by The Reverend Craig Lemming, Associate Rector

In the name of The Holy Spirit who has spoken through the Prophets. Amen.

I love when the appointed scriptures keep us on our theological toes. We have our work cut out for us this morning! We have the prophet Amos being rebuked by a king’s priest for speaking God’s disruptive truth to power. We have that sublime 10th verse of Psalm 85: “Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” We have Paul’s spellbinding proclamation of Christ gathering up all people, all of creation, all things in heaven and on earth in God’s freely given Spirit of adoption. And we have the gruesome beheading of John the Baptist by that weak, narcissistic, man-baby, Herod Antipas. This is spiritual work that demands our best efforts. And I made a vow to God and to all of you, to give you the best that I’ve got. In the words of American songstress Anita Baker:

The scales are sometimes unbalanced
And we bear the weight of all that has to be
I hope you see that you can lean on me
And together we can calm the stormy seas

We love so strong and so unselfishly
And I tell you now that I made a vow
I’m giving you the best that I got.[1]

The very best that we’ve got, when it comes to understanding prophets, is Abraham Joshua Heschel. Holocaust survivor, key figure in the Civil Rights Movement, Rabbi, and arguably one of the greatest Theologians of the 20th century. In his book, The Prophets, we learn that a prophet is deeply compassionate, able to make God audible, and to reveal not only God’s will, but God’s inner life. To be a prophet, Heschel teaches, is to be in fellowship with the feelings of God, to experience communion with the divine consciousness. He states that the prophets’ experience of God involves sympathy with divine pathos; the deep concern by God for humanity. Heschel writes,

… we must think as if we were inside [the prophets’] minds. For them to be alive and present to us we must think, not about, but in the prophets, with their concern and their heart. Their existence involves us…
[The prophet’s] fundamental objective was to reconcile [humankind] to God.[2]

I think we can agree that our whole world is in desperate need to heed the prophets’ call to reconciliation. We need prophets to remind us that God feels our anguish with us. The prophets are essential for us to know God’s heart breaks with ours. Sympathy with divine pathos moves us away from indifference, to courageous and creative compassion. Heschel believed that God is not the detached, unmoved mover of the Aristotelian tradition, he insisted, God is “the most moved mover,” deeply affected by human deeds. Divine pathos means God’s constant involvement in human history is fundamentally an emotional engagement. Prophets show us that God suffers when human beings are hurt, so that when we hurt another person, we injure God.[3] Heschel also said, Adolf Hitler and his followers came to power not with machine guns, but with words. Words steeped in a debased view of human beings rooted in contempt for God. This is why prophetic words are an absolute necessity today. Especially in this country as the Supreme Court flirts with fascism.

In the Nicene Creed, we say we believe the Holy Spirit has spoken through the prophets. So, we turn to the two prophets in today’s Scriptures. Amos: the first Prophet to write down God’s words; and John the Baptist: the prophet Jesus praises as the greatest among those born of women[4] whose words fascinated and terrified Herod Antipas. Amos is admired for the purity of his language, his beauty of diction, and poetic art. His prophetic language was not cultivated in the schools of prophecy, nor was he born into a prophetic heritage. Amos declares plainly, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’” In phrase after riveting phrase, Amos calls God’s people away from greed and showy performances of empty piety. Amos denounces the hypocrisy of the pious rich whose extravagantly selfish and pampered lifestyles ruin the lives of the working poor. These divine words spoken and written by a lowly shepherd and dresser of sycamore trees disrupts the status quo and upsets the ill-gotten, luxurious ease of the religious and political elite.

Now, John the Baptist, son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, was born into the elite priestly class – both his parents were descendants of the first priest Aaron. God calls John away from the exclusive inner circles of the priestly temple elite to preach repentance to all people in the wilderness. Amos and John show us that God does not call the qualified. God qualifies those who are truly called. When those who are truly called by God to speak and write prophetic words, they get into what John Lewis called “good trouble.” Their words have the power to heal humanity for generations. A prophet called by God speaks words that deconstruct the idols of greed and power that are destroying our lives and the planet. Prophets proclaim inconvenient truths to renew God’s promise of salvation for all people.

Truthful words terrify tyrants. John called God’s people to turn away from the bloodlust, greed, and vainglory of the Roman Empire and to prepare for the arrival of God’s love incarnate and the Kingdom of Heaven. These truthful words terrified Rome’s puppet-king Herod. The Gospel says, Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and Herod protected him. When Herod heard John, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him. Herod was utterly fixated on John’s clear and powerful words. Perhaps Herod, like all of us, longed to know and to understand what he and we ought to do. In today’s Collect we ask God to grant that we may know and understand what things we ought to do, and to also have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them. Herod lacked the grace and power to do right. Caught in Herodias’s check mate, Herod saves face for his idol: unimpeachable, imperial power; and ends the life of God’s greatest prophet.

Getting out of our own ego’s way, to graciously receive a prophet’s truthful and disruptive word from God, takes courage. Courage to surrender to God’s will. Herod was incapable of surrendering to God’s will to love. The courage it takes to listen, accept, and surrender to a prophet’s divine words is sorely lacking today. Herods are everywhere. And there is a growing indifference to what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.”[5] Indifference to evil is complicity with injustice. That’s why Prophets are compelled to cry out. They inspire us to reject indifference, surrender to God’s will, and do something compassionate for another person. That is when “mercy and truth meet together; and righteousness and peace kiss each other.”

Heschel writes that “prophecy is a sham unless it is experienced as a word of God swooping down on [humankind] and converting [each of us] into a prophet.”[6] The words of John and Amos compel us to seek out and engage in godly, prophetic language of our own. Thoughtful language. Genuine, clear, wholehearted words that speak truth in love that heals. Language like Toni Morrison’s, who wrote:

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.[7]

In these warped, twisted, and dishonest times, I pray that we will see the plumb line God showed the prophet Amos. A plumb line to guide us as we build lives in true alignment with God’s love, justice, and equity. Which prophet in the Holy Scriptures will you read as you come to know, understand, and accomplish the things God is calling you to do? Side note: it takes exactly 26 minutes to read the entire book of Amos. Read it. It’s really good! As we inwardly digest what the Holy Spirit has spoken through the prophets, what do you imagine God will give you the grace and power to accomplish in the face of evil; especially in these troubling days of national and international political turmoil? Will you write that Op-ed? Will you write to your elected representatives? Will you write prophetic words to your president, congress, and supreme court? Will you speak and write God’s love language? May the truths we receive from God’s holy prophets, become the thoughts, words, and deeds of love that we do. And we thank God for setting us at tasks which demand our best efforts, and for leading us to accomplishments which satisfy and delight us.[8] Like Amos and John the Baptist, may each of us continue giving God, all of our neighbors, and all of Creation the best that we’ve got.

Amen.


[1] https://youtu.be/gKGj8XwooYQ?si=fMeI1uc7BCEte4Ar

[2] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York, NY: HarperCollins Perennial Classics, 2001).

[3] Ibid., xviii.

[4] Matthew 11:11. 

[5] Hannah Arendt, Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 2002). 
[6] Heschel, xviii.

[7] Toni Morrison, “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” in The Nation, 23 March 2015. 

[8] The Book of Common Prayer, 836.

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