By the Way: The world needs a few good prophets
By Jeff Lackie on March 18, 2023.
We are not sure what to do with ‘prophets.’ The Judeo-Christian traditions around prophets give us some strange ideas about what prophets do and who they might be. Prophets (in general) are viewed with suspicion; loud and frantic and very bold in their public statements, they make us uncomfortable. They draw horrible conclusions about our habits and patterns of living. We’d like to imagine that prophecy is an old-fashioned habit that ‘sensible people’ can safely ignore. But guess what? The prophets aren’t going away. Throughout Scripture, prophets appear when God’s people have lost their way. And the remedy always sounds like disaster. Punishment, exile, famine, conquest. The perils of the prophet are often hard to hear. And because we imagine that we’ve progressed beyond their reach, modern prophets are not easily recognized. But they exist. And they are just as hard to hear. They speak out against arrogance and certainty. They rail against the status quo. Their words and ideas tear the heart out of our comfortable, middle-class religion. We do to them what all people of ‘good quality’ have done to prophets down the ages. We ignore them. We ridicule them. We doubt their sanity. Prophets today are calling out the church. They follow in Jesus’ footsteps and aim their harshest criticism for the perfectly religious – for those who use tradition and letter-of-the-law literalism to hold people to impossibly pure religious standards. That was the trail that Jesus blazed through the religious arrogance of his day. He touched the untouchable; befriended the tax-collector and honoured God above all else. Jesus questioned rigid obedience to religious tradition, and made enemies of the folks who insisted that those traditions were the way to get right with God. We need to follow Jesus on that path. We need to fight for the underdog – the folks with no voice – To call into question any religious practice that punishes differences. We need to be on guard against religion that makes us think that we’ve ‘got It made,’ or have a right to the enormous privilege that we enjoy. Jesus had nothing to do with privilege. Jesus is the ideal model for a modern prophet, and the world needs a few good prophets. Rev. Jeff Lackie is the pastor at St. John’s Presbyterian Church 15-14
