The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipating Word

Chapter 6. The Continuing Mandate

129 Chapter 6 The Continuing Mandate In 1884 Denis Wortman wrote a hymn. He was a pastor in the Reformed Church in America and subsequently became the president of New Brunswick Seminary, a school of the Reformed Church in America. For the centenary of the seminary, he wrote the hymn with these words: God of the prophets, bless the prophets’ heirs, Elijah’s mantel o’er Elisha cast. Each age for its own solemn tasks prepares: make each one nobler, stronger than the last. Anoint them prophets! Make their ears attend to your divinest speech; their hearts awake To human need; their lips make eloquent for righteousness that shall all evil break. Anoint them priests! Strong intercessors they for pardon, and for charity and peace! O might with them the world, though gone astray, pass into Christ’s pure life of sacrifice. Make them apostles! Heralds of your cross, forth may they go to tell all realms your grace. Inspired of you, may they count all but loss, and stand at last with joy before your face.1 130 The Practice of Prophetic Imagination For the seminary, the hymn hoped and imagined that the school was educating students to be prophets, priests, and apostles in the church. I I begin with this hymn because in my church tradition, it has been sung at many ordinations of pastors to the ministry of word and sacrament. The four verses of the hymn identify three offices or functions in that ministry: • The fourth verse is, “Make them apostles” in order to “tell all realms your grace.” • The third verse is “anoint them priests.” This is a curious theme in a free Calvinist church tradition, my own tradition that has always been resistant to priests as mediators. The text says “strong intercessors they,” with an allusion to “pardon” and “sacrifice.” The verse reflects a sacramental view of ministry that hardly squares with the faith of that tradition. • But my interest is in verses one and two. The prophets, in sequence before priests or apostles, get two verses, with the address to God, “God of the prophets,” with a series of petitions: • that God should bless the prophets’ heirs (that word in the original was “sons” before being made inclusive), with reference to “human need” and “righteousness that shall all evil break.” • that God should “anoint them prophets” with an allusion to Elisha as the successor to Elijah, the gratuitous assumption that the older generation had been prophetic. The reason I begin here is to imagine the church singing not only in anticipation of coming apostles and priests, but two verses in hope of coming prophets . I know full well, of course, that congregations will sing almost anything put in front of them, whether in a hymnal or on a screen, so that the singing of hope for the coming prophets might well be, on the part of the congregation , largely unwitting. Nevertheless, the church does sing such words, surely with a modicum of intentionality. There is a tacit yearning in the church for the prophetic. And so the church sings about the prophetic with some vigor, in contexts of ordination with adoring attentiveness to the woman or man who has “run the The Continuing Mandate131 course” and made good thus far. The church sings that way with hope, all the while, in practice, mostly resisting anything prophetic and really wanting no more than a status quo pastorate or priesthood, mostly wanting apostolic faith that “tells” but does not summon too much. It is in that context of a singing affirmation side by side with a practical reluctance or resistance that frames the continuing mandate to prophetic ministry. Those who would be prophetic are situated exactly in that ecclesial ambiguity, an ambiguity very often felt among us quite personally as we at the same time intend to take the call seriously and yet cringe from it when we get down to it. But the singing does not stop! I conclude these presentations with some summary reflection on a contemporary call to be prophetic and on the contemporary practice of the prophetic. No doubt the prophetic dimension of ministry as a vocation of the double divine impossibility is made difficult because of the social conformity of the church and the diminution of the gospel. At the turn of the twentieth century, we spoke of the “acids of modernity,” not fully seeing that those...