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So, a bit of a sermon appropriate to the day. I won't promise it will be brief, because I always fail miserably at that.
Thread partially inspired by this one from yesterday: https://twitter.com/pastordan/status/1350897391138988034
I hear a lot from the left this idea that what "we" need to do is to confront conservatives with an objective moral standard that they seem to be failing.
Some of this is meant to confront them with their hypocrisy and some I think is meant to call them back to a shared sense of right and wrong.
Whatever the intent, it doesn't work out very well. The people addressed by this moralism either don't see or don't care about hypocrisy. You think you can shame Newt Gingrich? Good luck with that, let me know how it works out for you.
There's also an assumption that there *is* a shared moral core in the nation, which also doesn't work out very well.
You sometimes hear lefty Christians yelling things like Matthew 25! God's preferential option for the poor! Widows and orphans!
To which a great many people respond, "Huh?"
To which a great many people respond, "Huh?"
There are many people who just are no longer familiar with biblical narrative and ethical impulses. It makes no sense to them because they're not familiar enough with the source material.
There's another large group that knows the material but doesn't share the hermeneutic. Exvangelicals like @C_Stroop can probably testify that passages like Matthew 25 are seldom preached in some churches, & when they are, it's in service of individual service, not social change.
I don't intend to be mean here. It's all well-intentioned, and it can be really hard to understand the full implications of people not sharing your world view.
I think a lot of this stems from a misunderstanding of prophets and what they do. In this, I follow @WaltBrueggemann pretty closely, and yes, I'm definitely back on my bullshit again.
Brueggemann argues that the common reading of prophets is as brave speakers of truth to power, people who announce with clarity God's revealed truth and lay waste anyone who dare defy it.
(That's usually a rhetorical slaughter, but yeah, some of them weren't opposed to more than a little blood and guts.)
By this view, the paradigmmatic prophet is Isaiah, or even better Amos, whose quote "Let justice roll down like mighty waters!" graces Dr. King's tomb in Atlanta.
(If you've never been, you should. It's a beautiful and moving site.)
But again according to Brueggemann, if you read the texts and interpretation closely, you realize that the paradigm for prophecy is actually Moses, not Amos.
Now, don't get me wrong: Moses did plenty of the "revealed truth" thing. Ten Commandments, anyone?
But let's go back, all the way back to the start of the Exodus story.
But let's go back, all the way back to the start of the Exodus story.
Or close to the start of Exodus, anyway. There's a listing of the genealogy of Hebrews in Egypt, a description of the Israelite oppression, a brief biography of Moses, and then this curious part:
The Israelites "groan" and "cry out" in their suffering. They don't know *who* they're crying out to, they can't even really articulate their complaint. It's wordless, straight from the gut.
Remember, in the next chapter, when God calls Moses to speak to the Israelites, Moses has to ask, "And who should I say I'm speaking for?" The people have forgotten their own God.
Because they've forgotten their own God, they've forgotten their sense of right and wrong. In this world, unlike our own, those two go together so closely that the one is inconceivable without the other.
But they've also forgotten their *past.* They're so beaten down they can't imagine a time when they were free, when there was any other possibility than slavery and domination.
So while Moses does plenty of confronting the powers-that-be, much of his work as a prophet is to instill a sense of the past among the Israelites: you have been beloved and chosen by YHWH.
And in a sense, Moses (along with Miriam and Aaron) helps to create a past for the Israelites. It's not an accident that Exodus becomes the central narrative of Judaism. It's the core they are meant to keep touching back on.
Why is it so important to create a past? Because it's only when you have a past that you can have a future, says Brueggeman. It's only when you understand where you've been that you can begin to imagine a different path in what lays ahead.
To Brueggemann's mind, that's what the story of all those years in the wilderness is about: imagining a society that is not based on games of domination, scarcity and control.
And that for him is a central function of prophets and prophecy: to imagine meaningful alternatives to what he calls "the seemingly inevitable way things must be."
If you look at King's work, you see a lot of this imaginative work. Most obviously, it's all over the "I have a dream" speech, but it's there in the much more downbeat "mountaintop" speech at the end of his life, even in Letters from a Birmingham Jail.
Again and again, King points white allies and black activists to the idea that it doesn't have to be this way, we can make other choices. Certainly, that conviction is the basis of his pacifism.
King also points back very often to the founding of the nation and the sacrifices of the Civil War specifically to establish a past from which the present nation can imagine a different future.
But friends, we as a nation are not on the banks of the Jordan waiting to cross over to the promised land. We're not even in the desert. We're all the way back groaning for what and to who we don't even know.
Before we can get to the part where things are meaningfully different, we have to come to terms with the past. That means accepting *both* the promise of America *and* the way that promise has been so often betrayed.
To put it another way, if fascists attacked just another symbol of fascism on 1/6, we wouldn't really have cared. It's that so much freedom has come from the Capitol, and there is so much more that could come, that we're invested in it as a symbol of American democracy.
This is exactly why right wingers are so resistant to teaching "critical race theory" and the history of marginalized people. Because when those marginalized people own their history, they can begin to change their future.
It's a prophet's job to articulate the past and, tempered by realism about the present moment, imagine a different future to come.
And here's the thing: there's no special revelation needed to have imagination. You don't have to have daily chats with God to be a prophet.
