Ezekiel 2:1-5
The people of God are not as familiar with the prophetic voice as we once were. Many of us now, were we to meet someone who claimed to be a prophet, would meet them with raised eyebrows or even with concern for their health. We might brush them aside, thank them and move along. We might listen patiently, or even with curiosity, and then go on with our day. We are not accustomed to prophets, nor are we particularly prone to listening to their words. The prophets are relegated to the pages of scripture, to history, to insanity.
If we are feeling a bit more generous, we might see certain figures of recent history as prophetic. One voice that often comes to mind is that of the reverend Dr. King. Other voices of the various civil rights movements of this country may echo in your ears as we ponder the prophetic. We often speak of these folks as being “ahead of their time,” brave. Being ahead of your time is code for danger, for ridicule and disregard, for threat of death. Claiming someone was ahead of their time is really just a shorthand for saying they were right, and no one wanted to hear it. Many of our most prophetic voices have been silenced for this very reason.
And yet we are a people of prophets. We read and study a book, over a quarter of which is prophecy of some form. We name our children for prophets, Isaiah, Elijah, Eli, Miriam, Mary, John. Some of the most beloved passages and images in scripture come from prophets of the Old Testament, and some of the most bizarre are directly out of the book of Revelation, a record of the prophetic witness continuing after Jesus’s death and resurrection. We are inextricably linked to the prophets of God, as well as to the people they have been sent to speak to by God. Today we are invited to turn toward prophesy, to consider our own voices and to examine our ability to listen, first by the prophet Ezekiel, and then by the Apostle Paul, and finally by Jesus himself.
The call of Ezekiel begins with an extraordinary vision of otherworldly creatures and an overwhelming presence of God’s own glory. To look upon this glorious presence is too much for any mortal, and Ezekiel falls down on his face in a faint. This is where we meet him, weak and trembling on the floor before God. The voice of the Lord bids him rise, and the Spirit of the Lord possesses his body and brings him to his feet, that he might receive his commission from God. Unlike some prophetic call stories, God does not tell Ezekiel what his message to the people will be. God first tells Ezekiel who his audience will be, the rebellious and transgressive people of Israel who have lost sight of their responsibilities as the covenant people. Ezekiel’s call is to be a preacher, a messenger to a specific people in a specific time and place. The words he will speak to them will come from God through prayer, fasting, and Spirit-filled prophecy. All he knows in preparation is that the people who will hear him are people who have lost their way and hardened their hearts. God says to Ezekiel “I am sending you to them, and you shall say to them ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ Whether they hear or refuse to hear, they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.”
Ezekiel was not ahead of his time. Ezekiel was being sent to speak to the people in the present moment. He prophesied, he spoke of the future, yes. But those warnings of devastation and destruction were the future consequences of the present moment. The present reality of this impudent and stubborn rebellious generation, this group of people who had chosen the path that led away from God were only doomed in so far as they refused to listen, refused to change course. Prophets are harbingers of the future, but they only proclaim calamity in the hope that it will not come to pass. A true prophet of God hopes their prophesies never manifest into reality, prays that the people will listen and understand. To be a prophet is to speak the truth, whether the audience hears or refuses to hear. When we say the prophets were ahead of their time, we mean that they were right, and we have refused to hear.
And still God sends prophets to God’s people, knowing our stubbornness. God knows the state of our hearts, our fear of change, our greed for power and our desperation for certainty, and he sends us heralds of a better way, a way forward into righteousness and peace. God called Ezekiel and sent him to the people of Israel. God called Paul and sent him to the new believers across the known world. God sent his only Son, his own heart, to preach and teach and to in turn send his disciples out two by two. In all of these cases, and in the cases of the many prophetic voices that have been raised up throughout our history, their faithfulness to the Word of God endured even as they were threatened, imprisoned, and ignored by stubborn and impudent generations of audiences. The Word of God has been proclaimed by people of every age and every race and every gender, at the riverside, in the desert, in the colosseum and from the cross. The Word of God continues to come to us from the pages of scripture, from the pulpit, from the altar, from the voices and actions of our fellow children of God. We are at once both prophet, called to speak truth in love, and the crowds, tasked with discerning the false prophets from the true.
Like our ancestors, we will often struggle in this discernment. Ezekiel was met with scorn, Paul was criticized even by his fellow apostles, and Jesus Christ himself was derided in his own hometown. Like many of the great prophets, we will doubt our own voices, hoping someone else will be chosen to speak instead. And still we will be sent out, never alone but in partnership with our fellow disciples, tasked with preaching the Good News and bringing healing and wholeness with us in the name of Christ. To be a prophet, to be a disciple, is not to be ahead of our time. It is to understand that our present moment is capable of miraculous change, our present community capable of growing up into the kingdom of Heaven. We are called to look toward a future when all will be made right, and to look back at a history of which we are one small part. We are called in order that we might be sent. Where we are going will not be easy, the words we bring will not always make us likeable. We must go anyway. We must speak. We must listen. We must love wholeheartedly. Thus says the Lord.
Mother A Writes 