prophetic rhythms

Hear, you peoples, all of you; pay attention, O earth, and all that is in it,
and let the Lord GOD be a witness against you,
           the Lord from his holy temple.
For behold, the LORD is coming out of his place,
    and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth.
And the mountains will melt under him,
    and the valleys will split open,
like wax before the fire,
     like waters poured down a steep place.

Immersed in reading the prophets now for the third week.

Jonah. Amos. Hosea. Micah.

And now the somewhat winding journey through Isaiah.

I am struck anew with just how foreign this all is, whether in Hebrew or English.

Rhythm and rhyme and passion pouring out
A prophetic fountain bursting off the page
Drenching me in metaphor and color and hyperbole
Valleys and hilltops, deep rifts and jagged peaks
Mad prophets carried about by the Spirit
Wildly slinging words like a crazed painter missing more than an ear
Unlike Baal’s prophets, no bloody gashes on themselves do they cut
No, rather, they fling out an endless supply of divine tears
Pain and anguish, desperation and heartbreak
A divine romance collapsing in a heap
The prophet finally falling, exhausted, voice fading, reddened eyes pleading
Does anyone even hear?
Does any care?

Why is our preaching so lame, so limp, so flaccid by compare? Spock-like we mount our pulpits and dissect our texts – and each other, for that matter. Flatlander words. Greekish, analytical, or, for those daring a different flavor, comedic and brash and loud like a bad salesmen with that noxious cologne, confusing volume with veracity as we push our product line.

Some say people are tired of talk, that people want deeds and not words (this of course does not keep us from offering our sermons still). But perhaps they are merely done with meager fare, with the retreaded and tired old sermons of our endless regurgitations.

But prophetic passion, unaffected, unabashed…to see it walk off these pages and into our streets…would we risk it? Would I risk it?

Would I risk the stones?

crossing the Rubicon

Like a stubborn heifer,
     Israel is stubborn;
can the LORD now feed them
    like a lamb in a broad pasture?

Ephraim is joined to idols;
   leave him alone.
When their drink is gone, they give themselves to whoring;
   their rulers dearly love shame.

A wind has wrapped them in its wings.   Hosea 4:16-19

Warm-up: read Mark 3:20-35

The Rubicon.

The Rubicon is a shallow river in northeastern Italy that marked the boundary between the province of Cisalpine Gaul to the north and Italy proper to the south. In order to protect the republic from internal military threat, Roman law forbade any Roman general to cross the Rubicon southward with his army. In fact, any Roman soldier south of the Rubicon by law automatically became a civilian with no obligation to obey any military orders. To cross the river without disbanding your army was considered an act of high treason and even sacrilege — and was an offense punishable by death.

The Roman historian Suetonius tells the tale of Julius Caesar and his decisive move in his quest for power in
49 BC crossing the Rubicon on January 10th, breaking that law, and making armed conflict with his rivals inevitable. Caesar’s swift and bold move forced his key rival, Pompey, the lawful consul, along with a large part of the Roman senate, to flee Rome in fear.

According to Suetonius, Caesar was undecided as he approached the river, but after a supernatural apparition, he plunged across, uttering the phrase alea iacta est— “the die is cast.” Ever since, whenever any individual or group commits itself irrevocably to a risky or revolutionary cause, we say they have “crossed the Rubicon.” They have passed the point of no return.

The Pharisees in their growing opposition to Jesus clearly seem to have crossed their own Rubicon. It started off with questions. “Who is this that would forgive sins?” But the questions were unexpressed whispers in their own minds. Then came the verbal challenges to those around Jesus. “Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners like that?” Next came the direct challenge to Jesus himself. “Why do your disciples feast and not fast like the rest of us?” “Why do your disciples do what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” Finally came the plotting and scheming that led them to go out the door and plot secretly how to destroy Jesus.

This distance in Mark is covered in only a few paragraphs, but it reflects a momentous internal crossing in which they spill out of the river on the other side, dripping with snide insinuation of satanic possession.

We aren’t talking about something done or said carelessly or some technical violation of divine protocols. Blaspheming the Spirit is not something bad you say about or to God in anger or frustration or even under the influence. It is simply Rubicon water pouring out from our hearts revealing eyes that no longer see and ears that no longer hear. The mind is set. The die is cast.

It’s difficult to know looking at others — or even at ourselves — when this line has been crossed. I would have surmised that a certain Saul of Tarsus had crossed that line and would have written him off as “sinning unto death.” But Jesus knows. Such a chilling pronouncement is perhaps best left in his mouth.

