[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy. This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast. So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: My name is Claire and I'm usually doing the dismissal of our kiddos with Janelle here. I love to see our, like, army of kids that we have up front, but how is everyone doing this morning? Yeah, there's a lot of us in here. I wasn't sure with the rain how many people there were going to be this morning, but I'm like super impressed. Everyone got out of bed on a rainy California morning.
So we are in the midst of a teaching series that we are calling Prophetic Imagination here at Oceanside Sanctuary. And that sounds very woo woo at first, but I think it's actually pretty simple and aptly named. It really just means that we are exploring several prophets in our Christian scriptures.
And as Jason has already touched on a little bit, we are also one week into a new presidential administration.
And it's not a secret that there are many people who are feeling anxious about what has already happened, what might be coming. And I think as a church, this invites us to ask many questions, one of which is how are we going to fit into this unfolding reality? And as we explore the prophets together as a church, how can we draw on the wisdom of these prophets to envision and work for a good and just world? This is something that I often tell our kids is a world that looks like what God looks like.
So before we get into all of that and who our prophet is for this morning, I invite you all to pray with me.
Gracious and loving God, we gather in your presence today with open hearts and minds.
As we step away from the noise and the busyness of the world, draw us into the sacred wilderness where your voice calls to us.
God, would you remind us that your truth often arises from the margins.
Inspire us to see beyond the centers of power and privilege and guide us to hear the cries of those who are overlooked.
With this time together, awaken us to your call to justice, love and transformation.
In Jesus name that we pray.
Amen.
So in my senior year of college, my roommate and I started to watch a new show together called the Handmaid's Tale.
Very lighthearted, you know, as it often goes when you share a space with someone you get along with, I Found myself watching along week after week, and it really kind of started to become our show.
But the more we got into it, the more uneasy I felt. My tolerance for what was a fictional TV show that I was watching. My tolerance for what was fiction and what seemed eerily plausible was just beginning to erode. And if you're not familiar with the story, the show is based on a novel written by Margaret atwood in the 80s, and it's set in a dystopian future, which one or many people speculate that it's not far from our own time, where a radical theonomic political group overthrows the US government and establishes a totalitarian regime under the rule of extremist Christian ideology. And the main character is a Handmaid, and she is a victim of this system that controls and explains, exploits women's bodies, among other things, in the name of morality and order. If you haven't seen the show, those are some handmaids.
And this story isn't unique in its genre. Atwood wrote it during a time that was seeing a resurgence in dystopian novels. And as dystopian novels go, it's always a reflection of cultural anxieties around technology, government, human rights. And this book was written in the 80s. So fast forward to me watching this on TV in 2017, when our country was in the wake of these increasing political polarizations. The MeToo movement was in full swing. Many minorities rights were up for question.
It felt far like a dystopian TV show, and more like a look at where things were heading is I was trying to figure out my life as a college student, and it was really unsettling.
So unsettling, in fact, that I had to stop watching the show. I had to abandon mine and my roommate's show together, and I never finished it. But a couple months ago, I was walking by a little free library in my neighborhood, and there sat the book the Handmaid's Tale. And I had to pick it up. And as I returned to this cautionary tale years later in book form, it occurred to me that I wasn't actually crazy to feel the way I felt several years ago when watching the show. That just felt too real for me. Even then, I feel like I saw something from the issues in our country that had been accumulating all along, that much like others in my general generational cohort, I was even becoming a little bit numb to, especially by the time the January 6th insurrection happened in 2021, I had become a little bit numb. But by that time, I was Also unsurprised at what was going on. It seemed like all of the signs were there, the conditions were set, and unprecedented times seemed to be the new normal.
So I had previously felt a little bit crazy, hysterical, some might say sensitive, dramatic, paranoid about this dystopian story that looked more and more like a possibility even in my lifetime. And as I was reflecting on this and putting together my thoughts for this week, I was met with some reassurance when I read that Margaret Atwood herself, the authority, has said that when men ask her, why are your female characters so paranoid? She replies, it's not paranoia, it's recognition of their situation.
So perhaps I'm not so crazy for resonating with her work after all.
And it's in that way that I would consider Atwood a prophetic imagination.
And I don't mean prophet in a crystal ball, future telling way, but prophetic in a way that is deeply sensitive to injustice. Someone that really has their ear to the ground.
Margaret Atwood, I think, embodies what Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel describes as the prophet's deep sensitivity to evil.
He asks, if deep sensitivity to evil is to be called hysterical, what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails?
So, upon returning to this story, after several years of nearly becoming numb to what was going on around me in the world, it really challenged me to recognize the injustices and power dynamics that I was tempted to overlook and dismiss as me just being dramatic.
