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You are here: Home / Archives for Prophet

7 Pentecost B, 2021: If I were a Prophet

July 11, 2021 by Cam Miller

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist

When we have stories that feature
John the Baptist like we do today,
I repeatedly feel the need to pay our respects
to the Mandaeans,
followers of John the Baptist
that continue on in the world today.

There are roughly seventy thousand Mandaeans
spread from Indonesia to Iraq to Sweden.
They have their own sacred text, the Ginza,
and they continue to baptize – every week
rather than once in a lifetime.

Whereas Christians turned baptism
into a once in a lifetime sacrament,
the Mandaeans use it in every celebration
from weddings to funerals.
Many Mandaeans still speak
a unique form of Aramaic —
the language we assume
was Jesus’ first tongue.

But that said, I feel uninspired
by Mark’s peculiar
and somewhat inaccurate review of events
from so long ago.

I must confess that sometimes
I suffer from B.F.S. – Bible Fatigue Syndrome.
It is not a great ailment for a preacher
but maybe a professional hazard.

Sometimes I get tired translating arcane stories
into contemporary meaning.
Sometimes, not too often,
but sometimes,
I just look at the readings and say to myself,
“Really? This again?”

Anyway, I know I’ve got Bible-fatigue
when I feel that way
even with one of my very favorite prophets — Amos.

Amos encountered fatigue himself.

You see, early in the short book of the prophet Amos,
Amos talks God out of an angry
and torturous punishment of Israel —
the threat was first a scourge of locusts
and then consumption by fire.
But seven chapters into
the little nine chapter book,
Amos has given up talking God
out of anything.

He silently shrugs in resignation
as he is compelled
to report to the king and false prophets of Israel,
yet another vision of destruction.
The plumb line
is dangled
and the nation doesn’t measure up…again.

So, Amos warns,
the wall of inequity, Israel, will fall.

Amos doesn’t even try to talk God out of it this time,
and in Biblical literature,
talking God out of smiting people
is a special talent of a prophet.

I forgot to mention that last week
when I was talking about prophets.
They have a special gift
for soothing divine indignation.
But Amos doesn’t use his super power
for calming God this time.
He just lets the bad news hang in the air
because he knows God is right.

He know the people are just going to fail again
to measure up to God’s requirements.

I feel a special relationship to that image
of the plumb line
because I am one of those people
who can’t draw a straight line —
even with a ruler or a square.
When I used to make things,
I couldn’t make a square corner
if my life depended upon it.
I think I just see crooked.

I used to watch my dad work on a project
and build beautiful things
that came out square, level, and smooth.

Not me.
I’d be the one listening to Amos’ image
of the wall leaning away
from the vertical plumb line, and say:
Yep, looks pretty straight to me.”

But Bible-fatigue has taken hold of my mind this week
and I looked at this personal favorite from Amos
and that terribly interesting beheading in Mark
and shrugged my shoulders.
So what?
What’s in it for us?

So I am grateful to Robert Francis
for his more immediately accessible poem.
The punch line of which, is: “Here I sit,
between the known and the unknown.”

“Nothing was far that once was near.
Nothing is hid that once was clear.
Nothing was God that is not here.”

If it does not get me into too much trouble with God,
I am going to play prophet for a moment,
and echo this poem
and leave Amos and Mark
to speak for themselves.
And that may be the kindest
and wisest thing

I ever did for Amos and Mark.

Anyway, here is the wisdom
I want to leave us with today,
because there is no deeper or greater wisdom
that I know of anyway,
about God and the life of the spirit.

God is not available to us
in the past
nor in the future,
but only here,
only now.

The past can show us tracks —
the footprint of the holy on human history —
but it is not God.

The future is total mystery
toward which we can only blow a kiss
and wish.

God exists only here,
only now,
only in the present.

Our struggle, as Francis points to,
is that we constantly wander
between the past and the future —
the known and the unknown,
a pinball bouncing off each.

We linger in memories,
savor sentiment,
pine for how it used to be.
We reach for what is next,
and anticipate with great desire or anxiety
what is yet to come.
But rarely do we sit alone
between the known and the unknown —
present to the moment,
present with God.

