Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
July 2, 2023

Unexpected Company

Joseph L Morrow
Associate Pastor

1 Kings 17:7–16
Matthew 10:40–42

It’s been said and quoted widely that “making predictions are difficult, especially about the future.” But predicting can also be fun. When I was a teenager, a little contraption called the Magic 8 Ball — perhaps some of you remember it — became a rather amusing and playful tool for forecasting the future, or maybe it was more wish casting. It was fairly straightforward: ask a question, shake the ball, and through a little screen you could read a yes, no, or maybe so answer. To be precise, the gizmo offered ten affirmative, five uncertain, and five doubtful responses, which meant the probability of getting a yes to anxious questions adolescents tend to ask was quite high. Does the person I have a crush on like me? Am I going to pass that calculus exam on which my grade depends? How about winning the school election, or becoming lead scorer for the basketball team? Though I can assure you as a thoroughly uncoordinated youth under 5ʹ 8ʺ, lead scorer was not in the cards for me. Nevertheless, the Magic 8 Ball offered a lighthearted approach to an uncertain future.

I have an old friend named Mike who comes about his predictions in a decidedly more systematic and pragmatic way. He is a self-described futurist. In fact it’s part of his job title in the corporate world. From his view, the future he predicts is “translucent — you can see the broad shapes and outlines, but not the fine details.” With this picture, he hopes to help his business, but also humanity at large, avoid pitfalls and mitigate risks. As a responsible futurist, he sees himself as a sensor and sense-maker. He emphasizes that key for the futurist “is the idea that the future is plural.”

The Bible has its own responsible futurists. We call them prophets, and they often announce future events, but the similarities seem to end there. You see the kind of prophets Jesus calls us to welcome in Matthew’s Gospel are portrayed as a rather troublesome bunch. The long span of biblical prophets, many revered in Judaism and Islam as well as Christianity — from Noah to Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Isaiah and Amos, Elijah from our reading today, and Anna in Luke’s Gospel — were disinclined to consult for powerbrokers or see themselves as innovators and influencers. In fact, most never had the credentials or connections to be taken seriously among the intellectual class. They had very underwhelming LinkedIn pages.

But their principal aim was not to be disagreeable for its own sake. Today many would-be prophets relish the spectacle of making themselves known, but according to renowned Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, who wrote a book — perhaps the book — on the Hebrew prophets, biblical prophets would lose themselves in and shrink before the pathos, or passion, of God. They were rattled by a visceral feeling of God’s love, grief, anger, and claim on their lives so that they could not help but speak the fire shut up in their bones.

But that fire was embodied in ways that bordered on bizarre. Prophets lie on their side for 430 days in a row to pronounce judgment. They eat the parchment of scrolls, marry prostitutes, and wander the streets naked. By those standards, the encounter between Elijah and the widow of Zarephath seems decidedly mild. And yet all this should remind us how undesirable it was to welcome a prophet and why the call of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel to welcome prophets, righteous people, and little ones was easier said than done.

The widow of Zarephath struggles through a once-in-a-lifetime famine. Unable to feed her family, bereft of support, for her Elijah’s request was an intrusion without any clear sign of blessing or reward. It is exactly why you should stay away from prophets and righteous folk.

And yet Jesus says, welcome prophets anyway. Elijah wasn’t just a drain on resources. To societal elites like Israelite King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, he became a nagging irritant. As theologian Walter Brueggemann tells it, Elijah was guilty of “imagining the world as though YHWH, the God of Israel and the creator of heaven and earth, were a real character and a lively agent in the life of the world” (Walter Brueggemann, “In Their Own Words,” Political Theology Network, politicaltheology.com, 12 February 2012). These two corrupt rulers preferred to live a fantasy that no arbiter of justice was watching them and that there was no standard for righteousness save the one they invented. Elijah publicly dissented and as a good futurist might do, he cast a vision of the future that invited either their repentance or warned of their downfall.

To invite an Elijah to eat with you, or counsel you, is to invite trouble.

And yet, Jesus says, whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet receives a prophet’s reward.

