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The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany Almighty God, the breeze of your love and grace is ever blowing; may we set our sails to capture that breeze, and may it inspire these words and those who hear them. Amen. Moses said, The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet…. One of the most intriguing characters in these novels is Sibyl Trelawney, the divination teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Divination, for those of you who haven’t read Harry Potter, is the fine art of reading signs, looking for portents of the future—reading tealeaves, seeing in crystal balls, following the patterns in the stars. Professor Trelawney is a somewhat mysterious character, seldom seen out of her classroom which is tucked away high in the north tower of the Hogwarts castle. For many of the students, Trelawney and her class are something of a joke, for it seems that Sibyl is a bit of a fraud, making dire claims that never come true. Oh, she has her followers, students who hang on her every word, but most of the students, including Harry and his best friend Ron refuse to take her seriously and muddle their way through by making up wild predictions and crazy dreams for their assignments. Hermione, Hogwarts’ prize pupil, doesn’t understand why the Headmaster, the venerable Professor Dumbledore, hasn’t thrown Trelawney out on her ear for sheer incompetence. But Dumbledore knows something about Trelawney that no one else seems to know, for once long ago, Dumbledore heard Trelawney speak with authority, an authority he could not ignore, revealing a truth that no one wanted to hear, and information that was critical for defeating Harry’s archenemy, the evil Lord Voldemort. I won’t give you any more details than that, because doing so would involve revealing spoilers for any of you who may not have read the books yet. But for me, the character of Trelawney illustrates much about the way prophets’ lives have played out in both fact and fiction. There is, I think, something very appealing about the notion of being sent a prophet. We tend to think of a prophet as someone who can foretell the future, but it is more accurate to consider a prophet as someone who speaks in an inspired way, often telling hard truths, and biblically, as one who is called to speak for God. Whether we admit it or not, we often long for someone like a prophet to guide us, to make sense of where we are now and to help us navigate the uncharted waters of our future. And yet, at the same time, more often than not, we rail against prophetic messages when we hear them and we rebel against what they call us to do—we don’t REALLY want this guidance if it might cause us to change our very ingrained and comfortable behaviors. Perhaps it is because we have this love-hate relationship with the whole notion of prophecy that we so often look in askance at those who speak prophetically. And it’s also true that prophets both real and fictional are, like Sibyl Trelawney, generally quirky, unconventional characters. They stand out from the crowd and draw attention to themselves, by their appearance or by their behavior, or by their words, and the important truths they proclaim frequently go unheard or unheeded by the masses. Only those who are open to hearing, willing to pay attention to the message will get it. This was certainly true in biblical times. As Moses points out in our reading from Deuteronomy (part of Moses’ farewell speech to the people of Israel), God’s promise to raise up prophets to speak God’s word was a direct response to the people’s request—when they found speaking directly with God too fearful, they asked Moses to be an intermediary, and here Moses, before his death, is reassuring his people that future prophets would continue to fulfill that role. Ironically perhaps, those prophets the people desired, those chosen to proclaim God’s word, were shunned, ignored, ridiculed and vilified, and their words often ignored. And yet God continued to call prophets, continued to raise up individuals to proclaim with authority God’s message to God’s people—Elijah, Amos, Micah, Nehemiah, Jonah, Isaiah. Even though the people frequently reacted to these prophets in much the same way that Harry and his friends reacted to Sibyl Trelawney—ignoring them, discounting their words, even ridiculing them, God didn’t give up. Through these prophets God continued to call God’s people into relationship, continued to offer love and mercy and compassion for all, continued to place God’s word squarely in front of them, God’s word of redemption and grace. For us as Christians, we reach the culmination of this prophetic activity in our gospel stories. In Jesus we find not just one who proclaims the word as a prophet, but the one who is the WORD, capital W, the Word incarnate. And in today’s gospel we encounter Jesus, fairly early in his ministry teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. In Jesus’ day, there were many itinerant preachers and teachers and would-be prophets, but that day in the synagogue Jesus immediately stood out as one who was different, one who proclaimed something new. It’s interesting that Mark, unlike Matthew, doesn’t spend much time telling us exactly what Jesus taught. What seems to be more important for Mark was the way he taught it, the authority he exuded, an authority that marked his teaching as something to be attended to. Indeed, Jesus’ authority is so great that his divinity, his special status as the Son of God, a guarded secret in much of Mark’s gospel, is quickly revealed to the “unclean spirit” who possessed one man in Jesus’ audience. And when Jesus exorcises this unclean spirit simply by speaking as the Word, his authority is reinforced among the people. So what was it that made Jesus’ authority so palpable, so real that day in Capernaum? What set him apart from the other preachers and teachers and healers of his day? I think the story of Sibyl Trelawney provides a useful analogy here, too. When Sibyl made the prophecy that was so pivotal for the story, the one that Dumbledore took seriously, the one that kept him from throwing her out as a fraud, she wasn’t using any of the tricks of her trade—she had no tealeaves, no crystal ball, no astrology chart to back her up. Rather she spoke from her heart something that had been revealed to her and she spoke with an authenticity and lack of regard for self aggrandizement that lent credibility to what she said in a way that using her supposed powers could not have. We often associate authority with power of some sort. When Jesus came preaching in Galilee, when he entered the synagogue in Capernaum he came without any of the trappings of worldly power that might have lent him credibility. He wasn’t a political figure, nor was he wealthy; he wasn’t a king and he had no military might; he wasn’t even a member of a priestly family or part of the Temple hierarchy. Jesus’ power, his authority came in his authenticity, his realness, his actions and his presence that radiated who he really was—the Word incarnate, God’s only son. Like the people of ancient Israel, like those who crowded into that synagogue in Capernaum, like those who followed Jesus to the foot of the cross and beyond, we too seek a connection with God; we too look for that prophetic voice, we too seek that authority that speaks of God’s presence. And in a world where we are bombarded with images of power and authority of all sorts, we wonder what to trust. Short of having Jesus walk into our midst one Sunday morning preaching with authority, what do we do? We look to scripture of course, and to the preachers and teachers among us, but perhaps more importantly we can look for God in the world around us, we can look for Christ in each other and in our community. In fact, as it was with Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue, God’s power may be even more evident in actions than in words—actions that are authentic, actions that show more concern for the care of other than for the building up of self, actions that are grounded in prayer, grounded in seeking to hear and do God’s will. Just as in Jesus’ time the actions that exude the authority of God are likely be countercultural, they are likely to challenge us in our comfortable ways of being, but it is in and through those actions, connecting with that ultimate authority, that we find God’s rich blessings in our life. My prayer for us as we go back into the world today is that we might both seek to find God’s authoritative voice and to be bearer’s of that voice in all that we do, so that Christ’s light might shine ever more brightly in our lives. AMEN |
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