1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,000 ... 2 00:00:06,040 --> 00:00:10,420 ... 3 00:00:15,700 --> 00:00:20,000 ... 4 00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:25,000 ... 5 00:00:25,000 --> 00:00:30,000 ... 6 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:35,000 ... 7 00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:40,000 ... 8 00:00:40,000 --> 00:00:44,000 ... 9 00:00:44,000 --> 00:00:49,000 ... 10 00:00:49,000 --> 00:00:57,000 Do we have the strength I wonder to speak truth to power. 11 00:00:57,000 --> 00:01:02,000 This is a phrase we probably heard somewhere or other perhaps in the news, 12 00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:08,000 but I wonder whether we really appreciate how uncomfortable it is to do. 13 00:01:08,000 --> 00:01:18,000 Speaking truth to power is risky, because it means boldly proclaiming uncomfortable truths to people with power over you. 14 00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:21,000 about you, about your life. 15 00:01:21,000 --> 00:01:24,000 Truth, that those people would rather 16 00:01:24,000 --> 00:01:26,000 ignore or deny. 17 00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:29,000 It means pointing out shortcomings in 18 00:01:29,000 --> 00:01:32,000 behaviour, attitude, speech. 19 00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:35,000 It means speaking when you know 20 00:01:35,000 --> 00:01:37,000 that it would be safer 21 00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:40,000 and more convenient to stay silent. 22 00:01:41,000 --> 00:01:42,000 This morning 23 00:01:42,000 --> 00:01:46,000 we focused on the very difficult 24 00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:54,880 account of the beheading of 25 00:01:54,880 --> 00:01:57,260 Saint John the Baptist 26 00:01:57,260 --> 00:02:02,180 and this is the consequence that 27 00:02:02,180 --> 00:02:04,180 John the baptist faced of doing in short a prophets work 28 00:02:04,180 --> 00:02:09,180 ʻof course, we hear about profits ʻall the time ʻwe talk about them in everyday life. 29 00:02:09,180 --> 00:02:14,180 ʻUsually, we think about a prophet as ʻsomeone who tells the future. 30 00:02:14,180 --> 00:02:22,180 ʻWe might jokingly refer to ʻsomeone as a prophet ʻif they have some kind of mystical ability 31 00:02:22,180 --> 00:02:24,180 ʻto work out what's going to happen. 32 00:02:24,180 --> 00:02:30,180 ʻMaybe like a friend who predicts ʻthat it's going to rain ʻhalf an hour before it does. 33 00:02:30,180 --> 00:02:37,140 but of course in England that isn't that really impressive 34 00:02:37,140 --> 00:02:48,020 Or if we don't speak about prophecy in 35 00:02:48,020 --> 00:02:54,040 friends who seem to have some sort of clue of whats going on where we don't 36 00:02:54,040 --> 00:02:56,920 perhaps we imagine the prophets of the old testament with men in long flowing robs with very long and rather smelly beards. 37 00:02:56,920 --> 00:03:04,840 People with a long lost ability to talk to God directly and tell his people what to expect in the coming months 38 00:03:04,840 --> 00:03:15,400 or years. But we very rarely think about prophecy in present terms, though of course the work 39 00:03:15,400 --> 00:03:22,040 of biblical prophets not just Saint John the Baptist but all of the prophets, Amos, Elijah, 40 00:03:22,040 --> 00:03:31,720 Isaiah, the work of all of these prophets was concerned with their here and now with what was 41 00:03:31,720 --> 00:03:41,240 going on around them. What in fact made a prophet a prophet was not just some mystical and fast-lung 42 00:03:41,240 --> 00:03:49,400 ability, rather it was the ability to prayerfully discern what was happening all around them at 43 00:03:49,400 --> 00:03:56,200 the time and to give God's voice to it in a way that other people wouldn't or couldn't. 44 00:03:57,720 --> 00:04:05,320 The prophets came about every time Israel fell into sinful patterns of living in order to point out 45 00:04:05,320 --> 00:04:12,680 to the people that they've fallen away from the law that he had laid for them. When the people began 46 00:04:12,680 --> 00:04:22,200 to create unjust legal systems in which the poor were subjugated, in which the markets acted unfairly, 47 00:04:22,200 --> 00:04:31,400 in which the rich were able to do whatever they want, the prophets were there. When the kings 48 00:04:31,400 --> 00:04:40,760 acted poorly and turned the people away from worshiping Yahweh in order to worship the gods 49 00:04:40,760 --> 00:04:49,640 about them, the prophets were there. When the law was broken and people fell into sinful, 50 00:04:50,200 --> 00:04:57,800 unkind and broken ways of living, the prophets were the ones who were warning it was happening. 