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Sermon Notes*
Sunday, November 2, 2014
all SAINTS SUNDAY 11:00 a.m.
The Son Shall Go Down Upon the Prophets,
And Shall Rise Upon the Saints
by the Rev. Mark J. Pruitt, rector
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron, Ohio
Micah 3:5-12
Thus says the LORD concerning the prophets who lead my people astray, who cry "Peace" when they have something to eat, but declare war against those who put nothing into their mouths. Therefore it shall be night to you, without vision, and darkness to you, without revelation. The sun shall go down upon the prophets, and the day shall be black over them; the seers shall be disgraced, and the diviners put to shame; they shall all cover their lips, for there is no answer from God. But as for me, I am filled with power, with the spirit of the LORD, and with justice and might, to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin. Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong! Its rulers give judgment for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the LORD and say, "Surely the LORD is with us! No harm shall come upon us." Therefore because of you Zion shall be plowed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height.
Matthew 23:1-12
Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father-- the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted."
I
The prophet Micah certainly lives up to the stock images of a fiery biblical prophet with his opening line, which we’ve just heard repeated, and his follow through. He begins with a boom--“Thus says the Lord concerning the prophets who led my people astray…”—and the thunder keeps rolling. The corrupt prophets will loose their gift, see nothing and have nothing to say, live in the dark with no vision, no revelation.
When we hear these first words from the prophet Micah we know, as Micah’s hearers knew, that what comes next is not going to be easy listening, or music to the ears. When a passage of Scripture begins as the passage from Micah begins, most church leaders—entrusted with leading people into the truth about God— know what comes next is not going to be good. Or if it’s ultimately good in the long term, it’s not going to be painless in the short term. A mirror will be held up to the ugly face of our performance by the prophet. Somebody is going to get dressed down for their lackluster, careless, or pitiful performance—for being misguided and misguiding,.
In my past, like so many growing up in the athletic culture of my times, knew what it was like to get chewed out. I had soccer coaches who would announce after some shabby performance: “We will meet at the track for practice tomorrow.” Someone (new, young, unlearned) would ask, “Should we bring our soccer shoes?” And the answer would be, “No, you won’t need those. Bring your running shoes!” And I had wrestling coaches, a much grimmer bunch, who would say after an embarrassing loss, “We’ll meet in the weight room for an extra practice now. Or sometimes they would schedule it for the very next morning at 6 am.” In each case what was ahead of us was not really practice of the sport, but a kind of punishment: we were going to run till the point of collapse and lift weights till the muscles fatigued and couldn’t move any more.
Whether or not that was good or bad coaching, it was done to improve our game. Something was missing from our game, some drive, some commitment, some earnestness, or some vitality. And that is what the Prophets of Israel sought to do, too, to improve Israel’s game, Israel’s life. God had led that ancient people out of Egypt. But, we might say, God had to get Egypt out of the people. God had led the people to a victory in the land of Canaan, but still had to win His victory, we have to say, in those people. This was the task given to the prophets: to deliver the people from the confusion of life that is always brought on by worshipping false gods, and to establish confidence and trust in the God who has revealed himself in the history of Israel. And it is much the same task that preaching in the Church is about too: to get the world out of us—the wrong desire of the wrong things, false gods, and mistaken allegiances--and to assist the victory of Christ to be a victory in us.
Micah saw Israel hedging her bets, breaking commandments, and perverting righteousness
Forgetting the God above all gods,Yaweh, who had led them out of slavery, Israel hedged its bets and kept alive the worship of nature gods, and fertility gods. Forgetting Yaweh’s loving-kindness, and the wisdom of the commandments for good living, Israel broke those commandments. And forgetting Yaweh’s love of truth and justice, no guild of leaders was without shame for seeking their own advantage, their own gain, at the expense of those they were meant to serve in Yaweh’s name. This is what Micah has especially in view: the corruption of judges who perverted justice by seeking bribes; the greed of the teaching priest who demanded money for wisdom that they should have shared freely; and the fraud of prophets who, if money crosses their palms, with tailored their message from God, coating it with sugar, maybe, or aiming it somewhere other than Yaweh wanted it aimed.
And in his rebuke of Israel he utters a line that sounds like it might serve as a title for a tragic novel by Hemmingway or Faulkner. The sun, Micah says, shall go down upon the prophets.
Biblical Prophets—who are serious coaches for the serious business of life, which is more than a game—have to say these kinds of things. They have to warn us against certain possible tragedies of our own making. Micah’s warning, however poetically expressed, is very simple: disobedience by God’s prophets will lead them to lose vision.
It’s always that way with disobedience, for prophets and people alike. Sin and sins (start with the seven deadly ones and go from there), these always darken and distort our understanding, pollute our motives, and disfigure our vision of how things are.
Through our disordered loves—loving the wrong things or the right things in the wrong way—our reason becomes twisted. Who we are influences what we think. Do you know the truth of that? I don’t know how anyone could deny that. It’s a truth that any reflective person—christian or not, religious or not—could deny. Our loves, our history, influences, for good or ill, for good and ill, our perspectives. Our ability to reason and think and see the world as it is—morally, religiously, relationally—is bound up with what we have set our hearts on.
This came home to me not so long ago in an innocuous way when, in a group of church leaders, the name of a very famous athlete was mentioned (not by me) and one of those in the circle gathered did not recognize the name. Even when I explained the athlete’s history and accomplishment, I was met with a blank stare. Because I loved, and still love, sports I was astonished—and it showed—that someone else was unaware of what was so important. My love influenced by thinking: this man was missing something.
More seriously, reflect on someone loving comfort so much that they see certain chores as excessive obligations when, in truth, they are simple duties. Imagine someone in denial, loving the comfort of blindness, who sees any conversation or loving confrontation as a pushy intrusion, a boundary violation. Imagine someone loving self so much that a sense of privilege or entitlement makes them see what are really gracious gifts from others as duties owed to them. What we love influences how we see things.
