January 23, 2025

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be a prophet.

 For one thing, I’ve been immersed in the life, writings, and speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. Not only did we remember his life last Monday, but the first of my assigned textbooks for this semester is the collection of his words found in the book A Testament of Hope.

 Martin Luther King Jr. is often spoken of with universal love, but when you actually study his life, he was vehemently hated when he was alive. And not only by virulent racists like those who belonged to the KKK. He was also hated by polite, white moderates who felt that the Civil Rights movement was asking for too much, impatient, and utilizing unhelpful tactics. That is the premise of King’s famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in which MLK responded to a Letter to the Editor from a collection of white, mainline pastors calling for him to cool his jets and simply trust in the legal system to do the right thing.

By any stretch of the imagination, he was not universally loved. In fact, sometimes there are still today people who speak of him as a rabble rouser. A church I know had a heated discussion amongst the members of their Personnel Council because they felt it was inappropriate for their ministers to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This person called him a “troublemaker.”

Any way you look at it, Martin Luther King Jr. was a prophet. See, we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that biblical prophets predicted the future. We relegate them to Nostradamus-like soothsayers who predict that an infant Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. But the message of the prophets held a deep contemporality for their original audience. The prophets were not called by God to predict the future, but to also interpret the news of the present so that the people would be reminded of what lies in the heart of God. Ellen Davis, a biblical scholar who teaches at Duke Divinity, defines a prophet as “someone who interprets the faith for their time and their time for the faithful.”

One of my Old Testament professors told us that nearly all of the prophets were abject failures during their lifetimes. They were abused, imprisoned, mistreated, ignored, and killed. In fact, the only truly successful prophet in the Old Testament was Jonah and he hated every ounce of his success (Jonah 4:1-8). And let’s not forget that, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus begins his public ministry by standing up in the synagogue, reading Isaiah 61:1-2, and saying to the people, “Hey. What if God really meant what he said here?” And they tried to throw him off a cliff.

We Christians do have a prophetic role to the play in the world. Yet, most of us (me included) tend to shy away from that part of our calling. We prefer instead to serve as “peace-keepers” in the world rather than to engage in the more difficult task of “peacemaking” (Matthew 5:9).

There is, of course, the temptation to simply sound off with our political opinions and then to label that being “prophetic.” Which then, of course, provides the added bonus of seemingly baptizing our perspective and insulating us from criticism. But that approach is just as dangerous and often leads to divisions that never result in lasting change.

Taking our cue from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other prophets is to interpret what is going on around us and to be willing to speak up when necessary, but to also remain rooted and committed to the those we are called to love in community.

And then, ultimately, true prophets leave the results up to God. They hold loosely to how their words are received and instead just strive for faithfulness to their calling. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his sermon that he delivered the night before he died: “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.”

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