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Learning from Whistleblowers

When I was growing up, my good friend Roger had a grandfather who was a Methodist minister.  Whenever we would meet at Roger’s house before going out for the night, Grandad, as we all called him, always offered us words of wisdom.  As we all approached college age, he would give us career advice.  “I always tell young people, go into something that is needed, “ he told us.  Years later, when he passed away, Roger’s family paid him a public tribute.  In the town, families could buy memorial benches for the park with a plaque to honor their loved one.  Roger’s family did just that and on the plaque had inscribed some of Grandad’s simple words of advice, “Stand up.  Speak up. And know when to shut up.”

 Actually those words are two-thirds of a good job description for an Old Testament prophet.  Prophets stood up and spoke up for God, but never knew when to shut up.  Often that led to persecution and even death.  Prophets were people who spoke the word of God.  Their preaching would often begin with the bold declaration, “Thus says the LORD…”  Usually that opening was followed with strong critiques and warnings directed at those in power; people like priests and kings.  Imagine the conviction and certitude it takes to speak in such a way.  Imagine the criticism and attacks one would draw by speaking such words.  To put it in contemporary terms, prophets spoke the truth to power.  When their culture and its institutions strayed away from God’s ways, they were the whistleblowers who sounded the alarm that things were off track.

Such a description may come as a surprise to many.  Popular, and even Christian culture have defined prophets as predictors of the future.  They have been reduced to mere fortune tellers or the ancient equivalents of psychics. To be sure, prophets warned Israel that if she continued on her corrupt paths, destruction would indeed lie in her future. But the intent of these warnings was not to show off some supernatural prognosticating ability, rather it was to call the people back to the life God intended them to live.

The Hebrew word for prophet is navi and it means “seer”.  Prophets were those whom God gave the ability to see what others could not.  What God invited them to see, led them to speak out for God.  In this series we have been exploring some of the character types of the Old Testament, wise people, kings and prophets.  We are discovering the ways in which we can be like them in our context.  Some are easier to emulate than others.

Last week, we learned how the Wise tested the religion of their culture against their everyday human experience.  As postmodern people, most of us are pretty good at that.  Unlike previous generations, we are quite comfortable asking questions about  and even deconstructing our faith.  We may even relish the role of being the person who, when someone says, “Thus says the LORD,” replies “Not so fast  maybe he doesn’t.”  But many of us are profoundly uncomfortable being the one who says, “Thus says the LORD.”  We are afraid and even unwilling to be prophetic and speak up for God’s righteousness and God’s justice,  and we are paying a heavy price for that. 

Just as in times past, the world around us is an echo chamber of voices of immorality, injustice, selfishness and corruption.  Someone needs to be the prophet, the whistleblower, to speak up and say, “this is what God says in this place and time.”  Who is that going to be?  How can we be prophets and speak for God in our day?  If we are to be true disciples of Jesus, we must be prophetic, just as Jesus was.

Did You Ever Notice...

Have you ever decided to you were going to lose weight and get in shape?  At one time or another, most of us do.  Usually some event triggers our decision.  The triggering event can be anything from a health scare, like a high cholesterol level, to seeing a picture of yourself that forces you to say, “Do I really look like that?”  The first step to getting in shape is deciding how you are going to do it?  Will you go to gym?  Will you order that exercise DVD you saw on TV?  Will you follow the diet you heard a celebrity talk about on Oprah?

 With all of those options on the table, you can become a bit skeptical.  How can you determine, which of these programs work for you?  In the end, how does the real experience measure up to all the hype?  You’re not quite ready to believe everything you see in an infomercial or what a high-pressure gym salesperson tells you.  You need to do a reality check. You may look at before and after photos, read testimonials, or look up reviews by experts on the web.  After doing all that, you may still remain skeptical.  You’re not convinced.

Yet there is another way you can discover a diet and exercise program that is always convincing and dispels your skepticism.  When you bump into someone you haven’t seen in a while and they have lost a lot of weight, look great and are in shape, the first thing you ask them is, “How did you do it?”  The answer they give you will carry far more weight (pardon the pun) than any commercial or gym salesperson. The reason is simple.  You can observe first hand whether or not their fitness program works.  

