“Speaking Truth to Power” Dec. 1, 2024 Dr. Roger Ray
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Religious terms can mean very different things depending upon the circumstances. For someone to be a prophet or to be a prophetic preacher can be two very different things. Someone who describes themselves as being a prophet may well be an insane person who may or may not wear head gear made out of aluminum foil. A prophetic preacher is someone, often with no official position within a religious institution, who publicly speaks truths that the official religious institutions or governments don’t want to hear.
In science fiction and fantasy books and movies, you hear the word “prophesy” used to mean some ancient prediction of the future, often the distant future, as with a figure like Nostradamus, the 16th century astrologer who absolutely did not make accurate predictions about things that would happen centuries after he had died. He didn’t even make meaningful predictions about things that would happen during his lifetime but, the gullible public is always looking for a mystery they can claim offers them special insight since they seem to be so immune to reason.
In the context of theology and biblical studies, neither Nostradamus nor astrologers, nor Chinese fortune cookies are prophetic. Gandhi was prophetic. Martin Luther King, Jr. was prophetic. The Berrigan brothers, to a certain degree, Thomas Merton and the Dali Llama are prophetic.
And, in fact, what it ultimately means to be prophetic has nothing to do with predicting the future and it has everything to do with speaking the truth to power. So, in that light, it is not even necessary for the person speaking to be in any way religious. They just have to be willing to articulate something which they are persuaded is true to institutions and governments that don’t want to hear it.
Many of the Hebrew bible’s prophets were also priests though possibly not in great standing since they were often so critical of the priesthood, but some of them were just inspired individual, like Amos who said of himself: “I am no prophet nor a prophet’s son, but I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees.” Amos was a shepherd and a farmer and not a part of a prophetic or priestly community.
I suspect that many journalists, novelists, philosophers, and poets were prophets but not usually mentioned as being such. But then there were prophets who were priests but then it is difficult to tell how many different people and generations wrote using their name. The book of Isaiah may be the most important book in the Hebrew Bible but even though it, on the surface, purports to have been written by one person, the text makes it obvious that the writing stretches from the 8th century BCE into the 5th century BCE, so, clearly a lot of people may have had a part in forming a book that covers a time period of 200 years. How much it was influenced by the Temple priesthood is hard to say, but from the oldest part of the book, the prophet has some pretty rough things to say to the clergy. And I would like to spend some time looking at that critique today.
I think that I can defend the generalization that all of the great world religions began as a reform movement. Faith becomes a vehicle for the hopes of the victims of power, an appeal to conscience, to higher values but, sadly, every major religion gets coopted by the very power that it began to protest. Christianity was decidedly anti-empire in the time of Jesus but in a very few generations, it became the religion on the empire, a tool used by the empire to raise armies and enforce its abusive economy. The historical Jesus was a liberator who challenged the values of both state and church, but he soon became the symbol of monarchical power and whatever he had once promised to the poor in terms of housing, food, and freedom became the empty promise of heaven after a lifetime of bondage and servitude.
Isaiah lived in a time when the temple was already a couple of hundred years old. The priests had become a favored class who lived under the shadow of the king’s palace. They helped to control the people in return for being allowed to live comfortable lives of what Isaiah thought was drunken debauchery. So, the prophet has some tough things to say as he sees Judah sinking into the swamp of its own privilege and greed. . . made worse by the fact that the priests were totally irrelevant. I am sure that they didn’t see themselves in that light.
I can almost hear the priests saying that they just tried to avoid talking about politics. They didn’t want to offend either the King or the congregants. They were trying to be practical. They talked about holy scriptures, they ran the ceremonies and rituals of the temple and kept harmony among the people. If they got upset about something it would be because of a rival religion, mistaken doctrine, errant religious texts, but it wouldn’t be about military abuses, excessive taxation, it wouldn’t be about slavery, misogyny, racism, classism, or any of the practical issues upon which a stable government and society depended.
I’ve been there, more times than I care to recount. I had a pretty rough go of it in deeply red Missouri for more than 30 years. I was there, loudly protesting the invasions of Afghanistan and especially of Iraq. Leading in protests and loudly objecting to an obviously illegal war against a nation that had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks for which the Bush administration was trying to blame on them.
It was in 2004 that I was given the opportunity of a lifetime, to take a sabbatical from my embattled place in Springfield, Missouri and to go be a fellow at Harvard. Harvard really is a bit like Hogwarts, I was immediately seduced by the architecture, the history, and all of the fame and tradition in which Harvard is steeped. Unlike my years at Vanderbilt, the faculty was amazingly friendly, inviting us into their homes for tea, meeting us for lunch or coffee. I was a fan.
But one day the divinity school put on a panel of local Boston clergy to talk about how they were dealing with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in their congregation. There was a Catholic priest, a Muslim Imam, a Jewish Rabbi, a Buddhist monk, a random protestant pastor, and a Unitarian minister.
After laudatory introductions were made, the host went down the row, asking each member of the assembled clergy how they were addressing the wars within their faith communities. And one by one, every single one of them gave an excuse for having never spoken to the issue…. One said that there was a retired Army general in the congregation, another had a board member and major donor who was a military contractor, others talked about fearing public ire if they appeared to not be supportive of the wars.
I had gone to Harvard, determined to not be an obnoxious ass; to keep my head low and enjoy a few months with absolutely no conflict . . . but I had expected to be surrounded by better people.
