In many churches, the least-preached part of the Bible is the prophetic literature. Few sermons draw from Zechariah, Nahum, or Amos.
So how can we preach the prophets well? In fact, what does it really mean to be prophetic?
Here, a seasoned scholar answers those questions by pointing out four qualities of the prophets—qualities needed in any sermon we preach from the prophets.
The prophet loves God’s people
The stereotype of prophetic preaching is making judgments and castigating people’s sins. The image is too often of God and the preacher standing on one side against the sinful people in the pews on the other.
I used to teach seminary satellite courses. I remember one preacher who could not preach his way out of a paper bag. I worked with him and struggled to find out why he couldn’t preach. It turned out that he hated his congregation. He said, “They’re a bunch of egotistical jerks.” His view was that he and God were on one side and the people were on the other.
But actually he was all alone. God was with the people!
The Lord loves his sinful folk, so the Lord’s prophets love them too. Throughout the prophetic writings, Israel is, to be sure, always stubborn, stupid, blind, and whoring. “That worm Jacob,” as Isaiah calls him. But Israel also is, in the prophetic writings, “the Lord’s dear son, his darling child, his chosen servant.”
Because the prophets bear the word of God, they bear also God’s love for his foolish children. To preach from the prophets rightly, we can never overlook the prophets’ identification with their sinful people. The God of the prophets is not only a righteous judge; God is also redeemer and re-creator.
To be sure, the primary message of the preexilic prophets is one of radical wrath. In Jeremiah, the Lord details the people’s wrongs, then he asks the prophet, “Shall I not punish them for these things, and shall I not avenge myself on a nation such as this?” The dreadful answer is “Yes, I shall. Israel has lifted up her voice against me. Therefore I hate her,” God says in Jeremiah 12:8.
That verse always sends chills up my spine. What would it mean if God hated us? To turn Paul’s statement in Romans 8 upside down, “If God be against us, who can be for us?”
Perhaps we have never made clear to our congregations that we also suffer daily under the wrath of a sovereign Lord. The breakdown of our communities, our pain and strife, our warfare, our hatreds, our destruction, and our death are not just the automatic effects of our blind wrongdoings. They are evidence of God subjecting us to the fire of his very real judgment.
But when we equate prophetic preaching only with judgmental preaching, we fail to recognize that the prophets all proclaim salvation as well.
When Israel’s life hangs in the limbo of the exile and her future seems cut off, it is the prophets who proclaim that God is not through with his people. In Jeremiah 29:11, ” ‘I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord. ‘Plans for good and not for evil to give you a future and a hope.’ “
The prophet points out God at work
The prophet in ancient Israel was not primarily a teacher of ethics. The primary function of the prophet in Israel was to illumine where and when God was at work in his world.
In Isaiah 10, that prophet maintains God is at work in the ascendancy of the Assyrian Empire. In verses 5 and 6, God says, “Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger, the staff of my fury. Against a godless nation I send him, and against the people of my wrath I command him.” Isaiah is pointing out how God can be seen, even in the brutal judgment of Israel.
The worlds of national and international relations are seldom understood by our congregations as influenced by the actions of God. Rather they see their fate and destiny resting in the hands of the politicians, the industrialists, the military. The populace holds its breath at the terror of that thought.
Imagine the story of Israel if the pharaoh of Egypt or Nebuchadnezzar of the Assyrian empire had really been in charge—if God has nothing to do with influencing the destiny of nations.
We can’t equate prophetic preaching only with judgmental preaching.
Who knows what words of truth might break forth from our preaching if we let the prophetic texts have their way with our sermons?
The prophetic message can be preached in the world of small things as well as large. Maybe we need to start small as we try to illumine for our people just where and when God is at work.
It is prophetic preaching on a small scale and on the basis of the Word of God to remark on that dead bird lying outside in the church parking lot. “God knows it has died,” you might begin, “because not a sparrow falls to the earth without your Father’s will, Jesus says.”
Such simple proclamations help a congregation regain awareness that earth, seas, and skies remain only by God’s faithful sustenance. Prophetic preaching points every simple event to its deeper relation to the will of God.
The prophet cannot be claimed by any one group
We must abandon our attempts to identify the prophets’ proclamations with one of our social programs or sets of ethical principles. We must regain the freedom that the prophets knew in the Word of God.
According to Isaiah 6, Isaiah 40, and especially Jeremiah 23:18, the true prophet has stood in the heavenly council of the Lord to perceive and to hear his word, and is then sent forth to proclaim the word that God will act among his people.
I cannot help but wonder in our day if we leaders in the church have not lost that freedom. There is now a well-defined ideology of the left among the mainline clergy, as well as an ideology among the conservatives on the right. The reaction of church leaders to any public problem can be pretty well predicted by their ideology. Yet each camp claims that “our positions are both Christian and prophetic.”
In other words, we have frozen the free word of the prophets into an ideology; the lively oracles of God that stood opposed to every human claim to absolute wisdom and power have themselves been made the servant of absolutist pretensions.
The prophet calls for communion with God
The prophets continually insist that knowledge of the purpose and will of God is had only in intimate communion with him, a communion comparable to that of a loving wife with her husband or of an obedient son with his father. Proper interpretation of the prophets depends, as Jeremiah would put it, on circumcising the foreskins of our hearts. Or, according to Ezekiel, it depends on getting ourselves a new heart and a new spirit.
The call for a living relationship with God is the central demand of the prophetic literature, and it is, therefore, the key for all attempts to preach from the prophets’ writings.
Elizabeth Achtemeier recently retired as adjunct professor of Bible and homiletics at Union Seminary in Richmond, Virginia.
Condensed from a lecture given at the 1997 William E. Conger Lectures at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama. Copyright Dusan Petricic
1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or contact us
