–October 21, 2012
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
Reading from Like Fire in the Bones: Listening for the Prophetic Word in Jeremiah (Page 199, published in 2006) by Walter Brueggemann, professor emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, and a minister in the United Church of Christ.
Initially, a prophet is simply a poetic figure who stands outside the mainstream of public power and exposes what’s going on. The prophets are people who feel pain and are enormously sensitive to what the public processes are doing to others, and they seem to have amazing rhetorical imagination to get their message said in compelling ways.
In the Old Testament, the prophets are propelled by the vision of Moses and insist that the liberation of Exodus and the Commandments received at Mount Sinai are a way to organize public policy. Now, that’s a big argument because one can easily make the case that the Exodus and the Commandments are idealistic and romantic, and that people can’t really organize anything seriously that way.
In the Old Testament a prophet is always the counterpart of a king. Kings want to organize public power without reference to the human dimension. The prophets keep insisting that if the king organizes public power without reference to the human dimension, he is going to bring death on himself and a lot of other people.
Therefore, for the prophets, talk of God always carries with it socioeconomic-political talk. You can’t separate them.
Sermon
Today we are exploring the Second of the Six Source of Unitarian Universalism, adopted originally in 1984/84 as a statement of five sources, with a sixth – the spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions – added in 1995 – both times by delegates of the some 1000 UU congregations in the US at our annual General Assembly.
The second of six Sources from which Unitarian Universalism draws is “The 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.”
Our Worship Associate this morning, Carol Carter Walker, counted among her prophets these whose words appear in readings, some of my most favorite too, at the back of our hymnal:
Adrienne Rich, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Howard Thurman, Thich N’hat Hanh, Alice Walker, Marge Piercy, and the late Unitarian Universalist Marjorie Bowens Wheatley.
These 20th century American prophets meet the definition of “prophet” as described by Walter Brueggemann in our reading this morning: “poetic figures who stands outside the mainstream of public power and exposes what’s going on.” His definition suggests that a prophet is one who mainly uses words, one who “speaks truth to power” (a phrase which originated with the Quakers, from what I’ve read).
But, the language of our Second Source goes beyond words. It adds “deeds.” to the meaning of “prophet.” And, indeed, most of Carol’s prophets, like Dr. King (as we heard in the Opening Words), did more than just speak – they organized, mobilized, strategized, and led.
Poet Adrienne Rich, who died last March at 83, was a peace activist and a founding member of New Jewish Agenda; W.E.B. Du Bois was a founder of the NAACP and edited its journal for 25 years; Howard Thurman founded the country’s first racially integrated, intercultural church in 1944; Thich N’hat Hanh bas been a prominent peace activist, and he also founded quite a few Buddhist organizations; author Alice Walker has been a visible activist in the civil rights, anti-war, feminist, and pro-Palestinian movements; and Rev. Marjorie Bowen Wheatley was a leader for racial justice and multiculturalism within Unitarian Universalism until her death in 2006 at age 57 from cancer, sadly.
Of Carol’s list, only the writers Langston Hughes and Marge Piercy could be said to lack the organizational resume to include them as “prophets” whose deeds as well as words “challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.”
So, we see that, in the language of our Second Source, we Unitarian Universalists value action as much as reflection, deeds as much as words, doing as much as being. It harkens back to what we say about ourselves, that we are about “deeds, not creeds” or that what is most important is how people live not what they believe.
This criteria is more important than ever in these days of social media and electronic communications, when tweeting or emailing or signing an electronic petition is widely regarded as taking action, even though no more than a few fingers and a few seconds are required – and a computer, of course. In democracies, there is no risk in taking such actions, nor is there much impact, in my opinion. But, as we have seen in the shooting of the teenage girl Malala Yousufzai (you’ su fa zai’) in Pakistan, in oppressive societies, even to speak is risk-taking behavior with major public impact.
In contrast, maybe you heard the NPR interview this week with the young woman, an undecided voter, who started a blog called “Women in Binders” while she was watching the second presidential debate? She had lost her job as a Director of Social Media earlier that day. Her blog took off within minutes and by the next morning she said she had something like 1600 posts. Who would blame her, in this job market for young people, for hoping that the immediate widespread notoriety of her blog would result in a job offer? She acknowledged, though, that she knew her fame would last only for a week, and then subside, because that is the way of the Internet. A flash in the pan. A quickly rising, equally quickly falling star of words.
