29 August 1999
All Saints, Benhilton
Profiting from the Prophets
Jeremiah 20: 7-9, Rom 12: 1-3 Matt 16: 21-27
The reading which we heard from Jeremiah this morning reminded me that the whole subject of Prophecy deserves a bit of an airing.
There was a time, not so long ago, when everyone who attended church on anything like a regular basis could be relied on to know who the prophets were, what they said, and why they said it.
But that's not true any longer. Few churchgoers know anything about Jeremiah, for example and his name conjures up a deeply pessimistic crotchety old gentleman, finding fault with everyone and everything in the way that old gentlemen so often do, and the origin of the word Jeremiad.
the facts are otherwise. There's every reason to suppose that Jeremiah was quite a young man when he was recording his prophetic utterances about 600 years before the birth of Christ; and whilst it is true that things were pretty dire, socially, morally, economically, religiously and politically in the Jerusalem of his day, Jeremiah's message, like that of the other pre-Exile prophets such as Isaiah, Amos and Joel, to name but three, was shot through with a strong sense of hope, so that even the most gloomy passages like the one we heard today, stand out as a contrast, like the effect of the sun shining directly on black clouds in the sky, making them looked even blacker than they really are.
Why was Jeremiah so "down in the dumps"? Well, it seems that nobody would listen to him. "The word of the Lord has meant for me insult, derision all the day long". To his message that violence and ruin would for a certainty catch up eventually with the nation which turned its back upon God, the retort of his hearers was, "Well, it hasn't happened to us so far, so let's carry on as we are".
"This is a waste of time", thought Jeremiah to himself. "I'll keep my mouth shut". Yet no sooner had he decided this than he became aware of an irresistible pressure to "speak out". "There seemed to be a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones. The effort to restrain it wearied me." he said. Like the Author of Psalm 39 so graphically put it "My heart was hot within me, and while I was thus musing the fire kindled: and at the last I spake with my tongue "Lord, let me know mine end and the number of my days, that I may be certified how long I have to live."
The prophets spoke because they found they had no alternative. Let's remember that for the greatest part, what they said was addressed to men and women of their own time about things which were happening then and there. Very, very occasionally one of them would be inspired to look more distantly into the future and suggest what might happen in the long term. But we should be quite wrong to confuse the prophets with fortune-tellers and soothsayers.
Goodness knows there were enough of them around, telling people what they liked to hear and getting paid handsomely for it. These sort of prophets were the spin-doctors of their age, and it was largely against their utterances that the true prophets of the Lord were called by God to speak out.
If you look at any age, distant past or more recent, false prophets, like spin-doctors have always outnumber true ones by several hundredfold. Who, after all, would relish the idea of being in a permanent minority whose job was to tell people what they would rather not hear!
What sort of things did the true prophets say? Well, think of St Paul in the second reading for today when he said "Worship God... in a way that is worthy of thinking beings, by offering your living bodies as a holy sacrifice, truly pleasing to God. do not model yourselves on the behaviour of the world around you, but let your behaviour change, modelled by your new mind – the mind of Christ"
Can you imagine a less popular, less acceptable message in the present climate of opinion! the prophets of this age are endlessly urging people to strive for "self-fulfilment". What they and their hearers seem totally incapable of understanding is that self-fulfilment, like happiness and joy, doesn't come about by striving for it. As William Blake said of joy, it has to be kissed as it flies.
there can be no more striking example of this truth than our Lord Jesus Christ who "for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame" as the writer to the Hebrews puts it.
As a young man in his early thirties, Jesus was much the same age as Jeremiah. Jesus had a highly successful ministry behind him, a gang of enthusiastic apostles beside him and a rosy future as the Messiah of God's chosen people before him, and it must have seemed obvious to him that this was the way forward. And yet another voice, unmistakable in its authenticity, rose up above the "obvious" one in his mind and suggested that his Father's will for him, the Eternal Son, was something very different. It was that he should "suffer grievously at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, to be put to death and to be raised up on the third day
No wonder Peter protested, "This must not happen to you". Seen from the worldly point of view, the death of Jesus on the cross was a tragic waste; seen through his eyes, and the eyes of his Heavenly Father it was "the one, true pure immortal sacrifice which reconciled us to God himself"
"Heaven preserve you, Lord. this must not happen to you!" exclaimed Peter passionately to Jesus. But Peter was looking at things through man's eyes rather than god's eyes, and the two perspectives, whilst they are sometimes identical are more often not so.
It would be easier in some ways, no doubt, if the two ways of looking at things were always or never the same. If they were always the same then we would know anything our nature prompted us to do would be automatically God's will for us. That would certainly save us a whole lot of moral effort, wouldn't it? Do what you like would be our motto as it was that of the Hell Fire Club and Sir Francis Dashwood in the 18th century.
By the same reasoning, if we knew for certain that our natural wills were always exactly the opposite of god's will for us, then at least it would be easy to distinguish right from wrong, because "right" would always be the exact opposite of what we desired. It wouldn't make life easy, mind you, to obey God's will, but at least we'd have a clear idea of what God's will was.
As it it, the problem for us is that the two wills, ours and god's are sometimes alike, sometimes opposed to each other. Discipleship means learning how to tell which is which in a particular case. And it's here above all that the prophets can act as our guide.
For, above all, the prophets were people who learnt how to discern the will and purposes of God, not just for themselves but for their contemporaries, and by taking a leaf out of their books, so to say, we can become more skilled at doing the same thing.
Next week we'll look at how this process, let's call it Profiting from the Prophets works in practice.
Profiting from the Prophets Part Two
5 September 1999
Ezekiel 33: 7-9; Rom. 13: 8-10; Matt. 18: 15-20
This sermon is a follow-on from last week's sermon, so it's called Profiting from the Prophets Part Two.
