Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, July 5, 2009
Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Ezekiel 2:1-5,
Psalm 123, 2 Corinthians 12: 2-10 and Mark 6: 1-13
“… when (God) spoke to me, a spirit entered into me and set me on my feet…He said to me,…I am sending you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have transgressed against me to this very day… I am sending you to them, and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.” Ezekiel 2 (selected verses)
Prophecy in the warnings of Ezekiel was his “no” to what he saw in the life about him. He was among those exiled to Babylonia after Judah’s conquest by Nebuchadnezzar in 595 BCE. What he witnessed flew in the face of what he understood as God’s purposes for Jerusalem. In helping us understand such a prophetic witness, Rollo May in his book Love and Will might be of help. He writes that “human will in its specific form always begins with a ‘no.’ To be human, from the time of the infant’s first squall is to protest against a world we didn’t make, and to assert one’s self in the endeavor to remold and reform it.”
Some of the most profound contemporary prophesy, the inspired “no” in the face of a felt or experienced violation of a responsible stewardship of the created order often arises in quite secular forms. The New York Times (6/14/09) around this time of the year often includes segments of a variety of commencement speeches I find speaking in this prophetic tradition. Just two examples:
The first is from Stephen Chu, the nation’s present Energy secretary speaking at Harvard. “Climate change is not new; the Earth went through six ice ages in the past 600,000 years. However, recent measurements show that the climate has begun to change rapidly. The size of the north polar ice cap in the month of September is only half the size it was a mere 50 years ago. The sea level has been rising since direct measurements began in 1870, but that rate is now five times faster than it was at the beginning. These changes are not due to natural fluctuations. For the first time in human history, science is now making predictions of how our actions today will affect the world 50 and 100 years from now.” He’s telling us that we need to change our way of living in a big way!
Then at Rice University Zainab Salbi, the founder of Women for Women International told that university’s graduates, faculty and friends “Sometimes you just have to jump off the cliff without knowing where you will land. Sixteen years ago, I jumped. It was 1993. I was 23 years old and horrified by what I was seeing in the news about rape camps in Bosnia. I couldn’t find anyone doing something about the astounding injustices women were experiencing, so I decided to do something myself. I cannot tell you how many people ridiculed my efforts. I was not getting paid, and a lot of people said: ‘Stop doing that. Go get a real job, and get paid.’…At 25 years old I was honored by President Clinton at a White House ceremony for my grassroots work. Even then I would not have imagined that 15 years later, Women for Women would be assisting hundreds of thousands of women in countries all around the world…If I, an immigrant woman from Iraq with no money, can do this, you can too.” She’s telling us that we are indeed our brother’s keeper.
But just as in our lection from Mark, when Jesus began to teach in his own hometown and amazed many by his wisdom, there were those who murmured among themselves that a carpenter’s son with brothers so familiar to them couldn’t be that insightful. They were offended by him and turned away. Responding to that rejection, Jesus simply responded that “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kind, and in their own house.”
Our Gospel lection is a powerful reminder about how difficult it is for us to listen to warnings that threaten our self-image or self-interest. When contemporary prophets begin to say “no” to violations made upon our environment, or “no” to the subjugation of women in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world, we can count on a similar kind of resistance that Jesus, Ezekiel and the other prophets experienced in their time. After all, Jesus wasn’t crucified by being “gentle, meek and mild.” He spoke hard “no’s” and took strong action against the Jerusalem establishment supported by the imperialism of Rome and the unfairness and suffering created by them. In a similar way, the best of modern theologians are often people provoked by injustice. H. Richard Niebuhr, for example, made this comment in the late 1920’s and ’30’s when the Kingdom of God was equated by many of our church people with our nation. He wrote that, “A God without wrath brought people without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
The Church is called to remind us of our final accountability to a power higher than ourselves, to remember the prophetic tradition that has inspired the best of our religious and secular leaders to proclaim their “no” to violations of divine purposes. I close with the same words of Martin Luther King Jr.’ that I quoted last week: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it.”
Ralph Ahlberg
Leave a Reply