The Violence of Love

To continue the theme of my last blog entry I'm going to give space to the voice of a prophet who was promoted into the presence of Jesus by an assasin's bullet on March 24th 1980 - Oscar Romero.

It is very easy to be servants of the word without disturbing the world: a very spiritualized word, a word without any commitment to history, a word that can sound in any part of the world because it belongs to no part of the world. A word like that creates no problems, starts no conflicts.
What starts conflicts and persecutions, what marks the genuine church, is the word that, burning like the word of the prophets, proclaims and accuses: proclaims to the people God's wonders to be believed and venerated, and accuses of sin those who oppose God's reign, so that they may tear that sin out of their hearts, out of their societies, out of their laws -- out of the structures that oppress, that imprison, that violate the rights of God and of humanity.
This is the hard service of the word. But God's Spirit goes with the prophet, with the preacher, for he is Christ, who keeps on proclaiming his reign to the people of all times. (December 10, 1977)
The Violence of Love, a collection of Romero's outspoken words, is available from Amazon.

Prophetic Voices

I've finally got around to reading God's Politics by Jim Wallis. I must admit, attempting to read any book thicker than my bible sends a shiver down my spine but GP undisputably falls in that 'must-read' category. So far (about 1/4 of the way in) I'm finding it very dynamic indeed. Wallis' writing style is a bit more preachy than I expected but I suppose that's quite acceptable from someone who seems to have deliberately adopted a 'prophetic' tone of voice. And it's that 'prophetic' voice that I want to muse on for a few minutes...
For a considerable proportion of my Christian life I've been in circles where prophecy has a very specific meaning which I would define as this: Prophecy (noun) spoken word uttered by an individual round about 11am on a Sunday morning during a time of worship. O.K. that's being deliberately facetious but it really is an observation based on my (not inconsiderable) experience of the charismatic church. Contrast that then with Collins' understanding of what prophecy is: "Prophecy is not future telling, but articulating moral truth. The prophets diagnose the present and point the way to a just solution." Elsewhere he says, "The loss of religion's prophetic vocation is terribly dangerous for any society. Who will uphold the dignity of economic and political outcasts? Who will question the self-righteousness of nations and their leaders? Who will question the recourse to violence and rush to wars, long before any last resort has been unequivically proven? Who will not allow God's name to be used to simply justify ourselves, instead of calling us to acountability?"
Prompted by Jim Wallis, I think I need to dust off some of those pages towards the end of the Old Testament and take a fresh look at them. Can I discover what it really means to be prophetic? Can I find what Marcus Borg would call the "God-intoxicated voice of protest"?