Saturday, August 27, 2011

Would That All God's People Were Prophets

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Cycle A

Jer 20:7-9

Rom 12:1-2

Mt 16:21-27

What is a prophet?

When we think of prophets, we usually think of someone who can foretell the future, sort of like Nostradamus. We see them as fortune tellers, soothsayers, people from the carnival. We flip to the history channel and see the seeming coincidences of the prophecies of a Nostradamus and think, “How cool is that?” and then flip back to American Idol.

Or we hear the writings of the prophets read during Sunday Mass and just let the words pass right by us, because those words are usually a downer. They talk about suffering and lamentation and call us to change. Let’s get to the gospel so we can hear Jesus telling us he loves us. I would suspect that the vast majority of us sitting in this church right now have never even cracked open the prophetic books of the Old Testament; have never heard the words of the prophets spoken anywhere but at Mass. We don’t think their words are relevant to us today.

And today we hear from the prophet Jeremiah, not one of the most uplifting prophets. The weeping prophet. It’s good to know his story, because not only is his message ageless, his situation and life are also mirrored in today’s events.

Jeremiah was called to prophetic ministry in 626 BC. He was young, probably just a teenager or in his early twenties, and he was a reluctant prophet. He really didn’t want to be God’s mouthpiece, and he came up with all sorts of excuses not to do it. He came from a well-off priestly family, and probably was not what most people thought of when they thought of a prophet. The times in Judah were tough. The last few kings had not been faithful to God, choosing to worship the god Baal, one of the local pagan gods. They went so far as to adopt the practice of child sacrifice. There were rumors that the Babylonians were planning to sweep down and invade the country, as they had so many others, so the people were looking to the king to make the right alliances to protect them.

And so Jeremiah shows up and starts telling them that they don’t need to rely on human alliances, they really just need to repent and put their trust in God. Jeremiah’s job was to reveal the sins of the people and explain the reason for the impending destruction and captivity by the Babylonian army. “And when your people say, 'Why has the Lord our God done all these things to us?' you shall say to them, 'As you have forsaken me and served foreign gods in your land, so you shall serve foreigners in a land that is not yours.'" Not exactly a popular message. And Jeremiah was attacked for it.

Jeremiah was attacked by his own brothers, beaten and put into the stocks by a priest, imprisoned by the king, threatened with death, thrown into a cistern and left to die, and opposed by a false prophet. It was ironic that it was the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, who seized Jerusalem in 586 BC, who ordered that Jeremiah be freed from prison and treated well.

Jeremiah is in our midst today.

There is a picture going around the internet of a group of young people in Madrid last week during World Youth Day. For those of you who don’t know, millions of young people gather every two years in a different city, along with the pope, to pray and celebrate being Christian. This year it was in Madrid. Like much of the Western World, Spain is going through some very tough economic and political times. And as you also know, Western Europe has become one of the most secular societies on the planet. Anyway, this picture is of this group of kids kneeling in the street praying while surrounded by a crowd of people screaming and threatening them because they are there for World Youth Day. One of the girls in the group posted her experience on her Facebook page.

She wrote, “We had been wandering Madrid all day, chillin’. One guy who stopped us said there was an anti Catholic protest in Sol so we went to check it out. There was this HUGE crowd of people so Seamus & Louise didn´t want to come check it out with us, they sat at a corner. We went in and people were shouting filthy slurs and cursing the Pope and it was awful. So we knelt down and prayed a rosary for them in the crowd and got surrounded by angry protesters, shouting and threatening and spitting and filming us and mocking us and trying to burn our flags. Anyway, Dominic made us stand up because he felt threatened so we finished our rosary standing but on the last decade, a fight broke out right next to us between the Catholics who had been standing behind us and the protesters so some of the other Catholics led us out of the crowd. We went back and prayed a second rosary on the side of the crowd and we got more of the same, people getting up in our faces screaming. We chanted BENEDICTO, BENEDICTO and VIVA PAPA and waved our Papal flag and so on up against the police line. Lots of people yelled at us still. Then, the police line broke and they charged at us and we had to run for our lives a little more urgently than after our rosary. A lot of people got lost & hurt. The cops wouldn’t let us take the metro so we went off to find a pub.”

Would you have had such courage? I don’t think I would have. I would have just gone off to the pub. These young kids were simply professing their faith. They were there to join with over one and a half million other young Catholics in solidarity with their leader. And they were met with hysterical violence. These young prophets were meeting that violence with peaceful prayer. Like Jeremiah, they could not keep silent. They kept going back.