For the sake of those who missed last week, here is a very short resumé of it.
The prophets were men and women who spoke, almost without exception, to the people of their own day and culture. they weren't soothsayers or futurologists, from whom they kept a good distance. Very occasionally they might be inspired by the Holy Spirit to proclaim (like Micah, for instance) that the Saviour would be born in Bethlehem of Judaea.
Far more often, however, they found themselves called by God to speak out (that's what the word Prophecy means) to the people amongst whom they were living, about things which were happening there and then. Their message, though it was often in clean contradiction to the more popular soothsayers and spin-doctors of the day, was as often a message of hope as it was of criticism.
Now, let's take the matter one stage further.
Much of what the prophets talked about had to do with people's personal behaviour and what we might call the permanent values by which it is intended by God that we should live. If you look at any civilization or society or sub-section of society you will find that, in contrast to what is popularly believed, the values that all societies hold in common with each other outnumber the ones where they differ by a factor of several hundred to one.
Even when they do differ there is usually some straightforward explanation for the difference. A simple example the is ban on eating pork which exists amongst Jews and Moslems. It stems from the fact that in hot climates when there is no refrigeration, bacteria like salmonella multiply much faster in pork than they do in, say, lamb or beef, and are therefore much more likely to give people food-poisoning. So in those societies a ban on pork makes good sense, even if today refrigeration has made it redundant.
But these exceptions to the rule about permanent, universal values are few and far between, and it needs very little acquaintance with the human race to make us realise that "Permanent Values" really are permanent.
But to say that something is "permanent" is very different from saying that it's "inborn" or "self-evident". We don't expect dogs and cats to be born house-trained. We train them. We don't expect horses to be rideable the moment they're strong enough to carry someone on their back. We break them in. The values which make both horses and dogs useful to us are values which have been instilled or inculcated by man.
This is even more obvious in the case of human beings themselves with their much greater potential for good and evil than either horses or dogs. Babies are born with a mass of potential, and as near as dammit no values at all. Baby does what baby's body suggests at any given moment. The whole process of developing the human personality and potential consists in teaching every individual, one by one, to acquire these "permanent values".
Now where on earth can we get these values from other than from people who have themselves learnt them in the first place? It might just happen, I suppose, that a man might go into a church for the first time, see the Ten Commandments on the board above the altar and suddenly say to himself "Good heavens, I've been committing adultery for the past 20 years without realising that it was wrong!"
Possible, but not very likely. Far more certain to "convict" him of the wrong he has done is if someone, spouse, friend, brother, sister or parish priest takes him on one side and, as Jesus suggested, "has it out with him"; or like Ezekiel in the first reading suggests, "warns a wicked man to renounce and amend his ways." Even if he doesn't repent (and of course there's no guarantee that he will) at least he will stand convicted.
It looks then, does it not, that there is a whole code of right behaviour, varying little from one age or civilization to another, that everyone needs to learn and practise. In order for people to learn it, it's necessary for them to have teachers who both know what they're talking about, who practise what they preach, and who have the gift of communicating their wisdom to others.
And that's just the point where the whole process of inculcating permanent values breaks down from time to time. We are going through a such a period of crisis in moral teaching right at this moment.
For not only do many of today's teachers fail to practise what they preach – which can sometimes be alleviated if not overcome by the "Do-as-I-say-but-don't-do-as-I-do" approach. Even if that is far from the ideal it at least gets one side of the equation, the permanent value, right in people's minds.
Far worse than that, however, is the problem that for many years now even well-educated people people have never been taught even the basic rudiments of moral philosophy, with the result that few of them have any idea of how to work out what is right and what is wrong in the first place.
So here, to start you off are some very simple rules about how to educate ourselves into being morally literate and therefore able to pass on the "Permanent values" to others.
Rule Number One: Don't begin by thinking about hard cases Let them come up later when you've had some practice with the easier ones. So don't worry about whether it's morally right, for instance, for a man to steal a loaf of bread to feed his starving family who have already been refused assistance by their friends, their neighbours and the local community. Take instead the much simpler case of how to answer the ordinary common or garden shoplifter who tries to justify his or her behaviour on the grounds that "supermarkets have plenty more where that came from" or "because they're so rich anyway that they won't notice if a little goes missing every now and then"
Rule Number Two: Study the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the epistles of St Paul, especially the passage which we heard this morning, and the writings of good men and women throughout history and try and work out what moral principle lies behind each thing they are recorded as having said. Ask yourself, for instance, why it's so important to take part in at least one act of corporate worship every week, as Christians have insisted we should do from Day One; or whether there are things we can steal from people besides their material possessions: their reputation? their health? their happiness? their future?
Rule Number Three: Never be afraid to ask someone else's advice if you're not certain whether you should do something or not. Many wrong moral decisions today are taken, for example, on the principle of "What Feels Good" or "What Everyone Today Does". Neither if these is a reliable guide to the moral goodness or otherwise of a particular course of action. How often could people be headed off from moral disaster by some friend or relation, speaking prophetically, who says to them "I don't think that's a very good idea" or, better still "Why not do it this way rather than the way you are proposing"
If anyone follows these three simple Rules most moral dilemmas resolve themselves quite simply. It's here, in particular, that a thorough grounding in the Prophets really pays dividends – profits in other words.
For the stock-in-trade of the Prophet in this, as in every bygone age, are what we have been calling Permanent Values – values which don't change because they have come to us from a God who doesn't change, who has spoken to us "by the mouth of his holy prophets which have been since the world began"
Or, as one such prophet so neatly put it: For the best results, follow the Maker's instructions.