The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Advent 1C
“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.”
During the season of Advent, we listen more attentively to the words of the prophets. We listen to prophets and sages calling out in the wilderness. Those prophets and sages call out for us to turn from our ways and turn toward God, to prepare for upheaval that ultimately ushers in the fullness of the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ.
Of course it’s uncomfortable. The prophets have never been comfortable people. The prophets have always been distressing, frustrating, weird, unsettling. In the book of Samuel, a band of prophets are described as being in a “prophetic frenzy” (1 Sam 10:10). The prophets spoke truth to powerful people, calling out hypocrisy, injustice, nationalism, and greed – and so the powerful people would accuse the prophets of undermining the social order and being foreign agents or instigators of chaos. And even John the Baptist, who gets to show up this Advent as this voice crying out in the wilderness, he is clothed with camel’s hair and eating locusts and wild honey; not a comfortable, socially acceptable prophet, is he?
And we human beings despise what is uncomfortable. We don’t like being unsettled. We want to make it go away. It’s a very powerful psychological phenomenon. If we’re confronted with facts that cast doubt on what we believe, we double-down on our belief. If we’re called out for harmful behavior, we double-down on our justification. If what keeps us comfortable is taken away, we double-down on our demand for everything to be kept just the way it is.
So, when we hear the words of the prophets, we double-down, too.
First, we might double-down on making the prophets just future-telling mystics. The prophets are reduced to people who see the future, and the future for some reason is disconnected from the present moment. In this view, the prophets just forecast the coming of Jesus, and then we’re supposed to just wait around for something else to happen. The prophets calling for justice for the poor? Nah, just wait for Jesus to make it happen.
Second, we might double-down on our own prophetic identity. I’ve seen this, too, where folks take on the mantle of being a prophet to call out injustice in the world, but somehow our own repentance gets lost in the mix. We forget our own fallibility. We get excited by being this critic of the status quo, and we find ourselves scrambling to always stay one step ahead of the next prophet who will call us out for our own behavior, to always stay on the correct side of the movement.
And we double-down on this image that the prophet will always be palatable to us, that the prophet will never drag out the idols we’ve been worshipping and dash them into pieces. I think of the prophetic voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. Yes, he led marches and nonviolent civil disobedience to push the US toward racial justice and reconciliation. But remember that wasn’t the only thing he talked about. When he started to preach about economic justice and was taking a stand with workers on strike for living wages and better working conditions, now he’s questioning the sacred idol of the American Capitalist Economy. And when he started preaching about the need for peace in Vietnam, that the rights of the Vietnamese people must be respected, that brotherhood was better than bombs, ah, well, now he’s questioning the sacred idol of American Military Interventionism, so he must be a Communist agent for the Soviets and Maoists. See how they slander the prophets once the idols are revealed!
The prophets are an uncomfortable people. We must be ready to listen – if we are asked an uncomfortable question, given a distressing fact, how will we handle it? Will we double-down to protect our status quo, or will we let that discomfort open us up to a possibility more complex, more truthful than what we currently believe?
We must listen to what the prophets preach if we want what the prophets promise. The prophets preach repentance to us that we may turn our ways around, that we may be set free from the status quo. They preach repentance that we may find the way of salvation that God promises us.
The scribe Baruch promises us that God will bring us home from our exile. That though we have been exiled for how we have harmed one another and distorted God’s good creation, God is not satisfied until we are brought home. Will we let God take us home, or will we dig our claws into the pain of exile with a refusal to change?
The prophet John the Baptist promises that the salvation of God will be seen by all, that hills will be made low and valleys lifted up, to bring equity and equality to a world bent out of shape. Will we follow John out into the waters to be baptized with waters of repentance and to open our eyes for our Messiah, Jesus?
Will we heed the prophets and find new life, will we listen to the prophets and be part of the Kingdom of God, the reign of God? Or would we rather not change at all?