No Profits and No Prophets

"No prophet is accepted in their home town." Luke 4:22

It's hard to be accepted as prophetic in the community from which you came. People remember the silly things you did as a small child, those cute and goofy things, and cannot imagine how that little awkward toddler gained insight. Others remember the dangerous and testy things you did as a teenager, and would rather not know the insight you have gained. When we are known well, we are more easily dismissed than we are welcomed. People tend to like prophets who will make profits for them, and they like creams and potions that will make them look younger, thinner, more beautiful - you name it. Anything but who they truly are. To be known, to be local- that means all your bits, the good ones and the broken ones - are known. We have gotten in a financial crisis because we wanted the outside shaman to come in and we didn't want to see the cracks and broken structures we looked at daily. The charming ones, the outsiders,held up gorgeous mirrors that showed us all as beautiful and rich. We are in a spiritual crisis because we have tossed aside the ones who truly love us and know us as we are. We have followed the ones who told us that their strength and leadership are God's gift to them and we should see the world as they do. They held up a mirror of "all is well", and we looked away from our broken relationships and blindly followed.

Jesus understood the rejection. He was local and neither he nor they could get away with pretense. It is time to do away with pretense and act like a local. We are all in this together, we are all related, we are all part of the problem and we will all have to fix it together. Hoarding and denial will have to be set aside -they haven't worked anyway. Humility and a measure of contrite hearts will have to move in.

Today, I want to start that movement to be a local. No shame in who I am, just honest about all the cracks and fissures, offering what I have that God might use it. Let us all understand the rejection. Everyone initially wants the false ones, the glamor and the lights, but we all truly need the local from one another. We need our neighbors, with all their faults and judgments. With all their mistakes and their full awareness of ours. We need desperately to be prophets in our own country. We need to offer our broken known selves, and people just might listen. They might turn their broken expectations, their broken hearts and their failed lives to God. And God who is the Lover and Creator of all these broken, human locals will put all of the pieces together in a splendid tapestry of hope for all. A colorful blanket of renewed warmth and hope that will cover us in these desperate times. Today may we have the courage to be broken and local so that God might bring love back into the midst of the communities we love.