They Despised the Warnings and Scoffed at the Prophets

Somewhat regularly in the headlines, there’s a story about an elected official or an executive who gets caught for some kind of misdeed. As the investigation into their actions starts, more and more comes to light about many things that they had been doing. Sometimes, YEARS worth of back-door deals, special privileges, misuse of funds, lavish living and deceit are uncovered.

Rarely did the executive or official start that way, but each decision keeps compounding the situation – taking them further and further away from where they started. And their decisions reveal an inability to recognize and tell the truth about themselves or the situation.

Financial advisor and author Suze Orman says, “You can’t build a future if you do not know who you are. You can’t become who you are meant to be if you can’t tell the truth about who you are, what you have, and everything about your life. The truth is the absolute essence to your success, while lies are the absolute essence to your failures.”

At the heart of pretty much every form of healing and wholeness that I can think of is some form of truth-telling. As the common phrase in the recovery goes, “We’re only as sick as our secrets…”

In our readings today, we encounter a people that seems unable to tell the truth about who they are and is growing more and more unable to build a sustainable future.

2 Chronicles 36 tells us that “in those days…the people added infidelity to infidelity…early and often did [God] send… messengers to them [out of] compassion on [the] people and [their] dwelling place.But they mocked the messengers of God,  despised [the] warnings, and scoffed at [the] prophets…”

And the gospel reading from John 3 reminds us that “the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light.”

I’ll be honest, there are many days where I sit back and listen to the news and think that we as a collective have really lost our way. I still maintain hope, but we seem to be racking up “infidelity upon infidelity” to deep covenants with each other and with the planet.

So just for kicks I Googled the phrase, “the United States has lost its way.” Google offered me almost 3 billion results! For the record, I did not read them all (!) but I was amazed how common a sentiment this seems to be. And as I read a few of the entries, I was also amazed at the variety of reasons people would be thinking this.

What are your thoughts or feelings on this? Do you feel hopeful that our collective is on the right track?

When I talk about this and reflect on directionality, I am not talking about left/right politics and deciding if one person would be a better elected official than another. I am talking about our systems and the deep structures that guide us. I am talking about where we draw strength from and about sustainability and collective health.

In the passage from 2 Chronicles, the lost people eventually became taken over by an occupying force that held them hostage. I might submit that we’re in a similar predicament – held hostage by an occupying force – but it no longer comes from the outside.

During Lent, I have been sitting with the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Beyond Vietnam speech. I started reading it again in early December as I watched Israel’s extended military campaign in Gaza unfold in response to the Hamas attack on October 7. And it has only continued (with deep support from the United States). I have found King’s words useful in naming some of the dis-ease that I witness in our country and its support for war (and everything that accompanies our orientation towards violence).

Just take in these quotes from King’s prophetic speech and remember the line from 2 Chronicles “early and often did [God] send messengers to them”:

The war…is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit…that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. 

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values…we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.”

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. 

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency…and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries.

King goes on to conclude, “Let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.”

In that same speech, he said that we face a choice, “nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.” It is incumbent upon us as followers of Jesus to explore how violence works and organizes our society and how essential nonviolence is to bringing forth a new world.

Our second reading from Ephesians assures us today that even when we were “dead in our transgressions,” we can be brought back to life. May we have the courage to accept God’s grace, heed the warnings and fan the flames of a radical revolution of values.

Note: Every year, our local Gandhi Institute hosts a “season of nonviolence” for 64 days (from January 30th when Gandhi was killed to April 4 when King was killed). They have a downloadable booklet with daily practices and ideas, and it is such a beautiful resource for any time of the year. You can download it here