"Prophetic Imagination"
Roger Dick
Sunday, May 29th 2005

Good morning. Well, it never rains but it pours in many ways, sometimes in remembering. Memorial Day. The Feast of Corpus Christi. The birthday of G. K. Chesterton in 1874. Tomorrow the Feast of Joan of Arc.

You may know that I’ve long thought of St. Joan’s as a rather weird caravan journeying through strange lands, George himself as an outrider bringing back intelligence from what lies ahead: the country of compassion, the valley of hospitality. I think his last and most generous legacy is defining us as a prophetic community, verbalizing, finally, what and who we are. Perhaps he belongs to a real intelligence agency.

It seems to me that in the past we were quite haphazard, even unaware of having a prophetic voice. We went about our ministry and unconsciously let the chips fall where they may. In the last several years we’ve squeaked through some hair-raising adventures, but George has managed to fashion a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Because of him we are more clearly aware of our unique voice in the community. With Julie Madden as communications director we can become more conscious, more deliberate, more responsible for our voice.

Prophetic Imagination. Two of the most intriguing and most misunderstood words I know. Both fascinating and intimidating. But to yoke them together! It boggles the mind. Since George introduced the concept a few months ago, it has become one of the goals of the parish council to “continue to define how SJA is becoming a prophetic community.”

The Prophetic Imagination is the title of a book by theologian and scripture scholar Walter Brueggemann that the staff read several months ago. I can only give a thumbnail sketch of his argument.

Contrary to an almost universal misconception, prophets are not magicians or hell-and-brimstone lunatics. According to Brueggemann, they are primarily moved by grief by what has happened to the culture they love. They are pained into prophecy: Jeremiah’s inconsolable lamentations over Israel, Isaish’s poetry, Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. This suffering is the initial protest against the dominant culture and the beginning of its undoing.

Beyond dismantling the dominant culture, prophets don’t predict the future; through imagination they create an alternative consciousness. Bruggemann says their only weapon is words. The prophets are poets. In today’s gospel Jesus speaks as a prophet and a poet. If his words were taken literally, it would be more ghoulish than any Hollywood horror movie. For me, almost as heartbreaking as his crucifixion is seeing him in the gospels as a poet in a world of prose, straining to describe sunsets to the color-blind, a Pavarotti singing to the tone-deaf.

The prophets are poets. Doesn’t seem like much to work with. And even language itself they have to rescue from its debasement by the dominant culture, where war is peace, freedom is slavery, and “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” makes sense. We may think that prophets are crazy, but maybe it’s the dominant culture that’s crazy, or, if prophets are crazy, they are crazy with grief. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare says, “ the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” are all filled with imagination. Perhaps prophets, because they are lovers and poets, seem to be lunatics.

The dominant culture, of course, cannot tolerate criticism and strives to muzzle all dissent. That is why governments are afraid of artists. Why Nigeria hanged its most famous playwright. Why Russia exiled Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Why Pawlenty boycotts Bruce Springstein concerts.

To maintain its power, the dominant culture fosters a belief in a static present. It tries to eradicate memories of the past or dreams of a future. There is only the eternal Now. We have always been in charge. Things have always been this way; they will continue to be this way forever and forever world without end. Amen. America is the lone superpower in the world. We’ve always been a superpower. We will always be a superpower. There was no history before the American Revolution. There can be no history without us.

And it uses religion to support its eternal Now. It keeps God on a very short leash. As Bruggemann puts it, God is “domiciled,” tamed, housebroken. And how we circumscribe his freedom. “Well we’re doing what you want, now you have to do what we want. That’s only fair.” “Well you acted this way yesterday, so you should be consistent and act the same way today.” “Listen, we’d like you to show up at 8 a.m. to bless our troops.”

Against this stacked deck the prophets play their pitiful hand, fashioning an outlandish senario, not by sheer fantasy, but by remembering their tradition. They go back to the past to oppose the eternal present by summoning an alternative future.

