“For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you shall
burst into song, the trees in applause.”
—Isaiah 55:12
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Prelude. “I don’t know how my mother walked her trouble down / I don’t know how my father stood his ground / I don’t know how my people survive slavery / I do remember, that’s why I believe … / My God calls to me in the morning dew / The power of the universe, It knows my name / Gave me a song to sing and sent me on my way / I raise my voice for justice, I believe …” — “I Remember, I Believe,” Sweet Honey in the Rock
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One of the great misfortunes in believing communities is the segregation of pastoral and prophetic vocations. As if you have to choose; as if, for pastors, you want to keep your job. As if being civil (“friendly”) is the highest Christian virtue.
It is certainly true that it is difficult to affect people’s attitudes and behaviors if you do not love them, if you are unavailable in moments of crisis (and celebration). And many of those moments, especially the unpleasant ones, do not occur in timely sequence or on orderly schedule.
Ken Sehested
Being called “prophetic” may seem complimentary; but it often is a polite way of saying, “You make me uncomfortable.” And making people uncomfortable, is … well … pretty close to uncivil and unfriendly. You may get some begrudging admiration; but it doesn’t make people want to hang out with you.
When I was an organizer on justice and peace matters, a pastor asked me to preach while he was away. It was a complement, his church being a prominent one. But he ended his note of invitation saying, “You can come stir things up and I’ll return to settle them down.”
Or earlier, when my focus was on the scourge of world hunger and food insecurity, I was asked to spend a weekend with a congregation, doing training and then preach on Sunday morning. The training was focused on helping a small group in the congregation find “handles” to get involved in their own location.
Building on strategies for actual engagements with impoverished communities (theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez once commented: “So you love the poor? Name them.”), we explored the necessity for setting one’s local situation with larger national and international institutions, policies and practices. Doing analysis is important; comprehending the structural forces that create poverty is essential if we are to move beyond charity to the work of justice.
I had several good conversations with the family who housed and fed me during this weekend. So much so that near the end of our time together, the wife admitted she was very nervous about what meals to prepare: “I wondered if you subsisted on bean sprouts and tofu.”
Laughing, I said, “No, locusts and honey.”
I doubt John the Baptizer got many guest preacher invitations and even fewer invites to Sunday dinner.
As the popular aphorism says, if you give a person a fish, they can eat for a day; but if you show them how to fish, they will eat for a lifetime. Which isn’t true. To flourish, they need fishing gear; transportation to a market; regulatory enforcement so buyers do not exploit those who provide commodities; plus a trade network, with fair wages and just profits, to bring goods to a larger public, thus providing a reliable and sustainable circuit of production and consumption.
“We undertake this advocacy not because we’re committed liberals but because this work is rooted in God’s pathos.”
Then, of course, the training involved situating these engagements and analysis within our spiritual tradition. There are some 2,000 biblical texts that insist on God’s special concern for the poor, the marginalized, those with no seat at the table of creation’s bounty — a reality God has promised to abolish. The point is, we undertake this advocacy not because we’re committed liberals but because this work is rooted in God’s pathos which, according to Scripture, is to be reflected in those walking in the Way of Jesus. Or as St. Augustine said so concisely, “We imitate whom we adore.”
I’m not keen on the framework of “inner” and “outer” when it comes to personal and public spirituality. But I can’t think of an alternative. The one sense in which I am still an evangelical — the one and only sense — is my conviction that human hearts must be disarmed as well as nations. Decisions about “horses” and “houses” (biblical metaphors for war and wealth) are deeply rooted in the human hearts.
Spiritual formation is a lifelong process. Among my favorite quotes is from the legendary migrant labor organizer and proponent of nonviolent struggle Cesar Chavez, who wrote, “I am a violent man learning to be nonviolent.”
The pastoral vocation, if it is to be effective, entails the need for prophetic disclosure, which is often discomfiting, even controversial. The prophetic vocation, to be efficacious, must include attention to the pastoral needs of its constituency — and the refusal to demonize opponents.
Early on in my organizing career (later confirmed in my role as a local church pastor), I learned that helping people find needed resources in pursuit of their gospel passions, helping them connect with others who share their convictions, was laying the groundwork for a larger mobilization designed to thwart the rule of public corruption and exploitive policies. Such work requires much patience and perseverance. You never know in advance when the “ripe” moment arrives for large scale change. And most do not live to experience that breakthrough.
This is pastoral work, and the vast majority of my time (in addition to funding a nonprofit) was consumed with this work. This work creates the building blocks that are ready, when the moment arrives, to mobilize in publicly dramatic ways.
