BLOG 11/19/14. WHAT’S ‘PROPHECY’ GOT TO DO WITH ANYTHING?
In Paul’s algorithm of what are the necessary four components for the equipping of all of God’s people for their mature daily engagement in their ministry in the marketplaces of life (Ephesians 4), he obviously with intent includes prophecy. Have you noticed that prophets crop up all through the New Testament writings? Yet, it is another one of those words that we consign to those eccentric persons that we find, like in the Old Testament. They may come in colorful personalities, and yet they are critical to the accomplishment of the church’s work of mission. It is also true that the equipping for the work of prophecy doesn’t come in some isolated moment of meditation, but rather in being keen observers of the context in which we live and work.
In the discipline of missiology (the study of missions), prophecy would be something like: ‘exegeting the culture’ or maybe ‘cultural anthropology.’ In my own prayer disciplines I love the remote comment about “the sons of Issachar” in I Chronicles 12: “who understood the times with the knowledge or what Israel ought to do.” Anyone who has traveled abroad knows that it is critical to understand the cultural patterns of the nation, which we may be visiting. It is equally critical that the followers of Jesus not be oblivious of what is going on in the residential, professional, social, and cultural neighborhoods in which they have been called to incarnate Jesus in their New Humanity lives.
There are positive and negative components involved here. First, we need to discern what is taking place that is good and true and beautiful … what evidences of common grace are present, even in the most secular scenes, what quests for environment, beauty, justice, and relationships. These are those parts of the prophetic calling that we should seek first. Yet, behind the scenes we also know that we are in the midst of those, such as we have been, who are captive to the darkness in all of its evidences of meaninglessness, hopelessness, and screwed-up lives.
Simon and Garfunkel sang that: “The prophets of the day are written on the subway wall.” We often find the best understandings of what inhabits the hearts and minds and lives of men and women in unexpected places, like popular or folk songs, or maybe in poetry. I think often of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.
The colonies of God’s new humanity, if they are to be effective, should be quite intentional in helping each other become aware of the nuances of this piece of our equipping. We are the bearers of God’s love to real people, living in real neighborhoods, with real positive and negative qualities—they are not generic and depersonalized entities that we walk among, but real people. (If you want to give yourself a question to chew on, ask why brilliant Silicon Valley-types, and professionals of all sorts find their way religiously to: “The Burning Man festival. What are they looking for?) What forms your friends and neighborhood? God doesn’t love the world in the abstract, but in its colorful, existential, but often tragic, settings. “Seek the welfare of the city.” Prophecy seeks to understand this.
