Quoting WB in her introductory remarks, Carolyn Sharp notes:
[The prophets] are primarily poets who
bring the world to voice outside of settled convention. While the future is
implied in their discernment of the reality of God and while justice is
intrinsic to their characteristic utterance, the most important aspect of their
speech is their reperception of the world as the arena of God’s faithful
governance. (pg 95)
Later
in this section, in the lecture to the Festival
of Homiletics (chapter 7) we find these words:
Prophetic ministry is among those who
refuse the walk. The wonder of faith is that the talk sometimes authorizes, empowers, and emboldens the walk.
Prophetic ministry talks the talk
that the community may walk the walk
of faith into the abyss and walk the walk of faith out of the abyss into
restoration. Thus it is my thesis that prophetic ministry is neither prediction as some conservatives would
have it or social action, as some
liberals would have it. Prophetic ministry is to talk in ways that move past denial and that move past despair into the walk of
vulnerability and surprise, there to find the gift of God and the possibility
of genuine humanness. (page 138)
Can the words of
the poets really change the world? Is WB right about this? How and where and
when have you seen it happen? How does this challenge the dominant (simplistic?)
reading of the prophets even in mainline churches like ours that read a straight
line from Isaiah’s suffering servant to Jesus?
Another angle
for us to take into this material: in the opening paragraph of the seventh
chapter, he addresses us in particular – none of us “celebrity prophets” but
people who in the day-to-day parish tasks where prophetic ministry is “much more
difficult” and where “face-to-faceness…makes everything complex…” – how do we
both engage in this prophetic work and support one another in so doing?
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