May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing in your sight, LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer. (Psalms 19:14)
Please be seated.
So this is False Prophets Sunday, but what is a prophet? A prophet is someone who speaks for God. In the Bible we find the major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and whoever wrote the Book of Lamentations; and the minor prophets, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Jesus isn’t considered a prophet since He doesn’t speak for God, He is God. As Jesus is the Word of God, there can be nothing more to add after Jesus, so we would say that there can be no more prophets.
With that definition of “prophet,” we have a very short sermon. There is Jesus and the twenty-some-odd true prophets I mentioned. Neat and tidy. But then why would Matthew warn us about false prophets in sheep’s clothing?
To grapple with that, let’s look at those false prophets Jeremiah complains about in our Old Testament reading today:
You may remember that there was King Saul and King David and King Solomon, and then a long line of kings – most of them bad. A long decline into disregard for the God who chose the Iraelites and made them a people in the first place. These prophets, they speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD. (Jeremiah 23:16) They prophesy what their hearers want to hear – ‘The LORD says: You will have peace.’ (Jeremiah 23:17) – rather than proclaiming God’s exhortations to turn away from their evil ways. Through Jeremiah, God promises a bad end to this, and it came in 587 BC when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians and all but the poorest Iraelites were taken into exile. A national disaster.
When reading Bible passages it is always good to know a bit of the historical context and have some understanding of how the original readers would have heard the text. But to leave it there, as a, maybe, interesting story of some people long ago is always a mistake. To apply Matthew’s warning, false prophets must be anyone who teaches falsely about God or how to live righteously.
So, who are the false prophets today?
We hire our pastor to sort that out, right. We depend on Den Danske Kirke i Udlandet to send us a good pastor, and we trust that the pastoral seminaries produce qualified graduates.
Not so fast, says Martin Luther. You may have heard the phrase “the priesthood of all believers.” Luther rejected that some people are closer to God, holier than others. But that leaves us lay persons with a
responsibility. Luther didn’t accuse the clergy of his time of being evil – well, not at first, at any rate; later, after being the target of assasination attempts, he became less accommodating. But at first he saw the church as being led astray by well meaning but mistaken clergy. And he gave you the responsibility of ensuring that that would never happen again. That is why Luther insisted on the Bible in a language you can read, and that’s why Luther wrote his Small Catechism that is short enough to be memorized if you cannot read. (And if you forgot your Catechism, then the Bible Study will study it this fall.) We, the laity, have the responsibility of sorting out the false prophets by asking poignant questions.
When you have income that the CRA doesn’t know about and you decide that they don’t need to know, then you are obviously stealing from your neighbour by paying less in tax than you ought, but you are also telling yourself that what the CRA doesn’t know won’t kill them. And then are you really that different from Jeremiah’s false prophets telling the rich and powerful of ancient Israel what they wanted to hear?
Oh, but you never did cheat on your taxes, you only complain about how loopholes allow the rich to avoid taxes; that is, you tell lies about your neighbours, betray and slander them, and destroy their reputations – that’s the Catechism’s explanation of “Thou shalt not bear false witness.” And, knowing that slander is wrong you justify yourself thinking that the wealthy deserve their comeuppance. Again, are you not a false prophet?
Or if you do not gossip but only think this to yourself, are you not coveting those fabled tax exemptions. And knowing that coveting is prohibited not by one but by two commandments, you justify yourself saying that you are not a gossip? False prophet!
I used cheating on taxes as my example, but if you examine your heart, I bet that you’ll find that we all have a false prophet close at hand.
Now, if there is such an abundance of false prophets in our own hearts, in our own church, in other churches, and in the secular world, both online and in person, and if we have a responsibility to identify and challenge those false prophets, how do we sort them all out?
Our gospel reading tells us that we can recognize false prophets by their fruit. Indeed, the fruit of listening to those false prophets Jeremiah complained about – or that God complained about through Jeremiah – their fruit was the exile of Israel to Babylon. But that was years later, maybe five, ten, twenty years. How do we recognize our false prophets today?
For once, the good news comes from the epistle reading: Paul tells us that we are heirs with Christ to the Kingdom of God. As children of God we have His promise that the Holy Spirit will help and guide us – when we listen, and sometimes even if we do not. And, as children of God we have His promise that Christ’s world-restoring work on the cross applies also to us, that He will forgive us when we mess up.
And that’s why we began today with the Confession and Forgiveness. We need to confess our sins, put them in words – not for God’s sake, He knows, but for our own sake, words matter. And we need to hear His forgiveness, so let me proclaim to you again:
God, who is rich in mercy, loved us even when we were dead in sin, and made us alive together with Christ.
By grace you have been saved. In the name of ☩ Jesus Christ, you sins are forgiven.
Almighty God strengthen you with power through the Holy Spirit, that Christ may live in your hearts through faith.
Amen.