Jezebel and Ahab had a prophet in their midst but failed to treat him as one. Yet the widow of Zarephath received that same prophet into the place of her poverty, then dared to believe his preposterous predictions that her meager rations would outlast the hunger threatening to overtake them both. I hope each of you have someone in your life who can meet you in your place of hardship, telling you words of provocation but also hope that remind you that your life has value in God’s future. Each of us needs prophets. But communities need prophets, too.

The Matthean community of Jesus’ followers also sought them. In the wake of the resurrection, the early church was subject to somewhat regular purges at the hands of the Roman Empire, and after the 70 CE fall of the Jerusalem Temple, its days within Judaism were numbered. In such a fear-ridden and contested climate, this community gave fresh urgency to Jesus’ words about welcoming prophets, righteous persons, and little ones. Such hospitality was a material lifeline for persecuted and vulnerable disciples on the run as well as the communities sheltering them. But we can surmise it also prevented the community from folding in on itself in fear. By being open to itinerant prophets and servants, Christian communities could welcome Jesus’ imaginative vision of a divine future beyond the Roman Empire’s illusory version of it.

Yes, communities need prophets, and nations do too. This coming week will mark the 247th birthday of the United States. Now as Presbyterians, we dare not confine God’s glory, activity, and care in the world to our particular corner of it. We are not Christian nationalists. But we can honor any attempt to live into the values that resonate with the heart of God. However, those attempts are only successful when illuminated by prophetic imagination.

And I’ve observed that, as a country, the United States tends to do well when it welcomes and listens to prophets and struggles when it dismisses or ignores them. Sometimes they come in distressing disguise. Did you know that in 1944 the US government opened up what would become its only refugee camp? In the third year of the war, 1000 refugees, mostly Jewish, were shuttled to Oswego, New York, confined to a well-guarded old fort. It was a blue-collar town of some 18,000, complete with factories and mills. And given the war climate, few were eager to welcome these newcomers. But one teenager named Frances decided to cross the threshold and began gathering her friends to speak to the kids through the fences. A few awkward English how-are-yous, and she tried out the Italian she learned from her mother. Many of those refugees had spent time in Italy, and hearing the language resonated with them to the point they finally felt at ease, befriended, welcomed.

With the help of those like Frances, the town came to learn from their new neighbors. One article describing the situation said, “Interacting with the refugees, seeing their gaunt and frightened figures upon arrival, and hearing their stories through the fence, many Oswegans had their eyes opened” (Keren Blankfeld, “The Secret History of America’s Only WWII Refugee Camp,” New York Times, 11 September 2020). Opened to the terror of lives ripped open. Opened to injustices from which they were insulated. Opened to the dreams of God in the wisdom and folkways of people they had never known.

What strikes me about this story is not that these refugees had some superlative powers of perception, read fortunes, or uttered hard truths in thunderous prose, but that as they told their stories, they expanded the imaginations of the people of this town. They did the first order of prophets: in their own slight way they helped project and shape a different world, telling of a new possible future.

Those refugees were treading on the same prophetic ground as abolitionists, suffragists, scientists, civil rights activists, and philanthropists who have jarred open our civic sensibilities and pushed us to expand our imaginations.

What was brewing in that refugee camp and the welcome that came out of it was a different imagination for what the United States could be. That it happened there, but not in Manzanar internment camp in California, reminds us how precarious and episodic the prophetic imagination can be: it appears and then sometimes recedes too quickly. Even so, it will not arise from the vacuum of our private thoughts. Group attempts at dreaming God’s future will only produce delusions and deceptions unless we invite our prophetic neighbors into the process. You don’t get prophetic imagination without welcoming actual, flesh-in-bone prophets.

Prophets say things that are disagreeable, and they invite us not simply to accept their words without dissension but to wrestle with them until we find insight.

So Jesus says, welcome them anyway.

Prophets will make us vulnerable to ridicule from others. To welcome them may put some of our social capital in jeopardy. And yet the favor of God we gain from their presence is greater than what we lose in the sight of others.

So Jesus says, welcome them anyway.

And he sends those who aren’t perfect, they might not even be righteous all the time. But for the appointed time and purpose they are a messenger.

So Jesus says, welcome them anyway.

Now in Chicago we say I don’t want nobody nobody sent. And the prophets sometimes come in the form of the little we didn’t ask for.

And yet Jesus says, welcome them anyway. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church