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They traffic rather in elusive imagination that keeps opening life and reality out to another dimension.
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V
It was clear to the prophet that YHWH the lingered in grief over the loss. This point should not be overstated in the tradition, and prophet must have reckoned it to be a subordinate note alongside divine indignation. But it is there, and it has been largely disregarded among us.
There is, to be sure, never a hint that YHWH’s anger is inappropriate or that YHWH’s indignation is not merited. And as long as the relationship is understood in symmetrical, contractual terms, that is the end of the story. But of course biblical faith, and the God of the Bible, do not and are not capable of staying within such categories.
Divine indignation is a given, and well deserved. It is, however, the move beyond indignation that belongs properly to prophetic faith and prophetic preaching.
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I will surely have mercy on him …
YHWH’s resolve for the future does not derive from the petition of Israel or even the circumstance of Israel. It derives from YHWH’s recognition of YHWH’s own propensity. That propensity, moreover, contradicts the torrent of judgment that has been pronounced.
It is that contradiction of justified divine anger that becomes the basis for the future. YHWH, from now on, will attend
It is as though YHWH must now act for YHWH’s self-regard to refute the conclusion drawn by hostile observers. More than that, it is as though in this moment of readiness, YHWH discovered a depth of commitment to Israel that YHWH had not, until now, acknowledged.
Thus YHWH is indeed beset by anger and a propensity to punish. That is a serious contention of the prophets who insist that the historical process has a moral shape given by YHWH the creator that cannot be outflanked. That much we knew. But prophetic preaching that focuses just there, as is conventional in “prophetic preaching,” misses the deeper intention of these poets. In the very midst of such indignant self-regard, YHWH of these poets falls into grief and lingers there. Thus the terse New Testament report that “Jesus wept” (John 11:35) is fully congruent with the God he serves. Jesus wept
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VI
In a society either beset by denial (that refuses to acknowledge loss) or committed to despair (that settles in to abiding loss), the prophetic task is the voicing of the process of loss that moves through grief to possibility. That process is a bold contradiction of these twin societal temptations.
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The task of prophetic preaching then, is to break the immobilizing grip of such reductionism, to subvert the simplistic explanatory logic of dominant imagination, and to permit access to the thickness of processed grief wherein hides newness waiting to be enacted.
CHAPTER 5 The Burst of Newness amid Waiting
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The history of Israel and Judah is summarized as being unbearably out of sync. All of that, according to Sinai.
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The creator’s capacity to work a newness, unencumbered by conditionality and unassisted by any other power, becomes a joyous assertion that YHWH will work a newness right in the midst of Israel’s most dire circumstance of grief. That newness is articulated in many images; the important point, however, is that it is freely and singularly enacted by YHWH without respect to the “qualification” of Israel or the assistance of other gods.
It is useful to recognize, in our own context, that when faith is contained within modern rationality, there is a rejection of the God who can “do the impossible.” The present casting of that rejection concerns “an interventionist God” who violates our notion of the possible.
Israel never makes such a generic argument. Rather it focuses upon narrative specificity to name the moment of newness and surprise that violates the “possible.”
The tradition of faith continues to be dazzled by specific memories, in narrative form, of instances in which the “impossibility of God” has overridden the “possibility” of human wisdom. Israel clings to those memories that exhibit God’s faithful power beyond our expectation or explanation.
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It cannot be emphasized too strongly, in my judgment, that prophetic preaching is the enactment of hope in contexts of loss and grief. It is the declaration that God can enact a novum in our very midst, even when we judge that to be impossible. I suggest that such a performance of prophetic preaching may be particularly appropriate in the circumstance of our society.
It is clear in the prophetic books that the work is not completed until the depth of judgment, loss, and grief is turned to new possibility.
Hope can, of course, be spoken too soon. And when spoken too soon, it may too soon overcome the loss and short-circuit the indispensible embrace of guilt and loss.
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No doubt among us there is a common temptation to rush to the good news.
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In Ezekiel 34,
kings in Jerusalem did not practice covenantal obedience and so produced displacement.
In time to come, YHWH will do what kings are supposed to do; YHWH will utilize power for the enhancement of the community.
It is clear that the sacerdotal vision of Ezekiel, the Torah-based hope of Jeremiah, and the city vision of Isaiah rely on very different imagery. It is equally clear that for all their differences, the sum of prophetic hope is that God is about to enact an impossibility. It is that impossibility that is the substance of the gospel.
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Both Jesus’ actions and his narratives exhibit Jesus’ refusal of the world of the possible and his capacity for God’s impossibilities that make all things new. The parables anticipate the new regime; the narratives actualize that alternative world.
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CHAPTER 6 The Continuing Mandate
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It is in that context of a singing affirmation side by side with a practical reluctance or resistance that frames the continuing mandate to prophetic ministry. Those who would be prophetic are situated exactly in that ecclesial ambiguity, an ambiguity very often felt among us quite personally as we at the same time intend to take the call seriously and yet cringe from it when we get down to it. But the singing does not stop!
These ancients, to be sure, were not “handicapped” by our modern thin, positivistic rationality. We do not have that in common. What we do have in common, however, is a totalizing ideology of exceptionalism that precludes critique of our entitlements and self-regard.
The defining reality is not simply an intellectual problem of rationality, as acute as that surely is, but it is the socioeconomic, political status quo as a twin of that rationality that looms as context and challenge.
Every serious preacher knows that guardians of such privilege and entitlement who fend off divine “impossibility” are remarkably alert and vigilant in the congregation to fend off any imagined challenge.
The prophetic tradition persistently reperforms both impossibilities of dismantling and restoration; and the totalizing ideology can host neither the impossibility of dismantling nor the impossibility of restoration.
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And now, as we bid the “God of the prophets” to anoint the prophetic heirs, we take this double impossibility of “plucking up and pulling down, of planting and building,” of exile and restoration, of crucifixion and resurrection, of dying with Christ and being raised with him to new life, and we ponder our contemporary prophetic mandate as we in our turn are called to enact that double impossibility.
Our context, so it seems to me, is ripe for such a ministry. It is ripe because as anyone can see who looks, the impossibility of dismantling is under way in our society, in Western culture, and in the world generally. The old “business as usual” cannot any longer be credibly sustained.
Everyone can trace moreover, the emerging impossibility of restoration in new modes, new power arrangements, and new formulations of truth that have importa...
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I propose that in all the ways that are politically bearable and rhetorically imaginable, the prophetic-pastoral ministry is to walk with people ...
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III
The first task of contemporary prophetic ministry is to empower and enable folk to relinquish a world that is passing from us.
In our own time, the denial of what must be relinquished among us is everywhere around us. The political mantra “Take back our country” is a desperate yearning not just for small government but for a safe, white, straight world from which the disruptive “others”—gays, Muslims, immigrants—are banished.
"Make America great again"