For us it remains that we are all in the process of becoming something. We all have questions and stirrings and leanings that are propelling us forward. They may be questions shared and openly discussed and prayed, or held with increasingly closed hands and minds and hearts.

All of us in this life ultimately cross the river.

The question is which way.

religious intoxication

Warm-up:  read Mark 3:1-6

Beware the yeast of the Pharisees. Luke 12:1


Don’t gaze at wine when it is red,
when it sparkles in the cup;
when it goes down smoothly;
in the end it bites like a snake and poisons like a viper.
Proverbs 23:31-32

Religious intoxication.

It is a vice more vicious and destructive than the worst case of rampant alcoholism, because it is cloaked in
respectability and virtue and devotion.

And yes, it needs its own recovery group — but then, we would all have to be in it.

Legalism is an insidious seduction perpetrated by the enemy of our souls who converts brothers and sisters into legal pick-pockets and preachers into nit-pickers.

Faith is exchanged for exterior conformities.

Integrity swapped for appearances.

Holiness replaced by adherence to rules.

Love swallowed up by law.

And those seduced are clueless until the morning after — the hangover and the porcelain altar before which they bow when suddenly they realize they are staring back at themselves with soulless eyes.

That is, if they are fortunate enough to wake up and actually feel the hangover. For legalism can become a lifelong binge from which there is no recovery (hence Jesus’ words on the blasphemy of the Spirit later in this chapter of Mark).

And so the warning: don’t look at the wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup...because the next thing you know you will find yourself positioning a man with a withered hand or marriage or life like a pawn among pews; seeing no man but an object, a thing, to be used, in this case, as bait in a trap for a galling rabbi who dares to speak forgiveness and feast with outsider sinners and who tramples your most holy laws and sacred institutions.

And then you will find yourself outside your holy place (or, perhaps even better, still within it) plotting on your most holy day how to destroy this Man.

“And Jesus looked around on them with anger…”

And he weeps.

storm

And there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. Jonah 1:4

Having been in my share of storms – personally, at home, in the workplace, and in church life –
I immediately connect with the storm Jonah faced. It has me pondering storms…

Some storms come because we are headed the wrong way, like Jonah; the storm intended as a corrective, to wake us from our sleep (“What meanest thou, O Sleeper?” – you can hardly improve on that as a question in such times) and cause us to examine our faulty course.

Other storms come to test our resolve or even to simply alter our course just a bit, like Paul’s storm in Acts 27 that detoured him to that little island of Malta for the rest of the winter.

Other storms come as an outright assault to take us under – like the storm on Galilee that Jesus got up and rebuked.

And some storms come because, well, we live in a place of many storms.

Jonah’s storm was clearly in the first category (can we call it a category one storm?) – divinely sent as a course interruption/correction for Jonah, personally. One thing I have always loved about the story of Jonah is how that, regardless of how insensitive and flawed he is in his response to God (whether in the first act of the story in his disobedience or in the second act in his obedience), God is at work in everything else around him. And so pagan sailors cry out to their gods for help and then throw every thing they can overboard. Rousing Jonah, they entreat the prophet’s prayers (what a wonderful role reversal!). And when everyone starts asking who might be to blame for the storm (isn’t it amazing that we always go there!), and the cast lots point to Jonah, he, of course, tells all. He offers the solution of throwing him overboard to stop the storm – and here’s the amazing thing: they refuse to do it! Businesses and churches in crisis will and often do readily throw shipmates overboard because they’ve deduced they’re to blame or just because someone has to go to lighten the load…you do what you gotta do (though families don’t normally throw their own overboard in crisis…not normally...though in biblical times, as we've seen, sometimes they did eat them). But these sailors row with might and main, desperate not to be reduced to that extreme.

But ultimately over the side Jonah goes as he yields to the storm and is willing to “go to hell” for the sake of the ship (the deep sea represented “hell” to the Jewish mindset – it’s why it’s a comfort in Revelation that “the sea is no more”). And “hell” (Hebrew sheol = the grave, the pit, the unseen place of the dead) is what he finds waiting for him in the belly of the fish for three days and nights.

I see some wonderful lessons from these pagan sailors on how to navigate the storms of life.

Let my first response in the storm be to cry out to God, rather than cursing, hiding below deck in denial, or beating up and blaming fellow ship mates.

