RCL
Advent 2B
7
December 2014
Saint
Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver
BC
Over
the course of hundreds of years the history of the Hebrew people was
interpreted in a series of writings we now call the Hebrew Scriptures. In those writings we learn that this history
was shaped by forces from inside the people and from outside. Three ‘inside’ institutions that were most
influential were the monarchy, the priesthood and the prophets. Of these three the oldest and most enduring
institution was the prophets.
It
was only after the people had left Egypt and had begun their journey to the
land of Canaan that the priesthood emerged to lead the corporate ritual life of
the people. It was only after the
political crises of the early tribal confederacy, perhaps a century or two
after the people arrived in Canaan, that the monarchy emerged.
But
it was Moses the prophet who led the people out of Egypt and towards the
promised land. It was Samuel the prophet
who yielded to the cries of the people and anointed Saul and then David to be
king. When the Babylonians threatened
the people and eventually destroyed Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, taking the
monarchy and leadership of the people into exile, it was the prophets we know
as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and eleven others who tended the embers of the
Hebrew people and their covenant with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
And
closer to our own times, when the Romans occupied the land, turning the
monarchs into a series of client kings and the priesthood into a cautious,
self-preserving religious elite, God raised up other prophets. One of these prophets emerged in the
wilderness east of Jerusalem in the Jordan Valley, a man we know as John, who
called the people to a renewed commitment to God.
These
prophets were agents of God who risked their reputations, their fortunes and
their very lives to fulfill the ministry God had entrusted to them. Although they were separated from each other
by decades, by centuries and by political and religious contexts, they have
many things in common.
After
all, what makes a prophet a prophet? We
sometimes think that a prophet is someone who predicts the future, a divine
fortune-teller. But that is not what the
prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures and the prophet John were. Prophets are men and women who speak the word
of God to the people of their own times and places. The words of the prophets are meant to be
heard in the midst of current
events, even when they may suggest the future consequences of the actions of
the present generation.
A
prophet, even those whose words are sometimes fierce, knows that the love of
God for us and for all of creation is unrelenting and passionate. Sometimes this love is expressed in words
that are compassionate and nurturing.
Sometimes, when this love is sorely tested, God’s beloved people are
left to experience the consequences of their poor choices. Sometimes the prophet speak words of
encouragement and offer insights into God’s purposes and visions of creation as
God sees it and wills it to become. At
all times and in all places, this love seeks the ultimate good and well-being
of the beloved. As the writer of the
letter to the Ephesians puts it, God acts in many and various ways so that “. .
. all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of
God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians
4.13).
The
prophet’s knowledge and dependence upon the steadfast love of God for us gives
her or him hope. Hope is the inevitable
product of love. When we are loved and
love, we look at our times and our circumstances with new eyes. Hope dares to believe that the present, with
all of its conflicts and tragedies, with all of its uncertainties and
disappointments, is not God’s last word
to us. The beauty and good that we
glimpse and experience in the present anticipate and whet our appetite for the
beauty and good that God intends for all creation on that day that shall so
surely come.
Because
the prophet is convinced of God’s steadfast love and inspired by that love to
hope in God’s purposes for us, he or she can act in faith, daring to speak
God’s word to the powerful and to the hopeless, to the faithful and to the
seeker, to those who are for us and to those who are against us. Faith is the choice to act as an agent of
God’s purposes despite our doubts
not because we have none. During a time
of political crisis, the prophet Habakkuk proclaimed that “(there) is still a
vision for the appointed time; it will testify to the destined hour and will
not prove false. Though it delays, wait
for it, for it will surely come before too long.” (Habakkuk 2.3) Faith chooses to trust in that vision because
of the love already made known to us and the hope that love engenders.
In
the Book of Numbers, Moses is described as having become overwhelmed by the
obligations of his prophetic leadership.
God offers to share some of Moses’ prophetic authority with selected
members of the community. Two of those
selected don’t arrive on time for the ritual, but they receive the power to
prophesy nevertheless. When Joshua
protested this to Moses, the tired prophet responded, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that
the Lord would put his spirit on
them.” (Numbers 11.29b)
You
and I, my friends, have been called to be a prophetic people. By choosing to follow in the way of Jesus of
Nazareth, we have chosen to be agents of God who speak God’s word to our
times. Unlike some voices in today’s
world, our words are ones that arise from our conviction that God loves all humanity not just some. Our words are sustained by our hope that God’s last word to all humanity is life in
its fullness. Our words are spoken
in the faith that God’s purposes will be
fulfilled.
I
cannot under-exaggerate the importance of this message in today’s society, even
one as wealthy and relatively peaceful as ours here in Canada. Despite our culture’s search for the ‘true
meaning of Christmas’, that search continues to be misled by messages of
over-consumption, fear and self-interest.
The material advances of the last century have not led to greater
satisfaction nor to a stronger sense of our responsibility to care for one
another with compassion and dignity.
But
throughout the world there are prophetic communities such as ours who dare to
resist the pull of the message that ‘the one with the most toys at the end
wins’. Like John we invite people to
look at the world with a new yet ancient perspective, a perspective rooted in
our common humanity and in our common identity as children of God in whose
image we are made and in whose likeness we are invited to live. This, my sisters and brothers, is ‘the real
meaning of Christmas’, a world in which we remain firm in the hope God has set
before us, “. . . so that we and all (God’s) children shall be free, and the
whole earth live to praise (God’s) name.
Amen.” (The Book of Alternative Services, 215)
No comments:
Post a Comment