The Prophetic Imagination, a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Javier Alanís, LSPS Assistant Professor of Theology, Culture and Mission, given on October 4, 2005, in Christ Chapel

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of each heart be acceptable in thy sight, Oh God our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In the name of the Holy One, Grace be unto you from Diosito, the Giver of Life, and from the Son who calls us AMIGOS Y AMIGAS. AMEN.

To be honest with you, I'm kind of surprised to be here today because I don't usually preach from this pulpit until some time in the Spring. But then I learned that Wayne, the other helper of the Holy Spirit, had asked Nancy Bose, helper par excellence, if I could be put on the preaching schedule during the celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month … so here I am, embodied Hispanic, given the privilegio of telling my story during this month of remembrance.

In fact, with your indulgence, I would like to share a couple of stories from my life experience and ministry which I believe have a direct bearing not only on this cultural heritage but on the texts for today, and in particular the text from the First Epistle of Peter that describes us, the amigos and amigas of God, as "living stones and a holy priesthood." I believe this text has much to say about the question of identity and how we are called to imagine or re-imagine ourselves as the people of God.

Many of you have already heard this first story. It's one that I like to share every year in our missiology class, but I think it bears re-telling on this occasion. It has to do with how a Hispanic or a Latino person like me who also has Mexican indigenous roots in the family tree, ended up a Lutheran of all things!

Sounds like an oxymoron to be sure, but this really has to do with the idea and history of protest and confessional identity.

Well this first story has to do with my grandfather who was living in Mexico during the time of the Revolutionary War of 1910-1920. And true to Mexican cultural and religious ethos, he was of a Native American background, what the Spaniards mistakenly called "Indio" or Indian during the time of the conquest of Mexico. He was also a Roman Catholic. Well one day Don Arnulfo, my grandfather, was asked to be the padrino or sponsor at a baptism of a friend and when he went to the church with the family and the child to be baptized, they met up with the priest of the community who most probably was of Spanish origin since during those times it was uncommon for native Mexicans to study theology or to become priests. The priests often came from Spain. Well, during the course of the conversation with the priest, the priest committed a major faux pax, a cultural indiscretion, if you will. For some reason, he became angry at the mother of the child and told her in a harsh tone, "when I speak to you, you look at me in the eye!"

Sound familiar? We often hear that phrase as children as a sign of discipline and in our context here in the U.S. that may be fine. But among the indigenous communities of the Americas one does not look into the eye of another for that is to look into the soul of another, and a married woman certainly will not look a man in the eye even in response to a question. So the priest, perhaps unwittingly, committed cultural violence in that context and threatened to deny the child the sacrament of Holy baptism. At that point, my grandfather, who was a man of strong character and principle, did the only thing left for him to do as a man of faith. From underneath his poncho or serape, he took out a gun and pointed it at the priest and told him in no uncertain terms "You will baptize this child!" Needless to say, the waters of baptism were stirred and the child was baptized! In thinking about this story I like to believe that the priest experienced a conversion that day, a metanoia, as his priesthood and his life were put to the test!

Mind you, I don't recommend the use of violence in the church in order to get anyone saved; we have enough of that history to atone for, but I tell you this story as a part of the oral history of my family and I certainly don't mean to disparage the clergy of the Roman Church for there are many responsible clergy in that tradition, including in my family, but I believe this story has bearing on how one sees or interprets oneself as a person of faith with a vocation of justice. My Grandfather later became a Lutheran when he came to this country because he liked the idea that as a man of faith he was entitled to protest injustice in the church as part of his confessional identity. The short of it is: my family became Lutheran in large part as a response to this experience of cultural violence and threat of sacramental denial. I like to think that my grandfather exercised his prophetic imagination, even if a bit unorthodox in execution, when he acted in defense of the vulnerable, and that as a person of faith he was as a living stone, perhaps rough around the edges, but a rock of offense to those who would deny the sacraments to the innocent. The story I believe begs the question: which one of the two was truly the priest?

The second story I would like to share with you concerns my role as a priest when I served as a pastor of a church in San Antonio after graduating from LSPS a few years ago. In this story, Don Arnulfo's grandson is the priest, yours truly. As the pastor of a church in a city with a predominant Hispanic population I would often go to the hospital to visit my parishioners. On one occasion I had conducted a funeral in the morning so I was dressed in my clerics … so guess what I looked like walking down the hall of the hospital that afternoon? Yes, I was the "Roman Catholic priest" to the woman who saw me in the distance and who like the Syrophoenician woman requesting a blessing from Jesus, made a bee-line for me with a request that sounded more like a threat, "Father, give me a blessing!" I don't know what her specific needs were at that moment but that didn't seem to matter. She knew that I had something significant to offer her that no one else could give her at that precise moment in her life. At that point in time, my clerics revealed my public identity as a priest of God and one who was given the authority of the church to bless the people of God in that office, whoever they might be. At that moment the fact that I was a Lutheran pastor became irrelevant; in fact, she didn't even give me the opportunity to reveal my true identity. She wanted a blessing now, not manana!

