O Jerusalem, Jerusalem (2nd Sunday in Lent; Luke 13:1-9, 31-35; March 12, 2017)

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem

2nd Sunday in Lent
Luke 13:1-9, 31-35
March 12, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

There is nothing in the Bible that is so consistently misunderstood and misused as the prophetic material. No parts of the Bible are so consistently sliced apart, yanked out of context, rearranged, and made to say what they do not say as the prophetic parts.

We begin to veer off the road before we've even begun to look at the texts themselves. We start by imagining that a prophet is someone who can tell the future. We place prophets and biblical prophecy in the same category as astrology, the I Ching, Ouija boards, Tarot, and the Magic 8 Ball. "If I ask Laurie to the spring ball, will she say yes?" "Yes." "No." "Try again later."

For as long as I've paid attention, since the days of Hal Lindsay's Late, Great Planet Earth, the Bible has been subjected to a strip mining operation the likes of which even eastern Kentucky has never seen. Television huckster and mega-church preachers have mined the biblical text for snippets that they can use to prove that God sends hurricanes because we see the grace of God in gay people, or that we have to support the nation of Israel even when they engage in apartheid and a slow-motion genocide. When these strip miners leave the Bible behind, all that is left are slag heaps and ponds of poison leaching into the earth.

It is time and past time for Christians to say, "Enough of this desecration!" The Bible does not belong to the fundamentalists, the Dominionists, and the huckster. It is time and past time for Christians to reclaim the Bible. In places it is an unsuitable text, but it is our unsuitable text and we shouldn't let anyone take it away from us.

So let's start with what prophecy is and isn't. Prophecy isn't a form of divination that lets us predict the movements of the stock market or whether this year's harvest will be plentiful. It is not a way of sketching out the events that lead to the end of the world. Prophecy in the Bible was not given so that people two thousand years later would have useful information. Prophecy is not spoken by people who have been taken over by God's Spirit and made to say things they don't understand to people who did not understand what was being said but who nonetheless wrote it down word for word so that it could become part of a sacred text that was not understood by the people who read it but was nevertheless copied and passed along to other people who didn't understand either until it got to us and suddenly it all makes sense to me and I tell you what it means and won't you keep this ministry going so that others can finally hear what this otherwise senseless book says, no donation too small. God will bless you for it.

No, that's not what prophecy is. Prophecy is what happens when someone looks deeply into the present through what they discern of God's vision and then tells what they have seen. Sometimes when that happens what the prophets sees and tells has to do with a potential future that is contained in the present, and that, of course, is where the confusion comes in. Even when that happens, the meaning of the present is the purpose of the prophecy, not the events of even the immediate future let alone the distant future.

The more deeply into the present the prophet is able to look, the more clearly they understand God's purposes, and the more fluently they express this insight, the better the prophecy will be. Prophecy boils down to telling God's truth about how things are. Prophecy--not in the spooky, Nostradamus sort of way, but in this truth-telling way--is a core mission of the Church at all times and in all places. As an aside I will say that it is my belief that the reason there are so many charlatans and huckster is that the Church has largely neglected its prophetic ministry and mission and left the field open for the charismatic self-promoters.

So this is the first thing we need to know about the prophets and the bits of prophetic speaking that are sprinkled all through the Bible: Prophecy has to do with the present and what it means as far God's dream is concerned.

The second thing that we need to understand is how Jesus does what he does when he acts as a prophet. Christians have long affirmed the divinity of Christ. And for good reason. In the birth, life, ministry, preaching, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth we have and continue to see the nature of God revealed in its fullness. And further, the God whom we have met in the birth, life, ministry, preaching, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is not an almost-God, but the God who really is God. That is the Nicene creed in a nutshell, translated as best I can do it into modern categories and ways of thinking. Christians have affirmed these things for centuries.

The Church has also affirmed that this revealing of the nature of God took place and takes place in and through the humanity of Jesus. As a modern theologian put the matter: "The divinity of God is revealed in the humanity of Christ." (I think it was Karl Barth, but I can't find the reference. If it was someone else, well, good for them. If I'm the one who came up with it, good for me!) "The divinity of God is revealed in the humanity of Christ."

