Neither Prophet nor Priest...

But maybe I still have time

(This is the first of two…)

A while ago now I sent one of my Sunday sermons to a former counselor/friend of mine, and with it—by way of introduction—this comment: “About as prophetic as I ever get.”

And indeed, to my own mind so prophetic that as I prepared the manuscript I grew increasingly uneasy about actually preaching it.

Only once before in my long career had I felt the same way—that time, during a solar flare of racial tensions starring Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and a host of white-robed anarchists, one of them a member of the small church I had recently been assigned to serve and whose family still regularly attended worship. He had been arrested, tried, sentenced and imprisoned for conspiring to blow up some petroleum storage units near Greensboro. For some months I had tried to be quick to listen and slow to speak, but at last came the time I had to break silence and preach peace. The peace of Christ. I entitled the sermon, “Jesus Ain’t Whistling Dixie,” and I trembled before, during and after the “preaching moment.”

Now, again, with a congregation full of red hats were gleefully following where Orange was leading them astray, came the bone-burning sensation that something had to be said. But carefully. The bold, unvarnished and unequivocal truth, yes, which as Luther said, is more powerful than eloquence, but truth worthy of stewarding, too. An exacting word that, given the political climate, would be better delivered slant, as Miss Dickenson said, or in parables, as the Lord Jesus did.

And so I set about to study and stewardship.

But after only a couple of days I realized that with every word and phrase, every new revision and rewrite, I was not so much crafting a sermon as I was stropping a blade that, like a carving knife in the holster of a sous chef, I would apply mercilessly to the gelatinous faux-religious fat that MAGA’s toadies were serving the body politic and calling it steak. And, I guess, also to those who had lost their taste for lean.

That is, if I could actually screw-up my courage like Jeremiah and deliver, well, my jeremiad, And if I lived to tell the tale, it would mean I had succeeded in causing my MAGA people to think otherwise.

I searched for “scandalous metaphors” as Brueggemann described Jeremiah’s speech, for “dazzling images,” and by the end of the week I was sure I had crafted from the irrefutables of Holy Writ a risk-taking theopoetic counter-narrative for reforming the church and the world.

And when, in fact, I made it alive all the way to Sunday lunch, I wanted my friend to join me in a victory lap.

He replied tersely: that my sermon was not prophetic at all, neither discomfiting nor reordering. That what I considered “slant” was actually obfuscation. That what I imagined as its sharpest edges were either dulled or chipped by obscurity… or cowardice.

Whatever burning I felt left him cold, he said, and congratulations, he replied, on making it to lunch but he thought it no great surprise as my points were so anemic and forgettable that it was “gone” by the time folk put their keys in the ignition.

He rounded-off his rejoinder by reminding me of John Wesley’s riot-causing anti-slavery sermon in Bristol, and, of course, the biblical prophets who preached with a figurative sword to their necks. And John the Baptizer.

Short of going into the wilderness and praying to die, there was nothing for me to do in turn but reread the sermon with self-critical rather than they-critical eyes, and that on the other side of my animus.

Yeah, he was mostly if not entirely right.

Not surprising, all in all, given that I not a prophet nor, if I might say it this way, a descendant of prophets. Never was. There was a time when I thought I might be, or would be, or could be. But, no. I am far too much a coward for that. I am averse to, a) rejection and b) pain

Then again, as I have known more than my fair share of both those things anyway it might have been better for me, the church and the world had I endured them on account of wearing a prophet’s mantle.

Alas, prophetic “mantling” is God’s work alone to do (though sometimes with an assist from another prophet) and I was not deemed worthy of or chosen for that particular honor/burden—at least not vocationally.

Who am I to gainsay the One making such decisions? After all, I know my faults and failings—and my proclivities—and prophets have enough working against them from the outside as to make their job hard without adding existential disqualifiers. But for a while the jury was out, given that I was too religious to be secular and too secular to be religious. Residing just there, however, in that very mesh, might have made me wonder if I were on my way to being a prophet, especially as I had some of the costuming and set pieces for it.

I was always given to weird clothes, for instance, and wild hair.

Once my beard came in, I grew it. I carried around a ruck sack and one of my favorite phrasings was “Thus saith the Lord,” though more as an aside than a genuine announcement. My Bible was well-thumbed.

I did not eat bugs but Marlboro Menthols made me smell of sulphur and marked me as counter-cultural.

I was outspoken and willing to speak. And as angry and naive as Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchins—or George Carlin, bless his dearly departed heart—if just as selective regarding my targets. Which is to say, if I for one moment believed “God” were like the straw-being they jousted, whose brainless and violent followers they condemned, I would join them on stage.

