December 8, 2006
Prophetic Imagination
Advent 2C / Lk 3.1-6
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
John, the Baptist, was a baptizing fool. As Apostle Paul would put it, he was a “fool for Christ.” But that he was a “baptizer,” let there be no doubt. It is that calling from which comes his name. And it is that calling that always anchored his fiery and thundering antics. He carried a lot of freight in his flamboyant and head-long service to his God, and thus came the people, flocking to his cause.
John Baptist was a prophet in the grand sense. He must have had a set of lungs the envy of the New York Philharmonic’s brass section. He had precious little to no interest in the liturgical puffery some of us get into. Indeed, were he to show up in one of our churches come Sunday all arrayed in his rags with his mess kit full of grasshoppers, the more faint-hearted among us would likely not stay around all that long.
We do well when we think of him to remember that “prophet” means indicter, not predictor, spokesperson, not fortuneteller, and that the true prophet is always deeply rooted in and loyal to the tradition in order to effect his message even more clearly. His role — or hers, for we just may have one now in our new PB — is to unmask, to name, and to expose pretense in all its forms in and out of the church rather to encourage it. It is not a welcome task. There is little evidence to suggest that anybody ever invited a prophet home for supper more than once.
But prophets are essential, indeed, I believe, absolutely necessary in whatever the culture or the religion or the church. We need them to keep us away from our temptation to think of ourselves only as a tax-exempt and privileged society, somehow immunized from the run-of-the-mill cares everybody else has to take for granted.
Take, for example, the pretentious way some assume as a free pass the commission to make disciples of all nations and to define evangelism as running roughshod over whatever other religion and culture that may stand in the way. Take, for example, our perilous treatment of Native Americans in our early years as a nation and take again our recent shrugging off the destruction of Mesopotamian treasures in Iraq as just breaking up a bunch of pots with the offhanded comment that “stuff happens.”
This commission to make disciples is a truly noble charge, and it is from our Lord himself. But it can become a dangerously subtle way to presume that evangelism simply means to makeover others in the image of ourselves and then to overwhelm the world in some grand March of the Clones. Dwelling on this — as we are prone to do — can lead us to overlook an even more important and prior commitment, a wider and deeper evangelism to which the prophets must call us and which scares the socks off many.
When the early church was itself chosen, and given that Great Commission to make disciples, it was never set free to such ministry until it first attended to the prior and greater Commandment, the commandment on which hangs all the law and everything else, the commandment to love God and neighbor as self, and in doing so, thus to become a community under the holiest of orders one can ever imagine. These orders have been called the “prophetic imagination.” They are the way our ministry must constantly be conceived and shaped and implemented. And their very living heart is embodied deeply in our Baptismal Covenant.
Listening to and embracing these Covenant vows, we can hear them call us away from the presumption of grandeur and numbers and remind us that our true service to the world is not so much to “plant” church as it is to “be” church. This even greater evangelism is not all that different from the one described by the prophet in Isaiah — not to overwhelm the world in triumph but to suffer and die for the world and to be champions for a just peace over all. If we are to be leaders, let us be servant leaders in the image of our Lord. For it is to that imaginative ministry that we are called.
This is a quickening time in our lives as a parish and a diocese. There could not be found a richer juncture than the threshold on which we now stand, readying ourselves to enter into our own commissioned prophetic ministry in this community, indeed, in this nation. We’ve a new bishop, unknown and untested. We anticipate a new rector whose role with us we are making every intelligent and thoughtful effort to understand and articulate. We’ve a rich tradition in prophetic and pastoral and teaching ministry from which to draw our energies and to plan our future. God blesses us in many ways all the more to expect us to be an extravagant source of God’s grace to enrich and nourish ourselves and our fellows and the community at large.
This kind of neighbor love, however, is singularly personal and at most a matter no wider than one’s family and close friends. The church as institution cannot love in this way, and we’d be remiss to think that it can. But it can fulfill the Lord’s Great Commandment to love by continuing to create and model a just community where people can live together in security and safety, mutual commitment and freedom to be at peace, and to become who they are.
Advent as a season of preparation calls us not only to the ultimate joy of Christmas, but as well, to remind us that there is no more winsome evangelism than to become like a great magnet for God, drawing women and men and children into this new creation.
Perhaps you may remember when our colleagues in the United Church of Christ dared such an invitation through a TV commercial. They left no doubt that they welcomed all sorts and conditions of women and men into their fold. CBS and NBC refused to run it, labeling it “too controversial,” and what is even more absurd, calling it contrary to the Administration’s opposition to gay marriage — a fact which was not even mentioned in the commercial.
The UCC chooses to live by such prophetic imagination and needs have no concern for its own righteousness, but only to help create a fair, just, and open community. On the other hand, the networks are simply not into that sort of thing. Like the prophets, however, the UCC may well not be invited out to supper a second time.
And well may not we. But we can and have and will invite others to our board and table. It is that kind of imagination to which we are called, a prophetic imagination demanding justice and fairness and peace for all.