What they find in their past is amazement: “the freedom of God.” A God who says to the dominant culture, “I am not at your beck and call. I have my own agenda, which you cannot even imagine. I will rescue the oppressed, even in the very teeth of empire.” The dominant culture would like us to believe that a moment in time is forever, that an overnight stay in a pup tent should become an impregnable four-star hotel. In our first reading today God says, “Au contraire. I am a God on the move. You are the caravan people. I alone am your sole support on the journey.”

In our particular case Bruggemann sees America and the contemporary American church as drugged by consumerism into a numbness that can feel no grief. One wonders if we were not drugged, would we not weep with other nations over what has become of America the Beautiful? And, although we may be a prophetic community, we ourselves are tainted, like the doctor in Camus’s novel, The Plague, who labors day and night against the Bubonic Plague which has suddenly erupted in his city. One day he realizes that at the very same time he is struggling to save people, he himself is a carrier. We are all infected. Bruggemann says the prophets have what we druggies in our consumerist stupor have not got: passion. The prophets can wake us from our drugged state, can energize us to work toward a new future only with words. Yeah, right.

“I have been to the mountaintop, and I have seen the promised land.” In thirteen words the whole landscape shifts. Martin Luther King assumes the mantle of Moses, the despised race becomes the chosen people, their 200 years of slavery is exile in Egypt, the struggle for equality a journey through the desert, the land of the free is Egypt, its government is Pharoah, a future society of justice and equality becomes the Promised land.

Turning to our own tradition, I can think of no more suitable patron saint than Joan of Arc. To me she seems to have been fashioned exclusively for this community, and we can find many of our values in her story.

Although she seems like a figure out of a fairy tale, Joan lived in a brutally real world. Tomorrow it will be 574 years since she was burned at the stake. 25 years later the Church reversed the verdict. The body of the bishop who presided at her trial was dug up, excommunicated, and flung into the common sewer. 85 years ago, in 1920, the Church canonized her, 489 years after her death.

In Joan’s day the English were the lone superpower. Edward the Black Prince launched a pre-emptive strike, terrorizing France. On October 25, 1415, St. Crispin’s Day, the English practically annihilated the French at Agincourt. In Shakespeare’s Henry V we can still hear the 28-year-old King crowing the night before the battle. The English were outnumbered four to one, but by the end of the day the flower of French chivalry, 1,500 armored knights had been killed by the English longbow. The French lost 6000 men, the English 450. In terms from the Vietnam era, a kill ratio of 13 to 1. Joan was three years old.

Fourteen years later, as a girl of 17, she won her great victories beginning at Orleans, was captured, languished in prison for a year-and-a-half, and endured 15 examinations, six public and nine private. She was tried and convicted of heresy, witchcraft, and conduct unbecoming a lady, in a French city occupied by 800 English men-at-arms under the command of the Earl of Warwick, to make sure the verdict was to their liking, - and died at 19. She lived in a very real world, the world of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, our world.

Much of Joan’s story is utterly appropriate for this particular parish:

a prophet who loved her culture and grieved over its destruction,

a prophet engaged in dismantling the dominant culture,

a prophet energized by passion,

an example of low Christology (you can’t get much lower than a 15th century female peasant!),

an activist with the courage and energy to do what she believed in,

an example of leadership springing from unimaginable sources,

a woman in a leadership role,

why we need to incorporate our youth into our parish,

leadership by the laity,

a patriot in a more ancient sense, not so much a lover of the nation, but a lover of the land, of one’s own little corner of the world,

an anti-imperialist, believing that one nation has no business gobbling up others,

the little person being crushed in the collusion between church and state,

an example that, whatever it says, the church does change.

When Joan is scornfully told that her voices come from her imagination, she replies, “Of Course. That is how the messages of God come to us.”

Jesus, Jeremiah, Joan, George, Julie. Jumping Jehosophat! Imagine that!