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Excerpted and adapted from Yearnings for Peace: Assemble the
Worldwide Orchestra (Independence: Herald Publishing House, 2001, ISBN
08309-09648),130-142. Used by permission.
As an Englishman I love my language and literature, soccer and cricket, my
country’s landscape and flowers, and its Christian traditions of ethical
non-conformity found in the Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and
Methodists. I rejoice in my country’s developing pluralism. As a family we
really enjoyed living in inner city Leicester, a city where half the children
are from ethnic minorities. I am proud of our unarmed policemen and the National
Health Service with virtually free medical treatment for all according to need,
including free emergency treatment for visitors from overseas. Anglican
Archbishop Temple is reputed to have said in the1940s that our commitment to a
health system for all was the most Christian thing we had ever done.
Yet, I also feel personally ashamed at the violence and injustice my small
nation has inflicted on the world in its creation of an empire that exploited a
quarter of the globe in its hey day. The industrial revolution, which began in
my nation, was funded by profits from the slave trade. These slaves, amidst the
tears and unimaginable suffering of humans torn from family and home in Africa,
picked the cotton in America that supplied the textile mills of Lancashire. It
is in Lancashire that I was born and grew up-–both sides of my family benefited
from the Lancashire cotton industry.
All of this is by way of introduction to the main purpose of this essay: to
explore the prophetic task of engaging with culture. I define culture as the way
of life for a people. It includes language, stories, beliefs, values,
institutions, and technology. In exploring the prophetic task of engaging with
culture I want to consider two questions:
- What does it mean to be a prophetic people?
- What is a possible agenda for prophetic people today?
What Does It Mean To Be A Prophetic People?
The Hebrew prophets reveal what it means to be a prophet. A prophet is one
sent to speak justice, God’s justice, to a people and their culture. Consider
first the call of Moses::
Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are
in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I
know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the
Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a
land flowing with milk and honey....So come, I will send you to Pharoah to
bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.—Exodus 3: 7-8, 10 NRSV
Hear Isaiah:
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice,
rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.—Isaiah
1:16-17 NRSV
And see how Amos judged a religious culture:
Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on Mount Samaria, who
oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to their husbands, "Bring
something to drink!"....I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no
delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt
offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them;.... Take away from me
the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But
let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing
stream.—Amos 4:1, 5:21-24 NRSV
I see this prophetic tradition being lived out in the life of Jesus as he
confronted his own culture and spoke against participation in systems and
actions that violated the sacred worth of persons. When challenged by the
religiously devout as his hungry disciples plucked ears of wheat on the sabbath,
Jesus said:
Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were
hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was
high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for
any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions." Then he
said to them, "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the
sabbath.”—Mark 2: 25-27 NRSV
The sabbath institution was originally created for a people who had escaped
from slavery. It was to be a day of rest equally for all (Deuteronomy5:12-15).
It was a cultural institution for blessing humans. When understandings about the
sabbath did not serve human good, Jesus challenged them: "The sabbath was made
for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath." Likewise Jesus challenged the
whole temple system. Intended to be a house of prayer for all nations it had
become a den of thieves in which the priestly aristocracy, under the cloak of
religion, ripped off the poor in collaboration with the Roman taxation system.
Religious and imperial taxes could take forty or fifty percent of a poor
peasant's income.1 As Jesus angrily cleansed the Temple in a
prophetic action (Mark11:15-19 and parallel passages) we glimpse the anger and
sorrow of God at human perversion.
"The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath."
Culture is made for humans, not humans for culture. When our cultures (stories,
language, values, institutions and technology) serve and express the equal worth
of persons, then God’s will is being revealed. When a culture violates any
human, especially the vulnerable, then we are confronted with the judgment of
God. The story of the people of Israel is a prophetic story. Prophetic
leadership freed the enslaved Hebrews of Israel from the exploitation of Pharoah.
At Mount Sinai Prophetic leadership presented God’s teaching, the Torah, a new
constitution for a freed slave people, to help the poor, to reduce slavery, to
protect the vulnerable, to respect the stranger. The people of Israel were not
to repeat with one another what they had suffered at the hand of Pharoah. Some
have called the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai a second Exodus, this time not
from slavery to the promised land, but from an old culture of exploitation and
death to a new culture that saves and enhances all of life. The amazing thing
about the people of Israel is not that they frequently faltered but that they
institutionalized the role of prophet and allowed themselves to be called back
to the original vision of shalom—God’s peace and righteousness.
The Spirit of prophecy is the song of the worth of persons. This is the
Spirit that challenges what is cruel, oppressive or dehumanizing. We see this
Spirit of prophecy in the Hebrew prophets. It is in this tradition that Jesus
unmistakably stands. Luke portrays this vividly when Jesus at the beginning of
his public ministry is given the scroll of Isaiah, one of the greatest of the
prophets. Jesus read:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring
good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim
the year of the Lord’s favor.”—Luke 4:18-19 NRSV
This is the scriptural manifesto of Jesus, his vision statement, his mission
purpose. We cannot understand Jesus if we do not understand his passionate
commitment to creating out of his culture that which will save the poor, free
the captive, ennoble the despised, include the outcast, heal the sick, and serve
all humans equally.
As we seek to become a worldwide movement dedicated to the pursuit of peace,
reconciliation and healing of the Spirit, then this prophetic task is for all of
us in every family and congregation in every land. In the story of the Hebrew
prophets and the life of Jesus we have a model of engaging creatively and
redemptively with culture. We are called to be more than a people with a
prophet. We are called to be a prophetic people. God called the prophets of
Israel so that all of Israel might be a light and blessing to the Gentiles.
Jesus calls us to be a prophetic people so that we might be salt, a city of
light on a hill (Matthew 5:13-16).
How can we be a prophetic people? I discern the following method from the
biblical tradition:
- Listen to the voices and tears of those what are hurting and let that
pain touch us. See the statistics of war and poverty and imaginatively
seeing the persons they represent.
- Hear God’s call to liberate the suffering and oppressed from their pain
and the causes of their hurt
- Confront the powers, institutions and values that oppress and exploit,
be it government, bureaucracy, business, the military, multi-national
corporations or the local school.
- When repentance begins, when the truth is being heard, when the victims
find healing and new hope, then seek mercy for and reconciliation with the
perpetrators of evil.
We see this prophetic method lived out from Moses to Malachi among the Hebrew
prophets, in Jacob and Abinadi among the Nephites as recounted in the Book of
Mormon. We see this prophetic witness particularly clearly in the early ministry
of Joseph Smith Jr. as he sought to give expression to radical justice for the
poor in zionic consecration of surplus. We see this prophetic witness in
Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. who all modeled that it is as
important to not co-operate with evil as it is to cooperate with the good. We
are privileged today to see courageous prophetic ministry in Ed Guy in
Guatemala, Rupa Kumar in India, and Kathy Bachman in her work with Amnesty
International. However, not just a few people are called to be prophetic. All of
us are called. If all are called to be prophetic what might be an agenda for a
prophetic people to consider today?
Endnotes
1. See Dennis C. Dulling and Norman Perrin, The New Testament: Proclamation
and Parenesis, Myth and History (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishing,
1994), chapter 3.
(2001) |
