Prophets and Honor

Currently, our great Episcopal church is in the middle of its General Convention in Indianapolis.  The church is considering many issues that have divided us.  There are prophets in that place who are trying to be heard.  Will we listen to them, or will we simply continue to go on our way and speak nothing but platitudes to the country?  I hope not.  There is a great deal at stake,  certainly the least of these are the health and the future of our church and our nation.

Prophets are not held with honor.  We heard last week of Jesus going to his hometown of Nazareth and how the people there rejected what he had to say to them.  They chased him away and the gospel said that he could do no works of mercy in that town.  So he went to other places in Galilee and healed and told prophetic stories.  He was well received wherever he went, but in Nazareth, he had no credibility at all.

All that Amos the prophet was doing in Israel was telling the people what the Lord had told him, that the high places would be made desolate, that Israel would be laid waste, and that Jeroboam, the king would be put to the sword;  but Amaziah, a priest of Bethel told the king what Amos had been preaching, and then told Amos to go somewhere else with his prophesying.  But Amos told Amaziah that he was not a prophet at all, just a herder of sheep and a dresser of sycamore trees who had been raised up by the Lord and told to go and prophesy to Israel.

John the Baptist prophesied to Herod the king that it wasn’t lawful for him to have his brother’s wife, Herodias.  Herodias was furious with John and when an opportunity came, when Salome danced and when Herod was very pleased with her dancing, he told her to ask for anything and he would give it to her. Prompted by her mother,  she asked for John the Baptist’s head on a platter.  The startled Herod gave it to her as she asked, and thus perished the prophet who had troubled the king.

Prophets are not held in much honor, are they.  I remember when Martin Luther King was preaching around the country in the middle of the nascent civil right’s movement how the FBI and many others were horrified by what he was saying.  He was called a communist and was stalked by people who hated him, and when he was finally killed in Memphis, we discovered that it was a racist former Klan member who had shot him.  We weren’t surprised, even though the nation was horrified by that season of terror that we had experienced.  We don’t like prophets who trouble us.  We would be happier if they would either stay silent or go somewhere else.  What the former Klansman had done was to fulfill the will of many of the silent majority of Americans who had been very troubled by Martin Luther King’s words, and who wished that he would simply go away.

We don’t like prophets.  There are those who say that global warming is simply a made up fantasy and that the world will be just fine if we continue to pollute the planet.  There are others who tell us to leave the banks alone, that there is just too much regulation and that the banks will be just fine if we will ease up on our desire to have more rules.  There are those who want us to stop spending so much on government because we have a terrible deficit and that the solution to all of this is to cut taxes and spending, even though this will mean cutting needed funds to take care of the poor and the elderly.  It will mean taking stock of our priorities and arranging them in ways that will or will not honor human need in opposition to greed.  Part of the problem is that greed has enormous power.  Certainly the laws are tilted in that direction.  It is hard to move people who have a great deal of money.  There are those who say that preachers ought to shut up about politics, that these issues have no place in the pulpit.  Such a facile statement.  It just doesn’t fit with what God calls his preachers to do.

So how are we to respond?  The prophets continue to speak and we continue not to listen.  When the Lord finally creates the chaos that the prophets are telling us about, then we will blame them and each other.  That isn’t necessary.  It is not hard to simply listen and to hear the words that are put before us, and to ignore the voices in our heads of our greed that tries so very hard to undermine them.

The prayer that begins our service today asks our God to hear the prayers of his people,  and to grant that we may know and to understand the things that we ought to do and to give us the grace to faithfully accomplish them.   If we will only listen to that prayer, it would go a long way to moving us in the right direction.