Prophets are not convenient. Prophets go against the common wisdom of the day.

A prophet discerns the will of God and then submits to it and calls others to change. False prophets maintain the status quo. A prophet speaks universal, eternal truths, because he or she speaks for God, who is eternal and universal. That’s why what prophets said in the past seems to speak to our current day problems so well. They were not foretelling the future, they were speaking for their own generation, but because things never really do change, they were also speaking to us. And because things never really do change, we also persecute and kill prophets today.

Who are our prophets today? They are usually lone voices speaking out against evil with great odds stacked against them. We think of Pope John Paul II, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi. All of whom were met with violence. Two were assassinated and one had an attempt made on his life. All the major prophets in the Old Testament met violent ends. Why is it that the only way human beings seem to be able to react to the loving message of God is through violence? Why do we kill the prophets? Is it because we know deep down that they are right, but we are so deeply entrenched in our lifestyles and habits and selfish pleasures we react violently to anything that threatens to take them away? Why can’t we seem to ever change?

There are no silent prophets. As Jeremiah says in today’s first reading, no matter how hard he tried, he could not keep silent. Even in the face of extreme persecution and danger of death, he could not keep silent. Those kids in Madrid could not keep quiet. Martin Luther King knew he would probably be killed, but he could not keep quiet. Neither could Ghandi. An assassin’s bullet did not stop the pope.

Everyone is a prophet, or should be. Moses once said to Joshua, “Would that all God’s people were prophets.” St. Paul tells the Romans today, “Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Being prophets is transformational, both of ourselves and of society. But we have to think differently than the rest of society, because prophets are countercultural.

Like St. Peter, we are usually thinking not as God does, but as man does. A prophet is someone who thinks as God does. Be a prophet. You are a prophet when you turn off the TV or put down the magazine when they present immoral and unnatural lifestyles and relationships as normal and good. You are a prophet when you take the time to educate yourself on the issues and the candidates, and vote your fully formed Catholic conscience. You are a prophet when you are chaste in your relationships, even when you are married. You are a prophet when you understand what it means to live your marriage as the sacrament of God’s love it is meant to be, and then you live it.

There is no such thing as a passive prophet. Every month when I conduct the baptism preparation classes for young parents, I ask them how they plan on being the first teachers of their children in the ways of faith, and invariably they say that they will be good examples to their kids. That’s great, I tell them, but they also have to talk about it with them. I think many of us think that if we just quietly live our lives according to the teachings of Jesus that’s enough. But prophets must not be silent.

We will be an example to others, for good or for ill, whether we intend to or not. But we must not be silent. Where would civil rights be if Martin Luther King had stayed at home with his family? Would India be a free democracy today if Ghandi had not spoken out and acted against British oppression? Would the Soviet Union still be standing today if John Paul had not spoken out to the millions in Poland? We’ve gotta talk about it.

We need to do more than just turn of f the TV. We need to tell our kids why they can’t watch certain shows, because what they portray about relationships is not true. Enough of us need to turn them off so that Hollywood gets the message that smut doesn’t sell. We need to not buy the products of the companies that sponsor such garbage. We need to stand up and support candidates and policies that espouse Christian values, and not just in the privacy of the voting booth. We need to tell our friends why we are doing it. We need to actively support the sacrament of marriage and not cower when we are threatened.

And we will be threatened. We will be mocked and vilified and called bigots and backward and out of touch. We may lose our jobs and be pushed out of the public arena of ideas. You think it cannot happen here? It is happening every day. Those kids were not threatened with violence in some third world country or by a group of jihadists. They were in Spain, where Catholicism has been the strongest in Europe for centuries. There are countless other stories of American Christians being marginalized as fringe nutcases just because they try to live up to the teachings of the faith.

To be a prophet is to stand up and to stand out. To be a prophet is to get off our tails and do something. To be a prophet is to be a disciple of Jesus, and to be a disciple is to be a prophet, because the greatest prophet was Jesus himself. When you were baptized you were anointed with Sacred Chrism and the priest prayed that “As Christ was anointed Priest, Prophet and King, so may you live always as a member of his body, sharing everlasting life.” For a Christian, prophesying is not an option. We are all anointed prophets.

We have been duped, O Lord, and we have allowed ourselves to be duped. You have called us all to be prophets, and even though you have told us time and again that it won’t be easy, we still think we’ll get a pass. And all you offer us in return is…eternal life.