Stupidity versus Wisdom



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Would You Know a Prophet in Your Midst?


Mark 6:1-6
July 8, 2012

He left that place and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. Then Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.
Then he went about among the villages teaching.

            Are you a person who likes high school reunions? Many people love their reunions. I have to say that my feelings about them range from lukewarm to dislike. It’s the reason I haven’t gone to that many.  I have a 35th one coming up this fall, and I haven’t decided whether I want to go or not.  I have gone to a few, though.

            The reunion that sticks in my mind is my 15th reunion in 1992. It stands out both because it was very well attended by my classmates, and because of the way some of my classmates reacted to me at the reunion. As is typical in these kinds of reunions, much of the initial talk surrounds “where are you now and what are you doing?” I had a bunch ask me that question, and when I said, “I’m a Presbyterian pastor,” they visibly moved one step back. Then they’d say, “C’mon,… really,… what are you doing.” I’d repeat that I’m a Presbyterian pastor, and they’d say, “You’re kidding. How did THAT happen?”  

            There’s a reason they reacted in this way. If you looked back at the way I was in school, especially junior high, there seems to be no possible connection between that guy and who I am now. They remember me in seventh grade, helping spark squirt gun battles in English class each time the teacher turned her back to us to write on the chalkboard. They remember me as the idiot who would put thumbtacks on people’s seats. They remember me as the guy who was always getting bad grades, always getting in trouble, and who seemed to have no interest in religion. My interests were sports, television, and getting into trouble.

            What they didn’t know, because they hadn’t seen me in years, was that when I went to college, I went with the intention of reinventing myself. It can be hard to reinvent yourself in your hometown because your past sticks with you there. People always hold your past against you, which makes is hard to develop a different future. By going somewhere else I was able to begin working on becoming someone else.

            It’s because of that reunion in 1992 that I really resonate with our passage for this morning. Jesus says, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” I certainly don’t count myself as a prophet, but I understand what it is like to go back to a hometown and have people be incredulous that I could be what I was. Too many people knew my past to accept my present

            Apparently too many people in our passage knew Jesus’ history. We have no idea what that history was, but apparently it was enough to make people skeptical about Jesus’ preaching and teaching. Maybe Jesus had raised hell when he was younger. Maybe he had been a nobody. Who knows,… but because people knew too much about him, they were not able to hear God speaking through him.

            Would you know a prophet in your midst? How would you tell if someon was or wasn’t a prophet? What might get in the way of your accepting her or him as a prophet? All throughout the history of Israel and Christianity, there have been false prophets. In fact, all of the true prophets of Israel complained about them. Ezekiel said this about them, speaking God’s words: “My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and utter lying divinations…” Zechariah said this: “For the teraphim utter nonsense, and the diviners see lies; the dreamers tell false dreams, and give empty consolation. Therefore the people wander like sheep; they suffer for lack of a shepherd.”

            There were many false prophets in Jesus’ time. They were preaching all over the place. Whenever I think of the false prophets of Jesus’ time, I think of a very funny scene in the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian. When the film came out in 1979, Christians from all corners protested the film, complaining that the film belittled Jesus. In fact, the film only shows Jesus once, during his preaching of the Sermon on the Mount, and it was very respectful of him. They were really making fun of Jesus’ time, not Jesus himself.

            The film is about a man named Brian, who can’t seem to find a job, who is something of a simpleton, and who has horrendous luck. For some reason, people think he’s a prophet or a messiah, even though much of what he says is fairly banal and ridiculous. The scene from the film that reminds me of false prophets is a scene in which Roman soldiers are chasing Brian through Jerusalem, after seeing him paint anti-Roman graffiti on a wall. As he runs through a marketplace, you see prophets, all lined up and preaching.

            The first prophet is covered with dirt, has wild eyes, holds a forked stick with two amputated hands on them, and has a thick accent that makes it almost impossible to understand. He yells to the assembled crowd, “And the Bizan shall be huge, and black, and the eyes thereof RED with the blood of living creatures! And the whore of Babylon shall rideforth on a grey headed serpent,…”  Then the next false prophet comes into view. He’s wearing a crimson red garb that cascades off his shoulders and arms in tatters. A hood of the same material covers his head and falls across one eye. He says, “And the demon shall bear a nine bladed sword. Nine bladed! Not two, or five, or seven but NINE! Which he shall wield on all wretched sinners, sinners just like you, sir, there. And the horns shall be on the head…”

            Finally, the screen pans to a last false prophet who has bushy gray/black hair, wears a ripped and moth-eaten cloak, and a faint, almost confused look. He speaks in a quiet, timid voice: “There shall in that time be rumors of things going astray,…erm,… and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi,…with the sort of raffia-work base, that has an attachment. At that time, a friend shall lose his friends hammer, and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock…”

            The scene is a lot funnier when you see it than when I describe it. I was able to show this clip during the actual preaching of this sermon (sorry you missed it). It shows that in Jesus’ time there were many false prophets, just as there are many in our times. Back them they were in the street. Today they are on television, radio, and the internet. Jesus warned us of these false prophets in Matthew’s gospel, saying, "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” Jesus recognized that it’s hard to distinguish between false and true prophets.

