Prophets and Dreamers
Our first reading for this Sunday, Jeremiah 23:23-29, contains some ideas about prophecy that may be shocking to some of us. While we may think that prophecy often originates in dreams or other visionary experiences, this passage seems to reject that. Those prophets who claim to have dreams are cast in a negative light, until we finally get to a very stark contrast in verse 28.
“Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully.”
There is a sharp contrast between a dream and God’s word. Those prophets who prophesy by dreams are seen as a separate category from those who prophesy by the word of God. Does this mean that dreams are bad and that prophecy is not something done through dreams and visions?
Our understanding of prophecy has changed significantly over the years. While today the image of a prophet is often some ecstatic erratic living in a shack in the woods who you can go to to hear how you’ll die or a passionate street preacher speaking about the end times with fiery rhetoric, in ancient Israel and Judah prophecy wasn’t quite as wild. Prophecy was a job. Isaiah was a court prophet in service of four different kings. A guild of prophets existed that probably functioned much like any trade guild. They would gather together to discuss prophecy and train apprentices in the prophetic arts. Prophets may have received a call from God, but they didn’t simply get zapped into being capable prophets. They trained with other like-minded people until they had a grasp of what the office entailed.
The role of a prophet was to interpret the will of God. As much as we assume from our expectations today that prophets made predictions about the future, that wasn’t all they did. While there were certainly times when they would predict who would win a major battle or when a good rain or natural disaster would arrive, they also talked about what they saw God doing. They interpreted events of the day through a spiritual lens. They made claims about who God wanted in positions of power. They gave advice on foreign policy and guided people into right relations with God. While priests offered sacrifices and interceded on behalf of the people, prophets bore God’s answers back to them. Between the two offices, the people could offer thanks, praise, and petitions to God and then see how God responded.
In many ways, the prophetic role is carried on today by pastors and other church leaders. They train together to use the Word of God as a guide to interpret God’s work in the world and what God wants from, and more importantly for, us. Prophecy isn’t necessarily some magical thing that arbitrarily descends from heaven as a gift. Often prophecy comes from dedicated work, practice and immersion in the Word and in a community that is dedicated to such study. The Word of God is translated into current application through the passionate effort of modern prophets who study, discuss, debate, pray, and work to find God’s voice in a flurry of different voices.
Unfortunately, we have a tendency to believe the mystical over the mundane. When we see a professional musician performing with incredible proficiency, we often attribute it to some innate talent, as if these experts were born with a left hand fit to support the neck of a violin. In reality, experts develop their skills through thousands of hours of hard work, focused practice, and years of grueling experience. A truly remarkable performance on a stage comes only after twenty years of working to get there.
I suspect the same is true of prophecy for us. If we see someone predicting the future with a booming voice and their hands in the air, they sound more convincing than a sheepish seminarian quietly mumbling through their interpretation of a Bible passage. Prophecy has become more about spectacle than work to us. We pay attention to the loud, perhaps controversial, voices that leap from the fabric of our society, rather than the humble threads that form the texture against which they shine. The mundane is boring. We don’t care about years of hard work, study, and engagement with a learning community. We want something exciting.
Though I am a seminarian myself, I will be the first to admit that I often believe I find the word of God in quite mysterious places. A tremendously irreverent song or poem seems to have God hiding behind it. I will turn to a quiet country lane for an experience of the divine sooner than a sermon. And while I do believe that God can be found in art and nature, it is wrong to turn away from the hard work of modern day prophets to find God in the mysteries of clouds flying high above the furnace that is Nebraska in the summertime. I make the same mistake that many of us make. It’s more fun to look for God where we don’t expect to find God, even though we know God has promised to come to us through the preaching of the Word. We already have prophets. We don’t need to turn every viral indie musician into one.
Perhaps this is the problem being faced in Jeremiah’s day. Everyone with a dream was claiming prophetic status without actually doing the work to understand how to interpret God’s word. If the work of prophecy is reduced to a magic trick with which a select few are gifted, rather than a skill that a few people are called to develop, then interpretations become chaos. God’s Word remains pure and true, but the field is so awash with faulty interpretations that few can discern anything real.
As is so often our failure, we have a tendency to reject the gifts of God to search for something more interesting to us, like cats ignoring new toys to play with the box they came in. As much as the cardboard fortress may be fun, the gifts God has given us are priceless and irreplaceable. We don’t know which poet will teach us about God, but we do know that we can find God’s Word read and interpreted, hopefully faithfully, in church every Sunday. We don’t have to search far. God’s Word and God’s prophets are already here.