Let me be willing to part with any thing. One of the bottom line lessons of every storm we encounter is the ultimate worthlessness of every thing. Every thing can go. In the case of Paul's journey, even the ship can go (and it did, on at least four different occasions). It’s a good day when the ship breaks up in the storm but all hands are saved.

Let me cling to every soul around me in the storm. When the normal reaction is ‘every man for himself,’ the pagan sailors stuck together and risked all for Jonah. What a shame if we do any less.

And taking a lesson from Jonah, let me yield myself to the waves with grace when I must – for my Papa is the owner of earth and sea. Or if I’m still standing on deck after the storm has subsided, let me, like those pagan sailors, take time to thank God – and sail on.

pawn

Pul the king of Assyria came against the land, and Menahem gave Pul a thousand talents of silver, that he might help him to confirm his hold on the royal power…2 Kings 15:19

“Which one is the possessor of heaven and earth: He who has a thousand houses, or he who, with no house to call his own, has ten at which his knock arouses instant jubilation?” George MacDonald

Jeroboam II reigns for forty-one years and then dies, his son Zechariah reigning in his place for six months. Then he is murdered by Shallum, who now reigns for two months before being offed by Menahem – who then goes on a rampage in Tipshah because the region wouldn’t acquiese to his rule, upping the ante of cold inhumanity by ripping up the women with child. Menahem pays dearly to secure his hold on power by tribute delivered to the king of Assyria – but ultimately death can’t be so easily bought off and he dies after a reign of ten years. Menahem’s would-be dynasty comes to an abrupt end when his son Pekahiah is then eliminated after only two years on the throne by Pekah, son of Remaliah – another man with big dreams. He makes his dreams of power stretch for twenty years before being struck down by a conspiracy driven by Hoshea. And when Hoshea makes his own power play by betting with Egypt against Assyria, he loses – as does all Israel as the northern kingdom falls into oblivion in the shadows of Assyrian captivity.

Exchange the names with those of any language or culture or time or place – the story is the same. It’s always the same in our kingdoms, isn’t it? An endless quest for power and control, seeking to direct events and using people like consumables to achieve our ends, to build a dynasty, maintain a legacy – all for the greater good, of course. Some are generous in how they do it, others brutal. But in the end, despite whatever good intentions or malicious will all the kingdoms we build ultimately collapse under the weight of our own fallen humanity.

Made me think of one of the few psalms to be essentially repeated twice in that divine hymnal:

God sticks his head out of heaven.
He looks around.
He's looking for someone not stupid—
   one man, even, God-expectant,
      just one God-ready woman.


He comes up empty. A string
   of zeros. Useless, unshepherded
Sheep, taking turns pretending
   to be Shepherd.
The ninety and nine
   follow their fellow.

Don't they know anything,
   all these impostors?
Don't they know
   they can't get away with this—
Treating people like a fast-food meal
   over which they're too busy to pray?


Night is coming for them, and nightmares,
   for God takes the side of victims.
Do you think you can mess
   with the dreams of the poor?
You can't, for God
   makes their dreams come true.

“Treating people like a fast-food meal over which they’re too busy to pray.” People as commodity, as resource or filler or fodder, taking a seat in our kingdom chair as we, like Sweeney, send them down the chute to be part of tomorrow’s menu. These kings consume each other as readily as their culture consumed the poor “and panted after the dust on their head, selling the needy for silver, the homeless for a pair of shoes.” And all of this for what? For a kingdom and reign and rule and control that was but a breath, and of which we can only read in an ancient tome as we stumble over the pronunciation of their names.

And standing apart is the son of man who, rather, emptied himself to “make the dreams of the poor come true.” Consumed rather than consuming. Moved about as a pawn himself by the powerbrokers of his day from high priest home to religious council to praetorium to flogging to skull hill. The ultimate object of contempt moving along his via dolorosa. “It is better for one man to die than for the whole nation to perish.” A small price to pay for preserving their kingdom…for another few decades, anyway – for like everything else we build it too surrendered to its own inevitable demise.

While the contrary kingdom, moved itself as a pawn and launched from skull hill, grows to a mountain that fills the whole earth. A mountain in which every one is valued, where none are used and discarded, where there are no kingdoms to build or control to maintain, but only life to enjoy, meaning to explore, beauty to realize, and wonder to discover in each other’s faces.

Is there really such a place?

