule them and lead them and protect them.  Why shouldn’t they have such a king, too?  When God, however reluctantly, grants their wish, it’s pretty much downhill from there.  Before that, it was God who led them and protected them.  When you’ve got a king, it’s awfully easy (except when it comes to jazzing up some ritual) to forget God altogether.

The other thing that the people wanted so that they could be like everyone else was a temple.  Again, God reluctantly granted this wish, too.  With a temple, you get a whole host of priests and an encyclopedia of rules and rituals.  People need to make money, so sacrifices and healings and various other rituals are offered at a “low, low, cost to you.”  It seems that when you’ve got a king, you forget about God because you don’t depend on God in the same way.  In a similar way, when you’ve got a temple and religious professionals, practicing one’s faith isn’t about how you treat people.  Rather, it is about how often you go to the temple and how well you keep the rules.  Everyone knows where God is.  God lives in that religious place over there.  Everyone knows who’s job it is to think about God.  Thinking about God is what priests do.  God ends up being more and more compartmentalized in everyone’s life.

In the big picture, the average person is more and more divorced from any connection to God.  The more divorced our ancestors were from that connection, the less likely they were to make the connection between what they believed and the real choices that they made every day about how to treat people.  Faith wasn’t about compassion for others.  Rather, faith was about our own purity and piety.  Faith wasn’t about how you treated your neighbor.  Faith was about how often you went to the temple and how carefully you practiced the temple rituals.  Faith wasn’t about feeding the hungry.  Faith was about how you deny yourself food in a pious fast.

If the palace and the temple were the two major institutions in play in the world of our ancestors in faith prior to Jesus’ birth, we need to remember that there was a third tradition.  There were prophets.  Very few people would ever have the chance to be a king.  The pool of people who were considered worthy of being priests was also a very narrow tribe.  What was interesting about the prophets is that they were average people who were called by God but almost no one wanted to be one.  Who could blame them?  The prophets had no power other than the truth that God inspired them to speak.  In their day, just like ours, generally, nothing good happened to those who spoke the truth to those in power, whether those being spoken to were royal or religious in nature.  Just to ramp things up a bit, the average person didn’t really like prophets all that much either because they were also speaking truths to them that they had no interest in hearing:  truths about not cheating their customers at work; truths about the obligations that they shared to care for the poor and the sick and the widows; truths that the corrupt king and the corrupt temple were never going to save them.  Who wants to hear that?  Which is precisely why the prophets had a tendency to scream and smash pots and do whatever else it took to be heard. This is also why any prophet worth their salt could be found sooner or later bobbing in the local sewage system or rotting in a prison cell.  Sure, they might be remembered fondly after a few hundred years.  However, no prophet was loved in his own time, in his own land, by his own people.

When it came time to think about the Messiah, it wasn’t hard to think of some Arnold Schwarzenegger/George Washington hybrid warrior king—big muscles and lots of brains with a dash of good looks to boot.  It also wouldn’t have been hard to think of someone so holy and religious and sacred that the temple would simply glow a little brighter with his presence.  You know…the kind of guy that you might get to see from afar at the temple if you were super lucky.  What no one really considered though was that the Messiah might be more like a prophet than anything else.  After all, no one would have ever wanted to invite a prophet to dinner, much less have God send one as a savior.  Prophets mostly just made everyone uncomfortable.  Why would a Messiah do that?

Here’s the truth… A Messiah was going to come to change things which always makes people uncomfortable.  Those in power don’t ever want to give up their power.  Those who sit down stream of those in power have generally figured out how to work the system and don’t want to see change either.  Really, the most likely people to seek genuine change are the “losers” in the current structure of things:  the sick, the lonely, the outcast—you know, exactly the kind of people who would be Jesus’ best followers years later.  Folks who had nothing would have nothing to lose when invited by Jesus to follow him.  Pretty much everyone else would turn out to be possessed by their possessions or their position or their power.

Let me put the matter even more succinctly.  The problem with kings—even the good ones—is that they always got confused by what was in it for them and what was in the best interests of the people.  If you have a problem with this notion, look up the name, “Bathsheba” on Wikipedia or check out how many wives and concubines the otherwise allegedly wise King Solomon had.  Or, if you think power doesn’t corrupt any more, check out how many of our leaders’ first response when the pandemic started was to adjust their stock portfolios.  Or, simply consider the number of hungry people in their cars waiting for a box of food in the richest nation in the world.

Jesus didn’t come to adjust the political order.  He never offered a single public policy proposal (which is hard to remember after two millennia of politicians speaking on Jesus’ behalf.)  Jesus also didn’t come to purify the temple and straighten out the priests. Mostly, he got angrier at the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the like for their hypocrisy.  Not infrequently, Jesus spoke the truth to the politicians and the priestly folks.  Pretty much across the board those folks would respond to him as if he were a prophet speaking the truth to those in power:  they rejected him!

So the Messiah that we are getting ready to meet again isn’t a politician or a priest.  He is most recognizable as a prophet.  (We’ll work on the whole “savior” thing for the next few months.)  He’s coming to change how we live: to get us to make different choices about how we treat the people around us; to get us to make different choices about how we share our food and our money; to get us to care.  Even more than getting us to think differently (which is always less threatening!), he is coming to get us to live differently which is the heart of the prophet’s message.

Of course, the biggest surprise is that he’s going to come as a baby first and be born not in a royal palace or a pristine temple but in a barn with all the sights and sounds and smells that come when you are surrounded by animals.  That’s the kind of humble place where a prophet would be born.  He’s born not to a royal or priestly family but to common folks who, if anything, are more questionable than most since by all appearances, his mother was pregnant just a little too early.  Again, welcome to the roots of a prophet who matters because he was called not because he was well bred.  Finally, who are the first to visit this child?  Shepherds—the most average guys around, even if they smelled a bit worse than the average Joe.  Remember, though, this infant prophet’s super power was going to be that he could make us love him and that he would have time to love the world as he grew up.  And having been loved and having learned to love, he would speak loving words of grace, not judgement, to the world. 

So where is God these days?  God is sitting in the car in that long food line with that desperate family.  God is suffering with that patient in intensive care and the people who love them.  God is whispering to each and every one of us, “Do what you can to ease this pain!” Now is the time to live what we believe.