The Church As Sentinel
Sermon by Cynthia A.
Jarvis
October 30, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Ezekiel 3:16-23
II Timothy 3:1-5a;4:1-5
"Mortal, I have made you a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them
warning from me."
On this Reformation Sunday and in these times when religion and politics bed one another regularly, we would do well to ask
what it means for the church to exist as prophetic sentinel in a society with itching ears. What must be dared, in other
words, if God's word is to be spoken in the midst of a culture that has turned--as all cultures do--from listening to the
truth…in the midst of a nation that has wandered--as all nations must--into myths?
"The exercise of the office of prophetic sentinel with regard to social and political affairs is an indispensable constituent
of Reformed practice," writes Eberhard Busch.* The image of sentinel comes to us first from the prophets, specifically from
the historical context of the prophet Ezekiel. A priest exiled to Babylon during the initial deportation in 597 B.C., Ezekiel
prophesied in a time of intense political and religious crisis. Though the real crisis facing God's people was not political
but theological: had God withdrawn God's promise to the Davidic line by the destruction of the temple? Had the political
triumph of Babylon signaled, as well, the triumph of Babylonian deities over Israel's God? Yet even more to the point of our
text and times, how among the many words attributed to God in the public square were God's people to discern which word was a
word from God, the same God revealed in the law at Sinai who now seemed to be absent or in hiding?
Judah's prophets themselves were at odds. Earlier Hananiah had spoken the word that suited the people's desires, a word
assuring them of their imminent return to life as it had been, while Jeremiah counseled surrender to Nebuchadnezzar and the
acceptance of a long exile as evidence of God's judgment. By the time Ezekiel was summoned to speak, the people had little
use for the institution of prophesy. They had, in Paul's words to Timothy, become lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of
God and soon would join their God to the gods of Babylon. "Holding to the outward form of godliness," Paul would have said,
"they denied its power." Still Ezekiel prophesied. Hearing as he did a word of death and judgment, spoken by the God who
brings life out of death, he gave the people warning.
We think, from this distance in time, that surely we would have been among those able to hear, in Ezekiel's counter-testimony
to the cultural hegemony of Babylon, a word from the Lord. Suspecting otherwise of myself, I sought words that had the
stinging ring of a sentinel's cry closer to home: "No man or nation is wise or good enough," begins Reinhold Niebuhr from an
American pulpit in 1946,
to hold the power which the great nations…hold, without being tempted to both pride and injustice. Pride is the religious
dimension of the sin which flows from absolute power; and injustice is its social dimension. The great nations speak so
glibly of their passion for justice and peace; and so obviously betray interests which contradict justice and peace. This is
precisely the kind of spiritual pride the prophets had in mind when they pronounced divine judgment upon the nations.
That we can swallow! But then as most prophets do, Niebuhr gets specific, begins to meddle. He might as well be
preaching in 2005:
Consider how blandly the victorious nations draw plans for destroying the economic and political life of defeated nations
in the hope of rebuilding them as democracies 'from the ground up.' This lack of consideration for the organic aspects of the
social existence of other nation, this confidence in our ability to create something better by our fiat, is a perfect
illustration of the pride of power. It is not any more sufferable by the idea that we are doing all this for the sake of
'purging' the defeated nations of their evil and bestowing our 'democracy' upon them. The very absurdity of bestowing
democracy contains the pretension against which the prophets inveighed.
How are God's people in any age to hear the word God's sentinel speaks when that word is over against the words of our
highest national aspirations or unsympathetic to our reasonable political compromises? "The primal departure from Babylon,"
says Walter Brueggemann, "is not geographical [or political] but imaginative….The summons…of an alternative community of
praise and obedience depends upon the clear articulation of an 'either/or,' the offer of a choice and the requirement of a
decision that is theologically rooted and ethically exhibited, that touches and pervades every aspect of the life of the
community and its members", that works in us an imagination for God's reign. Perhaps the second context will be easier to
take!
It is the context of the Reformation, specifically the Swiss Reformation and Heinrich Bullinger. The Council of Zurich
stipulated in their call to Bullinger to be preacher for the Gross Munster that "he has not to meddle in worldly affairs,
for which the civil government is responsible, but to let us do our work." Bullinger replied, "Concerning your desire that we
should preach the Word of God peacefully, we want to obey joyfully. But because there is no endless struggle between good and
evil, between truth and lies, the divine word has also its discord and pungency. Therefore we are content, if you order us to
preach the Old and New Testaments freely, uninhibitedly, unrestricted by human discretion. For the word of God is not chained
(II Timothy 2:9). Whatever is found therein, whatever it seeks and whatever it confronts must be openly stated."