I had been risking life, limb, and employment by speaking out against illegal wars and civilian casualties while I worked in one of the most hostile red states in the country. These pastors, ministers, priest, and rabbis worked in Boston, that haven of American liberalism, but even there, they were more concerned about attendance, donations, their own popularity and job security than they were about speaking a word of truth against a nightmare of an illegal war.
Isaiah was evidently a priest, a member of the clergy, serving at the nation’s hub of religion, at the temple in Jerusalem. But this is what he said:
Isaiah 28: 7
These also reel with wine
and stagger with strong drink;
the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink;
they are confused with wine;
they stagger with strong drink;
they err in vision;
they stumble in giving judgment.
8 All tables are covered with filthy vomit;
no place is clean.
9 “Whom will he teach knowledge,
and to whom will he explain the message?
Those who are weaned from milk,
those taken from the breast?
10 For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
line upon line, line upon line,
here a little, there a little.”[a]
11 Truly, with stammering lip
and with another tongue
he will speak to this people,
12 to whom he has said,
“This is rest; give rest to the weary,
and this is repose,”
yet they would not hear.
On the surface, you can see in the English translation of the prophet’s poetry that he is calling them a bunch of drunks. Probably not literally but who knows? It is an ugly scene, like the worst of fraternity parties where people are stumbling and vomiting everywhere. Obviously, whatever they had to say in their religious services sounded like drunken rambling, or maybe even worse.
I am certainly no expert in Hebrew but I heard a lecture by a Hebrew professor on this passage in which he said the words, “For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little.”[a]
Are read like this: cav la cav, cav la cav, sav la sav, sav la sav, siershom siershom. He said that it sounded like a baby prattling, a baby, not quite old enough to speak clearly. Because their faith was nothing but meaningless word salad; precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line,” and then he says “here a little, there a little,” like a preschool teacher speaking to toddlers in the room, “here little one, there you little one.”
Some years later, after I had burned all of my bridges with my former denomination, I was back in Missouri, trying to start a new church that would be willing to fearlessly share a prophetic message in such a troubled time in America. It was a tough assignment, trying to find enough progressives in Springfield, Missouri to support a new church.
Every “butt in a seat” counted in those early years but that was when the rumors of torture at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison went from being probable to being certain. I railed against this official military practice of physical, sexual, and psychological torture.
That afternoon I got a call from one of our leading donors and supporters. He just said, “I’m out. I won’t be back.” I was shocked and when I asked why he said that he would not tolerate hearing our soldiers being criticized from the pulpit. And, dumbfounded, I asked, “So you are going to go to a pro-torture church?” and he shot back, “I’ll go where I don’t have to hear about it.”
And I realized, yes, yes, exactly. There were 300 churches in Springfield, and it was a pretty safe bet that there was only one where the issue of Americans torturing prisoners of war would ever be mentioned. Because, for most of the church, faith is just a matter of precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line . . . . cav la cav, cav la cav, sov la sov, sov la sov….. meaningless, irrelevant, religious word salad.
We are all aware that in the past generation our nation has become more divided than ever before. Isolation has become so epidemic that even the surgeon general is talking about loneliness as a major threat to public health. Vitriolic partisan political discourse has us choosing up different news sources that will stroke our own egos and we have, for most purposes, forgotten how to talk with people who are not just like us, which is approximately no one, and so we are more and more isolated in our own little bubble.
As churches try to survive this age when church attendance seems to be of less and less importance . . . we’re lonely. We would like to have more friends . . . but we seem to have accepted that the only way to do that is to reduce our conversation to baby prattle. We don’t know how to discuss important matters, so we focus on the mundane. Churches become places of entertainment . . . life enhancement . . . but no longer a place where a prophetic word is welcome.
We don’t have a lot of reliable historical information about the ancient prophets of Judah, but I suspect that Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah and their ilk were pretty lonely characters. I wish that there were more prophetic preachers in the church, but I have taken my lumps. I have been fired, lied about, threatened with bodily harm, and left on my own a good deal and I wouldn’t wish that life on anyone.
But what I have come to believe in these years of declining church attendance is that we don’t need brave silver-throated prophetic preachers as much as we need prophetic communities of faith, or at least, communities of friends who know how to disagree but to stay in conversation with one another.
After all, Gandhi did not accomplish major social change in India on his own.
If Gandhi had marched over 200 miles in 12 days in 1930 all by himself to protest the salt tax, we would have never heard about it and it wouldn’t have accomplished anything. It is only because he was joined in his protest by thousands of others that made Gandhi an effective leader.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophetic preacher, a great writer and teacher, but all of those thousands of people who turned up for speeches were not there just to hear a prophet preaching. They showed up because they already knew what he was going to say, what he stood for, the reforms that he was demanding . . . they showed up to make the change happen.
Folks, we don’t need another Gandhi or another Martin Luther King, Jr. as much as we need congregations that are willing to show up, to be prophetic communities that will speak truth to power whenever there is a truth that needs to be spoken. German and Polish churches largely watched the holocaust happen. . . maybe they watched in horror, but if they had come together, they could have stopped it.
The churches of the south in the 19th century, had its examples of protesting slavery and maybe even protesting the genocide of the Native Americans but there were not many.
My patriarchal relatives both started a Church of Christ and were the largest slave traders in Kentucky. The Trail of Tears marched thousands of Indians off of their property in a death march towards Oklahoma and walked right through towns and farms, past churches and cathedrals, towards their virtual extinction. That’s where we need to be different, radically different. Because, if we will not be silent in the face of evil, evil will have to hide in shame.
