They were not the recognized scholars by the intelligentsia and cultured. They were not slated to become the top religious officials nor were they successful merchants or sagacious estate managers. Few would have wanted them as political leaders. Instead they became part time poets, sometime visionaries, itinerant teachers with a few motley followers, and mystics, with a touch of personal charisma perhaps, but few credentials claiming a definite area of expertise. They were known as the prophets and they shaped the scriptures far more than the movers and shakers and the high and mighty of their time.
First and foremost the prophets were social critics who held up and compared the society they lived in, to the society they believed God had called them to form; God intended Israel to be like a city on a hill, rising from the miles of flat plains around them; a model and example for all humanity to look up to and emulate. The prophets did not set out to be predictors of events far off in the future, but they did warn of the inevitable consequences of an unjust society. They exposed the widespread economic and social corruption of their time, rather than concentrate on personal sexual morality that everybody could nod their heads and comfortably point their fingers at someone else. Without exception, all of the prophets could be accused in some way of inciting class warfare. They knew that a nation built on the sands of oppression with the bricks of dishonesty, deceit and exploitation of the least powerful would not stand.
In their time, they were rarely heeded. Again, they had no credentials to lean on or power to exert. They rarely said what people wanted to hear. Like most calls to an honest self-examination and earnest insistence on profound change and repentance, their words were painful and scathing. It was far easier to dismiss them as unpatriotic, extremists, and weirdoes and run them off into a wilderness of oblivion.
Micah some of whose words we read for our first lesson had seen the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the people taken off into exile. The Southern kingdom, where he lived, survived, but it had been a matter of luck. The Assyrian Empire had decided to stop expanding, for the present at least. The Southern Kingdom with its capitol of Jerusalem was just ripe for the plucking. Militarily it was a pushover. In the end, of course, the majority of people dismissed Micah and another foreign empire would swoop down, destroy Jerusalem and take tis people into exile.
Some people, however, remembered Micah’s words and preserved them for future generations. Nonetheless the question may always be raised of whether it does any good to honor and heed the words of a prophet. Prophets were noticeably unsuccessful in their own time to change most people’s minds or the brutal course of history.
Yet it is the prophets who inspired the remnant of Israel to hold on, not to assimilate with the people of Babylon, but to remember their heritage, and then to return to Jerusalem and rebuild it once more. The prophets set the hearts of succeeding generations on fire, including Jesus’. In a sense Israel would have withered and died if the prophets had not lived and their lessons had not been remembered. Moreover their words have inspired the witness of countless people of faith everywhere ever since.
This past week at our opening session on The American Church in Times of National Crisis it was suggested we have a session on the great depression and the church’s response and how that may inform us on what God is calling the church to be today. Are there some prophetic words in the midst of all the media noise?
They have been roundly discounted and condemned by the high and mighty of our age, but the Occupy Wall Street protests may be saying something significant. To be sure, some of the crowd is professional rabble-rousers and aimless joiners. Yet they also carry a message about economic and political injustice, and expose a system that over the past decades seems more and more biased towards the very rich at the expense of everyone else, the 99% of us. It’s not a movement against wealth or the good life per se; it’s about exploitation of the less powerful by the very powerful. It’s about the denial of the possibility of a good life for anyone but a few. In a sense their message is similar to the Catholic Workers Movement that grew up in the 1920’s. We shall see, we shall see what will become of them. Yet I know that 9/11 is not the only watershed event of our time. The crash of Wall Street, the financial scandals of the banks too large to let fail, and shenanigans of financiers like Bernie Madoff seem to be indicative of a society that needs to change. And perhaps it is people of faith, people called to love God and our neighbors as ourselves, who are called to bring it to task. Indeed as a prophet from another time, just a few short decades ago used to sing, “the times they are a’ changing.” In changing times especially, the voice of the ancient prophets like Micah might be well to heed.