My reason, cried out John Donne, is “held captive, weak, and is untrue” because God’s hand was not the controlling force over his loves.Put more positively as I will come to say in the words of George McDonald, “Obedience is the opener of the eyes.” Obedience, for prophet and people, is the opener of the eyes. When we make the pursuit of sanctity of chief aim, then we will not go into the darkness, but we will receive the light that those who sought sanctity were given.
Take either side of this away today: the positive stating of this truth. Loving obedience of God will lead to light and understanding in our morality, our relationships, and our walk with God. Or the negative: Moral blindness,Spiritual blindness, and Relational blindness come with disobedience.
II
Now, warnings – whether from the mouth of God or the mouth of man-- may not be what we want to hear ANY SUNDAY, or especially on a day dedicated to remembering and celebrating God’s saints.
We want to be cheered up by the good examples of those who have run their race, and cheered on by their gladness as we run our race. We want to be stirred up to do good works and to love God with a renewed zeal. So some enthusiasm – and not a little, but a lost – is what we need, prophets and people alike.
Count me in for enthusiasm and cheer. I’ve been to too many dreary, joyless, downcast meetings and gatherings to want another one. But I’ve also been to too many exuberant, loud, bouncy worship services where enthusiasm had no long-acting power, and was paper thin. To put it all another way, when we celebrate the saints who have run faithfully their race, we don’t want a sentimental celebration that in the name of comfortable thoughts ignores what real sanctity is about. Don’t you want to stand open, secure, and transparent as the real you, before the real God?
It will take you no more than a moment’s reflection to see that God’s saints were watchful people. They were vigilant, on the lookout for where God wanted them to be – and who God wanted them to be. And they were watchful about things that would deflect them from God’s plan, and defeat the purpose God has for them.The pursuit of sanctity teaches us to be aware of what gets in the way of love for God and love for others: Ego, remembrances of wounded pride, slothfulness (which is love of comfort over love of God), cowardice (also love of comfort over love of God), a false understanding of grace, believing that God’s radical forgiveness and acceptance of you or me, stops there, and has nothing else to do.
III
The series of front page articles in the Akron Beacon Journal last month will give local critics of religion a lot more ammunition to launch against the Christian Faith. Those revelations, of depravity, dysfunction, and weirdness, assuming they are true, do not mean that God has gone silent, that God is no longer at work in the world, nor that the gospel is untrue.
Those articles do confirm the truth that a failure to cleave to Christ, following as closely as possible in all the dimension, causes spiritual blindness. Contrast that with what we see in St. Paul. He may not be your favorite saint, but it would be hard to say that the sanctifying process of God is NOT apparent to Christians after him in his story. On almost every page of his correspondence joy pulses through because he knows God’s judgements come on the great tide of God’s love in Jesus.
In Paul we see his willingness to live as an open book. He was transparent, we heard today, in Thessalonica, working openly and without seeking gain, to promote the gospel. In I Cor 13 he speaks of the importance of love—sacrificial, other-regarding love—to the fractious community of Corinth. Throughout his ministry he promotes a content-rich version of the faith, but its never a barren rationalism. He points to the Spirit of God groaning in us and searching us with God’s light of truth. We see in Paul, I think, someone open to the judgments of God.
But the judgment of God – the true judgments of God – is all meant for our flourishing, our health, are salvation. God doesn’t take joy in pointing out faults (as we often do) and leave it at that. No. God rejoices in our repentance and renewal. The judgments are meant to promote the reformation of our lives.
IV
If this makes sense, t is not a contradiction that Jesus said that he gave his teaching so that our joy might be made full . . .and that he, like the prophets before him, exposed hypocrisy as we see in our lesson today (especially to those prone to it, those who act in the name of God). In fact, the two are as tightly related as possible: for our joy and our cheer and our renewal to be full and perfect and, well, real, really real, then we have to be remade, refashioned by the power of Christ. There is a deep cleaning beyond what we can do. Of our own power we can’t be rooted in God.
What we need on All Saints Day is not sentimentality about the pursuit of sanctity. We need a church that is frank and disarmingly earnest in its proclamation– not acting always solemn, not constitutionally somber, or ceremonially precious, but serious for the sake of truth which will increase our joy.
Listen to how one theologian, John Webster of St. Andrews in Scotland in a little book The Grace of Truth, speaks of being sincere about weekly communion:
If we take seriously what we are doing, then we have to see that we are about the bleak and humbling business of seeing ourselves as we are – not just as good folks who sometimes make a mess of life, nor even as bad people hiding a spark of native goodness, but as sinners: those who have offended, not good taste or morals, but God.
Humbling. Bleak. Offending God. Sinners. These are not words that I like to hear and this is not a passage I like…if we mean like like I like a favorite TV show or book..But I turn to these words because they are, I think true. “we have to see that we are about the bleak and humbling business of seeing ourselves as we are – not just as good folks who sometimes make a mess of life, nor even as bad people hiding a spark of native goodness, but as sinners: those who have offended, not good taste or morals, but God.” And what happens is that far from weighing me down, they enlighten me and lighten me. My vision is improved and my spirit lest burdened. Why? Because stepping into the light with our real selves before the real God allows us to see, with Paul, the work of the Spirit working in us, working on us.
May we trust the testimony of those who trusted, by their daily obedience, this truth, and trust the truth ourselves. Amen.
The Reverend Mark J. Pruitt, Rector
The Son Shall Go Down Upon the Prophets,
And Shall Rise Upon The Saints
1361 West Market Street ◊ Akron, Ohio 44313
Telephone 330-836-9327
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