Who Me? A Prophet??

As If by Magic...

Last Word or First…?

Choose your poison…
or not!

Darkness Giving
Way to Light...?

Time To Say Yes

Of Science, Oatmeal
and Meaning

The Cypress in the Garden:
A Koan Revisited…

Divine Hospitality
at Work...

For the Time Being...
Some Thoughts on the Stewardship of Time

Who Me? A Prophet??

By Whitney Wherrett Roberson

Sometimes we just get it backwards. In our careers, at our workplaces, within our organizations, we sometimes forget what we're really about. Recently, as I was preparing to give a talk on an aspect of the church's life in which we're prone to get it wrong, I recalled a cartoon I saw years ago.

The cartoonist was Dan O'Neill's whose strip, "Odd Bodkins," was published regularly in the San Francisco Chronicle in the late sixties and early seventies. Who knows how my memory has modified it in the more than 30 years since I first saw it, but here's what I remember: in the first frame, in large, ornate script, were the words "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was...." And then in the second frame from a cloud came an exclamation written in even fancier script: "Yes!" In the beginning was the Word and the word was Yes!

In the next frame a few of the Odd Bodkins characters were listening with awe to this divine proclamation. One of them, overcome, runs off, arms uplifted, to proclaim what he's heard: "Yes! he says, "the Word is 'yes!'" The fourth frame brought a couple of other characters musing dreamily as our evangelist streaked away in the distance still proclaiming the divine Affirmation. One of these dreamy characters says to the other, "Did you hear that?" To which his companion replies, "No." Another character, in the next frame, who's overheared this conversation, says, "No? Did he say 'No'? Oh, my God, the word is 'No!'" Now this character, in a panic, runs off, arms uplifted proclaiming, "NO! The word is 'no'!" And all who hear him repeat his 'no' in subsequent frames: some with puzzlement, some fearfully, some angrily, some matter of factly. The final frame returns us to the heavenly cloud, this time depicting apparently a celestial conversation: in orate but small script, the words, "They got it backwards" and in the larger, fancier script, a weary, "I don't believe it..."

I wonder: how do we get it backwards, turning "yes's" into "no's?" We do it in our own lives, I suspect, and, certainly, we do it in our institutional lives as well. Organizations that begin with a sense of purpose can lose their way until those working within them have little understanding of the vision that may have guided their founders. New Testament scholar and author Walter Wink has written compellingly of the ways organizations lose track of their deeper vocation to serve the common good. Suggesting we reclaim some ancient Biblical language for our own time, Wink in his little book, The Powers that Be*( points to the spiritual dimension of institutions and organization; like individuals, he believes, they are accountable to divine Mystery. An organization's culture or mindset as well as its values are aspects of its "spirit," or to use the ancient term, its "angel." When an organization gets it backwards, forgets its vocation, its "angel" becomes "demonic," becomes life-draining, self-serving, even destructive. It's "yes!" has become "no." Don't we all know organizations or institutions in which exactly this has happened?

I wonder: what's the vocation of your organization? And what is your vocation when you see your organization forgetting its vocation? Where has your institutional "yes" become "no," and how will you respond? In the Christian story, the Holy Spirit sends prophets to remind the people of their vocation. Now there's an intriguing image: prophets at work. I wonder what that would look like...?

* Wink, Walter, The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millennium, (Doubleday: NewYork, ) 1998.