51 00:04:59,160 --> 00:05:05,160 The prophets were not there primarily to speak about what was going to happen in the future, 52 00:05:05,160 --> 00:05:12,280 they were there to point out what was happening right now, the things that no one else wanted to see. 53 00:05:14,200 --> 00:05:22,040 And though Scripture treats the prophets in very vaulted terms, they were actually very unpopular 54 00:05:22,040 --> 00:05:30,280 for what they had to say. Just look at our reading from Amos. Amos in pointing out the 55 00:05:30,280 --> 00:05:38,040 shortcomings of the people, pointing out the shortcomings of the king was told to depart the land 56 00:05:38,040 --> 00:05:46,760 and never return. Prophets were weirdos, they were outsiders, they stood apart from society and in 57 00:05:46,760 --> 00:05:55,960 a sense they had to because they held up a mirror to society's shortcomings. This meant that they 58 00:05:55,960 --> 00:06:03,160 were hounded, attacked, often killed because they said the things that was at other people were 59 00:06:03,160 --> 00:06:11,720 afraid to say, they called out the powerful when they lost their way publicly. The prophets 60 00:06:11,720 --> 00:06:21,080 were almost invariably hated because they saw and spoke to the lies at the heart of the society 61 00:06:21,080 --> 00:06:31,080 of their time. And all of this was true of St John the Baptist and in his work. St John the Baptist 62 00:06:31,080 --> 00:06:39,560 was a weirdo, he was an outsider, he wore weird clothes made of camel skin, he ate weird food, 63 00:06:39,560 --> 00:06:47,560 locust dipped in honey, he lived in the wilderness because he knew that as a prophet his job was 64 00:06:47,560 --> 00:06:53,160 to distance himself from the way that everyone else was living, from the towns and the villages, 65 00:06:53,160 --> 00:07:00,760 so that he could see, truly see from the outside what was happening amongst his people and pointed 66 00:07:00,760 --> 00:07:08,600 out to them. St John the Baptist's central sermon throughout his ministry was to accuse people 67 00:07:08,600 --> 00:07:18,440 of sin and he did it in pretty blunt terms, the Pharisees and the scribes he called a brood of 68 00:07:18,440 --> 00:07:28,760 vipers, he was the one who pointed out the secret shortcomings of the people and not only did he 69 00:07:28,760 --> 00:07:36,840 accuse the people around him, he attacked their sense of identity, the people who came to him were 70 00:07:36,840 --> 00:07:46,520 predominantly Israelites and he assured them that just because they were descendants of Abraham 71 00:07:47,800 --> 00:07:55,240 they were not so righteous as they assumed themselves to be. So John preached that being a 72 00:07:55,240 --> 00:08:02,200 descendant of Abraham meant nothing if the people remained sinful, their heritage as the people of 73 00:08:02,200 --> 00:08:11,640 Israel gave them no credit, this was a common belief particularly in the first century, the people 74 00:08:11,640 --> 00:08:18,280 of Israel clung on to the idea that they were the children of Abraham, they were God's chosen ones 75 00:08:19,240 --> 00:08:25,880 and in a sense perhaps they could do no wrong, God would overlook their sins, their injustices, 76 00:08:25,880 --> 00:08:35,080 the way that they treated each other because they were children descendants of the one that God had 77 00:08:35,080 --> 00:08:45,160 chosen and yet John the Baptist pointed out that if God wanted to he could make the very rocks of 78 00:08:45,160 --> 00:08:52,680 the wilderness the children of Abraham, he told them the axe is lying at the root of the tree, 79 00:08:52,680 --> 00:09:01,960 do not assume that you are safe merely because you have been chosen, if you live a life of sin 80 00:09:01,960 --> 00:09:10,680 God will point it out, as well as criticising the people of the towns and villages you came to see 81 00:09:10,680 --> 00:09:17,320 him, we read in our gospel this morning that's the John the Baptist spent much of his time criticising 82 00:09:17,320 --> 00:09:25,880 King Herod and this really was speaking truth to a great power and not only a powerful man Herod 83 00:09:26,840 --> 00:09:36,120 was not someone you wanted to get angry, he had a dangerous reputation as a vain greedy cruel 84 00:09:36,120 --> 00:09:43,080 leader and of course the John