For me, it disrupted my complacency and exposed the indifference that I was beginning to feel in this way. Margaret Atwood was kind of like a prophetic voice or imagination in my life that was unsettling. But I think ultimately prophetic voices like this can guide us towards God's justice and mercy.
So I've talked a lot about Margaret Atwood. She's actually not who I'm preaching on this morning. I just thought she was a great example. But I found myself looking at John the Baptist this week. And in our tradition, prophets are most thought of in the Hebrew Bible. But John the Baptist, we find him in our gospels, carries this prophetic imagination forward in his pronouncements of the kingdom of God. And there's a lot I could say about John the Baptist. I think we could do an entire series of him. But this morning I'm just going to suggest three things that we can learn from his role as a prophet.
So first, let's look at what Luke 3, 16 has to say about him.
The scripture reads.
In the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod, tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip, tetrarch of Itura and Trachonitis and Lysanias, tetrarch of Abilene. During the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness. He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah, the prophet. A voice of one calling in the wilderness, prepare the way for the Lord. Make straight paths for him. Every valley shall be filled in every mountain and hill made low. The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth, and all flesh will see God's salvation.
So I just read you a very long list of ancient names that are not easy to pronounce, which, by the way, after years of school in Hebrew and Greek, reading names from the Bible is kind of one of my party tricks. You know, I'm just like, I'm a delight to have at parties.
But anyways, I didn't read these names this morning as a party trick. I really read them because I think the author of this gospel places John here in relation to all these important political and religious authorities. To make a statement, he recounts that in this particular year, when all these people ruled, were in power, they were calling the shots. The Word of God didn't come to them.
The Word of God came to John.
The word of God came to this other guy who lived out in the wilderness.
And this is the first thing I think we can learn from John, that God's voice comes from the margins and not from the centers of power.
John the Baptist was an outsider in every way.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: He.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: He is said to have lived on locusts and honey and dressed in animal hair, not the fancy kind. He had this parallel movement to his cousin Jesus, and he traveled around baptizing people and asking them to get ready for the kingdom of God. John the Baptist actually baptizes Jesus too. But that's another sermon for another day.
He didn't fit the mold of a respectable religious voice. He wasn't polished. In fact, I imagine that he looked like someone you might avoid or just kind of dismiss as unhinged. It's not lost on me that I'm showered and somewhat well dressed up here preaching about him. He was quite the opposite of that.
John is calling for, in this scripture, for a baptism, a repentance for the forgiveness of sin, sins.
Now, how exactly do we read that? Because in dominant forms of Christianity today, these ideas like repentance and salvation are often understood as primarily a personal transaction, something between the individual and God. And I don't think we need to entirely throw out personal repentance. But I think John's proclamation here, which rises up from the wilderness, invites us to see repentance as something far broader and deeper. It's about a collective turning of a people, a transformation of societal systems, a healing of communal brokenness.
His prophetic voice that is literally rising up from the wilderness is calling for a kind of repentance that looks like and acknowledgement of how systemic harms or how systemic sin harms both individuals and communities. He's saying that our salvation, our liberation is tied up in the salvation and liberation of others. That's what he's announcing in the reign of Jesus, whose kingdom, as we continue to hear about in the Scriptures, is about turning away from these structures of. Of oppression and towards God's vision of justice and mercy and liberation for all people.
He quotes the prophet Isaiah and says, prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight. I imagine here a vision of roads being cleared and obstacles removed, not for one person, but for an entire people.
It's a shared project, a collective movement, a realignment of the community towards collective thriving.
This call for repentance was a call for the entire community to reorient itself towards God's justice and righteousness.
John's prophetic call also invites us into the wilderness, where transformation can begin.
When we think about wilderness, at least my mind goes to these desolate and untamed places, landscapes that are remote and removed from the bustling centers of power and influence. And maybe the wilderness is that.
And throughout Scripture, wilderness is often where God's voice speaks the loudest. It's where Moses encounters God's voice in a burning bush. It's where the Israelites receive their law. It's where Jesus is driven to solitude and breath wrestles with the devil at the outset of his ministry.
I don't think that the wilderness is a place of absence. It's a place of revelation.
And therefore I think it's a place worth listening to.
So these prophetic voices and imaginations, like John, they not only rise up most often from the margins, but I think these voices are also willing to stake their claim there. Which brings us to our second point about John.
These prophetic voices are not about personal gain or personal power.
They always seem to be about directing others towards God's. Justice and mercy.
And I think that means we have to beware of those carrying a cause when it's aligned with the centers of power.
