Prophetic and Pastoral

Sermon for Advent 2, 2024

Let us pray: 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.

Good morning. I usually pray to the Holy Trinity before I preach, and certainly that collect is to the Holy Trinity, but I wanted to reiterate the collect of the day because it sort of sets up the theological emphasis for the day. “Your messengers the prophets, to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation.”

What is a prophet? What do they do? Are they around today? Am I called to be a prophet? These are the questions that I would like to examine today, here on the second Sunday in Advent. 

Last week I gave a sort of primer of one of the aspects of Advent, namely apocalyptic, this notion that God is absolutely on the throne and intends, soon, to come to be all in all. It is a reality that we proclaim and even live, the Church is when we live God’s future now. Prophecy, then, is the human voice to that reality. Prophecy is a person who lies close to the heart of God and gives utterance to this great desire for God to set things to rights. 

In the history of the people of God, prophets only ever really came about when things were dire: times of great political, social, economic, and even environmental breakdown. Indeed, for the Hebrew prophets, there is a consistent vision that social justice, the vitality of the land, and theological righteousness constitute a sort of integrated braid; when one of these was out of place, the others dragged. For example, in the daily office lectionary, we have been in the book of the prophet Amos for a while. There Amos mentions blights upon the land, wild extravagences of the rich; all of which are symptoms of the larger issue of Israel being less about God and more about greed.

The prophet has a large, integrated vision of God’s desires for abundant life, not merely a quietist peace, but a place where Peace and Justice reign together, where the earth itself is able to bloom into praise. This is the vision of the prophet, but that vision was always granted, never cooked up individually out of study or creativity. So the standard way this granting of the prophet’s vision is described in Hebrew literature is that the “Word of God came to Amos, or Elijah, or whomever.” Prophets in the ancient world were also distinct from other ways of divining the truth about the gods’ actions in the ancient near east, Hebrew prophets didn’t answer questions of individuals like, say, the oracle at Delphi. Instead the Hebrew prophets spoke on behalf of God always to the entire society. 

Finally, in many cases, maybe in all the recorded cases that we have in the Hebrew Bible, the prophet is seldom the willing vessel of God’s message. It’s not something you aspire to, indeed Jesus in his critique of the powered elite calls Jerusalem the city that kills the prophet; meaning that they can’t handle the truth; but for the prophet, speaking God’s word often meant persecution and sometimes death. 

Here in Advent we pray that we might heed the prophets. We do this because each of us, the entire church, and indeed our society need constant reminders to remember and recommit to God. 

In my life I have met many who might wish to take on the moniker of prophet, but they really just were kind of aggressive about a particular issue socially. Most of what passes for prophetic these days is utterly indistinguishable from your run-of-the-mill activist. The only person I’ve known who could safely be described as prophetic was our dear friend Angie Forde; whose memory is a blessing to us. Talk about Advent: Angie always walked around with the apocalyptic vision that Christ is returning soon. She was often heard remarking that she was interested in creating a safer community for those without resources and power because, when Jesus arrived again, he would cast down the mighty from their thrones and send the rich away empty; that meant her. So powerful was the vision in her mind and heart that she was working for her own safety when the fact of God’s judgment would be accomplished. I want to return to this prophet Angie in a moment. I’m also fully aware that she’ll make me answer for this mention of her in the sermon one-day. Angie, we will argue this out later, ok?

Now, in the history of the church the office of the prophet has not been so much closed as eliminated. There are exceptions of course, but for the mainstream of Chirstian thinking and practice in the East and the West, prophets are not a thing. However, if it were possible to do a google search of the word “prophetic” in Chrisitian usage over the last 2,000 years, I’d wager you would see that usage at near zero unless it was in reference to the Hebrew prophets, that number usage would be a near zero and then in the 1970s it would start creeping up and then shoot through the roof over the last twenty or so years. The reasons for this are many but I think the three biggest are that 1.) the church has gotten serious about the Jewish roots of Christianity, this has caused a much needed ressourcement of the Hebrew Bible, Ancient Near-Eastern Religions, and various Judaisms. This has, second, allowed the Chirstian church to rediscover the power of the prophet not as a mere signaler of the coming of Jesus but as an important function within Jewish life. And, finally, the use of prophecy as understood in this new-to-us-but-the-original-way, fits awfully neatly into categories of critique and interrogation of power that is prevalent in various schools of Critical Theory. So the prophetic is having something of a resurgence these days.

Usually, you will hear of prophetic words or prophetic preaching that attempts to “speak truth to power,” or otherwise “afflict the comfortable.” Early in my career, I found myself attempting to preach in this manner, to afflict the comfortable. I stopped that one day because of a question I was able to ask directly to the great scholar of the Hebrew Bible Ellen Davis. She suggested that we should never preach against the text or against the congregation. Good advice that I have hopefully kept for nearly ten years. 

