O come, O come, Emmanuel. Amen.
As the old saying goes, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Whether it’s our health, home maintenance, or school work, that’s pretty good wisdom. Even if you are last minute, fly by the seat of your pants sorts of person, we all know that there are some situations in which it’s simply too late for preparations, like going to the store to buy a fire extinguisher after the fire has started. As I said last Sunday, the Collects for Advent are splendid prayers to guide us through this season and today’s is no exception: Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
It’s
a prayer all about preparation – namely listening to the prophets of God who
have a message for us all to hear. Now, when we hear the word “prophet” we tend
to think of someone who can tell the future, but that’s really not how prophets
are understood in the Bible. Prophets are not people who have special or secret
knowledge, rather they are vessels through which God chooses to speak. And
prophets really don’t deal in the future, rather they speak to the present.
Instead of being foretellers, prophets are forth-tellers; that is, they are
speaking to the present more than they are speaking about the future. Yes,
sometimes prophecy involves speaking about future consequences or signs that
validate a message, but prophecy is not a parlor trick about predicting the
future, rather prophecy is speaking God’s truth in the present moment.
And
this is not some point for scholars to write papers about and for us to ignore.
No, if we don’t know how to read prophecy then we completely miss what God is
saying to us today. If we misunderstand prophecy to be about future
predictions, then who cares? Really. If the words of Malachi, or Zechariah, or
John the Baptist are predictions about something that already happened, then
those words are little more than interesting stories. And if they are
predictions about something that hasn’t yet happened, then so what? Knowing
that something will happen at some undetermined point in the future has very
little bearing on us today. But that is not what prophecy is about. Prophecy is
about the living and active Word of God speaking to us today.
The
words of the prophets are not their own, they are God’s. This is why prophetic
speech often begins with “thus says the Lord.”
God’s speech is not bound by time in the same way that our words are. What God
said to Isaiah is just as applicable today as it was then. While what God had
to say through Ezekiel meant something in Ezekiel’s day, the Word of God is
never rendered obsolete by the passage of time. All this is to say, prophecy
cannot and should not be dismissed as no longer relevant to us.
What
allows the words of the prophets in such a timeless way is the direction from
which they come. It’s easy to think that prophecy was spoken in the past, but
it’s actually that prophetic words come from the future. The fancy way of
saying this is that it’s about eschatology, not teleology. Teleology is about
taking the current situation and extrapolating towards the future. Think of it
in terms of cooking – if you have sugar, flour, eggs, and vanilla, chances are
that you’re going to end up with a birthday cake, not a crab cake. And this is
how most of us think about the future – in terms of human potential and the laws
of cause and effect.
The
alternative though is eschatology. This is being assured of the future and then
living accordingly. It’s being promised a crab cake dinner and knowing that
maybe the flour needs to be reserved for that instead of used on a birthday
cake. And this is what the prophets help us to do – they remind us that God
remains in charge. God has possibilities in store for us beyond what we can
imagine. Eschatology is not about human potential, but rather divine
possibility. This is why the prophets can speak about hope in hopeless
situations, about redemption in the midst of brokenness, about peace in times
of strife, about Resurrection when we are surrounded by death. The prophets
remind us that with God, all shall be well.
Putting
these two aspects of prophecy together, the idea of prophecy being about the
present moment and about God’s potential, we can see what the purpose and the
function of Biblical prophecy is – it is about helping us to imagine a
different world, to see the world as God sees it. And this is why prophecy
often involves a call to action. Our opinions, experiences, and ideas are
always going to be limited, but the prophets help us to see something beyond
what we can imagine, giving us new priorities and possibilities. This sense of
Godly vision is what gives people the faith to keep on: people like physicians
and nurses in the midst of a pandemic. Saints like Mother Teresa who care for
those in poverty when there seems to be no end in sight to corporate greed.
People like school teachers and counselors who give so much to children growing
up in a society that does not help them realize their potential. People like
clergy who wonder what future the church has given declining membership and
church attendance.
These
things only make sense in light of the world that the prophets help us to see,
not one limited by the present brokenness of the world, but one full of God’s
grace, mercy, and love. If we think that the future is doom and gloom, that’s
how we’re going to likely live. But if we know that God’s got the whole world
in those almighty hands of love, well, that enables us to come and see the
difference that Christ makes.
The
way that the prophets deliver this message is often through poetry or song.
When you flip through the prophetic books of the Bible, more often than not,
you won’t find block text, indicating prose, but rather indented lines which
preserve the poetry of prophecy. Today, instead of a Psalm after the first
reading, we have what is called a “Canticle,” which is a song found in
Scripture. This particular song is called the Benedictus and is
prophesied by Zechariah, the father of John the Baptizer. Using both his words
and that of this week’s Collect, we receive God’s message for us today.