I am not wise enough to know
why we are so bad at this,
but I do know that to sit alone
in the present,
can be filled with anxiety,
ghosts,
pain,
and all manner of dread.

It is a place we do not go
because to be alone in the present
is to see and hear and feel things
that unsettle us.
And yet there in that place,
in the midst of those things —
both underneath
and among them —
is God.

It is the only place God is.
Sit with that for a moment.

 

We go looking in cathedrals
and Grand Canyons
and lakeside,
when God is present in a diner,
in the recliner,
in the shower for crying out loud.

When we get good
at turning off the noise around us
and listening to the noise within us
and allow it all to settle a little bit —
not trying to get rid of it
but listening through it —
then we begin to notice the presence
of something or someone else.

We cannot find God in scripture
or in nature —
we only find tracks there —
tracks that resonate God’s presence in the past.
But God is not there
in the grand beauty of the natural world
nor in the intricacies of Scripture.

God is here:
right now
right here
in each present moment.

If I were a prophet…
that is the message I would proclaim.
If we seek God in the present moment
we may not only discover God,
but we will discover more nearly
ourselves.

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2 ADVENT C 2019: Christmas Subversion

December 8, 2019 by Cam Miller


Alright folks, this is the Second Sunday of Advent
so it is time to get honest.
That’s a consumer warning.

Second Advent
is far enough away from Christmas Eve
that we can open the book on Christmas
and read the margin notes.
If you didn’t know it,
the Christmas narrative is a prophetic story.

By prophetic, I mean a story
that wants us to see something
that is right in front of our eyes
but that we need a different lens
in order to perceive.
Prophets offer that kind of a lens,
and Christmas is that kind of a story.

But we know the nativity story so well
that its very familiarity works against us.
So let’s work backwards,
from the United States in 2019
back to Matthew in the year 85 or so,
of the first century – who, remember,
is telling us a story that took place
fifty years before him.

Actually, before go back that far,
let’s take a stop around the turn of the 20th century.
JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie,
and John D. Rockefeller –
the Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos,
and Mark Zuckerberg of their day –
controlled oil,
railroads,
and banking monopolies.

They also concluded
that the Women’s Movement
and religion
had become too mettlesome in politics.
They actually colluded with one another
and their peers,
to take both the Women’s Movement
and the Churches
out of the public square.
They were quite clever about how they did it,
and more to the point,
it is a strategy that was copied by titans
of the last decades
of the twentieth century as well.

What those earlier robber barons did
was to use their money and influence
to raise up leaders within Christianity
and the Women’s Movement,
who divided them, and eventually
redirected the energies of both
toward private morality
instead of public policy.

Today we don’t think of feminism and Christianity
as allies, which is a measure of how successful
the robber barons were.

But feminism and Christianity
were a powerful social force
focused with passion on issues of public policy:
the distribution of wealth,
addressing the ravages of poverty,
creating fair labor and child labor laws,
fighting to break up and limit
the power of monopolies,
and counter-acting the growing
nationalism and war-mindedness.

The robber baron’s strategy shifted that energy
so that the Women’s Movement and the Church
became obsessed with
alcohol and drug consumption,
sexual behavior,
and, what else, teenagers.

Christianity was diverted
from being a passionate advocate
for social justice
to a watchdog of private morality.

The obsession with private morality continued
from the Temperance Movement on,
until slowly the churches became enmeshed
in the Civil Rights movement of the sixties
and then the anti-Vietnam war Movement.

But then again in the late 20thcentury,
millions of dollars from very wealthy,
politically and economically minded patrons,
began funding
theologically conservative leadership
in all of the mainline Protestant churches,
including The Episcopal Church.

What we have witnessed as the moneyed invasion
of political parties
actually began in mainline Protestant Christianity
and to a lesser but significant extent
in Roman Catholicism.*

It was a guided effort
that succeeded in fracturing
and weakening Protestantism,
which was also just beginning to stumble
under the weight of pervasive secularism.
Long story short:
Just because you are paranoid
doesn’t mean someone is not out to get you.