Baptist knew all of this but as a prophet he knew that it was 85 00:09:43,080 --> 00:09:50,040 his calling to point out when people were getting it wrong, there was actually an awful lot that was 86 00:09:50,040 --> 00:09:57,080 sinful about Herod's life, the way that he treated his family members, the way that he treated the 87 00:09:57,080 --> 00:10:05,240 people around him, his unjust taxes on the poor in order to build great luxurious palaces but this 88 00:10:05,240 --> 00:10:11,480 morning we read about the sin which John the Baptist focused on which seems kind of small 89 00:10:11,480 --> 00:10:18,440 comparatively speaking, Herod had married his divorced brother's wife whilst his brother was 90 00:10:18,440 --> 00:10:27,640 still alive and this broke Jewish law, why did the John the Baptist focus on this sin rather than 91 00:10:27,640 --> 00:10:35,240 any of the other massive shortcomings, well it's not entirely clear but what we do see 92 00:10:35,240 --> 00:10:44,920 is that he learned and taught the price of speaking truth to powerful people, 93 00:10:45,960 --> 00:10:52,120 St John had crossed not only Herod but Herod's wife and there was a price to pay 94 00:10:53,080 --> 00:10:59,960 and of course at the end of our gospel we heard what that price was, his life, his head, 95 00:10:59,960 --> 00:11:07,320 perhaps the reason that St John focused on this sin rather than the many others of Herod's life 96 00:11:07,320 --> 00:11:14,280 is that Herod was fashioning himself as a new Solomon, Solomon had built the first temple and was 97 00:11:14,280 --> 00:11:22,840 widely regarded in his time and afterwards as one of Israel's finest kings, Herod was building the 98 00:11:22,840 --> 00:11:29,080 second temple and had gone to an effort to make it bigger and grander than Solomon's original 99 00:11:29,080 --> 00:11:38,840 to showpence his piety and majesty and so St John was pointing out the hypocrisy at the heart of the 100 00:11:38,840 --> 00:11:45,400 narrative that Herod was trying to tell himself and other people, he might have been trying to 101 00:11:45,400 --> 00:11:53,880 model himself on a second Solomon but in fact he had no regard for the wisdom and the love of the 102 00:11:53,880 --> 00:12:02,680 law which made Herod which made Solomon great, in this as in all of his sermons about the 103 00:12:02,680 --> 00:12:11,800 sinless ways of the people of Israel St John acted as a prophet, at the heart of the prophetic voice, 104 00:12:11,800 --> 00:12:18,600 at the heart a speaking truth to power is the act of dismantling the lies that people tell 105 00:12:18,600 --> 00:12:28,360 themselves in order to avoid looking at ugly truths, Herod had sold himself the truth, the lie 106 00:12:29,160 --> 00:12:37,640 that he was the second Solomon, a great builder, a great stanktner, someone wise and godly and 107 00:12:37,640 --> 00:12:49,560 majestic but the reality was that he was a small cruel unkind leader, the reality was that he had 108 00:12:49,560 --> 00:12:58,200 no regard for God or the law, the people of Israel sold themselves the truth, the lie that they 109 00:12:58,200 --> 00:13:03,800 were righteous just because of their heritage, they were descendants of Abraham so they could 110 00:13:03,800 --> 00:13:11,640 not be trusted and yet the truth was that they were living as sinfully as anyone else 111 00:13:12,920 --> 00:13:19,800 and being descendants of Abraham didn't get them off the hook just like all the prophets 112 00:13:20,360 --> 00:13:27,640 St John the Baptist wasn't preaching to make the people feel guilty, he preached in order to get 113 00:13:27,640 --> 00:13:33,640 people to realize what they were doing, the truth of what they were doing and get them to change 114 00:13:33,640 --> 00:13:41,720 their lives, he accused Herod so that Herod could see the truth of his unrighteousness and change 115 00:13:41,720 --> 00:13:49,000 his behavior, though Herod didn't take the opportunity, he accused the people of Israel 116 00:13:49,000 --> 00:13:55,000 so that they could accept the baptism of repentance that he'd come to bring, the forgiveness that 117 00:13:55,000 --> 00:14:03,240 he was offering, St John was called a voice crying out in the wilderness, one who prepared the way 118 00:14:03,240 --> 00:14:10,040 of the Lord, he was the prophet come to prepare people to hear the message of Jesus Christ, 119 00:14:11,400 --> 00:14:18,600 Jesus came to preach the kingdom of God made a reality by his dying on a cross for the sins 120 00:14:18,600 --> 00:14:27,240 of