The time of prophets (and false prophets)

I wonder what you would say if Jesus handed you a megaphone and said "now go preach on the corner of William and Princess Anne Streets"?

I wonder what you would say if Pastor Anne came to you and said "I really want you to give the sermon, some Sunday, would you?"

I wonder what you would write if the Free Lance Star called you and said, "we want an opinion piece from you about what you think is going on in our town?" or if the NYT wrote you and asked you for an opinion piece about what's going on in our country.

I wonder what you would say if the bishop of our synod asked you to give an address to synod assembly about what it means to be a Lutheran in 2025?

What would you say about the state of the world, the country, the city? What would you say that you see? What misbehavior, what violence? What calls to repentance would you make? What amendment of life would you ask us to?

This passage this morning is from the very beginning of the book of the prophet Jeremiah, one of the biggest and most major prophets. There is an entire section of the bible dedicated to the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jonah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and too many more to name.

It is a common and helpful question, when reading scripture to ask yourself: where do I see myself in this story? How is God speaking to me and calling me through this passage? And reading this passage from Jeremiah this morning, written in the first person perspective, it is hard not to see and hear yourself as the prophet God has called with the words:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

and before you were born I consecrated you;

I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Prophets feel like an old-timey kinda biblical reality- but we get to wonder if and how God is still calling prophets in the mess we still find ourselves in: Is God still calling prophets? Who is God calling to be prophets? What is God calling them to say? It may not be me or you, but I feel quite sure that there are prophets called by God among us and I see that there is quite a lot for prophets to say these days, don't you think?

There's a couple things that feel true about prophets from this Jeremiah reading and from our knowledge of other passages of scripture.

For one, prophets are often reluctant to be prophets at all or don't want to say what God wants them to say. Remember how Jonah ran away from God's call to be a prophet and ended up in a whale, and then even after he prophesied and saved the city of Nineveh, Jonah changed his mind and he got UPSET that God saved undeserving people. Prophets can be reluctant, prophets can do the right thing and then turn away from God and start doing the wrong thing.

Prophets, we know are also instructed not to speak their own words but to speak with the words of God. God says to Jeremiah: “I have put my words in your mouth." God's words, not ours. It means that a prophet is not just somebody with good ideas or somebody who is charismatic or who seems like they get it, but it's somebody who is speaking in a way that is inspired by the word of God and is resonant with the word of God as we understand it.

And we also know, very much related to this, that the field of prophets is completely saturated with false prophets. There are a boatload of people out there who are claiming to speak with the authority of God and among that population of "prophets" there are folks giving completely opposite messages across one another. If one prophets says "God spoke to me and says the Greatest Commandment is still to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself" and if another prophet says "God spoke to me and said that the Greatest Commandment stuff about loving your neighbor doesn't really apply anymore" then,,, they can't both be right. If one person says, go ahead and love your neighbor and one says, hey so we're actually allowed to be as mean and vindictive as we want now, they can't both be right.

This is a problem even in scripture- folks just all throughout scripture lifting up false gods and spreading false messages, folks contradicting one another, and even pointing at Jesus and for all the ways he undermined authority and argued with political and religious leaders, they called him a false prophet too.

And yet, prophecy is part of what Christianity entails and so the question we are left with these days is how do we tell good prophecy from bad, real prophets from false?

This is a question, the answer to which we will not agree- I don't mean you and me but Christians collectively are not going to ever really agree, at least not this year and in this country. But it is part of our work as Christians, then, now, and forever to keep asking the question: how do we tell the real prophets from the false?

I have a couple of thoughts.

1. God says in Jeremiah 1: "See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.” It might help to think that the false prophets preach only destruction, but the prophets of God preach both what will be uprooted and what will be planted in its place. Maybe it is not only about who will be called to repent but then how we will all called to be reconciled, what systems will be torn down but then what will replace them, not only who is called to repent but then how we will live together, reconciled, after. A prophecy that is eagerly and only about what will be destroyed and who will be judged, not what will be planted and built, is maybe a prophecy for us to wonder some more about.

2. Second, we might hear folks prophesying about the state of affairs in the world and we get to look at if what they claim to be the words of God are consistent with the rest of scripture. It's tough because there are parts of the bible that contradict one another, so it may not be enough to have a single line of scripture to back stuff up. But there are great big consistent themes throughout the bible and especially in the Gospels- love of neighbor, welcoming of the strangers, the uplifting of the least among us, the love of our enemies, the idea that God regards not wealth- and we can reflect prophets against these clear throughlines of God's word. Does this help me love my neighbors? Does this help me love my enemies? Does this uplift the downtrodden? Is this welcoming of the stranger? If it doesn't, then I might have some questions.

I wonder if you were given the microphone on the street corner in downtown, what would you say into it? I also wonder if you saw somebody holding a megaphone on the street corner in downtown, how you would know whether or not to stop and listen to them? Or if there were a single circumstance in which you would stop and listen to them.

I wonder how we identify which churches are the good ones and which news channels are the honest ones or who saying things in the name of God are the real ones. I wonder it for me and I wonder it for all of us. And it makes me wish that the world around us did not feel so complicated, nor the conflicts we face feel so fraught. But if it's any consolation, what we see in the world around us is not crazier than what Jeremiah faced, not crazier than what Jonah faced, or Ezekiel, it's certainly not wilder than what Jesus faced. Definitely then, and surely now, God calls people into the midst of that craziness and wildness to tell the truth in a world that God is heartbroken over. It is not easy to tell who those people are, but it is always, has always, will always be our jobs to listen for them. Amen.