Remembering and Being Re-Membered: Prophetic Witness from Outside the Walls
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 4th Sunday After Epiphany, January 31, 2021 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.
Talk of prophets is a great way to end conversation (and not an advised avenue for beginning a sermon). We tend only to think of prophecy in terms of false prophets. Jim Jones and David Koresh. Garden variety AM radio apocalypticists who turn the Wedding Feast of the Lamb to which we are are all invited in the Book of Revelation into a dully literally timeline for the end of the world whose date turns out to be moveable feast in the worst possible way--”Did I say April 14th 2021? I meant April 14th, 2022. My bad.” Or, we hear pronouncements by prophets of QAnon and their blue-painted priest with a headdress taken straight out of Fred Flintstone and his Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo Lodge. Is the word of the Lord rare, visions not widespread? Who are prophets? What does it mean to prophesy?
A couple things to notice. A true prophet is never about power, control, and manipulation. Prophesy is always about the proclamation of a new, more just, more peaceful, more reconciled social order where the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in the land have a dignified, fully human, seat at the table. Prophesy is always about greater and greater inclusion, calling people back to love, and never about casting out scapegoated victims. The sacrifice of even a single child of God is a price any prophet simply cannot ponder. Prophesy always arises in response to the question, “Who is being left behind? Whose voice is not being heard? Where has justice not yet rolled down like waters? What dry land needs to be irrigated by the ever-flowing stream of righteousness?” The prophet asks those questions in fear and trembling, in the power of the Holy Spirit, that they might be given eyes to see, ears to hear, the grace to proclaim what she or he sees/hears, and the courage to walk in the way of ever-deeper, ever more costly, and yes sacrificial, love for the neighbor.
Neither is a true prophet a predictor of future events who receives messages from the future via some angelic pony express. Prophets speak, certainly, of the future, but it is most often in the form of an “if you continue on this current course, here’s what’s going to happen.” Prophets’ imagined futures are the result of being able to see clearly, to see deeply, in the present moment. The prophet is a living instance of purity of heart, a space that has been opened by grace where truthful seeing, cleansed perception, takes place. The prophet’s purity of heart is a happening of God in and through the human person where the veil has been lifted, the scales fallen from the eyes. Fr. John Main, OSB writes,
purity of heart… [is] that clarity of perception that enables us to see reality as it is, to see ourselves as we are, to see others as they are: the redeemed and loved of God; and to see God as he is: absolute Love. To see all that we require purity of heart… we need to be able to see straight ahead of us with our refracting our vision through the prism of ego.
The prophet, then, as one who sees things clearly… as they are, without the distortion of the ego--the self at the center of everything that draws all things to itself. The prophet as one who has undergone God, suffered the purgative death of self-centered desire and shows us what’s right under our noses.
The purity of heart and clear-sightedness of the prophet is also about the ability to imagine alternative futures, more just, equitable, and reconciled social arrangements than the ones under which they currently labor. If the question of the prophet is about who’s being left behind, the “answer” or prophesy is always about reminding, recollecting, God’s purposes for God’s people. The prophet imagines an alternative future by remembering God’s promises, by recalling all the things God has done for God’s people. Again and again in the psalms, King David sings the story of Israel, the “story of us” as the gathered people of God in this place, to remind us who and whose we are. The prophet mines the biblical narrative in order to re-mind the people in the present. Not as mere nostalgic pining for the Good Old Days, but as a true act of memory--anamnesis--a memory that opens up new possibilities in the present and opens new doors for the future.
The Eucharist is truly a memorial in that very particular sense--it is a memory that makes Jesus really present in the bread and the wine. We’re not play-acting the last supper with the priest as Jesus as mere forlorn nostalgia, but remembering in its truest sense, in order that Jesus might be recognized here and now in the breaking of the bread, that we might be re-membered, made whole. As that surliest of prophets, Jeremiah, proclaims, “Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply” (23:3). God-centered memory re-members and empowers for service, mission, and human flourishing. Mere human-centered nostalgia ossifies and leaves us longing for a distant past--always a day late and a dollar short.