That means that from the point of view of Christian theology, Jesus was--and needed to be--fully human. He got tired. He got hungry and thirsty. He had a mind like ours, with only a limited grasp on the universe. He believed that the world was flat, had edges, and was supported on pillars. He did not understand radar. He had no special powers or knowledge.

In particular when he spoke prophetic words he did that in the same way that every other prophet did it: he looked deeply into the present through the perspective of God's dream and told what he saw about the meaning of the present and the potential future that it contained. He did it really well, but he did it in the same way that Elijah, the Isaiahs, Jeremiah, and Hannah did it.

How did he see his own present? That's what is laid out for us in this morning's reading.

He looked at Jerusalem and he saw a fig tree that had gone too long without giving any figs. He saw it living on borrowed time only because of God's forbearance. The gardener was about to cut his losses. Jerusalem was the place where God's Temple was, the place where David had reigned, the place where (according to some traditions) Jacob had dreamed of a ladder reaching up into the heavens. Jerusalem was the place of God's covenant. If you had a question about the Torah, Jerusalem was the place to go. There were people there who knew and they would tell you. You would think that such a city, such a place, would welcome those who could look deeply into the present through the lens of God's dream and tell what they had seen in convincing ways. You would think so, but you would be wrong.

When Jesus saw Jerusalem he saw the city where prophets go to die. He saw a place where those who had been sent to do the same work he was doing were stoned to death. He saw the place where he himself would die. It took no divine knowledge, no direct revelation from God, to see this, torn as the city was between those who would do anything (including killing a prophet) to keep the peace with the occupiers and those who with the slightest movement of a hair-trigger would explode into murderous rage. Neither side could tolerate an announcement of the meaning of the present from God's perspective.

He saw Jerusalem and wept with compassion for the city that he would have embraced and protected, the city that refused the refuge that he offered. Blessed is the parent who has never known a moment like that when a beloved child rejects the values they were raised to value and stands poised on the edge of an abyss of self-destruction. Blessed is the patriot who has never wept for their country that has failed its promise and calls that failure its greatness. Blessed is the teacher who has never seen a brilliant student lay waste to their own potential.

Jesus saw deeply into Jerusalem's present. He saw it through eyes that had been trained both by God's call to do justice and by God's compassion. He bore in his own body the tension of the contradiction between Jerusalem's possibility and its reality. Would I be off the mark if I said that in its pain this moment is comparable only to the crucifixion itself?

The life of a prophet is a life both of exaltation, of suffering, and of frustration. Exaltation from being allowed to see God's dream. Suffering from being forced to see the reality that is being chosen instead of God's dream. And frustration that, no matter how eloquent, no matter how powerful, no matter how persuasive, none of the prophet's words are ever adequate. This is the agony of prophetic ministry. And Jesus suffered this agony fully.

The Church no longer uses stones to kill prophets, but it still exerts itself mightily to silence them. The Church does not want prophets: it wants entrepreneurs and charismatic leaders; it wants care-takers and program developers; it wants success stories of new members received and apportionments paid. And who can blame the Church? Prophets are hard to live with. They ask all the wrong questions. They demand, not restructuring of organizations, but deep repentance. They offer, not plans or strategies, but warnings. They are not optimistic. They are sad. They weep too much.

The Church doesn't want prophets, especially those who turn their gaze toward the Church itself. It's okay to cry "O Washington, Washington," but when they cry "O Nashville, Nashville," it's not fun any more. And the thought that the Church itself might find itself under God's judgment is unbearable.

And yet that does not mean that prophets have no hope to offer. Jesus lamented over Jerusalem, but that did not stop him from demonstrating in its streets, its Temple, its governmental courtyards, and its place of execution what God's dream looked like and how little the peaceful justice of God's dream resembled the reality that the priests had blessed in Yahweh's name or the chaos that the zealots would bring as an alternative, also in Yahweh's name.

The hope of the prophet is the hope of a reality no longer taken for granted as the only possibility. It is the ability to tell a different story than the ones told by politicians, pundits, and purveyors of the latest gadget. The hope of the prophet lies in the certainty that when all the voices have said every word they have to say, when they've run out of things to tweet, when even kittens and puppies have lost their ability to distract us from the nightmare the human race has substituted for God's dream, there is yet another Voice to speak and when it speaks its word, all things will be made new, even Jerusalem, even Washington, even Nashville, even Decorah.

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