Ezekiel 2; 2Cor. 12:2-10

Prophets sent from God to the people of God with a Word from God are seldom popular folk. Most folk want to hear good news, to hear that they’re OK and things are going to be fine. They want to live their lives with God’s blessing. They want to raise families and establish households. They want God’s help in the way we take out insurance. We never want an insurance agent to tell us how to live our lives. Instead, we want insurance for the way we want to live our lives.

Viewing prophecy like insurance isn’t hard to understand. If the weather is bad, or the economy is slow, we want to hear it’s going to be all right. Most of us look at our circumstance and situation, and that’s the limit of our world’s horizon. We want our world to be OK. We want God to “make it so.” We want God to show up on the scene and change the world into the place we need it to be in order to live our lives the way we want.

When I say, we want to live our lives the way we want, that doesn’t necessarily mean in selfish ways. We want to live our lives in the way we are used to – we want the familiar things, ways, and customs to stay around. We want our streets to look like they’ve always looked. We want our churches to be just as we remember them. That’s our culture. It’s what’s we’re used to. We want to keep it pretty much just as it is.

Now, a prophet starts out just like us. A prophet doesn’t fly in on a UFO. She or he is raised on our streets, attends our schools, plays sports with our children, and is (pretty much) just like you and I in every respect. But, somewhere along the journey, something happens. Something shakes loose. The way things are just don’t seem like the way things should be.

Now, when I say, “something shakes loose,” I use those words intentionally. I could have said, “something connects,” and that would be more accurate, but, for the most part, something only connects from the prophet’s perspective, while something shakes loose from our perspective. Who does this guy think he is? Isn’t this Paul, the Pharisee? Where does he get off teaching like that? He’s not much to look at. He’s not a preacher of any great renown. We’ve got better teachers right here in our town – and we like what they have to say far better than what Paul is telling us.

Well, when the voice of the Spirit intervenes, a person becomes radically transformed; [she or he] is turned into another [person].”[i] Suddenly, they have a word to speak that language cannot contain; they have a vision to share that isn’t rooted in our common experience. In effect, they have no way to relate to us who have yet to undergo their transformation. Yet, still, they are required to speak. They are required to act. They are required to try.

“Hey,” God might say, “do you realize those migrant Mexicans don’t have Medicare?” “Well,” the prophet would normally answer, “They’re not supposed to have Medicare. We didn’t ask them to leave Mexico. Why should we pay for their medical coverage? If they want medicine, let them get a green card and get a real job.” The things that we would normally say, the things that make sense to us in our little worlds, just don’t seem adequate in the presence of God. God makes connections that we haven’t. God cares.

When you stand in the presence of a God that cares, something connects (or something shakes loose). Suddenly, you realize that the way you’ve been living your life, in fact, the way everyone you know has been living his or her life, is wrong. It’s too limited in its perspective. It’s too concerned with the details of our houses and our family’s welfare and not concerned at all with “those people.” When you stand in the presence of a God that cares, you suddenly realize that God cares about “those people,” too. Something connects (or something shakes loose).

“That’s where it gets difficult, because no one is able to comprehend the voice of the Spirit. We look at people who speak God’s message like folk looked at Paul – with anger and outrage. So long as we can’t look past the person we know, we can never see, really see, the person we haven’t encountered – the Divine Presence, the voice of the Spirit.

It might surprise you to hear that this condition is called “hardness of heart.” It seems too innocent for that. After all, hardness of heart is what happens to bad people – not to you and me. Yet, it is precisely hardness of heart that prevents us from hearing the living Word of God burning in the speech of the prophet proclaiming that God wants our hearts dedicated to a radically different course of action in order that the future God desires for the world may be birthed in the present through our acts of obedience.

You see, God does not just determine the course of the future. If that were so, there would be no freedom. Instead, God invites us to participate in creating the course of the future. The future God desires to create, however, is not just suited to us. Instead, the future God desires to create is a world of justice for every living creature – for God truly cares more deeply than any of us will ever know, for all of creation. From our own limited perspective, the present is just fine, and we want the future to be more of the same (or, ideally, even better for us). From God’s perspective, however, the way we are living in the present is not contributing to the future God desires for creation. That’s a difficult word to hear. It’s a difficult word to obey. In fact, in order to hear it (which, in the Hebrew also means to obey it) we are going to have to give up what we think is right in order to do what’s right. We don’t want to. We resist. In fact, the Scripture tells us, we rebel.

In Nazareth, the people were offended by Jesus. God’s healing power was present, but instead of opening their hearts and seeing the hand of God, they focused on the man they knew who was telling them to change their course. They respond by assassinating his character. Polite circles would have described Jesus as the son of Joseph. By asking, “Isn’t this the son of Mary?” they were reminding themselves (and Jesus) that he was a bastard. He was amazed at their unbelief and could do no mighty work there.

He didn’t argue with them or try to prove them wrong with miracles. He moved on. If some couldn’t see past the trees to see the forest, he still had to proclaim, “Hey, folks, there’s a bigger picture, and God wants you to be a part of it. But, if you’re not willing to participate, God is going to paint someone else into the picture, because the future is bigger than just you – God has staked a claim on a better future for everyone.”

Someone asked a mother how she divided her love among 6 children. She answered, “I don’t divide it, I multiply it!” That’s the prophetic task. It says the world is bigger than we imagine, and it always pains us to discover that it’s not just about us. Yet, if we can set aside what we think is right for us, we may well discover God in the midst of us, caring for all of us, and showing us a way that is right not merely for us, but for everything that God cares deeply for. While that may include us, it’s certainly not limited to us.