Luke 4: 16-24
When [Jesus] came to Nazareth , where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
The Spirit of God is upon me,
because God has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
God had sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free
to proclaim the year of God’s favor.
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “is not this Joseph’s son?” He said to them, “doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did in Capernaum .’” And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”
I Hope: Responding to Prophets
The Rev. Joshua Mason Pawelek
Unitarian Universalist Society: East
Manchester , CT
January 14, 2007
_________________________________________________
“I hope for more love, more joy and laughter. I hope you'll have more than you'll ever need. I hope there'll be more happy ever afters. I hope we can all live more fearlessly. And we can lose all our pain and misery. I hope, I hope.”
I’m not a big country music fan. But I haven’t stopped listening to the Dixie Chicks since I first heard “I Hope” on the radio last summer. Some of you know their story. They were a hugely successful country music act from Texas. The top selling female band of all time, two of their albums have reached “diamond” status, meaning they’ve sold more than ten million copies each. They’ve won nine Grammy awards. They’ve sold out concerts around the world. At a March, 2003 concert in London, on the eve of the United States invasion of Iraq, lead singer Natalie Maines made an off-the-cuff, fifteen-word remark: “Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” The anti-war London crowd loved the remark, cheered wildly. Back home in the United States it was not so well received. Overnight the Dixie Chicks went from paragons to pariahs. Major country radio stations pulled their songs from rotation; conservative talk radio ridiculed them; concerts were cancelled; ticket sales plummeted; CDs were burned; death threats were made. “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”
The Dixie Chicks were upset and confused by the US response. But mostly they were angry. And I suspect they felt betrayed by so many millions of fans and country music industry big shots who found it so easy to turn on them, to disown them, because of fifteen off-the-cuff words. But they didn’t cave in. They didn’t back down. Instead they wrote a set of songs in response to the whole experience, and put out an album last spring called Taking the Long Way. They wrote songs about their outrage in response to people who told them they had no right to say what they said, who threatened to kill them, who told them to shut up and sing. They wrote songs about their sadness. They wrote songs critical of the mindset associated with country music culture. And they wrote “I hope.” In the midst of a very painful experience they found hope. “I hope for more love, more joy and laughter. Perhaps that what the best prophets do: they find hope and then share it.
I have three sermons left in my series on the sources or building blocks of our Unitarian Universalist living tradition. This morning I’m focusing on the second source, words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love. I saved this sermon for this weekend when our nation commemorates the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the most compelling prophets the world has ever known.
I want to talk about prophets. To begin, I want to lift up a common definition of prophet and throw it out the window because it is not what Unitarian Universalists typically mean by prophet. That is, the notion that a prophet is one gifted with clairvoyance--one who can predict the future. For example, Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French poet whose 942 quatrains appear to predict events centuries into the future. His quatrains so vague and colorful that they lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations. Anyone can go surfing through the history books and find a multitude of events that can be spun so as to confirm Nostradamus’ quatrains. We can certainly find this future-predicting prophetic tradition in the Bible. For example, the Christian book of Revelation and the Hebrew book of Daniel both foretell the end of the world.
I don’t buy it. In Biblical times it was a standard literary convention to write a book as if it were written in the past. The writer would claim not to have written a new book, but to have “discovered” an ancient book. There was no carbon dating; no one could know for sure when a manuscript was actually written. If it was allegedly written in the past but contained knowledge of more recent events, then the alleged writer would be seen as a prophet who could see the future. This leant a degree of authority to the book which it wouldn’t otherwise merit, and whatever else the book said would be read through the lens of that prophetic authority.
We see a version of this phenomenon in the New Testament surrounding the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem. The Romans destroyed the second temple in 70 AD. The destruction was catastrophic for all Jewish people. Everyone in the region knew about it. In the book of Mark, which supposedly takes place forty years before the destruction of the temple, Jesus points to the temple and says to his disciples, “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” Many readers believe Jesus actually predicted the destruction of the temple, and that his ability to see the future is a sign that he is the messiah. But if we look at the Bible from a historical critical perspective, which is the liberal religious tradition, what we realize is that the author of Mark must have lived after the destruction of the temple, and thus knew about it, and therefore was able to insert it into the story of Jesus, making it appear as if Jesus predicted it. Why would a writer do this? The purpose of the book is to establish Jesus’ authority as the Messiah. If, on top of everything else Jesus could do, he could also predict the future, Mark’s audience fifty or sixty years after Jesus lived, would have all the more reason to accept Jesus as the messiah. On the other hand, the most prolific New Testament writer, Paul, never mentions the destruction of the second temple. He never mentions it because he died before it happened.
I believe people can intuit the future, imagine the future, use computer models and statistics to make a pretty good guess about next week’s weather. But predicting the future with any degree of accuracy, especially decades and centuries from now? I don’t think it’s possible, and that’s not what Unitarian Universalism means by prophetic.
