Who Speaks in the Name of God?

WHO SPEAKS IN THE NAME OF GOD?

A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan

University Public Worship

Stanford Memorial Church

February 1, 2009

At the very beginning of his ministry, as reported in the first chapter of Mark, Jesus astounds Jews gathered in a synagogue with his teaching and even exorcises a demon from a congregant: “He taught them as one having authority… He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” As a result, his fame begins to spread in the Galilee region of Palestine.[i] But almost immediately the question arises as to whether Jesus is a true or false prophet. The scribes, or professional interpreters of Jewish law,[ii] quickly become his enemies. By the second chapter of Mark, when Jesus has begun forgiving people’s sins, the scribes are saying, “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy. Who can forgive sins but God alone?”[iii]

So who speaks in the name of God? By what authority? How can we know? Earlier in the first chapter of Mark it’s explained that “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.” That’s well and good for us to read now, as Christians with 2,000 years of church history behind us. But what about people who were hearing this carpenter from Nazareth for the first time presuming to talk with expertise about Jewish law? The next thing that religious officials find him doing in the second chapter of Mark is eating with tax collectors for the Romans and sinners who flout Jewish law.[iv] Understandably they question Jesus’s religious authority.[v]

In this morning’s reading from Deuteronomy,[vi] Moses instructs the Israelites that after he dies, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet.”[vii] Moses explains that God himself has told him that “I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet [and]… Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable.” But God has also taught Moses about false prophets: “[A]ny prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak – that prophet shall die.”[viii] Now, how helpful is this to us, the common people, in separating true prophets, whom we must heed, from false prophets, who will lead us astray? Are we to wait to see if they die or not? Martin Luther King, Jr. died at the age of 39. Was he a false prophet? Everyone dies eventually. When do we begin deciding that a true prophet has lived long enough to be believable?

Luckily, Moses understands our problem. In the passage immediately following today’s reading, he asserts that “You may say to yourself, ‘How can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken?” His answer is: “If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the Lord has not spoken.”[ix] The only problem with this is that we may have to wait a long time to see if the thing of which the prophet has spoken takes place. The prophet Micah tells us that “In days to come…they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”[x] Micah wrote in the eighth century B.C. Hasn’t happened yet. Was Micah a false prophet?

Jesus gives us a little more help in his Sermon on the Mount: “Beware of false prophets,” he proclaims, “who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.”[xi] Jesus is quite poetic about this: “Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit… Thus you will know them by their fruits.”[xii]

Perhaps the Rev. Jimmy Swaggert would serve as an example. In 1986 he exposed a competing televangelist, Assemblies of God minister Marvin Gorman, for having an extramarital dalliance. Gorman was defrocked and his telecasts ended. By your fruits you shall know them. Gorman then hired a private detective who found Swaggert having an extramarital fling with a prostitute in 1988. The Assemblies of God denomination then suspended the Rev. Swaggert from his television broadcasting and later defrocked him when he resumed his television ministry before the end of his suspension time. In 1991 Swaggert was found with yet another prostitute.[xiii] By their fruits you shall know them. Hypocrisy must be one of the leading criteria for identifying false prophets.

Moses provides a few more markers in Deuteronomy for recognizing those who do not speak in the name of God. In the passage immediately preceding today’s reading, he warns against soothsayers, sorcerers, those who cast spells, those who consult ghosts or spirits, or those who seek oracles from the dead.[xiv] Other biblical tests for false prophets are those who claim to speak for God in order to realize material gains for themselves, court prophets who tell the king what he wants to hear rather than the hard message of what God requires, and those who only speak but do not act.[xv]

We’ve just been through a presidential inauguration with a number of people presuming to speak in the name of God in invocations, benedictions and prayers. In the process, they’ve used many of the phrases we would expect from true prophets. Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson was the first to speak when he delivered the invocation for the kickoff inaugural event on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial two days before Barack Obama was sworn in. He began by asking, “O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will bless us with tears -- for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women in many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die a day from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS. Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.”[xvi]

The Rev. Joseph Lowery in his benediction after Barack Obama was sworn into office, stated that God is able and willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.” Then he asked God “to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.”

Both Bishop Robinson and Rev. Lowery received some criticism, though, from people wondering if they were really speaking in the name of God, or only in the name of their own interests.[xvii] But the most criticism was leveled at the Rev. Rick Warren, who delivered the invocation on Inauguration Day. For instead of praying to “God of our many understandings,” as did Bishop Robinson, he specifically prayed in the name of Jesus, and then asked everyone to join him in the great Christian prayer, the Lord’s Prayer. How different the Inaugural Prayer Service was the next day at the National Cathedral, when there were prayers not only by Protestant, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians, but also by Jews, a Muslim and a Hindu.[xviii]

Warren also has called homosexuality unequivocally wrong and compared gay relationships to incest and pedophilia. He has called abortion a “holocaust” and described U.S. power as a divine instrument for punishing evildoers. Understandably, many on the Christian left, not to mention on the secular left and from other traditions, were deeply disturbed by Obama’s choosing him to deliver the inaugural prayer.[xix]

