Prophetic?



STILL PROPHETIC?

I have only recently become a reader of Walter Brueggemann. If the mind has slipped into the repetitive rhythms of sermon preparation, then Brueggemann will force you to do some serious intellectual push ups again. What about this quote:

The theological failure of religious leadership consists debilitating the character of God. In the old covenantal tradition, God was indeed an active agent with whom to reckon. But as the urban economy flourished, as the urban elite became more affluent and with it more intellectually sophisticated, such a notion of divine agency became less and less palatable, more intellectually embarrassing, and more politically inconvenient. Without ever being explicit, the wild rawness of divine agency simply disappeared into smoother liturgical formulation. Now God who was an agent who took initiatives, became an object to be adored...the God of Sinai is reformulated as the patron of Zion” Walter Brueggemann: Reality, Grief, Hope-Three urgent prophetic tasks.

Of course this is worthy of several reads.

Allow me to pontificate a little. Meryl and I have had the privilege of being in four or five major global moves of the Spirit or Jesus visitations or revivals. ( Each description has its limitations). One can write deep and weighty accounts of each. They were compelling, empowering, demanding something significant of those who were privileged to be in the flow of both the moment and the movement it produced. A definite common thread in each of these is the strong prophetic content of the visitation. With each, there was a raw, passionate, prophetic cry where the very chest of heaven was ripped open and the heart of the Father was revealed, we heard his voice, we felt his pain, we surrendered to his call.

Jesus said it this way: “But Jesus answered them, ‘ You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God’... ‘oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city who kills prophets and stones those who are sent to it. How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you weren't willing".

"See your house is desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’” Matt 22:29, 37-39

With each “move of God” that we experienced, the foundation point was that God was visiting planet earth with diving prophetic intent to encounter us, challenge, transform, correct the spiritual errors that leak into our common practice. God as “an active agency” was less given to our convenience and more to our conformity to his will and good pleasure.

But soon after the high point of the visitation, the prophetic gives way to the pastoral as the primary voice resonating from our pulpits. The uncertainty of a Spirit-led journey is awkward, so to pander to a more sophisticated palate, lithurgy, simple, predictable, ritualistic repetition, has to replace divine visitation - they do tend to add to the awkward factor. The raw edge of sovereign interruption becomes quietened to God the “patron of Zion”, a gentle undemanding grandfather like figure, soothing our woes and silencing our foes.

My simple reflections this morning is that we cannot cower to the pressure of cultural conformity, but remain courageous men and women, whatever the cost, to keep God the primary raw active agency in our community. Nothing should stand in the way of “God who had been an agent who took initiatives”. In Southern California the loud dominant, demanding cultures of rampant individualism, insatiable materialism and the pursuance of pleasure has required a very pleasant and palatable form of Christianity. These three enemies to the cross have produced a consumer christian that vulnerable pastors have pandered to-silence the prophetic edge at all cost. This is truly an inconvenient truth.

Of course we think, plan, strategies using our intellect to craft a creative, God glorifying narrative. However, that should never get in the way of allowing God to reign supreme with freedom to initiate, direct, mobilize. That is what happened in those glorious visitations we were part of. We marveled at all that he was doing. We were not fatalistic at all. We felt empowered by the huge privilege of partnering with king Jesus in project,

planet earth. We just knew that this was more amazing, more demanding, more compelling, more impacting than anything we “could ask or imagine”.

Oh for one more visitation. I'm sure it will blow our minds, offend our theology, unsettle our churches, mobilize our people and challenge our culture, gather in the harvest. But yes, that is our deepest cry. “Even now come Lord Jesus”.

Comments

  1. Hi Chris. Ive thouroughly enjoyed Brueggemann over the years, and you are right in that he forces us to re-think a lot of what we glibly accepted. His book "the prophetic imagination" was (sadly, in many complex ways) the catalyst for us closing the church 2 years ago. If God wasn't increasing and I/we weren't decreasing, then all we were doing was getting the people to "make more bricks for pharaoh".

    Oddly enough, when I was getting excited by reading him, I discovered my traditional church leadership friends had been reading him for years and at seminary... not sure how they didn't grasp what he was sayin sometimes!

    Nice to see your blogs up again. Blessings

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