Unknowing

Deuteronomy 18:15-22

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.’ You may say to yourself, ‘How can we recognize a word that the Lord has not spoken?’ If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; do not be frightened by it.

As is so often the case, to really understand this passage, we have to look at what comes just before it. What Glenda just read for you are essentially rules for prophesy—rules on how to listen to prophets, how to discern who’s a real prophet and who’s a false one, rules on how to hear God’s immortal word in our mortal world. But what comes before this is what not to do. What comes before this is Moses forbidding child sacrifice, sorcery, divination, any kind of magic, essentially.

There’s probably a reason these two very different instructions are next to each other, even though they seem quite different, maybe totally unrelated— that’s the point, I think. Human sacrifice, sorcery, these are things done by humans to try to convince the gods or God to bend to human will. They’re examples of fallible humans trying to change the course of the future. And Moses makes it clear to his people that these things are “abhorrent” in the eyes of God. When we think about those forbidden acts, contrasted with these prophetic guidelines in our passage today, we see that the point is, to use a Christian cliché I don’t actually dislike, ‘letting go and letting God.’

So much of faith, any kind of faith, is about the need to let go of our egos, and let go of some control. I’ve talked about this in sermons before, and it’s, admittedly, somewhat of me preaching to myself—I’ve always had a hard time with just kind of… letting go. When plans don’t go the way I thought, when my schedule or routine gets thrown off, it used to really throw me. It still does sometimes, I’m not cured of my need for control, and certainly I never will be fully, but it’s definitely gotten better. I remember in preparation for going home with Frankie, I downloaded all these apps to track “wake windows,” to track her diaper changes, her feedings, her sleep, her tummy time, and after she finally hit her birth weight again, I just stopped. I stopped all of it. It was maybe the first time in my life that routines and plans actually stressed me out more than just going with the flow. I was on the whims of my infant daughter, and you know… it felt really freeing. I’m still shocked at the fact that I didn’t try to control when or how Frankie napped, played, etc, and it’s brought me to a really positive place in life, I think—it’s really given me a new perspective on what can happen if we let go a little bit.

Because this passage, these rules for prophesy, they’re all about being able to properly discern what God is saying to us through prophets, through people like us, right in our midst. And if we’re constantly trying to control things that are out of our control, if we’re trying to find loopholes and workarounds to get ahead in life, or to get our way, we can’t focus on what God is actually saying to us; we won’t be able to tell how or whom the Holy Spirit is working through if we’re preoccupied with trying to get ahead by immoral means.

Now things like divination and sorcery—that’s something out of fantasy novels, right? Totally moot for us today—but you know, I was sort of thinking about it in terms of insider trading—people trying to get ahead by these unethical, sometimes illegal means. I remember when whispers of covid had started, it came to light that several politicians had bought stock in companies that did focused on work from home technology. They had some insider knowledge of the future and they used that for their own gain. And some of those politicians were those who were publicly denying covid was a problem—but that didn’t stop them from profiting off of a very real crisis, all while claiming to be devout Christians. This is a perfect example of how people can lose sight of what God is trying to tell us; it’s a perfect example of how we can blind ourselves to modern day prophets and to the word of God when we’re all too focused on how to get ours by any means necessary.

Because to add even more complications to these rules, prophets are almost always people you’d least expect. Moses says that more prophets will come after him, and they will be “…like me from among your own people.” Remember, Moses was a very reluctant prophet. He was honest and good, but he was humble and did not consider himself worthy of such a calling. And prophets will always be one of the people— they toe a very thin tightrope—they’re both one of us, and also an outsider. That is, they’re one of us in that they’re someone who knows our struggles; but they’re also an outsider in that they don’t hold any kind of position of power—so in Moses’ day, they weren’t priests of politicians or scribes, or anything of that nature. And I think this still holds true today—when we think of those we might consider modern day prophets—Martin Luther King Jr. for instance—yes, he was a pastor which is a position of some authority, but he was also a Black man in the south in the 60’s. He knew the struggles of his people, and he wasn’t in a true position of power—and remember, at the time of his death two-thirds of Americans disapproved of him and what he was doing. Greta Thunberg, climate activist—she’s a member of Generation Z, and she understands the fears they have about the waters rising and extreme weather events, and she understands the anger so many feel when they see not enough being done about it— and she’s also a young, neurodivergent woman, and so she’s an outsider. I’ve recently been following videos made by Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda, who risks her life every day to record videos and to tell people what is happening in her home in Gaza—in each of her videos she begins with some variation of “Hello this is Bisan from Gaza, we’re still alive.” She sees her people dying every day, and she reports on it from the rubble.