So, duly noted: our Second Source is the “words and deeds of prophetic women and men.” There are two other questions about our Second Source that I want to touch on today.
First is why do we tend to look only for individual prophets? Why not prophetic communities?
The only well-known Unitarian Universalist theologian of the 20th century, James Luther Adams, published a collection of essays entitled The Prophethood of All Believers. A play on the more traditional phrase that originated in the Protestant reformation, “the priesthood of all believers,” the title reflected his belief that the laity – that is the members – of the church is called to “share in the analysis, criticism, and transformation of institutions, including the analysis and transformation of the church.” He said that this “requires the capacity to discern and define the actual world about us and in a timely way to envisage the potentialities latent in it and in the creative and transforming powers. Worship, prayer, meditation can be crucial… The congregation brings with it its experience from its various occupations and perspectives and from its associations with others in the church and in the world. From the laity and its minister and from their criticism of the injustices of the world emerge … proposals for innovation … affecting the family and the social, economic, and political structures.” (p. 95).
To support his case for the prophethood of all believers, Adams quotes the Torah, in the 11th chapter of the book called Numbers, “And a young man ran and told Moses, ‘Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.’ And Joshua the son of Nun, the minister of Moses, one of his chosen men, said, ‘My lord Moses, forbid them.’ But Moses said to him, ‘Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!’” (p. vii).
And the second is: why are our most-cited prophets liberal or progressive politically? Does our definition of “prophet” necessarily exclude conservative prophets? I feel so embedded in my own perspective, having never lived in a progressive or social welfare nation, raised in the lineage of Judaism and Christianity, I feel ill-equipped to answer this question objectively. But it intrigues me. Because, if ours is a liberal religion of the 21st century that welcomes people of various political persuasions, wouldn’t we draw from the words and deeds of conservative prophets?
As I’ve pondered this question in preparation for writing this sermon, I’ve bumped up against the limits of my range of sources and the polarization of public discourse: I’m not widely read in conservatism, and I rarely listen to or watch conservative talk shows. There must be conservatives whose words and deeds “challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.” But the conservative prophetic voices that come to mind are ones that critique the very social stands we take. They call “evil” our vision of full acceptance of gay and lesbian people, to give one example. They say it’s the downfall of our country, that it will bring the apocalypse. Nevertheless, it would do me good to look harder. I welcome your suggestions.
But, the truth is I really do identify with the Biblical prophets who named the greed, hypocrisy, and failure to provide for their people of the powerful of their times. For example, Brueggemann talks about a passage in Jeremiah 22 in which God, speaking through Jeremiah, compares two kings, a father and son, Josiah and Jehoiakim. Jehoaikim was a bad king who ripped off poor people. He’s accused of spending his time building cedar houses – cedar being a metaphor for enormous luxury – trying to prove his rank among kinds. His father, Josiah, on the other hand, was a really good guy. King Josiah did what was “right and just.” And God says, “Because he dispensed justice to the weak and the poor, it went well with him.” Then God asks, “is this not true knowledge of me?” Brueggemann points out, “That’s an extraordinary comment: knowing God means caring for the poor and the needy. The passage doesn’t say if you know God, you will care for the poor. It doesn’t say if you care for the needy, you will get to know God. It says that caring for the poor and needy IS the act of knowing God.” (p. 203). The prophets of old demanded compassion from the rulers of their day.
Prophets today would demand in word and deed the same from the powerful institutions of our day. Our role among “the prophethood of all believers” is illustrated in the words of a colleague, Rev. Victoria Safford, whose suburban Minnesota congregation I had observed for a month of sabbatical some years ago. She puts forward an image of the Gate of Hope, which is the place for the prophets of words and deed. I will end with her words, published first in a sermon and then in the magazine The Nation, back in 2004.
“Our mission is to plant ourselves at the Gates of Hope–not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything Is Gonna Be All Right.” But a different, sometimes lonely place, of truth-telling about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we’re seeing, asking them what they see.
With our lives we make our answers all the time, to this ravenous, beautiful, mutilated, gorgeous world. However prophetic our words, it is not enough simply to speak.”
The words of our closing hymn are adopted from the Hebrew prophets Amos and Isaiah. It was composed by Carolyn McDade, who also wrote “Spirit of Life.”