Prophets from Among Us

Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Mark 1:21-29

February 1, 2015

As most of you have heard me say before, I was born in Jim Crow Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1959. A scant three hours up the road from there, and 18 remarkable years later, I graduated from high school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with a class that was exactly 50 percent white and 50 percent black. When my father had graduated from that same high school in the mid 1940s it had been, of course, all white.

The world that I came of age in was profoundly changed from the one I was born into, and the changes were driven in large part by prophets raised up by God from among their own people, prophets who spoke a new teaching with authority.

Some of these prophetic voices became widely recognized and well known, others spoke in smaller circles but with equal power. But whether or not that lived in the bright spotlight of history or labored unknown but to a few, they spoke a powerful word of justice and liberation.

To get to that point, though, they had to practice. I love the stories of such practice. The great John Lewis wrote in his brilliant memoir, Walking With the Wind, about preaching to the chickens on the sharecropping farm of his childhood in Troy, Alabama – about 150 miles from where I was born. Later on, he and his classmates at Fisk University in Nashville would have dorm-room “preach offs,” where the only question that matters, he notes, was “can you preach?”

Imbedded in that question was a deeper one: will you preach? Will you speak truth to power? Will you take the risks required to insist that your voice be heard?

We don’t have time this morning to tell their stories, so let’s cut to the quick. God has delivered time and again on the promise to raise up prophets in the fashion of Moses, and if, in our own time, the church is again to hear a prophetic voice then some of us in rooms such as this one need to acknowledge the privileges we enjoy and relinquish the power that we monopolize.

You see, I never needed to ask myself the kinds of questions John Lewis confronted. I didn’t need to practice preaching to the chickens, because I can speak in any room and pull up a chair to any table. Had I been around in those days, at the table where ecclesiastical Jim Crow was decided, I had a voice. Similarly, at the table where women’s ordination was decided, I had a voice. At the table where GLBT ordination was decided, I had a voice. At every table where power is decided, I, by virtue of being a straight, white, Protestant, man have a voice.

As I read the passages from Deuteronomy and Mark this week, I began mulling over the power of the voice and the challenging question of deciding when to use that power and when to step back and insist that other voices be heard.

Perhaps it is as much a function of my age as anything else, but I know that the church and the society that I believe God is calling into being will be shaped and led by folks much younger than I.

A huge, but too often unacknowledged power of privilege, is the capacity to build barriers to tables of decision. It is my responsibility, as one who is so very privileged in this church and society, to use my power to create space at every table of decision for voices long silenced. That means, sometimes, letting go of my own power in order to heed the voice of the prophets God is raising up in our midst.

There is so much more that must needs be said on this, but rather than try to give voice to it, let’s enact a small bit of it by gathering together at this table where there are no barriers, and the one voice we attend to calls us simply to gather, to share from our incredible abundance, and to love one another.

There are prophets among us. Attend to their voices. Come to the welcome table. Amen.