The
Collect asks for God to help us in heeding the warning of the prophets. To do
this, we have to engage with Scripture. It’s really hard to heed words that we
never hear. A few Sundays ago, I preached about the place of Scripture in our
faith and I offered to meet or correspond via email with you all about the
questions you have about Scripture. That offer never expires. Reading Scripture
is so important, not to make us holier or better Christians, but to help us
hear what God is saying to us through the words of Scripture.
Through
the gift of the Holy Spirit, prophecy has not ceased. No, we’re not adding
books to the Bible, but God still speaks words of prophecy to us today. Martin
Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Elizabeth Duncan Koontz, Michael Curry, Greta
Thunberg all speak prophetic words to us. The mark of a prophet is usually that
people don’t want to hear what they have to say. Many Biblical prophets ended
up jailed or exiled, John the Baptist was beheaded, Jesus was crucified,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed, Oscar Romero was assassinated. If you
disagree with what someone is saying but you fear that they might be right,
that’s a decent sign that what we are hearing is prophecy. It’s not so much
that prophets seek to be disruptive, it’s just that God’s ways are not our
ways, and so when they call us to return to God, we often resist. This is why
we pray that we are able to heed their warnings. This is a prayer asking for
God to disturb us, to make us uncomfortable, to change us.
And
this is what the word “repent” is all about. The Collect notes that the
prophets preach repentance and we heard Zechariah speak about us having
knowledge of our salvation by the forgiveness of our sins. To repent in the
language of the Bible is not limited to an apology and then moving on.
Repentance is not about making amends, though that might be a part of it. No,
repentance is even bigger and more challenging because to repent means to
change your mind. The Greek word here is metanoia. Meta means
“beyond” and noia means “mind.” We still use the word “paranoia” which
has that same noia in it to mean that someone is out of their mind.
Thus, metanoia means to go beyond your mind – which is to say to adopt a
new sense of vision, to see the world as the prophets show us. Repenting is
about saying something like “I once was blind but now I see.”
So,
embedded within heeding the message of the prophets and repenting is humility –
acknowledging that we don’t know it all and don’t have all the answers. No
matter how much we listen, learn, read, experience, each of us is limited to
seeing the world through our eyes. That means that our perspective is something
like 1/8-billionth of the perspectives in this world. There is nothing wrong
with having a perspective, but there is great danger in thinking too much of
it. Rather, we put our trust in eternal and secure truths of God’s mercy,
grace, and love. Where our thinking is not aligned with God’s ways, the
prophets help us to repent, to think differently.
The
metaphor in Luke that John the Baptist, who is quoting Isaiah, uses for this
repentance is that of highway building. You can probably hear these words in
your heads as arranged by Handel, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths
straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be
made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made
smooth.” As we all know, highway construction is not fun. It costs a lot of
money, it disrupts our commutes, it takes longer than expected, and as soon as
it is finished, it’s time to do it again. Repentance is the same – it might
cost us our sincerely held beliefs; it will take us a while to have our actions
align more closely with God’s call to us; it will be hard work and might
require heavy machinery; and as soon as we think we’ve sufficiently changed our
mind, we’ll find another blindspot to address.
The
prophet Malachi compares it to a refiner’s fire or a fuller’s soap, signaling a
process of having heat and pressure applied to us so that we might be
transformed. And what is helpful in Malachi’s prophecy is that these things are
done to us, not things we have to do to ourselves. The metal does not refine
itself nor does the cloth scrub itself clean. Instead, God helps us to repent.
If repentance were up to us, well, we wouldn’t have those schoolteachers,
nurses, or saints that I referred to earlier. Through the Church, through the
prophets, through the Sacraments God is shaping us to be the sort of people who
are made different in the difference that Christ makes.
And
the purpose of all of this prophetic call to repentance is, as Zechariah sings,
“To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide
our feet into the way of peace.” Just as prophecy is not intended to be locked
away in the future but is a present reality, so is this joy and peace. The call
to repent is not so that we can get into heaven when we die. That is a gross
misunderstanding of our faith. Rather, this call to repentance is to help us to
enter into Kingdom as it exists and is unfolding on earth as it is in heaven.
The prophetic call is urgent because God’s grace is here and now. Repentance is
hard work, but the result is a highway to prepare the way of the Lord. It can be a challenge to live in
the economy of grace instead of the economy of individualism or capitalism, but,
as John the Baptist tells us, through it, “all flesh shall see the salvation of
God” or as the Collect puts it, we shall joyfully receive Jesus Christ our
Redeemer.
For
us, the question is what we do with the prophets. Do we dismiss them? Do we
cancel them? Do we kill them? Or do we pray the bold prayer that God might
grant us ears and hearts to heed their warnings?