This prophetic voice that we hear crying out in the wilderness was not one seeking to gain his own power, but it was about pointing others to God's justice and mercy to prepare the way for Jesus.
And this is a kind of humility that starkly contrasts these systems of power that John's message was challenging.
Prophets speak out of a deep commitment to truth, even when it costs them, and it often does.
John the Baptist eventually lost his life to Herod. And if you remember, Herod was actually ironically listed in that long list of names.
I'm also reminded of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Whose life and legacy we honored last week, who lost his life for the cause of justice.
The prophetic voice is always rooted in selflessness, because those with this kind of prophetic imagination, they are people who have truly been transformed. They've truly repented. As John says here, their life and work flows from a place that is so deeply sensitive to the cries of the needy. Their life and work often go directly against systems of power and control that dominate our world.
Which leads us into our third and final consideration about John the Baptist today.
Remaining attuned to the voice of God in these prophetic voices requires that we are sensitive, that we resist numbing out, that we resist that indifference that so often comes for us when we just can't do one more day of hearing about it.
It's even about resisting indifference that's born out of keeping the peace.
Last week, our guest Kendrick, which, if you were here, it was awesome. He reminded us that you don't have to operate with great malice to do great harm.
He quoted someone who said, the absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient.
Indifference is not just born out of exhaustion. I think indifference, or you could say also complacency. I think it can also sneak through under the guise of unity.
This is the very tension that Jason was talking about during communion.
And unity that is at the expense of some is not true unity.
Which is why in order to resist this indifference and seek true unity like what Jason was trying to get at, we really have to listen to what is rising up out of the margins, out of the wilderness, that we see John the Baptist vision, where valleys are lifted and paths are made straight, all will see God's liberating salvation. And not as a nice religious platitude about a pie in the sky. That's to be worried about after we die, but as an action item for here and now, because when we push ideas like this off to only be about later, I think that's when it gets really easy to become indifferent to how it applies in the present.
It's also easy, I think, to numb out and resist that sensitivity that the gospel calls us to when there are prophetic voices and imaginations presently around us that are being accused of being hysterical or crazy.
This very week, Bishop Marian Edgar Buddy, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, she stood in front of the president and spoke directly to the fears of those on the margins. It was all over the news.
She was asked to apologize. Eventually, some of the things she was called or accused of was for being ungracious, not smart, or even nasty.
In her sermon at the National Cathedral, she looked at President Trump and she asked him to have mercy on those who feel the most vulnerable in our society.
People like LGBTQ children and families, immigrants seeking refuge, and countless others who live in fear of policies that strip away their dignity and their safety.
There were lots of responses to her sermon, but in many of them, like ones that asked for an apology, I think in those, there is that deep indifference to the very mercy of God that the bishop was speaking of.
So if our goal here is to work for a good and just world, this world that looks like the love and compassion of God, we have to resist this indifference.
And this means seeing sensitivity as a gift, this prophetic sensitivity that can really only speak to the margins, because that is where it is arising from.
It's awake to the brokenness and attuned to the world's capacity for harm.
And it's in this way that when we look at prophets, those in our scriptures, like John the Baptist and those around us today, we have to see that their words are not born out of overreaction or paranoia.
They're not just bearers of cancel culture, but they gift us with a deep sensitivity to the fractures of the world and a divine urgency to call them out.
Prophets see what others sometimes refuse to see or just can't see.
They name injustices that fester beneath the surface, and they challenge the indifferences that allow these injustices to grow.
So this morning, I'm not saying that we all need to eat locusts and honey and live out in the wilderness like John the Baptist. Not everyone actually needs to be a prophetic voice. So everyone take a collective sigh.
That's comforting to me.
But I'm wondering if simply, what would it look like if we were just more sensitive towards prophetic voices?
Sensitive as in listening more closely to prophets like John the Baptist. If we really examined what authors like Margaret Atwood are getting at in their work, or if we took seriously the words of Bishop Buddy not because she's saying something that sounds really great, but because she is speaking truth to power, and she's speaking it from a place that can only come out of intentional alignment with the oppressed and not with power.
What would our world look like if we attuned ourselves to these voices, to these prophetic imaginations that rise up from the wilderness?
So I'd like to invite our band back up front. And as I do that, I invite you all to pray with me.
Gracious God, we thank you for the voices of prophets. We thank you for prophetic imaginations and sensitivities, these people who challenge us to see beyond the surface, to listen deeply and to act justly.
Would you give us the courage to embody prophetic sensitivity in our lives, communities and world?
Help us to be instruments of your justice and love.
Would we always seek your wisdom and wilderness places?
Amen.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where, your tune tuning in. To learn more about our community or to support the work we do, Visit
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