Must we simply surrender to using and being used as so many ancient – and very much dead – kings?

Joktheel

He struck down ten thousand Edomites in the Valley of Salt and took Sela by storm, and called it Joktheel, which is its name to this day. 2 Kings 14:7 ESV


Seizing the rock city of Petra in Edom by storm was no small feat for a king.

I remember at least seeing the narrow passageway leading to the Rock city in that third Indiana Jones flick (one day, maybe, I’ll go there myself…but not holding my breath). Amaziah seems to have been right proud of his accomplishment. Calling it Joktheel (“The Lord Subdues”) he slathers his deed with God’s name – and who knows, maybe this is what God wanted him to do and what he did through him. But the pride that surfaces in the rest of his story makes me wonder if this wasn’t more about him that God.

Just gets me to thinking about our own “Joktheel” monuments and achievements – all those trophies we tend to collect with God’s name on them, but about which he may well be saying, “Please, don’t bring me into this!”

Reminds me of a picture I saw today:

So in one little, obscure name that I just noticed and researched for the first time in my recollection comes a pointed and personal reminder to be wary of making pronouncements of what God just did through me.

And btw, the city isn’t called Joktheel anymore.

and God ran

When he was still a long way off, his father saw him.
His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. Luke 15, MSG

And God ran.

I’ve always been blessed by the popular song about the prodigal son with that refrain – “and God ran.”

The scandalizing picture of the dignified father running with his robe flapping wildly in the wind, his heart pounding, tears streaming down his face. What did the son do? Did he stop in his tracks unsure whether he was going to be tackled or embraced? Did he start running towards him? Did he want to turn on his heel and start running away – again? Doesn’t seem to have mattered to the father one way or another. He ran to and embraced his wayward son.

It’s a picture I can’t escape as I read this story in Kings.

The northern kingdom was wayward from start to finish – and there’s plenty of fire and brimstone, blood and mayhem along a journey that ultimately leads to captivity and final destruction. But what strikes me increasingly as I walk through these pages is God’s relentless pursuit of his wayward northern sons.

Ahab is described as one who sold himself to do evil, as the worst of the worst. Despicable me. Yet amidst the pronouncements of judgments, God continues sending prophets to warn him and even to guide him in his strategies and campaigns. And when God pronounces the final doom of his entire household after the murder of Naboth and the seizure of his vineyard, Ahab mourns and walks about in sackcloth…and God takes notice. God more than takes notice, he actually delays the punishment.

I grew up hearing preachers quoting the blind man in John 9 – “now we know that God does not hear sinners” – as gospel fact. But that simply doesn’t square with his dealings with Ahab – or the rest of us, for that matter.

Then there’s the Jehoahaz story in 2 Kings 13. “He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and followed the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat” and so “the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he gave them continually into the hand of Hazael king of Syria.” Typical judges type scenario setting up. And then, “Then Jehoahaz sought the favor of the LORD, and the LORD listened to him, for he saw the oppression of Israel, how the king of Syria oppressed them.” No indication that Jeroboam’s calf-idols were removed, that the worship at the shrines had stopped, the altars destroyed (it would be a future southern king that would do that). And yet God listens. He hears Jehoahaz when he asks for God’s favor and mercy. And God moves not because he sees efforts at reform in his northern sons, but because he sees the heavy, oppressing hand of Syria upon them. And he sends them a savior – a “Jesus,” a “Joshua,” one who saves. And “nevertheless, they did not depart from the sins of the house of Jeroboam, which he made Israel to sin, but walked in them; and the Asherah also remained in Samaria.”

Yes, God visits the northern kingdom with wrath, just read the rest of the story. But he keeps running after them, running to them at any sign of turning, running to them in endless attempts to inspire a turning. He runs to them in the faces of Elijah and Elisha, the faces of Jonah and Amos and Hosea, and of a host of other and unnamed prophets and saviors.

For nearly two hundred years.

Two hundred years…

How heavily and how naturally we lean into judgment after the barest, most surface exposure to the hearts of others – a leaning often derived from these very stories. And in so doing we remain oblivious to the persistent tipping of the divine hand on these very pages; a hand leaning heavily into a compassion and mercy that runs to wayward sons rather than skewering them on the third strike; a tipping of the divine hand that point us to the full revelation of that hand, pierced and bleeding, that leaves the indelible, blood-smeared final revelation that “mercy triumphs (boasts loudly over, taunts, jumps up and down laughing) over judgment.”