What we mean by prophetic has to do with speaking truth to power. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his followers spoke truthfully about injustice directly to the powers oppressing people of color and poor people in the United States. For me, this is the most important definition of prophet: one who courageously speaks the truth in love directly to those in power for the sake of justice. A prophet is one who sees injustice, bears witness to it, lovingly calls for its end, and takes action to transform it. Speaking and acting on behalf of difficult truths always entail great risk. A prophet is not welcome in the prophet’s own hometown. But taking that risk, finding the strength and courage to speak and act, and refusing to give in to the powers that be is not only a path of integrity, it is liberating. When we know a difficult truth but don’t speak it, fearing what the reaction may be, we are not free. We are bound by fear, our spirits stunted. Speaking a difficult truth--naming an injustice and calling for change--is liberating because it overcomes fear, allows us to be fully who we are, allows our spirits to soar.
I don’t mean that the prophet of social justice has no fear. I mean fear ceases to have control over the prophet’s speech and actions. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues spent many long hours training their followers in what he called “self-purification,” which I understand as a process of removing fear’s control over people who were preparing to engage in non-violent direct action. In his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” he writes, “We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: ‘Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?’ ‘Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?’” This kind of relentless self-questioning prepares the prophet to risk speaking truth to power; prepares the prophet to step beyond fear; prepares the prophet for acts of personal and communal liberation.
That experience of liberation is something I hope for all of us, each in our own way, each in our own time, each in our own place. We all have the capacity to be prophets. It is a pillar of my ministry, not just that we make the work of social justice central to our individual lives and our life as a congregation--and that is deeply important--but that we cultivate the capacity to risk speaking the truth in love no matter what the context. This is certainly a way of being Martin Luther King, Jr. demonstrated with his life. Or as the Dixie Chicks sing, “I hope we can all learn to live more fearlessly.”
This definition of prophet as one who speaks truth to power for the sake of justice has its origins in the Bible. We see it in the reading from Luke 4 where Jesus invokes the social justice tradition of the Hebrew prophets to those gathered in his hometown synagogue. This is Jesus’ first public teaching, and it is very significant that Luke’s author has Jesus speak the words of the prophet Isaiah: “I have come ‘to bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of God’s favor,” otherwise known as the jubilee year, the year when slaves and prisoners are released from bondage, all debts are forgiven, and all land is returned to its original owners. Isaiah was one of the great Hebrew prophets of social justice, and by having Jesus speak these words at the very beginning of his ministry, Luke’s author is saying, in no uncertain terms, social justice matters.
Martin Luther King, Jr. followed the example of the Hebrew prophets and used their vision for social justice in ancient Israel to communicate his vision for social justice in the United States. When King said, in his famous “I have a dream” speech, "We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream," he was quoting from the prophet Amos. When King said, “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight,” he was quoting from the prophet Isaiah. King’s prophetic witness was grounded in the Hebrew prophets’ prophetic witness.
When we Unitarian Universalists identify the words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront structures and powers of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love as a source for our living tradition, we are referring primarily to this social justice tradition which begins with the Hebrew prophets. However, it is also important to acknowledge that social justice, though significant for many of the Hebrew prophets, was not their primary concern. A far more central concern in the prophetic books was Israel’s constant turning away from God. The prophets were always naming how the Israelites were ignoring their relationship with God, or the ways God would punish them for breaking their covenant with God. God calls or commissions the prophets for the primary purpose of bringing the people back into right relationship with God, getting them to obey the commandments, make the proper sacrifices, etc.
I ask us to pay attention to this central element in the prophetic tradition. I ask because a critique with similar overtones exists within Unitarian Universalism. This critique says that in pursuing social justice we seem to forget about the quality of our spiritual lives. Our congregations feel more political than spiritual, more like left-leaning social clubs than houses of worship. What about matters of the spirit? What about God, however we understand God? What about the spiritual implications of atheism? This is an important critique because we all have spiritual lives, and if we lose sight of our spirituality the minute we start talking about social justice, or any other aspect of the life of the church, then we’re missing something profound, and quite likely undercutting the impact of our social justice efforts.
Social justice is part of the identity of this congregation. Social justice is a very important component of my ministry. But mark my words: if we agree to enter into the work of social justice as Unitarian Universalists, as people of faith, the spiritual life must come first. King knew this. Jesus knew it. The prophets knew it. Social justice work is immeasurably difficult. The rewards are few and far between. The struggle is long. The forces that perpetuate injustice are vast and powerful. Without the solid grounding of deep spiritual lives, nurtured in this community, how can we expect to be effective in the long-run? How can we expect to sustain ourselves over time? How can we expect to deal with the inevitable failures and setbacks? Spirituality nourishes us, grows our souls, heals our wounds, connects us back to the things that matter most, inspires us, and calls us back out into the community.
This is my hope: that this congregation not only responds to the prophets of our day, but that we be prophetic women and men. My hope is that we continually become speakers and doers who confront structures and powers of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love. My hope is that we will risk liberation by speaking truth to power. My hope is that we may all live a little more fearlessly. And that is precisely why are spiritual lives must come first.
Amen and Blessed be.