When we read our passage from Deuteronomy though the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus (how Christians read scripture by the way) it’s easy to hear those lines about “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people,” as referring to Jesus. Jesus embodies in his very person the law and the prophets--why Moses and Elijah are either side at the Transfiguration. Prophets, hear whispers, glimpse, perform sign-acts that point to the Kingdom, but Jesus actually embodies the Kingdom.
Prophets call the people to repentance, remind them who and whose they are, and demand a radical reorientation of communal life. Jesus enacts the Kingdom in his very person--he shows us through word and deed what it looks like for God to be in human form, and what a truly human human life looks like--healing the sick, calling the nameless, faceless woman with the issue of blood in the jostling crowd “daughter,” feeding, washing feet, and ultimately laying down his life in sacrificial love for others--all others: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
If you pay attention to the opening of the Gospel according to Mark, you’ll notice that immediately (Mark’s favorite word, clearly) after calling the disciples Jesus begins to manifest the healing, integrating, reconciling power of the Gospel in three different spaces: the synagogue, Peter’s mother-in-law’s house, and throughout Galilee--church, home, and public square. Healing--the same word in Greek as “salvation”--is not just reserved for some small corner of our lives. It embraces the entirety of our lived experience. In his birth (surrounded by migrant foreigners) life and ministry (hanging out with sinners, sex workers, and tax collectors, entering into spirited relationship with shifty Samaritans, the sick, and the cast off) and in his death and resurrection--Jesus is revealed to us as the man who is for all. He is boundary-crossing love, radical welcome, and discriminate hospitality. He is not just telling us to be more loving. He shows us--not just with his lips, but in his life--the shape our human lives are to take by grace in union and communion with him.
And that’s why, in this time and in this place, practicing the Way of Love is so desperately needed. First we turn and root ourselves in the wondrous love God in Christ through the Holy Spirit. We commit ourselves to learning and entering in relationship with the Risen Lord through scripture, and formation classes. We develop a daily pattern of prayer. We worship in community. We practice blessing others--give, forgive, teach and heal in Jesus’ name. We take seriously the call to sacrificial living and giving. We take seriously the call to be “repairers of the breach” and go across human-created boundaries as instruments of peace, justice, and reconciliation. We rest--like God in creation, like Jesus in his earthly ministry going apart to a desert place--and find those practices and habits that renew and restore us, that remind us that though we have been given much work to do, that God is always the primary actor in any good work we engage.
We’ve been baptized into a momentous time, to be sure… about the furthest thing from the Pax Romana. The work we have been called to do--fighting a pandemic, addressing systemic racism and structural inequality, working to combat climate change, bridging the great chasm that has opened in our political discourse--is daunting. But we are the ones called to do it. Ordinary fisherpeople who would, perhaps,, rather mend our nets. But God doesn’t need net-menders at this time. God needs a people--this parish, this diocese, this Episcopal Church--to do the work we have been given to do. To know Him and make Him known. To open ourselves, to make a little space for God to get at us and do God’s transfiguring work in us so that we can go in His name, in the power of the Holy Spirit, as agents of his Grace to all.
The prophets have seen, the prophets have heard a word from the Lord speaking as a still, small voice in sheer silence. We are living in a time when, contrary to the time of Samuel, visions are widespread. King’s dream. Me Too. Black Lives Matter. Greta Thunberg. The word of the Lord is not rare. It’s just that these prophetic words are coming to us, oftentimes, from outside the walls of the Church. It’s our task, our duty, to be an open ear that listens to how the Holy Spirit is working through unexpected people to call us back, to help us remember who and whose we are and what it means to Christians worthy of the name--those who work for building up the Kindom. We must be ever-vigilant lest in failing to harken to the prophetic witnesses of our time we dismiss Christ himself--hang him on a tree all over again.
Let us pray. Almighty God, whose prophets taught us righteousness in the care of your poor: By the guidance of your Holy Spirit tabernacled in us, grant that our hearts of stone may be replaced with hearts of flesh. Let our ears be unstopped, and our eyes opened, that we may do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in your sight; through Jesus Christ, our Judge and Redeemer, who lives and reigns with you and the same Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.