To Be the Prophet, To Be the Church

To Be the Prophet, To Be the Church

Some Quotes and Some Reflections

From the book, Saving Jesus From The Church

By Robin R. Meyers, United Church of Christ Pastor

Jeremiah was a prophetic performer, shattering a clay jug and announcing, “Thus says the lord of hosts: So will I break this people and this city.”(19:11)  Ezekiel was also a star of prophetic street theater: “In a public placed, he is to lie on his left side for 390 days, then on his right side for 40 days, to symbolize the number of years that Israel and Judah are to spend in exile.  During all this time, he is to eat starvation rations such as would be available in a city under a prolonged siege, and he is to bake bread using human dung as fuel.  All of this would symbolize what was soon to happen to Jerusalem.”(4:1-17)

Then Meyers shifts to how prophets and the church are allowed to behave today: “And to think that today we arrest people for stepping over imaginary lines, or when the gather to protest war, or when they try to form a union.  We shame dissident pastors into silence and warn them not to discuss ‘controversial’ issues like immigration or equal rights for gays.  The truth is, we have few pastors in the church today who qualify as outrageous for the cause of justice, and in fact the most common model for ministry now is someone who is well married (preferably with children), respected, pious, and doesn’t cause trouble.  In this sense the church has turned ministry into a profession demanding decorum, rather than recognizing it as a divine calling with disturbing consequences.” (pp 224-225)

Now back to the Hebrew Prophets: “These God-intoxicated Hebrew prophets brought the abstract ideas of religion down to earth and fearlessly shared what they believed was wrong with the domination systems of the world.  Abraham Heschel describes ‘their breathless impatience with injustice’ and recognizes that they possessed ‘sympathy with divine pathos.’  They stood with the poor and against the elites as shamelessly as Hosea stood by his fallen wife and then claimed that it was never too late to go in search of her and bring her home.”

The primary focus of the entire book is that the church is a body, a community whose primary purpose is not to worship Christ in order to be taken to escape earth when we die, but to follow Jesus, doing what he did and what he taught us to do.  This excerpt is an excellent summary of the book as a whole.  As Meyers puts it in the prologue: “What does it really mean to follow Jesus as a teacher and not just worship him as a supernatural deity on a rescue mission?”

Meyers believes it is time for the churches across the land to hold a “teach in about Jesus the Galilean Jew, the world’s most famous missing person—but only if everyone is invited.”(p. 8) Meyers believes that the reason many mainline churches are dying is that “they have put so much energy into survival that they have forsaken their responsibility to be places of free and fearless inquiry and radical hospitality as well as spiritual substance.”(p. 9)

Meyers’ final challenge to those who read the book is: “to let the breath of the Galilean sage fall on the neck of the church again.  First we have to listen not to formulas of salvation, but to a gospel that is all but forgotten.  After centuries of being told that ‘Jesus saves,’ it is time to save Jesus from the church.”(p. 11)

The book is thought provoking, challenging, possibly disturbing for some, and an exciting vision of what the church has been and can be again.  I recommend this book to all for whom faith is both life giving and challenging.  If your faith is a struggle then this book may just be the tool you need make some sense out of it.