the world and his rising again to new life for those who would follow him, St John first 121 00:14:27,240 --> 00:14:34,040 needed to prepare the road though because if the people didn't realize that they were sinful, 122 00:14:34,040 --> 00:14:40,120 if the people didn't realize that they needed saving then Jesus's message would mean nothing 123 00:14:42,440 --> 00:14:47,000 first a person needs to know that they are sick before they will go to the doctor 124 00:14:48,680 --> 00:14:54,120 and so St John the Baptist came to hold up that mirror and to say you need help 125 00:14:54,120 --> 00:15:02,760 and then Jesus came as the saving healing remedy as a church which carries the name 126 00:15:02,760 --> 00:15:10,680 of St John the Baptist our calling is no less prophetic than his and by now it should be clear 127 00:15:10,680 --> 00:15:18,840 that that is not an easy calling if we are prophets then there is a case for saying that we're meant 128 00:15:18,840 --> 00:15:28,120 to be weirdos troublemakers people who say the unpopular thing if we are a prophetic church 129 00:15:28,120 --> 00:15:34,120 then it's our job to hold up a mirror to the society that we live in to point out the things 130 00:15:34,120 --> 00:15:43,000 that people don't want to see it's our job as individuals and as a community as prophets it's 131 00:15:43,000 --> 00:15:51,080 our job to point out the things that we believe that God does not accept about our world to speak 132 00:15:51,080 --> 00:16:00,280 out when we see racism homophobia transphobia ableism to point out when society acts unjustly 133 00:16:00,280 --> 00:16:06,440 when the markets act unfairly when the poor and the needy are left voiceless and mistreated 134 00:16:06,440 --> 00:16:16,520 ours is in a sense a difficult and unpopular calling because there will be people who disagree with 135 00:16:16,520 --> 00:16:24,120 us it's so much easier to say silent in the face of wrongdoing than to point it out but if we are 136 00:16:24,120 --> 00:16:32,680 truly a church of St John the Baptist then we know that silence is not an option we must recognize 137 00:16:32,680 --> 00:16:40,120 our calling for what it is to cry out in the wilderness may straight the way of the Lord we must 138 00:16:40,120 --> 00:16:48,440 cry out when we see hatred and intolerance injustice and poverty despair and hopelessness 139 00:16:49,320 --> 00:16:56,760 we must make straight the way for those who have not found a path to Christ who have never felt 140 00:16:56,760 --> 00:17:05,640 welcome in the church who have never known that God loves them like st John the Baptist we must 141 00:17:05,640 --> 00:17:12,600 know that our prophetic voice is given because in order for God's kingdom to come people have to 142 00:17:12,600 --> 00:17:24,440 know that it isn't already here the world isn't perfect and there's a reason for it as individuals 143 00:17:24,440 --> 00:17:33,240 who live in st John the Baptist's legacy we know that it's also our duty to listen to prophetic 144 00:17:33,240 --> 00:17:40,040 voices all around us the greatest risk when a person or a group calls themselves a prophet is 145 00:17:40,040 --> 00:17:48,280 that they forget that sometimes they will be the people who need the truth speaking to part of 146 00:17:48,280 --> 00:17:54,520 our prophetic calling will be remembering that sometimes we're the ones who need to hear unwelcome 147 00:17:54,520 --> 00:18:01,560 realities we will need to look at ourselves in the mirror we will need to recognize that we all have 148 00:18:02,120 --> 00:18:10,840 unrepented hypocrisies things that we need to change we will need prophets to hold us to account 149 00:18:10,840 --> 00:18:21,960 just as we hold others to account prophetic life is far from comfortable our gospel reading this 150 00:18:21,960 --> 00:18:32,120 morning proved that there was never a prophet who had an easy time because they did the difficult 151 00:18:32,120 --> 00:18:41,560 thing they walked the difficult path and yet they provided such a service without the prophets 152 00:18:41,560 --> 00:18:49,240 there would be no people of God there would be no church the world would be poorer without people 153 00:18:49,240 --> 00:18:59,320 to point out when mistakes are being made and so though it's not easy let us thank God for our 154 00:18:59,320 --> 00:19:07,400 prophetic calling let us have the strength and the courage to lift up our voices and speak let us 155 00:19:07,400 --> 00:19:29,480 be prepared to listen let us speak the truth to power. Amen.