Many years ago, I visited La Guadalupana, an Episcopal Latino mission in Wilson, North Carolina, and had a chat with an Anglo priest about the Latino penchant for ritual. The priest told me a story about a Latino man who had come to see him and asked to be allowed to kiss the key to the tabernacle. “I am trying to learn English,” the man explained. “I’ve been taught that kissing the key to the tabernacle will help open my mouth.”
Can God open our mouths? And if that were to happen, what would God have us say?
The Old Testament offers several stories of reluctant prophets. One of them is Jeremiah, who, upon receiving his call, protested that he didn’t know how to speak. What followed was a truly dramatic episode: “The Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me, ‘Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant’” ( Jeremiah 1:9-10).
This story underscores not only God’s power to give a prophet words to speak but also the troubling ambiguity that comes with the gift of prophecy. Prophets not only “build and plant” with their words, but they also “destroy and overthrow.” This might help explain why the most typical image of a prophet is not that of a sweet teacher soothing people’s hearts: a prophet is, above all, someone who courageously (and sometimes, harshly!) says things people may not want to hear.
In 2013, the Supreme Court of the Dominican Republic stripped some 200,000 people of their citizenship. The reason: even though they had been born in the Dominican Republic, these people were the children and grandchildren of Haitians. The decision would force them to expatriate to a country where they had never lived. Shortly after the verdict was announced, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori traveled to the Dominican Republic. Along with the local bishop, Julio Holguín, Bishop Schori delivered a strong message that emphasized the tremendous hardships the Supreme Court’s decision would impose.
Bishop Schori even appeared on Dominican television to advocate for the Haitian Dominicans. Her Spanish was imperfect; sometimes, she didn’t have the exact word or her grammar faltered. I felt this made her message even more compelling: what she had to say was so important that she was willing to engage in a language she hadn’t mastered.
On that day, I felt Bishop Schori was a true prophet.
This meditation originally found in Waiting and Watching: Advent Word Reflections by Forward Movement.