Hometown Blues

Why There's No Waiting List For Becoming A Prophet

Dear Friends,

There was a stretch of time when I was in college when I’m convinced Hulu thought that I was a preschooler.

This was the early days of streaming; many of my friends were still receiving DVDs from Netflix to their college mailboxes and we were, fairly universally, illegally torrenting niche media (ask me about Turkish Star Wars). Streaming, as such, was still of limited functionality and so the available options were fairly small. Luckily, I am a person of limited tastes in the realm of television and movies. I only need access to a handful of things. And at that particular time, one of the few things I required was the VeggieTales Jonah movie.

I watched the Jonah movie over and over and over again. In response, Hulu recommended an array of children’s television and movies. Sorry, Hulu – it was just this ONE children’s movie that I wanted.

A Prophet Is Someone Who…

Now, I wasn’t especially raised on VeggieTales. It snuck in around the edges. And, at the same time, I think this movie is the first thing that really gave me a sense of what was going on with prophets and what it looked like to struggle with God’s demands on your life. My Sunday School education hadn’t really built much of a sense around prophets. It played the dominant tunes – Adam & Eve, maybe Cain & Abel, Noah’s Ark, Parting the Red Sea, Manna in the Wilderness, the Ten Commandments, Christmas, Easter, the Beatitudes.

Of course, as a Godly Player, the idea of Prophets is a stable throughline in my storytelling. It’s very clear who and what a prophet is. A prophet is someone who comes so close and God comes so close to them that they know what is really important.

Infamously, prophets are rarely having a good time. Jonah certainly wasn’t. And this Sunday’s lectionary (particularly Track 2) really turns our attention to that. As Jesus says in the Gospel lesson, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.”

Who are our modern disregarded prophets?

While I am not the most inclined to talk about prophets in a secular way, and I think that we need to approach these ideas carefully – that we need to look for sacred grounding, not just righteous ethics – I know that we also live in a world imbued with the holy. And so, as I prepare to depart for the Wild Goose Festival next week, I am thinking about one of the reliable presences there: the Whistleblowers.

Coming Close

Most of us are fortunate not to be in places that require us to be Whistleblowers, to put ourselves on the line in that way. But there are dozens of other aspects of daily life that call on us to listen closely for the voice of God and to act in ways that bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth. That’s what prophets do. And they suffer for it, which is why most of us aren’t signing up for that call in droves.

This week I began reading an advance copy of the Our Church Speaks devotional coming out this fall. I’ll be honest in that I thought it was going to be more of a child/family-oriented material and I wanted to assess it’s usefulness, but it’s decidedly designed for adults. Okay, fine.

As it turns out, I don’t recommend it – you’ve probably seen the graphics from one of the devotional’s writers on social media and they’re lovely, but the text is quite conservative – but it’s also true that I do recommend learning more about the broader communion of saints. That’s come up here before and the value of learning from faithful people who came before us is at the heart of the book’s introduction. I just wouldn’t choose to learn about it from these authors.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the ordination of the Philadelphia Eleven, a group who, in their refusal to be subjugated by human rule, instead sought the place at the table Christ set for them – and they were decidedly prophets. What can your family or community learn about them and about other trailblazers who came close to God so that we all might hear God’s voice more clearly?

Studying and praying with the calendar of saints is one way to do this. But so is reading the news and history books. Put on your sacred lenses. Get our your flashlights. Bring them to light as more than troublemakers or activists. See the holy, the prophets derided in their hometowns. Maybe even in your hometown! Who can you discover nearby?

Have a safe Fourth of July (or not Fourth of July - your mileage may vary by location). I’ll be hunkering down in my ear defenders hiding from the firework noise like I do every year.

Peace,
Bird