Often, a sharp distinction between prophetic and pastoral will be made. Whereas the prophetic is concerned with large societal and systemic injustices and their correction; the pastoral, it is averred, is more intimate, personal, and individual. The pastoral, to use very old churchy language, is about the “cure” of souls. 

So, the thinking goes, the prophetic is for confronting the big sins and the pastoral is for individual care. Sometimes I even hear that deacons are to preach prophetically and the priests pastorally. I’ve also heard some priests say they wish they could preach more prophetically or more pastorally, as the case may be; the point being that the two, pastoral and prophetic,are diametrically opposed. 

Obviously, I’m setting up a dichotomy that I intend to overthrow, but before I do that, I’d like to return to the earlier fact that the church has not, until very recently had an office of prophet. 

The reason that you won’t find prophetic matters in the Christian church is because since the very beginning, Jesus Christ has been identified as the culmination of prophetic desire. What I mean is that all that the prophets described and hoped for, the coming of the Lord,  was brought into being in Jesus Christ. If the prophets preached the coming of the day of the Lord, where God would come to be with us, Emmanuel, Jesus is that. Jesus is that which the prophets proclaimed. Did those ancient prophets know that they were proclaiming Jesus? I don’t think they did, instead they listened to God and discerned God’s desire for peace, justice, and presence. After centuries of that desire being expressed, a people were formed around that desire and, into that people, God came. The prophets listened to God’s hope and plan, they gave voice to it, it prepared Israel to think in terms of relationship with God. God came among those prepared people as Jesus: Merry Christmas.

So, from the beginning of the church, Jesus is understood to be the fulfillment of all prophetic desire. When something is fulfilled, you have no more need of it. You can’t be thirsty while you are drinking. 

To return to the idea of the pastoral. Pastoral has to do with shepherding, that’s what pastor means. The pastoral is the caring, intimate, leading, and even oversight. Pastoral activities are the meal train for a sick friend, the continual checking on while someone is in trouble, the vigils of prayer and presence. These pastoral activities have the name of Jesus on them because they directly derive from our pastor, the Good Shepherd. 

And, yet if Jesus is the culmination of prophetic desire; what then of the pastoral? I have not-so-humbly proposed that Jesus has wed the pastoral to the prophetic. Therefore we look to him as a walking story of the prophet’s desire. This is why we look to Jesus for everything: because he was a human life that most fully expressed God’s hope for humanity. The end result in how we act day in and day out is that our care for others, friend or stranger, is a prophetic act. But it goes beyond that, it means that when we do something that might get the category of pastoral, we are spreading God’s hope for the world. 

The pastoral, the caring, the listening, the loving, the attention given, is prophetic because it says to world: this is how things should be: shared burdens, multiplied joys. 

I want to return to our friend Angie, and I’m sorry many of you did not get to know her, she was truly a unique individual, this made her wondrous and maddening. Most people who saw her many efforts to alleviate the plight of people living with homelessness were amazed by it, truly tireless work. But she prayed 100 times more than she worked. And of course she wouldn’t have thought of prayer and work being at all separated. I remember at her funeral, no actually this was after it, out somewhere, there was someone who had seen the live-stream of the funeral and was thanking me for it. This was a person who worked in an agency for service to poor people. This lady told me that she had no idea about Angie’s activity in the church. I had to laugh, I answered, “Where do you think all that care came from?” It was awkward for a second. 

Let me tell you, if you think you are engaged in work or speech that you think is prophetic, and it is not linked to the pastoral, linked to deep relationship and sense of abiding, you will burn out, and soon. Basically if it looks more like Amos and Isaiah and not much of Jesus, well, you need Jesus. For sure did Jesus turn over the tables and speak truth to power, he was also with people, healing, listening, talking, arguing, loving. 

Since the prophetic is pastoral and the pastoral is prophetic we see now that while Christianity is a set of understandings about what the universe is and what God is; our faith is also a skill. And like all skills, there are ways of training and practicing that get good results. Understanding that the prophetic must be pastoral is a key understanding. So no longer are we free to just sling judgments around, no longer are we free to criticize from a distance without relationship. Instead, we are called to live like the culmination of prophecy, Jesus, to move closer, to get curious, and dig in, dig into relationship. It’s not easy, and it requires more than a little patience and the setting aside of your own agenda. 

My prayer for each of you as we move through Advent is that you heed the prophet’s warnings, that you return to God’s great hope; that all of us will take seriously the vivid vision that God has for us and then see the bright light of that vision concentrate like a laser onto the manger in Bethlehem where God’s hopes and our fears meet. Amen.