The sweep of the Biblical narrative
and the Christmas story in particular,
are radically corrosive to the self-interests
of those who wield power and wealth
and seek to control culture.

I am not making this up –
it is not some political spin
I am putting on the gospel:
it has always been there
right in front of our eyes
if we had the lens to see it.

When Matthew tells us
the word of John appeared in the wilderness,
his narrative is obsessed with King Herod.
Likewise, when Luke begins his story
of Jesus’ birth
it is with telling us who the politicians were.
From the beginning of Matthew and Luke,
the two Christmas gospels,
we know it was in the reign of Tiberius,
under the local dictatorship of Pontus Pilate,
and within the tetrarchy of Herod.
Here is why the Christmas story
is enmeshed with the narrative of political power.

History is told
from the point of view of the winners –
more precisely, by the winner’s historians.
The chemists of culture
tell us how it happened and why,
and they tell us what they want us to know.

So if you are telling a story
in the midst of a culture hostile to you,
as Matthew and Luke were doing,
and you want your story to be remembered,
then you have to peg the events
to milestones that the winners care about.

We have been in this position for a very long time.
Almost all of Biblical theology
is told from within a hostile culture,
and told subversively against the winners.

From the very beginning,
when we were slaves in Egypt
we have understood that God’s people
are in a hostile environment
and that by banning together
we are creating a counter-cultural movement.

There have been times in our history,
from Mount Sinai in Egypt
to Mount St. Alban’s in Washington DC,
when Christians acted
more like Pharaoh than Moses
but it never takes very long to be dramatically
reminded about which one is our spiritual path.

From the very beginning
our spiritual tradition
has been composed of prophets
that warned the kings
and religious authorities in Israel
of truths they could not see in front of them.

They warned that royal policies and culture
dedicated to self-interest,
maintenance of power for the elite,
and consumerism
would come to insure national ruin.
We have long understood
that such prophetic witness
is required of spiritual people.

From the very beginning,
when we were healers
for people who had been marginalized
because of illness and woundedness;
and then when we too had become marginalized
because we dared to embrace them;
we understood that subversiveness
is required of spiritual people.

From the very beginning,
when we were messiahs and disciples
who sought to reform our own religion
because it had become fat and corrupt,
and a rigid hierarchy of men who were enmeshed
in economic and military power,
we understood
that rubbing salt into the wounds
of those powerful elites
is what it means to be spiritual people.

From the very beginning
even though our religious leaders
and our religious institutions
often became the prostitutes and pimps
of economic culture,
strong currents in Christianity
have always remembered
that being the yeast of justice,
advocates of mercy,
and lovers of peace
is the ordinary work
of spiritual people.

It is the Christmas story,
perhaps even more graphically than all others,
that holds these reminders
of what spiritual people do.
And this is why we need to take the story back
from the chemists of culture
who have neutered it.

Week by week in Advent,
until that moment on Christmas Eve,
we tell a story from the margins of society
that holds a profound and poignant reminder
that being spiritual people
requires us
to always be swimming against the current.

Then, on Christmas eve –
like American slaves
worshipping under the watchful eye
of their masters –
we tell the more polite and socially acceptable
version of the story,
which also has a kind of truth
and so we can still tell it with integrity.

Being spiritual people,
it should excite our anger and indignation
that our story,
the Biblical one about Christmas,
is never authentically told in the public square.
All that Christmas stuff we hear on the radio,
see in those manger scenes,
read about in the newspaper,
images on Facebook or watch on television,
are sentimentalized and stripped
of any true spiritual content.

That Christmas
has been appropriated by the chemists of culture
in order to reinforce the story
they want us
to spend our money on.

Being spiritual people,
we understand that the Biblical story of Christmas
is counter-cultural,
and we share in the joy of surprise
when those who never knew it
stumble into its subversive wisdom.

So here it is,
a little whisper of truth for spiritual people
in the midst of a culture hostile to it:

“In the reign of Donald Trump,
when Cuomo was Governor;
Francis was pope;
and Michael, Presiding Bishop;
the Word of the Lord
came to a strange and motley group
huddled around a Wayfair altar
on the northern shore of Seneca Lake
located in the upstate region
known as FLX, or the Finger Lakes.

