Then, last Wednesday and Thursday, I had an idea.
Which I promptly forgot to write about. To be fair, it was because I got to spend all weekend in Austin!
I was there for the MFSA board meeting but I also got to go to some of my favorite restaurants and see some of my favorite people.
I actually did write a blog post while I was there, it just wasn't for my blog. If you're interested, you can read it here.
But back to the point.
Wednesday night was the weekly chapel service that I help to plan and Thursday morning was my class called Postcolonial Voices, which is both difficult and amazing. Postcolonial studies is a bit much to explain here, but one of the main ideas is that you can't ignore any point of view or restrain any voice. That's part of what makes it hard to define.
Wednesday night I was one of the readers, and the passage was Deuteronomy 18:15-20.
"The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet. This is what you requested of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said: ‘If I hear the voice of the Lord my God any more, or ever again see this great fire, I will die.’ Then the Lord replied to me: ‘They are right in what they have said. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command. Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable. But any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak—that prophet shall die.’"
This has always been one of my favorite passages (yes, even before I admitted to myself that just maaaaaaybe I was feeling a call to ministry) because, in some small way, I do see myself as a prophet. There are times when I do feel like there's a message that I've been called to share, and I guess that's part of what this blog has become.
But did you catch the end, about speaking words that haven't been commanded to you? Harsh. I've gotta say that this is one part of the Bible that makes me uncomfortable, that makes me wonder about who wrote it and when and why, though that isn't what I've been thinking about this week.
This week I've been thinking about how the end of that passage actually brings me back to the beginning of the passage, which brings me to the "Aha!" moment I had in class Thursday morning as we talked about listening to each voice.
The passage starts with "God will raise up for you a prophet...from among your own people."
Well we've already established that, in most ways, the people I am afraid of doing harm to with my desire to help are not really my people. I can't claim that history. I am a white, Christian, educated American with more or less enough to get by, even if I am a poor grad student.
I am not the prophet called out from the wounded and oppressed people of the world. I cannot speak on their behalf. I cannot share their stories- the stories are theirs to share or not. Those words have not been commanded to me to speak.
What I can be is the prophet called out of my own privileged, powerful people, and call them to better lives.
I can call my own people to share their power, to use it wisely, to honor the value of those that we have made outsiders.
To borrow some of God's words from Micah's mouth, I can call us- because Lord knows there are days when I need reminding- to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. To love God and love neighbor.
That is a message I can share.
That, if nothing else, is what I can do to make the world a little bit better, a little bit brighter, a little bit more like the kin-dom of God.
It's great that you followed up your feelings of conflict with a resolution post. And I think you're totally right. To have a powerful voice for an audience, you need to be someone that they can identify with.
ReplyDeleteSuper post!