January 31, 2010 | 8:00 a.m.

Prophecy, not Partisanship

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 71:1–6
Jeremiah 1:4–10

Individuals may be moral in the sense that they are able to consider interests other than their own . . . and are capable, on occasion, of preferring the advantages of others to their own. . . . But all these achievements are more difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups. In every human group there is . . . less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others, and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships.”

Reinhold Niebuhr
Moral Man and Immoral Society

In most seminaries today, a course in preaching is required for completing one’s Master of Divinity degree. Thank goodness, right? As much as students complained about required courses, I don’t remember any of my peers complaining about having to take a course in preaching, for we all knew that preaching is one of the arts of ministry that we would inevitably have to put into practice and we needed all the practice we could get.

So taking turns, we second-year ministry students preached to each other. We also evaluated each other, and though I don’t remember most of the peer-evaluations I received in those days, I do remember reading one anonymous constructive comment. A fellow student had written that she, or he, had a hard time discerning my prophetic voice.

“Prophetic voice?” What did that mean? And how was I supposed to have a prophetic voice? I was twenty-four years old. I had no gray hair to merit the authority to tell others that they had been living in wrong, socially unjust ways, against the will of God and that they should repent. I wasn’t sure what this prophetic voice was and how I could acquire it.

Now, fourteen years later, I happen to have the opportunity to preach on the lectionary text in which the prophet Jeremiah is given his prophetic voice, and in preparing for this sermon, I have been reminded of my question, “What does it mean to speak as a prophet?”

There are different kinds of prophets in the Bible. Hebrew Bible scholar Hans Walter Wolff, whose course I took at a German university, distinguishes the various kinds of prophets by classifying them into three categories. The first category consists of those prophets that appear in the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings – prophets like Elijah and Elisha, active as temple priests. Another category consists of prophets who proclaimed apocalyptic messages, as we find in the book of Daniel. Each of these categories of prophets have particular traits that they share in common. The prophets that most of us think of when we think of biblical prophets are what Hans Walter Wolff calls the “classical prophets.” They are the prophets whose powerful words we know best: Amos, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and others, including Jeremiah.

We know their words best because they spoke public words. They were public speakers who addressed public issues, using public, not esoteric, language. From these prophets the church has inherited a tradition out of which the morality of society, and not just of individual persons, could be brought into focus and called into question. Reminding the church that personal piety alone will not redeem God’s world, the prophets gave the church its moral platform to raise a voice against unjust social, economic, and political policies and structures.

In his book Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr, who was perhaps the most influential American theologian of the twentieth century, argued against what he observed to be a dangerous fiction. The church, he thought, deceived itself whenever it failed to distinguish clearly between the moral behavior of individuals and that of social groups. We should never assume, he warned, that society is making moral progress just because the individuals who make up society are becoming morally enlightened in their personal relationships. He suspected that no matter how good the individuals within a group are, the group would rarely, if ever, act in ways that transcend their egoism and self-interest.

Niebuhr lived during a time when the United States had come to understand itself to be a Christian nation. He worried that the United States had become so confident—too confident—of its Christian ideals that it would fail to see the stark realities of politics. While Christian America had come to recognize that God stands in judgment of every social reality, it had yet to recognize that God also stands in judgment of every human attempt to come up with an ideal social and political order. In other words, Niebuhr observed that the church was dangerously lacking in suspicion that behind most professions of ideals lie partisan self-interests of groups. One of Niebuhr’s greatest contributions to Christian theology was his insistence upon a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” that is, his insistence that because self-interest is so pervasive, we must be suspicious of all groups.

The prophets were, in a sense, the first people in history to alert us to this fact of social life. They were harsh critics of institutions—political and religious—for being corrupted by the self-interests of the powerful. They railed against hypocrisy, especially the hypocrisy of religious institutions.

Regardless of how unpopular their message, the prophets proclaimed what they understood to be religious and moral truths. The moral ideals they proclaimed were not simply expressions of their emotions or preferences; they were claims about the way things are or should be, no matter what other people thought about them.

Truth, as we know, can be a tricky matter. In our day especially, speaking about truth with a capital “T” is tricky because people speak about truth in different ways. For some people, the truth of a moral ideal depends on whether or not it conforms to what people generally believe about morality. For the prophets, however, truth could not be relative to some group of people. A moral ideal given by God was true even if nobody believed it.

Living and preaching during a time when the nation of Israel was suffering under the world powers of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia, the prophets presented both a harsh critique of Israel’s sinfulness and a word of compassion and hope. Although criticism of present circumstances played an important part in their prophetic speech, even more important were the prophets’ hopeful words about the future.

The prophet Jeremiah lived and preached specifically during the time when Assyria was losing its century-long control over Israel and Israel was beginning to show signs of a strong national revival. Instead of flourishing as it had hoped, however, Israel came to be besieged and captured a second time, this time by the Babylonians. Shaped for centuries by images of king and temple and by a royal ideology that began with King David, Israel did not have the imaginative tools it needed to come to terms with its new reality—a reality in which the kingdom of Israel was dead and the Israelites could no longer count themselves alone as God’s chosen people. As a prophet, Jeremiah had to challenge Israel to put to rest its old, established ways of thinking. He engaged himself in what Walter Brueggemann calls “a battle for the public imagination” (Hopeful Imagination, p. 26). Equipped with metaphors and images, Jeremiah used words—fifty-two chapters of words—to win for Israel a new way to think about itself and its future.

This new way of thinking is summed up in the words that God put in Jeremiah’s mouth when he called Jeremiah to be his prophet: “See,” God says, “today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” Through prophetic words, Jeremiah was to relay to Israel that although God had put an end to the kingdom of Israel and although Israel could claim no more special standing over against other nations, God had a good plan for Israel’s future, a future in which “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought” in the land (Jeremiah 32:15) and in which Israelites would be reconciled to God by a new covenant in which God would write his law “on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33) rather than on stone tablets.

It is hard not to notice that the prophetic words Jeremiah was called to speak are first and foremost poetic words. Where there is prose, it is usually to provide context. It is not incidental that the book of Jeremiah is filled with poetic metaphor, image, and verse. Jeremiah must have understood that when you are engaged in a battle for the public imagination, only poetry will do.

In her book, Speaking of Faith, journalist Krista Tippett reflects upon her observation that so many religious texts are poetic and, furthermore, that so many great religious figures speak poetically about what they hold to be religious truths. This may be because religion, she writes, has within its territory “the drama of life, where art is more precise than science” and for which poetry is more effective than argument and logic (pp. 44–45). In order to understand the nature of religion and the role of theology, Tippett thinks that we have to think about truth and knowledge in ways that attend to the poetic potential of words, “the insides and edges of words and ideas, the richness of their forms.” Tippett worries that in our fact-and argument-obsessed culture, we are becoming deaf to poetry. There are serious religious consequences of such deafness: not only do we impoverish our ability to know religious truths, but we also give ourselves very little chance of hearing prophetic voices that call us to transcend our self-interests and partisan views in order to imagine life together in new and just ways.

The prophet Jeremiah was a poet. Perhaps he wrote in poetic language because the truth of his message could not be formulated adequately in prose. Perhaps he drew on poetry in order to move his hearers from partisan to more inclusive perspectives. Although surely not all poets are prophets, it may just be the case that all prophets who truly speak of God and God’s moral vision for society are poets.

Amen.