‘Prepare the way of the Lord:
God is coming into the world
incarnate in the vulnerable flesh
of a human infant,
surrounded by the brutality and violence
of poverty inflicted upon it
by those who hold the reins of power
and those who look the other way.
God is coming to speak truth to power.
So get ready.
Be that truth.
Subvert that power.’”

Now in case you never heard it put quite that way,
this is the Christmas story – the Biblical one.

But please, let us also take care.
This is a tough season for spiritual people.
We see things
and we know things
that weigh heavy on our hearts and minds.

We understand what is going on
and we recognize the motives of people
that are led by profit more than justice.
It is a weary season for spiritual people
because we are by nature
and by desire
healers.

We see and we feel
the woundedness of others,
even as we experience most acutely
our own wounds.
So take care.
Spiritual people need to be nurtured
especially in such a difficult season.

Allow yourself
to be held in the arms of community.

Allow yourself
to find the arms of those
who love you most closely.

Allow yourself
to stop and breathe and remember
there is a bigger picture,
a deeper hope,
a greater love
than any we see named or evoked
in the culture around us.

Allow yourself
to rest and be touched
by the peace of God
that surpasses all understanding –
that strange whimsical and mysterious movement
of the Spirit
that winnows through
our ordinary days.

Allow yourself
to stop and look around
and see the marvelous people
in the world around you –
even right here
even right now –
and reckon them as a gift.

Who would have thought,
given what we have been told
by all those who are hostile to Christianity,
that a religion could be so spiritual
and that being spiritual
we could be so counter-cultural and subversive –
even to our own self-interest?

Welcome to the season
and take good care.

 

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4 Epiphany C, 2019

February 3, 2019 by Cam Miller

The prophet Isaiah’s Lips Anointed with Fire by Benjamin West

Somewhere in the recesses of your life
burrows the memory of a time
when you angered your family.
I do not know what you did, of course,
but I am pretty sure whatever it was,
they got doggone mad.

For some of us, there is more
than a single memory of such times,
and those memories can’t burrow
far enough down into the forgotten to hide
because they are too fat for cover.
But I would put money on the table
that every one here
has angered
those we have lived with
and loved
and been closest to.
It is just an ordinary event in the human domain –
an elementary property of the physics of love.

Not only have we angered someone,
but someone with whom we are close
or closely related,
has gotten US
hot under the collar –
more than once, if I am not mistaken.

We are never so lonely
as when we feel alone with those we love;
and few moments make us more isolated
than being angry with those we love
or feeling their anger toward us.

Jeremiah and Jesus lived the restless,
perhaps even tortured life,
of those steeped in the anger
of their peers and contemporaries.
But Jeremiah and Jesus
could not have been more different.

Jeremiah came from money –
the small power elite class of his society.
Jesus came from dirt, as in dirt-poor.
Jeremiah was educated,
and it shows in the exquisite images
and parallelism of his poetry.
Jesus was likely illiterate
and it shows in the pithy, earthy parables
so easily recitable from memory.

Jeremiah was a priest
before he was a prophet,
and his father was a priest who taught him the trade.
Jesus was a peasant who made doors
and wheels, and tables and ploughs
just as his father taught him to do.
But both of them, Jeremiah and Jesus,
separated by almost six hundred years,
knew from a very young age
he would be in trouble.

Both of them knew
that the wisdom they were given
would cause those who loved them
to become very angry.

WHAT they knew, was what God
had given them to speak.
Both of them were what we would call, preachers.
Just like the Bible is more sermon than text,
(as I talked about last week),
the main characters of the Bible, its prophets,
are more preacher than magician or guru.
Whatever magic they had
came from their lips more than their hands.

But this idea is hard for us.
The idea that God speaks on the lips
of an ordinary human being
is not something we believe today.

We know that if someone were to walk in that door
and tell us that God
had told him or her to come in here
and give us a message,
our knee-jerk reaction would be to think
he or she were crazy.
And yet, that is the idea of a prophet.