Bullinger's predecessor in Zurich had said as much from the same pulpit. Ulrich Zwingli held that the one task of the church
was to listen for God's Word and then to "preach nothing else than the Word of God." That Word, of course, turned out still
to be a two-edged sword which necessarily had significance for the common life and its ordering in 16th century Switzerland.
A firebrand finally drawn and quartered at the hands of soldiers in a neighboring Catholic canton, Zwingli judged social
righteousness according to the word of God by one criterion: "If the weak are protected legally from the strong, even if they
don't protest." As this duty was neglected by the state, then the word the church alone had to speak inevitably was heard as
a word of judgment that drew protest from "worldly powers." Zwingli had learned well from John Calvin how "worldly powers
persist precisely because everybody tolerates them silently"; but more and as if to propel us into our present context,
Calvin goes on to note that these powers "seek to make themselves unimpeachable by clothing themselves with religion.
Therefore the office of a prophetic sentinel [in the second place] includes the duty of unmasking false prophets who 'say
"peace" when there is no peace.'" Perhaps, then, the third context will be more to the liking of our itching ears.
It is, after all, our own: the context of Reformation Sunday 2005. The times, we must admit, are very confusing. If the one
word the church has to speak is the word the church has heard as she has listened for God's word, "persistently whether the
time is favorable or unfavorable" says Paul in the face of death…and if the same words are used by the state to cloth the
state's actions in religion, thus making those actions to the uncritical mind unimpeachable, then what is the word of the
Lord for our day? "It is an obvious fact of American life," acknowledges Craig Watts, a Reformed pastor and theologian, "that
the church has no monopoly on religious language and ritual behavior. Not only do other religious bodies share similar
expressions, but the state does so as well. Many have been content to assume that the superficially similar vocabulary and
symbols used by both church and state indicate the same transcendent reality." That is, when God's word and will are invoked
by the state, the referent is presumed to be the same God generally revealed in the Bible.
Not so by a long shot, says Watt. The God of civil religion "never ceases to be vague and abstract. The supposed acts of this
God in history are not acts of divine self-revelation; they do not disclose God. Rather, whatever specificity is found in
American civil religion pertains 'to the topic of America,' not to God." Natural theology, this is called, and is the product
of human devising, a word we speak to ourselves. If judgment issues from this word, it is "unlikely to be more than a
reflection of self-dissatisfaction, modest and compromising. For with natural theology 'God…is ultimately reduced to a mere
symbol or cipher' [and] 'sin takes on the appearance of something which is quite comfortable.'"
By contrast the God who has chosen to be known in Jesus Christ, "the Son of the Father is the face of God, the name of God,
the form of God, outside of which God is not God," roars Karl Barth. There is no resemblance between this God who comes to us
from outside ourselves and the God who bubbles up from the cultural cauldron of our common lives. Again, the one is the
product of natural theology and is simply a "facet of the world misidentified." The other is the word heard by the prophets
and the apostles, "living and active," wrote the author of Hebrews, "sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it
divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no
creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render account."
Who can stand? Who dares speak the truth when words betray their meaning? I think in the end of J. Robert Oppenheimer,
builder of the first atomic bomb and subject of "Doctor Atomic", an opera which premiered this month to rave reviews in
San Francisco. Of this American Prometheus his latest biographers write, "Oppenheimer dubbed the test sight
Trinity-though years later, he wasn't quite sure why he chose such a name. He remembered vaguely having in mind a John Donne
poem that opens with the line, 'Batter my heart, three-personed God…break, blow, burn, and make me new.'" The aria set to
Donne's poem closes the first act. Later Oppenheimer would write that the bomb detonated at Trinity "represented a 'dividing
line in human history, when the human species was no longer riding along with the rest of God's creation…but suddenly was in
a position to destroy the nest, to literally destroy the planet. That seemed to be a theme," he said, "that was worthy of my
time." "Humility," said Niebuhr in the same 1946 sermon, a mushroom cloud fresh in his imagination, "is a by-product of the
faith which discerns life in its total dimension and senses the divine judgment which stands above and against all human
judgments; and of the divine majesty which is justifiably jealous of human pretensions."
"Batter my heart three-personed God," we therefore pray because Trinity does represent the dividing line in human history
when, on a cross, the human species no longer was left to its own devises concerning God's Word, but beheld in the weakness
of human flesh the power and truth of God's love. What word does the church alone have to speak to the world? What word
speaks the truth which alone unmasks the lie? What word is worthy of our life and even of our death? Said the Reformed
preachers of the confessing church as each one faced the gallows or the firing squad at the hand of a political order in bed
with the religious establishment, "Jesus Christ alone is the one word to which we cling." May God so help us this Reformation
Sunday say the same!
* Professor of Systematic Theology at the University in Gottingen, Germany and biographer of Karl Barth
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