Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Zechariah chapter 13 verses 1 through 5:
On that day a fountain shall be opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity.
2 On that day, says the Lord of hosts, I will cut off the names of the idols from the land, so that they shall be remembered no more; and also I will remove from the land the prophets and the unclean spirit. 3And if any prophets appear again, their fathers and mothers who bore them will say to them, ‘You shall not live, for you speak lies in the name of the Lord’; and their fathers and their mothers who bore them shall pierce them through when they prophesy. 4On that day the prophets will be ashamed, every one, of their visions when they prophesy; they will not put on a hairy mantle in order to deceive, 5but each of them will say, ‘I am no prophet, I am a tiller of the soil; for the land has been my possession since my youth.’
It is better to have no prophets at all rather than prophets who lead the people astray.
When the prophets become purveyors of hatred and abuse and they bless all manner of evil in God’s name then it is better that there were none in the land. And when the prophets fail to watch over and protect the people, but rather lead them down paths of unrighteousness for purposes of their own political and economic increase or leave them exposed at the hands of predators then they have no right to the office or title of prophet. For they have bring shame upon the office, and blaspheme against the LORD, calling evil good and good evil.
Now is a time for discerning the prophets. It is a time for deciding whether those who are said to serve the LORD actually do so, or if rather they really serve the purposes of the State, or the Party, or business, or their own personal gain.
Seminaries are drying up left and right. There aren’t enough students to keep the lights turned on. Catholic dioceses are having to pull in priests from all over the world to serve North America. It seems very few people want to enter the ministry. And we might think to ourselves whether this might not all be a kind of judgment upon the kind of priests and prophets and Christianity we have created in America.
It’s something to think about.
No comments:
Post a Comment