The Edge of the Inside

I might have mentioned that we got some snow, and I also might have mentioned that Southern Maryland tends to paralyze when snow like this happens.  So Ash Wednesday service was cancelled, which is a little bit of a bummer because I was going to talk about prophets, and prophets are interesting characters.  Richard Rohr has also been talking about Prophets, and has some interesting things to say, and particularly the thing about where a Prophet has to exist: on the inside of the system, but not in its shining, gooey center.
Intuitively, I know this is true, and rather difficult, because to be a Prophet means you're probably going to offend some people, but the offense is actually necessary, because the word is "from the Lord" whatever that means in your particular system.  I have a couple or three examples milling around in my head.  The first example is the blogosphere, you know where I'm writing and you're reading, and where occasionally people take a stab at saying Prophetic things. I'm thinking specifically about Christian bloggers writing about the Church.  Because of the interweb, our religious ghettos are dissolving in a big hurry.  As a Presbyterian Teaching Elder, I regularly read things by Richard Rohr (Roman Catholic, Franciscan), Brian McClaren (Emergent, post evangelical), Shane Claiborne (Radical Hippie Christian), Rob Bell (whatever the heck Rob is these days), N.T. Wright (Conservativ-ish Anglican), Martin Marty (Liberal-ish Mainline Protestant), Eugene Peterson (Patron Saint of modern Presbyterians), Rachel Held Evans (Millennial mouthpiece and target of a whole lotta hating), and a whole bunch of other churchy writers and bloggers who have a lot to say about who/what/how we are the church or what we should be as the church.  I find that I am able to hear prophetic things from all of these people in some moments, and not in others, it depends on whether or not I feel they're in my system, or whether they're shouting at my system from the outside.
Eugene Peterson is pretty much always in my system, he is a Presbyterian Pastor who served a church in suburban Maryland, when Eugene says something, I pretty much have to listen, even if it makes me want to tuck my tail between my legs and wander off in shame.  The other ones, I have a pretty finely tuned filter (though Rohr is getting through a lot more than I would have expected an RC type would).  I can see the places where they're talking about "our" church, as in something we are both a part of and both fully invested in, and both concerned for the overall welfare and sanctity of.  I can also see the places where they're pointing the finger at me from the outside, telling me all the ways that my way of being the church is just wrong and they have figured it out.  If that seems like a fine line, don't worry, I'm about to get more radical up in here.
Earlier this week, a couple of friends of mine, secular humanist types, or as they say, "heathen."  Noticed that Pope Francis made a comment about people who chose not to have children being "selfish."  I heard in the tone and some of the comments that defensiveness of people who have been prophet-ed without being a part of the prophet's system.  I made a joke about cats, which is a popular thing on the facebook, and I got a bunch of likes, which is a good feeling, and in digital world means you are "in."  I then mildly defended Francis, and made a comment that pointed out that Francis (I called him Frank for the sake of maintaining my "like"ability) is actually bringing the RC church along in a rather stellar, progressive fashion, but that you can't expect him to all of the sudden just stop being Catholic.
I have really appreciated Francis for his stand on economic justice and our need to develop global empathy, and to get back to loving our neighbors, but I know he's not going to come out and support birth control, or women priests, or gay marriage, it's a bridge too far, and it would lead to his prophetic voice being silenced and cast out of the community of the Roman Catholic Church.  You want to talk about ugly? See what happens when the Church has to forcibly get rid of a Pope, since it can't actually excommunicate him, pretty much the only option is murder, which has happened, both in reality and suspicion rather more than one might think.  Which is, of course a major danger for prophet types in general, if you get to be too much of a pest, speaking for God and all, they just off you, because they can't kill God.  And when people get mad enough about anything, they seem to just have to kill someone.
Which leads me to the most irritating bit of prophetic troubling: ISIS, which honestly, I hate with a righteous hatred, on several levels.  I hate that they are just brutal and barbaric, I hate that they claim to be serving god with their abhorrent violence, and I also hate that they are a mirror of so much of what has gone wrong with religion over the centuries.  Add to this the fact that we are so resistant to seeing the indictment of our own history, and I can't help but be nervous about even talking about this.
It comes back to the fact that Jesus told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.  Don't get me wrong, when they lined up those Christians and beheaded them, I didn't even need to watch the video, it gave me a howling fit of rage and hate.  And that is the ultimate victory of evil, to get people who are trying to follow Jesus to forget all about what he said and did, and hate others and fear others, and eventually kill others. There have been many times where I let the hate win, where I just thought: "this is too much, those barbarians gots to be got, send in the bombs, let's go all shock and awe and see how they like that!"
I'm tempted to see violence as an answer.  Maybe it is, but it's not the Jesus way.  This doesn't mean I'm pointing the finger at everyone who wants to go in with guns blazing, I'm talking to the people in my system, the ones who are really trying to love God and love our neighbors.  We can't change ISIS, they won't even listen to other Muslims, they certainly won't listen to us.  We can't change the secular world, war is probably coming.  What we can do is "Rend our hearts, not our garments," as the Prophet Joel says.  Let your heart break for the brokenness of the world, but don't let it make you bitter, do not let it impoverish your ability to feel empathy, do not let the anger run you.
Listen to the voices of the prophets, the ones that tell us where cycles of violence will get us.  Look there for a solution that will not just lead to another generation of angry disenfranchised Muslims willing to fight to get back to the seventh century, "when things were better."  We can learn a lot from the darkness and evil of ISIS, we can see so many things that were festering in the secret cells of Al Quaeda and Hezbollah, now out in the bright light of day.  If you don't like it, let's try and turn and do something else, let's not just do the same things we've always done and expect different results.