Tag Archives: prophetic voice

by

The Prophet (Advent 3)

Click here to listen to the audio recording of this 18-minute message. Or watch the video here on Facebook (the message starts about 25 minutes into the recording). Or read the text summary below.

John the Baptist is arguably the second most important person in the New Testament – second only to Jesus. He was the last of the First Covenant prophets – prophesying about the coming Messiah. Once Jesus arrived, John’s ministry, and that of all the prophets in the First Testament, had reached fulfillment.

Curiously, in John 1:6-35, John the Baptist (or the writer of the Gospel according to the John) repeatedly speaks to who John is NOT, rather than to who John IS. In total, there are five negative declarations in this passage, suggesting a humility on the part of John and a clear understanding of his role, as the forerunner and preparer for the Messiah. John is not the light (8), not the Messiah (20), not Elijah (21), not the Prophet (21) (even though that is really what he is), and not worthy to untie the sandals of the Messiah (27). Strong negative statements about who he is NOT.

Alongside these are three affirmations of who John IS, only one of which he voices himself: he is a witness to testify concerning the light (7), he is a witness to the light (8) and he is the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord’ (23), even though this last is John quoting Isaiah. John makes not independent statements of himself in his own words.

John’s negations and lack of affirmations about his pivotal role and place in the Christian story suggest great humility and that the focus of all his efforts is on Jesus, the Messiah, the promised Son of God. His life purpose is to point to Christ.

This is confirmed in John’s testimony about Jesus, which includes him sharing that he himself did not recognise Jesus (31), but that he saw the Spirit of God descend upon him and remain on him (33).

And so John points us to Jesus: “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I meant…” (29) and the next day, “Look, the Lamb of God!” (35). This is the role of the Prophet – to witness to his experience of Jesus and to point us to Jesus. He is the pointer.

Our role, as Christians today, at the end of 2023, is to take up John’s prophetic role, by pointing to Jesus, as John did. Through our lives, our actions, our words and our values, we are (for better or worse) God’s prophets, pointing the way to Christ.

How do we do this? Our readings provide suggestions:

Isaiah 61 suggests we do so by sharing good news to the poor, binding up the broken hearted, proclaiming freedom to captives, comforting those who mourn, providing for those who grieve, restoring places long devastated, standing up for justice, and standing against robbery and wrong doing. All of these prophetic actions are located in the world – they all speak to the social justice that characterises the Kingdom of God.

Mary’s song in Luke 1:46-55 echoes some of Isaiah’s sentiments: extending mercy, lifting up the humble, and filling the hungry with good things. But Mary’s vision of her son, the Messiah, also includes some strong prophetic words: scattering the proud and sending the rich away empty.

And 1 Thessalonians 5:16-22 focuses on more obviously ‘spiritual’ actions: to rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, hold to the good and reject evil.

It is all of these actions – standing up for social justice, speaking out against injustice and evil, and ensuring a robust spiritual life – that serve as a prophetic voice in the world today. This is perhaps the most important thing for us as Christians to be doing in the world – pointing the way to the Messiah.

Statue of Elijah pointing, by Agostino Cornacchini (1727) at St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City

by

True North

Click here to listen to the audio of this 13-minute message. Or watch the YouTube video below, or read the text summary that follows.

John 15:18-19 reads,

“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.”

Jesus acknowledges that sometimes the world will hate us for our faith and teaches two things about this:

  1. He comforts us by sharing that the world hated him first, so we’re in good company, we’re not alone, we’re not the first.
  2. He explains that the world hates us because we don’t belong to the world, we don’t conform. The word ‘belong’ is what he uses in John 17:16, where he says “They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.” The Greek for ‘belong’ or ‘of’ is ‘up out of’, like a plant or a tree grows up and out of the ground. Jesus is saying that we do not come up out of the world, and that this can lead to tension with the world – that the world hates us when we speak the Truth of God.

Our capacity to speak the Truth of God requires us to have a kind of spiritual and moral compass that shows us the Truth of God. A compass that helps us discern the mind of God.

The verse just before our passage (John 15:17) reads:

This is my command: Love one another.

And this verse is the tail end of a longer passage about the vine and branches, in which Jesus calls us to ‘remain’ rooted in him and in his love (John 15:1-17). So our understanding of the world hating us is the context of loving others and remaining in the love of Christ and thus of God. This love – the command to love – is the frame around our experience of being hated by the world.

On the basis of that, I suggest two learnings about our relationship with the world and its possible hatred of us:

First, Jesus calls us to be thoughtful about HOW we speak to the world. Our words need to be saturated in the love of God. In truth, the Church has often been – and continues today often to be – hateful in the way it speaks to the world. Even if what Christians and the church says is True, it is often said in a hateful, unloving, judgemental, diminishing way. This is the not the way of Christ. Jesus was challenging and direct, but he was never hateful in the way he spoke. We need to model our way of engaging the world on Jesus.

Second, WHAT we speak out on is also important. It is not only about how we speak, but also about what we speak. Let’s return to the metaphor of the compass. A compass points to the magnetic north, but this is not the True north. In fact, they are about 500km apart – similar, but not the same. We need to ensure that our words point to the True north, not the some off-centre north.

How do we know what to speak up for and what to speak out against? How do we know what is True? Again, we must look to Jesus. In Jesus’ ministry, he almost always spoke up for sinners and marginalised people, and out against those in power. We seldom hear Jesus speaking out against sinners and marginalised peoples. And the people Jesus usually speaks out against are the powerful – the powerful of the world and of politics and the powerful of the church.

Christians today have tended to invert this, speaking up for the rich and powerful, and against those who sin and those who are marginalised. They have lost their True North. They are not following in the way of Christ. They are not remaining in Christ and not adhering to his command to love one another.

We must go back to the Gospels and model our lives on Christ, in the ways he spoke truth to power, on the issues that he spoke up for and on the issues he spoke out against.

Jesus is our True North.

2020.06.03_Ny+kompass

Featured image from https://www.euro-academy.com/euroacademy-blog/2018/2/18/pujof0xh909ihjovyuusrkvzsym4pl

by

Truth to Power

Click here to listen to this 14-minute message.

The Gospel of Mark, chapter 6, verses 14-29, presents us with the grisly narrative of the beheading of John the Baptist, at the hands of Herod Antipas, on request of his step-daughter Salome, who was acting on instruction from her mother Herodias. It is a passage that is inserted abruptly in an unrelated narrative about Jesus’ disciples performing miracles and preaching the Gospel. What is the purpose of such a narrative?

In this message, I suggest it serves as a tale about power and corruption. And about our role in the face of such power and corruption. I make three points:

  1. We need to avoid the entanglement of sin and guilt.
  2. We need to recognise and speak truth to the power of the powerful.
  3. We need to accept the cost of discipleship.

Christianity is not just about fellowship and singing choruses. It is not just about the love of God. It is also about challenging power and corruption in the world, about speaking truth to power. It is about championing Kingdom values, such as compassion, integrity, the intrinsic value of every person, equity, justice, the sacredness of the earth. It is about standing against oppression, exclusion, domination, exploitation, injustice and abuse. It is about accepting, even embracing, that speaking truth to power may have negative consequences for us. Christianity is serious business!

(Richard Strauss composed a chilling opera about this narrative called Salome. Not for the faint-hearted! Here is a link to a recent production.)