Prophets among us

The Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent

 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.

One of the more interesting things about Christians is that we are a people of paradox.

A seemingly absurd statement that turns out to be true.  Like a baby born in a stable who is a king.

That’s only the beginning of the paradoxes for us.

You and I still practice one of the best every Sunday morning as we read the scriptures and respond to them.  The Word of the Lord, one says, to which we all respond, “Thanks be to God!”    Or The Gospel of the Lord, and then we all say “Praise to you, Lord Christ.”

We say those things when often the lessons are not about things we would be thankful for, or praising for, if we were brutally honest.

This morning that’s the situation about John.   You don’t have to know much to know that this brief pericope about John is only the beginning of a horrible end for him.   A tyrannical ruler, besotted with women, caves in to the demands of an Ancient Near East Lolita and has John executed – for what?  Telling the truth.

I am not thankful about that, nor do I praise God for it.

But that is the life of a prophet.   Thankless, praiseless.   No one wanting to hear your words.  No matter how life-giving or beneficial those words might be.

Some of you are prophets and I bet you don’t realize it.

Perhaps you work now or have worked with children who have few others to speak for them.

Perhaps you are one who listens to sick folks when no one else does and keeps them company as they journey though illness.

Perhaps you, in the routine of your day, see that simple justice is done by keeping faith and standards in a world where honesty and integrity are often completely forgotten.

Those are only a few examples.

You don’t have to be a John or an Isaiah to tell the world it needs to change.

I read an interesting comment this week, that before we can identify sin, or where the world is apart from the will of God, we have to have known a place where the world is striving to do the will of God.

You can honestly say, “This is not the way things are supposed to be.”

Because you have both an innate sense and a cultivated sense of how things ought to be.

But it’s hard to be the one who speaks out when others are happy to just go along.

Martin Luther King was one.  When he was jailed in Birmingham in the early 1960’s for one of the marches, did you know that a number of prominent Birmingham ministers, including some Episcopal ones, wrote him a letter asking him to wait?  They wanted him to wait a bit longer, they said this was not the time.  “Not right now, Martin, not right now.”

And King’s response, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, asks the question,  “How long?”  How long do we wait for justice in the face of injustice?  One thousand years?  One hundred years?  Or one year?

Unfortunately, examples like Martin Luther King are often only examples because something makes them bigger than life – and often that something is death.

There are many other lesser known prophets toiling in our community, in our country, in the world, seeking to make the world into the place where they know “This IS the way it should be.”

Where children are honored for being people, and not just another mouth, impossible to feed.  Where people actually have a vote that truly gives them a voice in the government they live under.  Where a hand reaching up for aid, meets a hand reaching down to help pull you out of the muck of a disaster.

Knowing what life is like, and what it should be like requires change.   And someone to lead the change.

Metanoia is the technical term for that change.  It’s described as a 180 degree turn-around in one’s life,

a change from what you were to what you will be.

But we all must be the prophets who say, no, really, shout,  “Here is the place where change is needed.”  “Here is the place where God is leading us all to be.” And we’re not there yet. 

For you can turn around 180 degrees and still be walking in the wrong direction.

It is only by listening to the prophets among us and to God in the midst of us that we can find the right direction.  As one of the Eastern wise men has said, you must be the change you wish to see.

But how will we get there?   My friends, we don’t get to the world Jesus described by sitting here in our comfort and on our comfort!

Another paradox is that ours is a faith of coming – and going. Coming together to be refreshed, to be fed in the scriptures, and then going to do the work we have been given to do.

What work?  To love God and to love our neighbor as we love God. To see that our neighbor’s needs are met as if our neighbor were Christ himself.  And to do mercy in the name of God, wherever we find it lacking.

Another paradox is that we may occasionally find ourselves on the wrong road, as we seek to follow Jesus.  But the flip side of that paradox, is that if we are really trying to find Jesus, we have an internal self-correcting compass, found in our baptismal covenant, that will get us back on the right road. 

The road that leads to life, not death.

As we prayed today, “Give us grace to heed the warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer.”    AMEN.