Last night we reviewed the story of false prophet Hananiah. Jeremiah
had warned that Judah/Israel would be destroyed and remain in exile for
70 years because of their idolatry and economic exploitation of fellow
Hebrews. Hananiah, seeing that the king and people did not like
Jeremiah’s message, prophesied something different. They would only
be captive for two years; and then God would deliver them from
oppression (Jeremiah 28:1-29:32). Because of this false prophecy,
Jeremiah had been silent, but now he said to Hananiah, “The Lord has not
sent you, yet you have persuaded this nation to trust in lies (28:15).”
Our nation is in crisis, unless you believe the prophets of prosperity,
peace, harmony and security. No one likes bad news, unpopular
messages, negative analyses, and yet we must believe there is a problem
and if we are to act to address it. Too often our own personal comfort
and positions as beneficiaries of the present system cause us to “change
the truth” to fit our privileged place in society. Many people are
benefiting while most are not. We who have relative financial security
will too often look for a Hananiah to suit our false consciousness. We
must remember that the false prophet’s message of comfort does nothing
more than make us totally unprepared, rendering us useless in the face
of reality.
John Edgerton in his study, Speak Against the Day:
The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. The
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1995, writes, “Franklin
Roosevelt . . . called for a massive economic reformation to bring a
higher living standards to all; far-reaching new programs in support of
labor, education, health, housing, and the general welfare; . . . and an
opening of the democratic process to virtually all adults as an
alternative to both the oligarchic status quo and to the threat of state
control under socialism or communism.” He concludes however that by
November of 1938 the rich, using racial hatred in the south and “red
baiting” in the country as a whole, slowly regained ground in their
domination of politics and the economy against working Americans. Most
of us are too young to know of how bad it was, but according to
Edgerton, we are approaching those conditions again and need to act
quickly. An unpopular message. It is a message that those who are
comfortable and in the mainstream, will be reluctant to fully embrace.
No comments:
Post a Comment