The other night, I was on the couch, just about ready to fall asleep when I noticed my kitten, Pippin, standing on the back of the couch a few feet away with his front paws resting on the lampshade of a nearby floor lamp.
My first drowsy thought was, “Oh, this is not going to end well.”
And I was right.
A second later, the lamp was on the floor, the plug half-ripped from the socket so that the breaker tripped and plunged the living room into darkness and silence.
Pippin was okay.
He remains undaunted in his pursuit of the light.
I did relocate this particular lamp elsewhere though.
This is not going to end well.
We’ve all experienced these moments, haven’t we? Where, for a brief second, we all become prophets, as we gaze into the future and see little miniature apocalypses appearing. And if you’re like me, even when you have a two second warning, you’re still powerless to change the future. We are prophets with horrible reaction time.
Perhaps the only thing worse than seeing the future and being unable to change it (the subject of many science fiction stories over the years), is to see the future and have no one believe you (also the subject of many stories throughout history).
Such was the fate of Cassandra in Greek Mythology. Apollo gifts her the ability to see the future, but when she later spurns him, he curses her so that no one will believe her prophecies.
Let me just say, it does not end well for Cassandra.
Prophets everywhere always seem to have a hard time, especially among their own people.
In Luke 4:24, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”
Take Deborah for instance. She was both prophetess and judge. People listened to her. People knew she spoke for God, but when she tells Barak that God has commanded him to lead his army against Sisera, Barak balks and decides to test Deborah’s faith, saying he’ll only go against Sisera if Deborah comes with him.
Big mistake on Barak’s part.
While things could have ended worse for him, his lack of faith means the glory and honor of killing Sisera will fall on another—in this case, the woman Jael.
Barak doesn’t believe the leader of his people.
Conversely, Jonah is shocked and surprised when the heathen Ninevites respond to his declaration that God is about to wipe them off the face of the planet because they’re awful, horrible people … with almost instantaneous acceptance.
They say, “Hey, woah, that’s not good. Is there something we can do about that?”
But for the most part, prophets are used to being dismissed.
Being a prophet is hard work.
But then again, most prophets are doom and gloom. They never seem to have anything good to say, do they?
Today’s first reading is from the Book of Habakkuk. If I’m being honest, I really didn’t know anything about Habakkuk until this past week, but then, coincidentally he popped up in Richard Rohr’s new book The Universal Christ, a book that I have mentioned before and highly recommend.
Rohr points out that the Book of Habakkuk is very short, only three chapters, and that for most of it, Habakkuk “reams out the Jewish people.” But then, at the very end (and we did not hear this part in today’s reading), God says, according to Rohr, in effect, “But I will love you even more until you come back to me!” Rohr explains, “God always outdoes the Israelites’ sin by loving them even more!”
In fact, look at Habakkuk 3:18-19, “Yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and makes me tread upon the heights.”
This is a message of love. This is a message of incredible love. God has us. God always has us even when the world is against us, even when we are acting stupidly and selfishly. At every lowest of low points in our lives, God never abandons us, but is with us always in love.
This is good news.
But, as Rohr goes on to say, “…. the nature of our neurons seems to be that we remember the negative and forget the positive. Threats of hell are unfortunately more memorable to people that promises of heaven.”
Look at today’s reading from Luke 18:32-33 where Jesus predicts his death and suffering. He says, “For he will be handed over to the Gentiles; and he will be mocked and insulted and spat upon. After they have flogged him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise again.”
Verse 34 then says, “But they understood nothing about all these things; in fact, what he said was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said.”
Perhaps the reason they did not fully grasp what he was saying was because they were focused on the negative, words like mocked, insulted, spat upon. They focused on the flogging and then the death.
You may remember that in Matthew’s version, after Jesus tells the disciples of his suffering and death, Peter takes Jesus aside and scolds him and tells him that his death will never happen.
This is how we know the disciples were not focusing on Jesus’ resurrection. They didn’t understand. They only heard the horrible part.
I suppose one lesson in all this is when someone asks you if you want the good news or bad news first, ask for the good.
But really the lesson today is not about prophecies, it’s about listening. It’s about listening to God.
It’s about listening to those tiny prophetic moments that we all have—“uh oh” feelings, my mom used to call them, times when we know that something is about to go horribly wrong.
But it also means listening for those prophetic moments when we are certain that things are about to go wonderfully right. Think about love at first sight. Or, for example, the certainty I felt when I walked into this church for the first time, nine years ago, and knew immediately that it was the church I had spent years searching for.
If the most basic definition of prophet is someone who has contact with God, then being a prophet is a road open to all of us.
And through prayer and contemplative practice, it is something that could change our world.
Amen.
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