Notes for a sermon preached at Holy Trinity (Strathcona/Edmonton), Dec. 10, 2023
Texts: Mark 1:1-8; Isaiah 40:1-11
I once saw a priest start a kid’s talk with the question, “What’s a prophet?” It’s great when the answers you get lead into what you want to talk about, but this time the response from one young person was “It’s when you make money.” The talk went sideways from there, because the kids really didn’t seem to know the biblical word, and just wanted to talk about money. They understood that! “Prophet” is a word that doesn’t turn up very often in daily speech, and when it does, its usual sense is a person who foretells the future.
Predicting the future can be part of the prophetic role, but it’s not the whole story – not by a long shot! This past fall I thought a lot about prophets, when our Wednesday morning Bible study group read the Book of Ezekiel. If you haven’t read Ezekiel, let me tell you that the group found it very challenging, often harsh and violent, with relatively few signs of hope, notably in the first half. People left some sessions saying things like “I sure hope things get better!” Not a fun read, but if a doom and gloom kind of guy like Ezekiel is considered a major prophet, we might well be excused for wondering why these people play such a large role in Scripture, especially in the Hebrew Bible.
Fr. Richard Rohr says that all the prophets speak from “the edge of the inside,”[i] and Ezekiel is a case in point. The book is set in the early years of the exile to Babylon. A member of the priestly class (an insider), Ezekiel is among the deportees, far removed from the centre of his people’s life – Jerusalem and the Temple. The big question is why this disaster has happened. The prophet condemns the people of Jerusalem, whose faithless ways have led to the departure of God’s glory from the holy city. From the edge of his people’s existence, the previous insider can speak God’s message clearly.
The latter part of the book is devoted to a vision of a restored Temple and land, which bears little resemblance to what actually happened some years later, when a new Temple was eventually built. Before that could happen, the people had to return, an event on the near horizon for the prophet whose words we heard in today’s first reading, so-called “Second Isaiah,” who proclaimed:
Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her
that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.
The exile in Babylon was drawing to its end. The deportees would be led home to the land of Israel, forging their way through the wilderness, protected by God’s hand as they journeyed through a place of great discomfort. God would give them comfort, which is not the same as making them comfortable. This would be no easy chair kind of existence, but a journey through a wilderness transformed and turned upside-down by the hand of God. Like Ezekiel, Isaiah also spoke “from the edge of the inside,” but now of a return to the centre.
Receiving comfort from God means to be strengthened by God for the days ahead. It means being empowered by God to work through and in places of discomfort. The message of all the prophets, including Ezekiel, Isaiah, and John, is not to “get comfortable”, but to seek God’s way, knowing that God’s way may well – may often! – involve discomfort.
Writing in the December 2023 issue of The Christian Century, Pastor Melissa Bills said this:
Discomfort is holy when it leads us to deeper love for God and neighbor. It is sacred when it spurs our hearts to love and good deeds. It is a blessing when it drives us to seek justice and liberation. It does not cut us off from God’s promises of comfort but rather makes space for us to receive them.[ii]
Chapter 40 of Isaiah ends this way:
[God] gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
This is the prophet whom John invoked in his call to prepare the way of the Lord. John stood in the heritage of Isaiah and all the Hebrew prophets, speaking and acting as God had directed. That’s what makes a prophet a prophet: they don’t speak for themselves, but for God!
John’s message was clear: the Kingdom of God was drawing near, soon to be fulfilled in the one to whom John pointed – Jesus!
John’s life was not comfortable – living in the wilderness, clothed roughly, eating what he could find on the land. But he surely took comfort from knowing that he was doing God’s work, speaking for God, proclaiming the one coming after him, pointing away from himself and his own desires to God’s wishes, pointing to what God would do among those who heeded the call.
I have sometimes heard people say things like “If you say, ‘yes’ to Jesus, your life will be great from then on.” If only that were true! Following Jesus has a cost. It demands much of us. But the good news is that God offers the same comfort – the same strength – that was offered to the Hebrew people in exile. John called the people to repent, and to accept baptism as a token of that repentance – and repentance is hard work. It takes strength and determination, and the courage to refuse the easy way – the comfortable way.
On this Sunday of John the baptizer, let us remember that the need for prophets like John did not end with the coming of Jesus. If anything, the world stands in greater need than ever of hearing the prophet’s call to repentance. We followers of Jesus have inherited the role of John: to point to Jesus, to call people out of their comfortable places, and to proclaim God’s desires for the world.
The great Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has said this:
The prophetic tasks of the church are
to tell the truth in a society that lives in an illusion,
grieve in a society that practices denial,
and express hope in a society that lives in despair.
Only by telling the truth, by grieving honestly, and living in hope can we ever begin to find the comfort promised by the prophet so many years ago. Like the prophets before us, we are not called to leave this world behind, but to challenge the world from “the edge of the inside,” as we see in the ministry of the prophets. We must be prepared to leave the comfortable places in the centre, seeking God’s strength as we live into our God-given mission – our prophetic tasks.
So… let’s go back to that first question: What is a prophet?
Better to ask “Who is a prophet?”
Look around you – anyone you see may be called to step out of their comfort zone, to rely on God’s comfort – and to speak God’s word in in a world that desperately needs to hear that Word!
In the name of the one who came to give us holy comfort,
Amen.
[i] https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-true-center-2023-09-10/
[ii] https://www.christiancentury.org/article/lectionary/december-10-advent-2b-isaiah-40-1-11-mark-1-1-8
Into the blue... 