But there have been some contrary voices on the left that we might want to listen to before Rick Warren is too easily labeled a false prophet. Singer Melissa Etheridge, an openly lesbian activist, met Rick Warren at a conference last year, where they had a warm conversation and Warren asked for her autograph on her album. She said, “He entered the room with open arms and an open heart,” and “didn’t sound like a gay hater.” He claimed to believe in equal rights for all and “struggled with Proposition 8 because he didn’t want to see marriage redefined as anything other than between a man and a woman.” He also told her that he regretted his choice of words when he mentioned incest and pedophilia in a discussion of broadening the definition of marriage.[xx]

In December, Warren addressed the 20-year old Muslim Public Affairs Council. He was seen to be frank, open and cooperative, first saying, “We don’t have to see eye to eye to walk hand in hand, and you can disagree without being disagreeable.” He went on to ask to “actively and directly cooperate with mosques” to “combat the five global illnesses of spiritual emptiness, corrupt leadership, disease pandemics, dire poverty and illiteracy.” Bishop Gene Robinson has explained that he has “a lot of respect for Rick Warren” because of his compassionate response to AIDS worldwide and his commitment to eliminating poverty.[xxi] It’s also to be noted that in his inaugural prayer, Warren intentionally used a phrase from Muslim devotion when he called God “the compassionate and merciful one.”[xxii]

It turns out that Rick Warren shares Barack Obama’s desire to end the demonizing effects of the culture wars that pit right against left, religiously and politically. Warren put his own relationship with many Christian conservatives at risk by asking Obama to speak at his church both before and after he became a presidential candidate. Warren has called for “a new day of civil discourse” in America. So, flawed as he is (and as many prophets have been), the Rev. Rick Warren may be a new prophet of exactly what’s needed today: crossing partisan lines to build a new sense of community despite disagreement. He’s already learned and changed himself through civil discourse with those who disagree with him.[xxiii] Like the prophet inside the king’s court, he’s been challenging his own Southern Baptist denomination by calling for bridge-building. On the other side of the stream, he’s inspired the top official for the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches, Nancy Wilson, to say about him, “We may come from different theological perspectives, yet we share a common biblical commitment to caring radically about poverty, violence and the nurture of our Earth.”[xxiv]

Who was it who saw that Jesus was a true prophet who rightly spoke in the name of God? Not the religious authorities of his time, the scribes, but the demon inside the man Jesus healed in the synagogue. The religious authorities were calling Jesus a blasphemer who spends his time with the wrong kind of people. But the demon cried out “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth…I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”[xxv] The demon could see what the pious could not. It’s not easy for most of us to recognize authentic prophets. And Rick Warren or Joseph Lowery or Gene Robinson may or may not be one of them. But as Moses has reminded us, in the words of God, “Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable.”[xxvi] Let us have the ears to hear.[xxvii] Amen.

BENEDICTION

(The benediction comes from Rick Warren’s inaugural prayer)

Help us, O God, to remember that we are … united not by race,

or religion, or blood, but to our commitment to freedom and justice for all…

When we fail to treat our fellow human beings and all the earth with the respect

that they deserve, forgive us. And as we face these difficult days ahead,

may we have a new birth of clarity in our aims, responsibility in our actions,

humility in our approaches, and civility in our attitudes, even when we differ.

AMEN,

NOTES

1

[i] Mark 1: 21-28.

[ii]HarperCollins Study Bible (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), p. 1726.

[iii] Mark 2: 6-7.

[iv]HarperCollins Study Bible, p. 1727.

[v] Mark 2: 15-17.

[vi] Deuteronomy 18: 15-20.

[vii] Deuteronomy 18: 15.

[viii] Deuteronomy 18: 18-20.

[ix]Deuteronomy 18: 21-22.

[x] Micah 4: 1, 3.

[xi] Matthew 7: 15-16.

[xii] Matthew 7: 16-17, 20.

[xiii] “TV Evangelist Quits Over Sex Scandal,” BBC News (February 21, 1988); “Swaggert Plans to Step Down,” New York Times (October 15, 1991).

[xiv] Deuteronomy 18: 10-11.

[xv]Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1968), p. 226.

[xvi]Mike Allen, “Gay Bishop to Open Inaugural Weekend,” Politico (1/12/09)

[xvii] See, for example: Dan Amira, “Rick Warren and Joseph Lowery Yesterday: Offensive or A-Okay?” New York Magazine (January 21, 2009), Michael Sean Winters, “Bishop Robinson and the Inauguration,” America: The National Catholic Weekly (January 13, 2009)

[xviii] Program, Inaugural Prayer Service (January 21, 2009),

[xix] “Prayer and Conversation,” Christian Century (January 27, 2009), p. 7.

[xx] John Dart, “Obama, Warren Defy Culture War,” Christian Century (January 27, 2009), p. 13.

[xxi] Ibid., pp. 12-13.

[xxii] Rachel Zoll, “Inaugural Prayers Aim for a More Diverse America,” Associated Press and Yahoo! News (January 20, 2009).

[xxiii] “Prayer and Conversation,” p. 7.

[xxiv] Dart, “Obama, Warren,” p. 12.

[xxv] Mark 1: 24.

[xxvi] Deuteronomy 18: 19.

[xxvii] See Mark 4:9,23; 8:18; Luke 8:8; 14:35.