We go through this process when it comes to any new thing in our lives.  We evaluate the products we buy, the neighborhood into which we move, the schools where we send our kids, even the people we meet and with whom form relationships.  We even do it with our religion.  We may not be as open about it, but we do it nonetheless.  We compare what we hear about God with what we actually experience in reality.

Many of us have religious friends who tell us things about God with definitive assurance.  They may tell us God is in control of everything and has a plan for our lives.  Usually one can’t express your questions directly to a person who think that way.  So we walk away from the conversation quietly wondering whether that is really true.  We compare the reality of life to that statement and wonder if it makes sense.  We may call to mind a particularly tragic or meaningless loss of someone we loved, a young person killed in an accident or an innocent person murdered.  We may recall human acts of evil, such as the Holocaust or natural disasters like tsunamis and ask, “Was God really in control of that?”

Making matters worse, we feel guilty about even asking the question.  Why can’t we be like our friend and just take things on faith?  Will God be angry with us for daring to even ask such a thing?  Isn’t comparing religious claims to our actual experience something that is only done by atheists?  Isn’t it unbiblical?

In fact, comparing religious claims against our actual lived experience is very biblical.  In the Old Testament, there is a whole genre of authors who did just that.  The Judeo-Christian tradition calls them - not foolish unbelievers, not heretics - but the Wise.  In the pages of the Old Testament, we met many types of characters; prophets, priests, kings, and wise persons. Unlike the others, a wise person did not have a hard and fast job description.  The Wise did not pronounce revelations they received from God, as prophets did. Like stand-up comedians, the Wise offered observations about everyday life.

Taste and See - by Bob Scott

You may be wondering why, if we’re talking about Jesus and prayer this morning, we showed you that clip from Monty Python. When you heard the topic, you probably didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition. Well, the first thing I have to say is… that’s right…

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Marx said that history happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the next time as comedy. That’s how it seems to with the Inquisition, which was the Catholic Church’s way of combating heresy. Heresy basically means believing something the Church doesn’t approve of. Starting in the Middle Ages the Inquisition had the power to put heretics on trial, and if found guilty they could be subjected to serious punishment, including burning. Today it all seems pretty horrible, and even the idea behind it – that the church gets to say what right belief is – feels somehow medieval. Branding something heresy sounds like mind control, and we want none of it.

But the idea of heresy came into being long before the Inquisition. In the early Church, lots of ideas circulated about who Jesus was and what he taught. Sometimes we get the idea that the early Church had a clear set of beliefs and scriptures, and it’s gotten muddled over the years. The reality is just the opposite. They had to sort through a wide variety of experiences and stories and practices and try to determine which ones would best embody the experience they had of Jesus and allow them to pass that experience on to future generations, because it was so precious to them. Who was he, and who is he? What did he teach? How can we follow him?

One of the key statements about Jesus took about four hundred years to arrive at. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 stated what the church still believes today: that Jesus is fully human, and fully divine. He wasn’t simply an inspirational person with good ideas, but neither was he a divine being just pretending to be human. He was 100 percent God, and 100 percent human. Notice that’s 200 percent. We’re a little beyond everyday physics here. But the point isn’t about metaphysics or abstract theology. It’s actually crucial to our understanding of who Jesus is for us, today, for how we can follow him as disciples, and therefore how he can transform us and our world.

 

Have you ever seen this picture? If you look at it one way, you see an old woman. If you look at it another way, it’s a young woman. If you’re seeing one right now, let your eyes go soft and you’ll probably see the other. People who study such things tell us that we can all see either image, but we can’t see them both at the same time. I think there’s an analogy with how we see Jesus. When we focus too much on one aspect, we lose the other aspect.

I think that, if there’s a heresy we tend to fall into today in the church, it’s that we tend to focus on how Jesus is different from the rest of us. We may not use these words, but he winds up being seen as a magical being who gives us things and takes care of God for us. And what that does is let us off the hook. “Jesus took care of it.” Right? But Jesus says that to be his followers we must take up our own crosses daily. It also means we miss out on a lot. He said he came that we might have life and have it abundantly. Jesus was not only human, he was fully human. One of the early Church fathers said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

It's OK to be a Christian

Here's the video I submitted to be a speaker for The Nines Conference.  Please go to the site and vote for me so I get selected.

It's OK to be a Christian - by Don Heatley from The Nines on Vimeo.