But I don’t believe their quixotic condescensions.

Neither was I oblivious to the closed-minded and reactive defenders of a “god too small.” Nor indifferent to a church bent on domesticating God’s Law to self-serving moralisms and political domestications. Further, and almost unwittingly, after a horrible if eye-opening summer at our denomination’s conference center, I set myself to ramming speed and went all broadside against the Institution. But beyond whatever “friends and family” courtesies were afforded me in classes or conversations, I was in the last reel easy to ignore—I guess because of my accouterments. For sure on account of my abrasiveness. Not least the smell of tobacco.

Still, and crucially, I remained a faithful member of the church, if from the start and then increasingly very much on the edges of it—which is a peculiar wilderness, and precisely where the real prophets live and work. At least according to Fr. Rohr.

Prophets have to be in the circle to know what a prophet needs to know about cultus and covenant and the particular conventions that allow the church to function as an institution. Unlike priests, however, they have to have distance, too, and character enough to not be swept-under the Institution’s self-serving centripetalities.

If priests are possessed of neither the motivation nor power to change what is—they have been rewarded by things as they are—prophets are quick to point out the ethical inconsistencies and system-empowered hypocrisies of the priests. And they are typically benched for it.

But until they are stuck in a hole or stoned or sold into slavery, real prophets are never so far outside as to lose access and leverage. They retain, in other words, fluency in the lingua franca and the critical awareness that allows for stridency. Indeed, the real prophet’s work is always done at the near edges of the outside. It is there where the Word is delivered and the internal reform, if there is to be any, kindled.

And, when they turn their attentions outward, prophets are equally strident regarding kings, their minions and policies. And their consorts. Think: John the Baptist vis-a-vis Herod Antipas.

Priests often dismiss the prophets’ rage. They may at times offer their own rejoinders regarding the “church” but they serve the system every bit as much as they do the Lord—and they depend on the system to serve them.

Apart from the “ladder fatigue” and the occasional charge of “hypocrisy” (for excoriating Bill, for example, only to defend The D), living among the priests is a pretty comfortable precinct in which to reside.

Priests do not have to reform the liturgy, after all. Even when they do, liturgy rarely alters orthodoxy. As orthodoxy purports to synthesize what has been believed at all times, everywhere, by everyone, priests are thereby granted a well-established, “populist” and exclusionary platform from which to judge, condemn, and in one way or the other, dismiss the concerns of those too far outside.

Prophets excoriate such priests, of course, even as priests denounce and disregard the prophets. Anger is the order of the day.

And anger does not work the righteousness of God.

I had the anger to be a prophet, but little else. That said, even my best “angry words” were derivative, as I had no real access to or experience with the courts of religious or political power. I did not know what was going on.

Neither was I granted audience to the heavenly councils where a prophet’s message and might originate. Thus, most any salvo I fired always seemed wide of the target.

No wonder the mantle that was God’s to give was withheld.

Eventually, and with a hefty epaulet of irony, I took instead the stole that was the bishop’s to give: a reminder to the clergy who wore it and the laity who saw it of Jesus’ towel at the foot washing.

Jesus wrapped the towel around his waist as he expressed his self-sacrificing love for his feckless disciples. By the time it was placed on my shoulders, the stole had come to mean other things—first and foremost, authority—“to preach the word of God, to administer the sacraments, to order the life of the church.”

Yeah, but I never really felt I had much authority either.

I was not interested in any kind of control, and was among my people as one who serves, but my service was often reactive, fear-based and easily choked-off—a “refined form of serving myself,” as Dr. Baillie would confess it.

I have no defense for that except to say that most of my “fields” were rocky and overgrown. Had I known how to do it, I would have been glad to lead those in my charges into the green pastures and by the still waters of renewal and reform—which may be the most prophetic thing priests can do—but I was distracted by thoughts of my next, surely greener field. Which made the flocks I was shepherding at the moment nervous. And jealous. And restless for me to leave.

Nor did they miss me when I was gone.

They might have called me a bad shepherd. I might have responded that, like Amos in his pre-prophetic days, I was a “shepherd of (stubborn) sheep” (and also a “harvester of figs,” read that as you will).

More to the point, though, not only at the beginning but also facing the end, I have found myself feeling something of what the Father seems to feel—at least if my curious (and presumptuous) mirror to Isaiah 65:1 is right: in short, I myself were too was ready to respond but no one asked for my help; I was ready to be found but no one looked for me.

Then again, unlike the Israelites and their relationship to God, regarding me and my people, perhaps I wasn’t wasn’t ready at all.