            I think that in our day and age we have more false prophets than at any time in history because of television, radio, and the internet. It has become easy to follow false prophets in the media because they look or sound so good, and they appear to deeply care about us while they rake in millions for themselves. What makes them false is that they say what’s necessary to make themselves popular, loved, and rich, without really caring much about the impact of what they say. Their preaching is self-focused in the sense that it’s intended to make the world in their image, and it is followed by millions because they tell people what they want to hear. That doesn’t mean they tell everyone what they want to hear. They may only target a small, but passionate, segment of the population, but this segment is enough to make them millions.

            So how do we tell a false prophet from a real one? Here are my thoughts. Let’s start with the false prophets:
  1. They tell people what they already believe, which means that they’re not hard for people to follow. They preach messages that are simple and simplistic, often intended to inflame people’s passions. They are articulate and powerful, and the result is that they help people feel as though someone speaks for them. The key is that they do not stretch people beyond what they already believe, but placate people to believe that where they are is where God wants them to be.   
  2. They prey on people’s emotions. They want to make people feel fearful, angry, or righteously indignant. They tend to preach an “us versus them” message, getting people to fear “them” and what “they” will do to us if “they” gain power. They want people to be angry at “them” and what “they” are doing to us, or will do to us,if we don’t wield out power properly. They want people to feel indignant at what “they” are doing.
  3. They invoke God’s name and will in a way that promotes their own agendas, not God’s. They want us to think that God is behind whatever agenda they are promoting. The newest form of false prophet today is the atheistic false prophet who speaks in almost prophetic terms about the fact that God doesn’t exist, and they do it with such force that they aren’t questioned.
  4. They often hide their backgrounds so that people won’t know that they are charlatans. Or, if they’ve had an unpleasant or checkered past, they use their backgrounds to gain credibility. They create stories about how they used to be an addict, used to be a con man, used to be “whatever,” so that their transformation will make them appear more credible.
  5. They make themselves wealthy in the process. Ultimately, their wealth is the focus. False prophets are always focused on themselves. The key to asking whether someone is a false prophet is to look at his or her lifestyle. A false prophet gets rich through prophecy, and that’s the key to them regardless of what they may say to the contrary.

            How do we distinguish these false prophets from real prophets?  
  1. The first thing you have to recognize about prophets is that despite what we have come to think about them, they do not really tell the future. They tell the present. What I mean is that they look at the world around them, and speak about where God is and what God is doing. They then call people into a life with God. They call us to live God’s way in light of current events. Prophets only rarely speak about the future, and when they do it is almost (although not always) about the near future—what for us would be thousands of years ago.
  2. They literally are an “advocate” for God (προφήτης or “prophatas” in Greek). They are advocates for God, keeping our focus on God, and especially on God’s Great Command to love God with all our mind, heart, soul, and strength, and others as ourselves.
  3. They always call people to carry out God’s will in a way that cares deeply about all people, especially the poor and marginalized. This is a feature that bothers many people in modern American culture, and which has given rise to a prosperity gospel that ignores this aspect of the prophets. The prophets are constantly criticizing the rich for their treatment of the poor, oppressed, and marginalized. Many people today see this as a liberal interpretation of the prophets. The prophets certainly called people to a more moral way of living, but they also constantly criticized Israel for not caring about the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized. It’s what led Isaiah to say, “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners,…”
  4. They often put themselves in harm’s way and crisis as a result of what they preach. They often live with targets on their backs. Their willingness to speak truth to power makes them very unpopular in their time and place, and usually poor. For example, Elijah had to run in the desert because of his prophetic activities. Jeremiah had to run to Egypt. Daniel could have easily been killed for his work as a prophet in Babylon. Prophets don’t live cushy lives. They often have to live in caves, sleep outdoors, and live on very little.
  5. They tick people off because they call people to change, to stretch, to think and be different from the world’s way. The fact is that no one in any day or age wants to be told that they way they think or behave is wrong. Prophets challenge us anyway.
  6. They struggle personally with their calling, and sometimes falter and fall as a result. They are not always confident. They struggle with God, and not always privately. They also have faults that are pretty apparent for others to see, and that sometimes robs them of credibility. For instance, Jeremiah clearly had some mental health issues that caused people to criticize him. Amos was a shepherd and a fig farmer—hardly the background that the people of his time would expect of a prophet. Hosea married a prostitute named Gomer, and she didn’t necessarily give up being a prostitute while married to him. Again, hardly the kind of family one would expect of a prophet.
  7. They call people to a better way of living, to God’s way of living, regardless of the consequences.