“If I hear the voice of the Lord my God any more, ever again see this great fire, I will die,” says Moses, in reference to the time he came face-to-face with God in the form of a burning bush. He continues, “I will raise for them a prophet…”. So there are no more burning bushes. No more theophanies so astounding we won’t be able to handle them. God, from this point on, would only be speaking through people like us.

I think people are still looking for those burning bushes. I think people still want something that’s going to shock them out of their complacency, something they cannot ignore, when the reality is—prophesy comes from the Black man who’s grown up a in poor, segregated state; prophesy comes from young women fighting to be heard in the midst of deep uncertainty and unthinkable violence. Prophesy comes from the people society tells us to ignore, we can only hear that prophesy when we stop trying to control our surrounds and the future to fit our own needs, and when we let go and let the often quiet, unassuming voice of God be heard. And we might not be powerful, greedy insider traders, but surely we still get caught up in trying to control things to benefit ourselves, and trying to maintain some kind of semblance of order amidst the chaos that surrounds us. We’ve all been guilty at some point in our lives of trying to take some kind of shortcut, trying to find a loophole, trying to find answers to unanswerable questions with material things; trying to solve our problems with money or arrogance. It’s a cruel world out there, and it drives us to compete with one another to get ahead, or even to just get by.  

One of my favorite singer-songwriters, who goes by Bonnie Prince Billy, came out with a newish album that I’ve been listening to a lot recently— he’s a relatively new father, and a lot of his more recent songs seem to speak to that. One of those songs starts with the lyrics “Knowing is the first step to unknowing / Even little children will agree.” Later in the song, he talks about being able to see things “through someone smaller,” and I kept thinking of thigs song while working on this sermon—thinking about the more we seem to learn about the world, about God, the more questions there are, and instead of embracing that, we let it drive us crazy, and we try to control it, we try to reign it in so as not to get overwhelmed. But it’s a futile effort— because we can’t control God, we can’t bribe God to do our bidding, that’s just not how it works.

But like I touched in earlier in the sermon, since having Frankie, I’ve finally been able to begin letting go of some of my more type-A qualities. When I was discussing this with Chris, he pointed me to a term from the German philosopher Heidegger, who was inspired by the German theologian Meister Eckhart, the term of releasement.  Heidegger explains this concept as “the spirit of availability before What-Is which permits us to simple let things be in whatever may be their uncertainty and their mystery.” Meister Eckhart says that only when you “release yourself and let be” will you understand in the deepest sense who you truly are, and what God is calling you do to. I’ve said that prophesy comes from the most unexpected of people, so maybe in some ways, Frankie is a sort of prophet to me—she’s doing so much to teach me that all my attempts at planning, at control in the past were for naught—it was when I let myself be at the whims of and infant that I felt a real weight lift off my shoulders, and real peace—when I was able, as Bonnie Prince Billy sings, “to see it all through [the eyes] of someone smaller,” that things got quiet and peaceful enough for me to feel at more at ease and be more open to what God is trying to say in this world.

Our scripture passage today is set just before the Jews make it back into a new homeland after a long exile, and it’s written as one of the three speeches from Moses that comprise the book of Deuteronomy— now remember, Moses dies before he makes it into the promised land, and he knew that, so this passage is Moses assuring his people that there will be more like him—there will be more unassuming, humble people to share God’s word—but that reassurance comes with a command to “heed” the words of these new prophets. In the ancient Hebrew, this word means more than just “listen.” It also means paying attending and responding.

So I guess my question is—how are we going to respond to the words of the prophets today? Since prophesy comes from those society tells us to ignore or not take seriously—babies, the poor, the oppressed—will it just go in one ear and out the other, and will we continue to try to use what knowledge we may have to only better our own lives? or will we actually respond with action and with passion? Will we even hear it to respond at all? Will we be able to quiet the chaos of the world, to quiet our own minds to hear God’s voice at all?

As we prepare to go from this service into the world, and most of us, hopefully, to our annual meeting, I want us all to be able to be humble enough to realize that the first step to knowing is the first step to unknowing. I want us to be humble enough and free enough to realize that in order to hear the truth and be the truth, we must simply “let be” and give into the mystery and the uncertainty of what lies ahead. I want us all to try, with humility and awe, to see the world anew; through the eyes of a baby, a child; only then will we all be open enough to recognize those unexpected prophets; only then will we all be open to where God is guiding us. Amen.