The Posture of a Prophet (3): Criticize and Energize

Continuing out reflections on prophetic ministry/life, Brueggemann gives shape to what the vocation of a prophet is all about: "The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us....[It] serves to criticize and dismantle the dominant consciousness. To that extent, it attempts to do what the liberal tendency has done: engage in a rejection and delegitimizing of the present ordering of things. On the other hand, that alternative consciousness to be nurtured serves to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move...[We must not choose between criticism and energizing] to choose between them is the temptation of liberalism and conservatism. Liberals are good at criticism but often have no word of promise to speak; conservatives tend to future well and invite alternative visions, but a germane criticism by the prophet is often not forthcoming" (The Prophetic Imagination, p. 4-5) .

The point here is that the Church is not to be a body of people who only offer criticism of the world, which we often do, but at times only focused on some types of issues while missing other ones (which the Bibilical prophets focus on: war, oppression of people groups, and yes immorality as well). But it is to be a community that offers energizing visions of alternative practices and ideologies than the world has on offer. And we are to offer that both in our message and our actually living. Our role in the world is to be "salt and light" be being an alternative community--that is what the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-7) is all about. That is what Israel in Egypt/Bablyon/Rome was supposed to be. And what we are called to be in an age of war, abortion, sexual promiscuity, economic/enviromental exploitation--we are to be a community that speaks against such injustice and lives contrary to a world made up of such patterns. We are called to stop the pattern of such a society in its tracks. We stand in its way and say: "this is not the way it is supposed to be", indeed "this is not the way it has to be."

But our calling is deeper than just looking at issue to issue and saying "That is bad"--that was not Moses role in Egypt--his role, like ours was to point out and challenge the enduring larger crisis of history. Politician come and go. Issues flourish and die, and when abuses are taking place it is sruely important to protest, but what is important is why the injustices keep cycling through history and that cannot be blamed ona person, a nation, or anything else--there is something deeper at work--and the roel of the prophet is to identify that thing, expose it and call people to live alternatively to it. Again Brueggemann helps us here: "Moses did not engage in anything like what we identify as social action. He was not engaged in a struggle to transform a regime; rather, his concern was with the consciousness that undergirded and made such a regime possible...specific actions of a political kind are at times mandatory according to the gospel. But they are not inherently linked to nor the focus of prophetic ministry any more than is a hopstial call or a service of worship, Moses was not concerned with societal betterment through the repentence of a regime but rather with totally dismantling it in order to permit a new reality to appear" (21).

So the question becomes: how is the churh an alternative community to that of the empire? Or does it so reflect the empire that no one can tell the difference anymore? What is the new reality that can appear and how can we model it to show the world that what we are talking about is not fairies, and flying pigs, is not impossible, (because the empire has convinced people that it is impossible: that third world debt and rich getting richer ont he backs of the poor is "just the way it is")-- but that such alternative community is a reality on offer by the God of all creation? Now that is a vision of energizing hope that I can spend my life working to see come into being!