            If you want an example of a modern prophet, think of Martin Luther King, Jr. He received little personal gain from his message. He called people to change radically to join God in what God was doing. He ticked people off everywhere by calling for equality of everyone. He struggled and faltered, sometimes publicly. He transformed the nation to a better way of living. He was killed for what he preached.

            Who are the true prophets you see in the world today? They’re hard to pick out. Television makes it harder to recognize them because it’s too easy to know people’s backgrounds, which makes them seem like prophets in their hometown. I would imagine that any really popular true prophet would be investigated and turned inside out, being criticized for things he or she did in his or her youth.
           
            I’ll give you the secret to finding that true prophet, though. He or she is out there telling you things that make you uncomfortable. He or she will make you question your beliefs, get you to care about all people (especially those you may not care about), call on you to do something to make the world better, and lead you back to God.

            Are you following any of these prophets?

            Amen.

Active Listening, Active Waiting, Psalm 130, The Rev. Connie Frierson


         I usually start the sermon with a question so here is the question for you.  Do any of you ever get confused reading scripture? Do you wonder how to tell the important things from the run of the mill stuff? Well some of you might be biblical scholars, but for the rest of us reading the bible is a challenge. So I have one quick and easy tip to tell if a point is important in the bible. You can tell the important points because the writer repeats it twice. You can tell the important points because the writer repeats it twice, Oh duh. Oh true. In Psalm 130, we are called to wait for the Lord like watchmen waiting for the morning, like watchmen waiting for the morning. Hold it. This waiting for the Lord is so important the psalmist repeats the phrase twice, “more than watchmen for the morning. 
         Is that how we wait for the Lord?  What do you all think about waiting?  Is waiting something you like? Is waiting something you are good at?  We think of waiting as a bad thing. Waiting is dead time, a waste of time, something to be avoided.  Yet in our passage today we are called to wait for the Lord. But in our world waiting gets no respect. Waiting is the Rodney Dangerfield of spiritual disciplines.
         I don’t think of waiting as a spiritual act.  I think of waiting as a pain. In the perfect world waiting should be cut to the minimum. There should be no waiting at all. I should go right from my internal idea of what should happen to having that thing happen. Life should be instantaneous, especially MY wants and need. Yet Psalm 130 describes a way of waiting that is profound and expectant. If waiting is so important maybe the kind of waiting and the kind of being that the psalmist is describing is quite different from what we think of as waiting. Waiting might be a so completely different that we are blind and ignorant to what waiting can powerfully and sacredly be.  How do we wait and how does God call us to wait? What’s the difference?
         How do we wait? Take your time answering. I have all day. We wait impatiently. We wait anxiously. We wait with worry or with rage. We wait idly. We are predisposed to action. We live under an illusion. The illusion is that if we just keep on moving we are making progress.  So, not getting in to talk to the doctor, or the slow driver ahead of us or not having the biopsy results or not finding the perfect job or the perfect mate feels to us like wasted time. This is life at a frenetic pace.  Let’s just keep moving along.  But sometimes moving along is just keeping the little hamster wheels of our life in motion.  This isn’t living. This is racing to death. We are going to swerve through traffic, pass the slow poke, cut off the student driver, dodge around the big truck and race to that red light before anyone else.  Does that sound familiar?
         We are waiting all wrong. We are dumb at waiting. We wait passively. We wait anxiously. We wait idly. God wants us to learn soul waiting. Soul waiting is different. Soul waiting is waiting expectantly, hopefully and actively. Soul waiting is a state of being that is completely different from the toe tapping, blank space we are used to. You can see this even in the posture of waiting.  Dead waiting is slack jawed, blank eyed and drooling. Soul waiting is attentive and ready and completely in the now and active.
         I have an example.  Back in the day, long, long ago I was a captain in the Air Force. I spent one long hot summer in Montgomery, Alabama in SOS, Squadron Officer School.  As part of this schooling we had teams that would work through a series of crazy problem solving obstacle courses.  For instance six of us would have two pieces of rope and three poles of different lengths and we would have to get the team over a ditch and a wall. We would walk into the course area and have a set of instructions handed to us and be timed on how fast we could complete the problem solving exercise.  On the first task I was handed the instructions and I started reading them to my team.  So I read, “The team must go from starting point over the yellow logs.” I slapped the yellow logs to illustrate.  Big mistake. We have to get over the yellow log and the ditch without touching them. So my slapping the yellow log before I got that far in the instructions earned my team a three-minute penalty. We weren’t allowed to start moving for 3 minutes. So for about 20 seconds we froze in silence. Waiting. Doing nothing.  Then I asked could we talk? The answer was yes we could talk and think. We just couldn’t move any of the pieces in place. So we spent the 3-minute penalty, reading the instructions and planning our strategy. We made it over the wall in good time despite the three-minute penalty. 
