The Daring of Difference

The Daring of Difference

It is an odd image: a prophet of God frightened out of his wits. The image we have of prophets is more in the vein of “fire and brimstone”, that old sage-like fellow in flowing robes, pointing a long bony finger toward people and nation alike with a fire crackling in one’s eyes. “Fire in the belly” is an apt metaphor. So why is Ezekiel, one of God’s prophets, in need of propping up?

The audacity of this image needs to be reveled in: God’s prophet is called to prophetic work, yet it takes divine Spirit to hoist Ezekiel up from his spot, paralyzed there on the floor. Ezekiel is forlorn, prophetic fire extinguished: a prophet daunted, not daring at all.

Look into Ezekiel’s lot in life, and you can see why he falters. The people to whom he was to speak God’s word were as downtrodden as Ezekiel. The proud nation of David now split into two kingdoms, one now in ruins, the other kingdom nearing its end. The people had little left. No spark found among them, not even the prophet felt up to tackling God’s call to speak.

What does it take to be the prophet, when the times are against you, when the majority will not listen, when even the lesser and greater alike have no courage, no pluck left within? Ezekiel was a product of his times: trembling, forlorn, and as for what God could do to change things, Ezekiel was part of a generation certain that even the divine could not solve the problems looming large overhead.

Thus, a truth emerges: prophets are just like us in that each one of them struggles. Each one of them has the pragmatic realities staring them down. Prophets have to develop a taste, and then a thirst, for words like “hope” and “justice”. Only when the conviction that God indeed will speak a contrary word takes hold in their hearts are prophets able to speak the same.

Like the many prophets before and since, Ezekiel stands in the tension of being prophet to a rebellious world. Instead of “Jerusalem restored”, Ezekiel struggles to see something beyond a hope shattered. Instead of a new people rising up, Ezekiel can only see a valley of dry bones. Only when he hears God’s contrary word shall the prophet see that valley of dry bones become something more.

In other words, Ezekiel is a prophet we Baptists can understand.

Back in the 17^th-century, as Baptists began to emerge in Europe, their beliefs and teachings began to work in the minds of these upstart colonists in America. Roger Williams founded the “first” Baptist church in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1638, part of his personal odyssey of living a contrary-minded faith. When he arrived in America in 1630, Williams was a controversial figure, aggravating the Puritan colonial government to the point that within six years, he was banished from Massachusetts. To avoid deportment to England where he was equally unwelcome, Williams set off in the dead of winter 1636 for the wilderness.

I hear a bit of Ezekiel in Williams, a man who tangled with British and colonial authorities alike. Ironically, the British crown and the Puritan government thought of themselves along the same lines: both forms of government thought they alone knew what God had ordained for the order of things. To both, Williams would speak out against theocratic rule, embracing that religion is a matter of conscience and church and state kept separate. What we take for granted today came only because persons like Roger Williams argued for it and suffered consequences.

Recently, I came across a quote taken from Williams’ writings about his banishment from the Bay Colony. Williams set his reflections to verse:

God makes a Path, provides a Guide,

And feeds in Wilderness!

His glorious name while breath remaines, O that I may confesse.

Lost many a time, I have had no Guide, No House, but Hollow Tree!

In stormy Winter night no Fire, no Food, no Company:

In him I have found a House, a Bed,

A Table, a Company:

No Cup so bitter, but’s made sweet. When God shall Sweet’ning be.

(Edwin Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience, Eerdmans, 1991; current edition,

Judson, 1999).

In the midst of tangling with English and then colonial legal and religious leaders, Williams found strength in reading the sacred text. Surely you heard the refrain of the 23^rd Psalm weaving through his reflections. As he established Rhode Island and a Baptist congregation, Williams worked for religious tolerance, creating the first place within North America where persons of any or no religious background were welcome. The subsequent Constitution and Bill of Rights would be indebted to Williams’ early advocacy for religious liberty. When recently at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, I saw Thomas Jefferson’s historic 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, assuring them of his likeminded desire to establish the separation of church and state. Jefferson and the Danbury Baptists were indebted to the witness of Roger Williams, the first person in America to speak of the need for such separation. In the 1630s, however, Williams was a pariah and a pest, a threat against the status quo.

As a modern day Baptist congregation known and respected for our interfaith cooperation, we can celebrate that part of our spiritual DNA strengthening our ministry and our place in the community. Nonetheless, the prophetic call still remains. When persons in our society hear the word “Baptist”, religious freedom and interfaith witness are not necessarily the first things we are acquainted with in the American popular consciousness. Like Roger tromping off into the wilderness called “the unknown” toward his future, we present day Baptists who advocate for religious freedom and the liberty of conscience can also feel a bit “out there” in the wilderness. Nonetheless, we see what happens when the prophetic learns these words of hope and fills with the divine Spirit of God. Hopeful future births, even when all witness and wisdom alike say or fathom otherwise.

Another Baptist came to mind as I saw Ezekiel laying there, forlorn and uncertain. In the sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we are given this sobering and frank account of how King nearly quit the civil rights movement. His family harassed, his life threatened, King nearly buckled one night while alone in the kitchen. In his classic Strength to Love, King writes:

It was not until I became part of the leadership of the Montgomery bus protest that I was actually confronted with the trials of life. Almost immediately after the protest had been undertaken, we began to receive threatening telephone calls and letters in our home. . . .

After a particularly strenuous day, I had reached the saturation point. I was ready to give up. I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing to be a coward.

In this state of exhaustion, when my courage seemed almost gone, I determined to take my problem to God. My head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers, I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never before experienced Him. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice, saying, “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever.” Almost at once my fears began to pass from me. My uncertainty disappeared.

Three nights later, our home was bombed. Strangely enough, I accepted the word of the bombing calmly. My experience with God had given me new strength and trust. I knew now that God is able to give us the interior resources to face the storms and problems of life. Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. (Strength to Love, Fortress Press, 1981).

When I have had the privilege of talking to those who knew King in his ministry and civil rights work, there is a respect for his memory and a gentle affirmation to remember that he was a person just like you or me. The King standing there orating his “Dream” speech was the same King who found himself in quiet desperation around the kitchen table one night. Hear that prayer at the kitchen table, and you hear the calling of prone Ezekiel to the bold task of prophetic speech just as surely as you hear a modern Baptist summoned to renewed hope.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word “spirit” is “ruach”. Just saying the Hebrew word aloud, you hear its breathiness. Throughout the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures, you hear of the Spirit empowering judges, kings, and prophets. In the New Testament, the Spirit empowers Jesus for his ministry and gathers the Church. Indeed, Mark’s gospel speaks of the Spirit descending upon Jesus at baptism and then seizing him so that Jesus spends forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. When Jesus makes it to the hometown crowd to preach, he speaks with an authority unheard and unexpected previously. Even with the Christ, the Spirit brings a necessary spark, a liveliness, an empowering to speak the truth, that cannot be gone without.

The Spirit empowers the prophets. Whether prone on the ground, preparing to speak in front of the home crowd, sleeping in a hollow tree, or nearly in tears at a kitchen table, the prophet cannot go on without the Spirit filling them. “Ruach” must speak to the prophet before the prophet can summon the breath, the footing, the courage, or the strength to love.

For those of us sitting on what we believe are the sidelines of these stories, do not move to the side so quickly. The world is in need of a prophetic word, speaking to the fallen people, the broken people, the disheartened people, the excluded people. Yes, you might be the prophetic voice next to cry out. Yes, you. Yes, me. May we let the Spirit move in our midst. May we let the Spirit move within us.