Likely the least remembered quote from Dr. King is among his best insights: “Our most powerful nonviolent weapon is, as would be expected, also our most demanding, that is organization. To produce change, people must be organized to work together in units of power.”
It’s true that the strategies and tactics of pastoral work differ from those of prophetic work. And some people are better at one than the other. But it is essential that we build communities who know and understand that to meet the challenges we face, both these practices must be engaged, must work in tandem, must discern at any given moment what is the timely need and emphasis and focus.
Of course, conflictive encounters arise both in interpersonal and in highly public encounters. A modern framing of the older construct contrasting pastoral and prophetic work in this regard is referred to (particularly in feminist and anti-racist training) as “calling in” and “calling out.” There are times when conflict should be dealt with, at least initially, one-on-one or in small groups; other times, what’s called for is a very public form of reprimand. Both methodologies have risks. Discerning which to do when isn’t always simple or easy.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
Nevertheless, be clear about this, as South African Bishop Desmond Tutu insisted: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
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What stimulated the essay above was the desire to post two very different pieces of writing.
The first one — “Buttered hot biscuits,” a riff on Romans 12:9-21 — is a litany composed for use as the call to worship in my congregation.
The second is a stunning essay by Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian, one of the world’s leading authorities on Holocaust studies who also is a veteran of the Israeli Defense Force. One long paragraph in his article — “As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel” — is a stark, utterly discomfiting summary of the impunity of ranking Israeli politicians regarding the war in Gaza.
In that essay, Bartov reminds us: “Two days after the Hamas attack, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared, ‘We are fighting human animals, and we must act accordingly,’ later adding that Israel would ‘break apart one neighborhood after another in Gaza’.
Read the entire piece at The Guardian.
These two pieces couldn’t be more different. But both speak to the questions of who we are. What time is this? Why are we needed? And for what and where?
(As a reminder of that war’s present casualties: More than 40,000 Gazans killed, more than 16,000 of them children; nearly 100,000 injured; at least 10,000 missing. Israeli citizens and soldiers killed: 335. Israelis injured: 6,465.)
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Buttered hot biscuits
Inspired by Romans 12:9-21
Sisters and brothers: Before we get down to business, wrestling with what the Spirit has to say today, let’s do some stretching exercises. Don’t want any muscle strains in the house of the Beloved. Easy does it — bend and stretch and tip-toe fetch.
- Love from your devotion, not from your ambition.
- Be quick to praise, slow to blame.
- Don’t quit in hard times. Show what you’re made of.
- Practice hospitality — without issuing debt.
- Laugh ’til you cry with friends in their rejoicing; cry ’til you laugh with those doubled in grief.
- Don’t wrestle with pigs. It only makes them mad and you muddy.
- Be relentless in prayer, patient in pardoning, quick to encourage, urgent to amend.
- Don’t fight fire with fire — let your baptismal waters do their work.
- Settle old scores with buttered hot biscuits.
Now the warm-ups are over. Ready to break a sweat?
Descend, Holy Spirit. Take us to the mat.
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Benediction
Our journey with the Spirit leads us into the earth’s pathos, reflecting that same pathos that afflicts heaven. But all is not suffering. In the cracks and crevices springs Resurrection Day’s promise of joy. Of wonderment and reverential awe. An alleluia! sounds as signal that, finally, death shall not have the last word; that the meek will be the true inheritors of the earth; that the day hastens when enmity (including its eventual blossom as war) no longer will be learned or celebrated or calibrated.
We find ways, however modestly or dramatically, to locate ourselves in compassionate proximity to those who most fervently long for that sound. The very hills signal the advance of that Great Coming, with the trees breaking forth in applause. On that Bright Morning all tears will be dried; mourning will dissipate; and death will be no more in the boundaries of the new heaven and the new earth. (See Revelation 21:1-4)
We ourselves may not live to see that day. (See Hebrews 11:39) But in no way is our labor in vain, for in the midst of this present tribulation, joy girds our loins, shores wobbly knees, restores weak arms, renews weary feet. For this is the buoyant, persevering, unquenchable resolve of God’s love.
In the immortal words of Stephen Stills: “Carry on; love is coming. Love is coming for us all.”
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Postlude. “Drop, drop, slow tears, and bathe those beauteous feet, / which brought from heaven the news and Prince of Peace. / Cease not, wet eyes, his mercies to entreat; / to cry for vengeance sin doth never cease. / In your deep floods drown all my faults and fears; / nor let his eye see sin, but through my tears.” — “Drop, Drop, Slow Tears,” Orlando Gibbons, Tennebrae Choir
Ken Sehested is the author and editor of prayerandpolitiks.org, an online journal at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action.