         This is our problem. We think of waiting as the absence of action. Waiting is an opportunity for reflection, for preparation and for readiness. We need a new word in the language for waiting. We need to wait actively. There is a big correlation between waiting actively and listening actively. We need to wait actively like we listen actively.  Who here thinks of listening as just dead space and a waste of time? I mean really, you really would just prefer to tell your own stories and talk right? Well we may hear each other making noise but how often do we really understand? Hearing noise and understanding another person are two different things.  This is like dead waiting and soul waiting. There is a technique called active listening that helps move us from blah, blah blah to connecting.   Active listening is a way of listening intensely to another person.  It is a way to short circuit our preconceptions and get to what the other person is saying by paraphrasing and asking question first about what the other person has said.  So often we think of listening as just a gap between the times we get to talk. This is like dead waiting. We think of waiting as just the dead space between our one goals and our personal desires.  There is space and time but nothing going on in between. But active listening dynamically understands. Active waiting and active listening help us get in touch with God.
         The original Hebrew in this passage gives us a great picture of what waiting for God looks like.  The Hebrew word kavah, which we translate to wait, really means the extension of a cord from one point to another. This is a fine metaphor: God is one point, the human heart is the other; and the extended cord between both is the earnest believing waiting of the soul. This desire strongly extended from the heart to God.  When we hold onto the other end with attention this is the active, energetic waiting. When we wait properly, we can feel the leading of God. The line of waiting becomes a lifeline, humming with energy, from God to us. This is soul waiting. When we put down the rope or hold it so slackly we can’t sense God’s pull, this is dead waiting. Isaiah writes, “Those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength.” The soul waiting can connect us with the source of power and strength. Waiting on God gives us direction and purpose.
         Henri J. M. Nouwen writes so beautifully about the spiritual discipline that is soul waiting. He writes,” To wait open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude toward life. So is to trust that something will happen to us that are far beyond our imaginings. So, too, is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life, trusting that God molds us according to God’s love and not according to our fear. The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination, fantasy, or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.”  Spiritual waiting changes how we look at ourselves and how we look for God in the world.
         The truth is some waiting is harder than others. Psalm 130 starts with, “out of the depths I cry.” The psalmist is in the depths, a bottomless dark place. This isn’t waiting with happy anticipation for Christmas morning. Waiting in the depths is waiting in the hospital room or the dark hours of the morning for the teen to get home safely. Waiting in the depths is an uncomfortable, painful place.  So this waiting takes a different kind of hold on that cord from God. This kind of waiting requires a faith that God is at the other end no matter what pit we are in. This kind of waiting pays attention to who is at the other end of the cord.  You aren’t waiting for just anyone. You are waiting for God, for the Lord of steadfast love.
          When you are in the depths, in the deep pit there will be lots of philosophies that will tempt you to let go of waiting for God.  A Buddhist might say: "Your pit is only a state of mind."  A Hindu might say: "This pit is for purging you and making you more perfect.” Confucius might say: "If you would have listened to me, you would never have fallen into that pit." A new ager might say: "Maybe you should network with some other pit dwellers." A self-pitying person might say: "You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen my pit." A news reporter might say: "Could I have the exclusive story on your pit?" A bureaucrat might say: "Have you paid your taxes on that pit?"  A county inspector might say: "Do you have a permit for that pit?" A realist might say: "Yup, that’s a pit." An idealist might say: "The world shouldn’t have pits." An optimist might say: "Things could be worse." A pessimist might say: "Things will get worse." But Jesus, you in a pit, will take you by this expectant cord of faith and lift you out of the pit.
         Knowing whom you are waiting for is the difference between waiting dead and waiting with your soul.  A Christian holds onto the cord of faith so that God can pull you out. This is waiting with expectant faith. That is why we wait for God like watchmen on the walls on a dark night. A watchman is one who waits, looks and listens with complete concentration. A watchman knows the danger and remains alert. A watchman waits for that steadfast dawn.  So watch and wait wisely from a soul that knows its connection to God and knows the inevitability of the sunrise.
Amen