Scripture: Zechariah 7

In Zechariah’s Israel the recent history goes like this, Jerusalem had been important, it was strategically placed, the land around it was good and the geography was favorable, it was a tunnel of moderate land between the desert and the sea, it was the way from Asia into Africa.  God had established the descendants of Abraham in the land to be a witness to His greatness, to proclaim His covenant and His law.  They were given a place in the world that far outstretched where they should have been.  But they kept getting the idea that they did it themselves, that somehow they pulled themselves up out of the wilderness and made a great kingdom because they were so clever and strong.  Their relationship with the Living God dwindled to a set of dead rituals and lapsed into idolatry all too easily.  God had called them back again and again, some listened but most didn’t, in arrogance they continued to deny The Lord.  He warned them by letting their Northern tribes fall to Assyria, but Judah stiffened his neck and refused to repent.  So God withdrew and let them really do it on their own, Babylon wiped the floor with them.  They were cast off and captive for seventy years.  By the time they came back the powers of the world had lost interest in them, they weren’t captive any more but they were irrelevant.  They were orphans wandering in the ruins of a great city that none of them had ever seen in its glory.

            Zechariah is trying to get these orphans to grow up into the people that God intended them to be all along.  The glory of Solomon’s Jerusalem is long gone but that’s not even the important thing.  Rebuilding the physical nation is only part of it, the important thing is rebuilding the spirit of the nation.  The dead religion is not going to help, the arrogance of the DIY mindset is not going to help.  The job of a prophet is exceedingly complex and thus it is often shunned and neglected.  Those who do stand up with prophetic intention are often driven by the wrong motives and the complexity of what they think they are doing overwhelms them.  Prophets deliver oracles, messages from God, they cast a vision before the people and say, “thus says the Lord!”  The failure of prophecy in the modern church is caused in fairly equal measures by the lack of prophets and the lack of people who care what God might be saying.

            Zechariah’s work illustrates the complex prophetic predicament quite well.  He is working with the returning exiles, still under the sovereignty of a foreign king, they are given permission to rebuild Jerusalem and the resources to do it.  Nehemiah is their political leader, Ezra is their Priest and Zechariah and Haggai are their prophets.  Nehemiah’s work is difficult but fairly straightforward, he must simply inspire and organize, lead his people and keep them on task.  Ezra must remind them of their place in God’s kingdom and their duty under the law.  The prophets must live up to all those functions at the same time.  The people need to be reminded that the way they did things in the past is not going to work, their dead religiosity, their smug self-reliance, and their bald-faced injustice, will not be tolerated any longer.  Yet God has called them back, ransomed them out of captivity and brought them back to the Promised Land once again.  Now a people who have grown up in captivity and been inculcated into the Babylonian way of life must learn to be Hebrews again.  There was a lot to overcome, you can get used to anything, captivity, slavery, they become ways of life and the culture that is created among oppressed people doesn’t go away quickly.  One of the reasons the Israelites wandered for a generation was because they had to learn to be free people again and after four hundred years of captivity an entire generation had to die before the people could be free.  Children had to grow up without the memory of the overseer’s whip and the clay pits in Egypt, they had to learn to trust God for their provision instead of Pharaoh. 

            This is a spiritual issue, Nehemiah can only do so much, politicians can’t save us from ourselves, they can only lead their constituents, if the people are damaged politics will be as well.  Ezra can read the Law from morning to night in the water gate, the people can weep and wail and profess their dedication to God.  But even if they bring their sacrifices and keep their fasts they are still not the people of God without the change that comes in their heart.  A priest can only call them so far but perhaps a prophet can bring them all the way.  A prophet can give them the kick that they need.  Prophets often stand outside the central hub of society, they are often people who don’t quite fit the mold of leader.  They could never be politicians, they challenge power structures, they accuse the rich and powerful, this makes them unfit for the work of leadership, they could only be tyrants.  They can be and sometimes are priests but they often must step outside their box and criticize, as Zechariah does, the blind, ignorant, dead religious life of the nation.  You may comfort them at times, but only to inspire them to live more fully for The Lord.

            Prophets are liable to make people mad, to challenge their religious, patriotic and political perspectives.  Inasmuch as we have tried very hard in this country to compartmentalize those sentiments and thought processes, modern America is a wasteland for prophets, it has been for sometime, it is becoming a wasteland for priests as well, all that’s really left are the politicians.  We the people keep looking to our politicians to be the prophets but that’s barking up the wrong tree, they can’t be, it is a conflict of interest, they cannot fix the people, only represent them.  The ranks of the priesthood in this country have become timid, because we know a little bit about how prophets get treated.  I think I said a while back in a sermon that we don’t do complicated very well in this country, well that means that we don’t receive prophecy well, often we don’t even understand it.  I seen a lot about the Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright on the news lately.  I have heard many condemn him as a racist, an extremist, a nut case.  But I have heard a few say that he was being prophetic.  To tell you the truth, if he’s a racist, an extremist or a nut case, that doesn’t much interest me, there are lots of those running around.  But if he’s a prophet well now that interests me, and if he is a prophet it wouldn’t at all surprise me if he got stuck with all those negative labels.

            I’ve watched some clips, I’ve read transcripts, I’ve heard what people who like him said and I’ve heard what people who don’t like him said.  The conclusion I’ve come to is that he’s complicated.  The one thing I’ve figured out is that he’s not nuts, he’s not Louis Farakan or even Al Sharpton, you can’t write him off as a fruit loop.  He may be racist, he’s almost certainly an extremist but then again so was his namesake the prophet Jeremiah.  I don’t line up with him politically, I can only understand his liberation theology from an intellectual standpoint, never having been oppressed in any real sense, I definitely do not agree with his use of borderline profanity in the pulpit, and finally I can see why Obama had to disassociate himself from Wright.  The prophetic perspective will absolutely wreak havoc on secular America, it’s a hard enough pill for the church to swallow, it’s hard for us who have been at least trying to follow God to accept criticism of our efforts and have people point out where we have failed to act justly and love our neighbors.  For those to whom God is a mere abstraction the speech of a prophet sounds like lunacy, it provokes fear and hatred.  A prophet speaks not with his own voice but the voice of God and if you think that God is only going to have nice things to say about the way we’re living in His world and the way we’re honoring Him with our lives, then you aren’t paying attention very well.

            My analysis thus far of Jeremiah Wright has boiled down more to what he has done than what he has said.  His comments, taken out of context by the media, are indeed bombastic, and often ridiculous but when I look at what he has done with his life and his ministry in Chicago, I see a man who has consistently worked for justice, to lift up the oppressed and help the poor, sick and needy.  I cannot simply write off Wright.  In an interview I heard him talk clearly and hopefully about the role of faith in the future of this country, I heard a man who seems very passionate about serving God and preaching the Word.  In other clips I heard the nutty stuff about AIDS being a government conspiracy but I’ve read and heard more things that I agree with or at least understand.  Prophets are complicated but we need them.  It occurs to me though that whether Wright is a prophet probably depends mostly on who and where you are.  If you’re African-American, living in the inner city, if you’re poor, oppressed and disenfranchised perhaps he is your man.  But as I look around this church and this community and even the Presbyterian Church as a whole, I know he’s not our prophet.

            But we do need a prophet; we need to overcome some hard things.  We have lost our confidence in Christ, we have become a timid people, who trust more in our government and in ourselves than we trust in God.  We have relied too long on dead religiosity and not enough on a Living God.  We’ve got to get our courage up to rebuild, it starts with leaving exile, we can’t hold on to the stuff we had in Babylon and still be the seed of a new creation.