WHO SPEAKS FOR GOD?
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
Old First Church, Middletown, NJ
January 31, 2021
Texts: Deuteronomy 18:15–20; Mark 1:14–20
Several of us here are old enough to remember Billy Graham in his heyday. A fire breathing evangelist in the tradition of another famous “Billy,” Billy Sunday, he preached fundamentalist religion, conservative social policy, and was even considered to be a spiritual counselor to Presidents. He was one of the few who stood by Richard Nixon during Watergate. His politics flowed from his evangelistic message which could probably be summed up as follows: Repent, America, and turn to Christ or we’ll end up like Communist Russia. Even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, he was deeply distrustful of people in the former Eastern Bloc. It was Graham’s staunch and unyielding opposition to “godless Communism,” as it was called back then, that made him a friend of Richard Cardinal Cushing of New York. Although generally not widely known, in 1983 Ronald Reagan used Graham to help him with the evangelistic home front as he opened diplomatic relations with the Vatican. However, it’s also important to realize that Graham’s crusades were one of the few places in pre-1960s America where people of color could worship with whites; and he paid the bail money to secure the release of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Birmingham jail.
Rick Warren is a very different kind of evangelist, but his implicit and explicit political opinions are just as controversial today as were those of Graham in the 1950s and especially the 1960s. Warren is more outspoken about politics and the kind of political change we need in America today. His views on homosexuality and abortion are well known because they are so public. Both Warren and Graham, no matter what you think of their theological and political opinions, are untouched by financial or sexual scandal unlike some others, notably Jim and Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggert, and Ted Haggard. Remember them? And who can forget Don Imus’ hilarious parodies of Billy James Hargis, another televangelist who fell through sex scandals in the 1970s?
So, who speaks for God? What about our modern prophets who preached and practiced racial justice like Will Campbell, still alive and kicking at 85 in Nashville, or Bill Coffin, the Yale chaplain who spoke so eloquently against our war in Vietnam? Our tradition of great liberal prophet preachers extends back to the eighteenth century with George Whitfield who called slaveholding a sin, Horace Bushnell who championed the rights of children, Henry Ward Beecher who spoke for the Union, and Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor at Riverside, Church [NYC] who called for tolerant Christianity in an age of religious suspicion and skepticism. People like Jim Wallis, although he calls himself evangelical, espouse a liberal social policy based on a theology grounded on a more literal approach to Scripture than many of us accept.
Who speaks for God? And how do we know that those who say they do, really do? The Deuteronomist tells us that if someone claims to be a prophet and is lying that person will die. Now, the ancient Hebrews had a rather primitive understanding of what that meant. Remember that great sequence from Disney’s Fantasia? It was a bit like that, God coming down from heaven and zap! A thunderbolt. Cleaned that one up, by golly, by gum. But look at what happened to Swaggert and the Bakkers. They were destroyed, absolutely destroyed by public attention to their scandals. God didn’t need a thunderbolt, just the press.
Every once in a while a preacher-prophet comes and when we hear that person, we know, we just know this is the word of God in our midst. Martin Luther King Jr. was that kind of person. And he didn’t preach what we necessarily wanted to hear. In El Salvador Romero was that kind of person. And they were both killed by the forces of darkness, the forces that call us to yield to our fears rather than our hopes, to our baser rather than our nobler natures.
Who speaks for God? Asked that question and we all feel humble, none of us want to take that awesome responsibility. But we––every single one of us speaks for God––by our actions, by the way we either do or do not care and love each other. Each of us speaks for God through each act of kindness, through the way we respond to the call, to the way we live the Gospel. Each of us speaks for God.
It’s both humbling and exhilarating; it’s both reassuring and frightening––but, in the end, it’s what we are called to do as followers of the one who through his words and his life did speak for God.
Let us pray: Eternal God, you call us to be witnesses of your truth. Be with us as we search for your love and your truth for our lives. In the name of him who was the example of your love, even Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.