A prophet had the unenviable task
of speaking God’s mind to humans,
and sometimes
speaking the mind of humans to God.
The prophet was a mouthpiece:
not welcomed to speak his or her own mind
but to articulate GOD’s vision
or dream
or judgment.

In poor Jeremiah’s case,
he was given the words of ‘doom and gloom’
to speak to an affluent society
that was ‘partying like it was 1999.’
600 BCE in Judah,
was like the 1920’s in the USA:
a big party before the big bust.
In the middle of it was poor old Jeremiah
lobbing stink bombs and water balloons
on everyone’s good time.

Fortunately, he got some good news
to spread toward the end of his life.
I say fortunately,
because I do not think Jeremiah
loved being a prophet of doom and gloom.

At the end of his life,
when Jerusalemhad been torched
and ground down to rubble,
and his peers and contemporaries
brutally carted away into exile,
Jeremiah was finally given a vision
of restoration and hope
to spread among the survivors.
He was given a vision
of how it would be
when God welcomed them back
with open arms.

Jesus was more like the prophet Amos,
a peasant sent into the halls of power
where he did not belong;
sent to deliver both judgment against
the status quo
and an alternative vision
for how God wanted us to live.
We know that didn’t end well.

But here we are in 2019,
and I’m pretty sure anyone claiming to speak for God
would be thought of as nuts,
or a shyster.

This very idea of speaking for God
puts us smack up against our trust in God –
or more specifically, our trust that there IS a God.
It has to do with our willingness to believe
that God has any input
or influence
in life as we live it,
rather than as some nebulous concept of a Creator
who exists at great distance from creation.
Let’s face it,
many people who attend church each week
are functional agnostics.

While we or they may believe in God,
or the ‘idea’ of God,
we are also fitted so snuggly with a secular lens
that we can’t understand how God
could actually DO anything real –
anything that could be measured, quantified,
or replicated.

And truthfully, God
does not make much of an appearance
in a world defined only by
what we can touch and hold and measure
within the grasp our instrumentation.
Because, let’s face it,
on the other side of this equation
is our very limited instrumentation.

But in such a world as ours,
prophets do not exist
because there is no actively involved God
to give them an utterance or vision.
Yet, for some of us,
just as surely as we have a memory
of our family being angry with us,
we also have a memory snuggled deep inside,
of God breaking through.
It probably is not a Bollywood spectacular, rather,
something quieter –
as in the crisp air off frozen lakes;
or in the warm salty tear
magically drawn
by love we can see but not measure
in the iris of a friend;
or in a tender green shoot reaching out
from dark moist earth;
or in inextricable kindness or even
life-threatening heroics between strangers…

God’s presence breaks through
our modernists lens, and when it does
we suddenly have to decide
if we will trust it or not.
Very often,
the vehicle of that presence breaking through,
is the voice of someone
whose words we have discovered over time,
point to a power greater than ourselves.

The prophet’s voice could be
a big voice,
like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malala,
someone whose wisdom seems even wiser
after having put their body on the line
for the words they speak.

Or it could be a small voice,
one that few people hear in the way we do –
a grandparent
or teacher
or that person who always sits across
from us at a 12-step meeting
or a book club.

And a community can be that kind of voice –
those people we admire
who are always doing something
or witnessing to something
or quietly showing something
to anyone who will listen.

Well maybe that is a good place to stop
on a day we have our Annual Parish Meeting,
and to remember those folks
who have spoken wisdom and insight in our lives,
and those folks who we have gotten angry with
because they told us some truth
we didn’t want to hear.

It is a struggle in our world
to give credibility to any voice,
let alone suspect that God has laced it
with some wisdom
or perspective we needed to hear.

On a day like today,
it is well that we consider
who those voices have been for us,
and whether or not,
as a community of faith,
we can be such a voice for others.

And now,
sitting or standing as is our custom for prayer,
we voice our own prayers and hopes
as a community of faith.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 Trinity Place, An Open Space for Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts

“Open Space” means open and inclusive, welcoming the Geneva and FLX community to use our space, and to partner with us in building an inclusive community for spiritual inquiry and wellness. 

“Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts” means we are pointed toward a particular dimension of life, specifically that which strengthens the relationship of body, mind, and spirit. 

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