Deut 18:15-20
1 Cor. 8:1-13
Mark 1:21-28

If you were to ask people what a prophet is I expect that you would get a number of different answers. I also expect that among them would be included the one that says that a prophet is someone who predicts the future.

That’s not entirely unbiblical. There’s often an element of prediction in the words of the biblical prophets. But, the prediction is usually a consequence of the people’s behavior. If simply predicting the future were the prophet’s main job I imagine that so many of them wouldn’t have minded the calling. The harder part of their work was confronting their own people over actions whose consequences wouldn’t be good.

Here’s another definition. “Prophets,” writes Professor Brian Bantum, “are inconvenient reminders of our everyday idolatries and how they have hardened to become structures of death.”[i]   Prophets, I would say, are people who are called by God to tell a hard truth to a people who, mostly, would rather not hear it. Bantam continues, “We will resist [the prophet] by calling her crazed or too radical or too emotional. We will resist because if we can’t dismiss her, then too much has to change in our lives. If she is right, we will have to take the idols out from beneath our fine clothes and our beautiful homes and stable lives. We will have to discover that they are dry sand, creations of our own making.”

Prophets today might pick any number of idols to zone in on. What is it that we make God’s out of? What is it that becomes our “ultimate concern?”[ii]  What is it we truly worship?

Perhaps it’s creature comforts like nice homes and fine clothes, as the professor suggests. However, the theme I’m catching from today’s scriptures indicates that it’s something else.

The hard truth that I think we’re called to hear today is that when it comes to matters of transcendence – faith, God, salvation, etc. – we are wrong. Or, at least, we are never fully right. Paul says to the Corinthians, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by God.” There’s an element of incompletion to our faith, an element of smallness, an element of limitation, and an element even of foolishness, especially when put next to what is divine, true, holy, eternal, and ultimately real.

Now, God doesn’t fault us for this, at least I don’t think so. In fact, I think this is the way it needs to be. Limitation is an active force in our faith. To be human means not to be God. Our problem, at least the problem that I commonly see is that we too quickly seek to overcome our limitation. We make gods of ourselves. We become our own idols.

I remember watching a Larry King rerun shortly after the death of Pope John Paul II. He was interviewing a popular Christian radio host who spent the entirety of his program discussing the question of whether or not the Pope went to heaven when he died. The issue was: was he properly reborn? If not, could it be that the head of the largest Church in the world was excluded from heaven?

I thought, among other things, what a sad conversation that was, what a sad commentary on Christianity that was. If all those callers and listeners were so concerned why weren’t they on their knees praying for the Pope’s salvation? That would have been the loving thing, right? I think, rather, that their concern had nothing to do with the Pope. Ultimately, they were concerned with themselves.  Do we believe sufficiently, understand sufficiently, follow the rules sufficiently? Is our way right? Are we as saved as we think we are? One way to put those questions at ease is to aim them at someone else, to see if that someone else measures up to the faith we’ve formed.

Perhaps that’s not a “structure of death,” as Professor Bantum states, but it’s not good. It can’t lead to anything that’s truly life giving and liberating and filled with the sacred.

The Psalmist writes, “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.” This kind of fear, of course, isn’t simply being afraid. Rather, it’s awe. It’s reverence. It’s humility. It’s wonder in the presence of the holy. Notice it doesn’t say that knowledge is where wisdom begins. It doesn’t say that a collection of information about which we may be right and others wrong is where wisdom begins. And, isn’t it interesting that Paul says, “It’s not so much what you know, or the fact that you know; rather, it is the fact that you are known that matters.” It is what God knows that matters.

I once read of a man who walked into a Catholic Cathederal and came out a convert. It was the height and depth of the place, the colors of light through the glass windows, the saints on the wall, the stations of the cross, Christ, and the altar, and Mary, and the angels… and all of it swirled around him with an overwhelming force of awe. He came out saying, “Who knew that inside the church there is always a raging whirlwind!” It was wonder that taught him of God and opened his heart, nothing else.

As easily as today’s prophets might rail against the idolatry of the mighty dollar they might also rail against faith as we’ve too often defined it: the faith of certainty, the faith of cheap security for ourselves, the faith of answers that we no longer struggle for, the faith of loving something other than a dynamic whirlwind of a God who is always more than we can say or know.

Astonishment, you’ll recall from the gospel, is the result of Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue. He left them amazed, not simply informed.

Today the prophet might say to her own, to the faithful of God’s church: stop all your talking, stop all your knowing, stop all your efforts to enlighten the world. Stop and be silent. Stop and listen. Stop and be surprised, unsettled, and refashioned. Stop controlling. Stop and receive what it is that I’m offering.

There’s a power in stopping, in not doing what we enlightened think we’re supposed to. At the back of the church one Sunday morning after worship sat a woman alone and sobbing. I went to her to see what was the matter. After a moment or two she said, “My best friend just died in a car accident.” I sat down next to her and tried to think of what to say next. She cried and I panicked because I thought that I was supposed to say something wise, something faithful, something to make her see God there with her in the mist of her pain. But the words never came, and I finally gave up. I said a silent prayer for her and for her friend, and I left her there alone in the sanctuary to cry. I was sure I had failed her. I felt totally inept and useless. But a couple of weeks later I received a letter from her in the mail. She told me how she had moved back home. She told me how the church had meant so much to her in her brief time there. And then she thanked me. “Thank you,” she said, “for knowing that words were not enough.”

If you think you know something, you don’t; but, if you love, well… then you really have something.   If you think you know something you don’t, but believe me, you are known, and that is the greater thing. To be known by God, to be loved by God, that is the first thing and always the most important thing. Faith that forgets this, faith that’s lost its awe or is missing its wonder at the amazing good news of it all, is at best misguided and at worst an idol.

Thank God the invitation is always there! Thank God that every day is an opportunity to stop and receive what it is that God is offering.

[i] The Christian Century, January 21, 2015, page 19.

[ii] Paul Tillich