Apparently, something inside of her compelled her to demand it from the priest in front of her, and so not waiting to explain myself and offer my true confessional identity, I offered to pray for her since by now she was grabbing me from the lapels of my coat as if her life depended on it! So I started to pray in that hospital hall, but curiously enough she stopped me in the middle of the sentence and started telling me how to pray! She literally put the words of blessing in my mouth so that she could hear them the way she needed to hear them from me! And so we prayed together there in that busy hospital corridor, priest to priest, as it were, and when I finished praying she was at peace with herself and her God.

This nameless Hispanic woman identified me as a priest of God by the clerics that I was wearing; she mistook my identity for a Roman priest, the image that I was projecting in public, but that didn't seem to matter. She knew that I could represent her before God in prayer, and she was bold enough to tell me what she needed to hear. In that moment I believe she exercised what Walter Bruggeman calls the prophetic imagination that alters consciousness. In conceptualizing herself, in knowing herself, as a woman and child of God with the right to a blessing from God through this man wearing clerics, she was acting in way that would transform and re-imagine her life and perhaps even her ministry. At that moment, I was simply the conduit, the intermediary, the person in the middle acting in my religious vocation as one who represents God in the world.

That woman's prophetic imagination also altered my state of consciousness, because she made me ask certain questions about myself: Who am I, really and truly, with or without the clerics? and how do I serve those who call upon me for service? She prompted the question: Whose am I, really and truly, and what am I about in this world? In short, she agitated me, pulled me out of my orbit and meandering thoughts! By her action she invited me to do some serious introspection and to ask myself: How do people perceive me out there in the world? Am I a living stone like my grandfather Don Arnulfo? Am I agitating others by virtue of my identity as a priest and person of God? In fact, what message do I project unto others with the way I conduct my life? As the commentator of Faith in America said recently, "You might be the best sermon anyone has heard in a long time!" In that respect, I had to ask myself: "Who am I when these clerics come off?" And I realized then that with or without them, I was a baptized child of God called to a vocation of service and prophetic imagination wherever I am, and with whomever I am, even if that imagining invites agitation and a discomfort that comes from following after the prophetic vocation.

As in my ministry in San Antonio which was located in a changing community, this vocation of service may involve conflict or at the very least, cultural misunderstanding at times, and may take us to places where our identity will be questioned and made suspect, such as the time when I preached on the undocumented Mexican workers that I had prayed with one day while visiting friends. I realized then just how unpopular I could become or how agitated my congregation could become by a simple act of praying with strangers.

In today's Gospel Jesus' identity and ministry was being questioned by certain segments of his religious community. In some respects, his deeds were offensive to the powers that governed the religious establishment; he was operating "out of the box," as it were, doing ministry among the disenfranchised of his community, the poor and illiterate, the no-body's who were too ignorant to know the law or to observe it to the letter. He was a rock of offense to the legalists and those who believed that no messianic prophet could possibly arise out of Galilee. Even his disciple Nathanael asked Peter: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" That's not unlike my friends of the Rio Grande Valley who jokingly refer to me when they ask the question: Can anything good come out of San Juan, Texas, or the Valley, a place I call the Galilee of Texas, the cross-roads of two countries, the place considered one of the poorest areas not only of the state but of the entire country and a place where one's identity is often marked by ambiguity because of two competing and conflicting cultures living side by side and often internalized in the very fabric of one's being?

Maybe you can identify with that statement. Many of you have left your homes of origin to go to seminary to begin a formation process that will in a certain sense shape you and form you in a particular priestly way so that the identity you came with will be slightly altered or reshaped or re-imagined, if you will, by the time you leave this place. And maybe, just maybe, Diosito, our diminutive term for God, has a sense of humor and calls each and everyone of us here, to this place and time, with all our warts and wrinkles, for a special purpose and a special call. Jim Wallis said it beautifully a couple of weeks ago: "God knows everything about us and calls us anyway."

Speaking from my own experience as a former legalist, I like to call the concept of God's people as living stones as a sign and metaphor of God's radical grace! God knows everything about us, our defects, our warts, our identities, the way we used to live and the way we project ourselves outwardly in the world and inwardly upon ourselves, sometimes even hating ourselves for being less than perfect, and God call us and loves us anyway.

The writer of first Peter calls the called: a holy priesthood. Luther called us saint and sinner, a paradox of being; you can't have one without the other; the two intertwined inextricably as one being and one embodied essence that has the sprinkling of baptismal water on us to make us God's own people of holy agitation, so as to exercise the ministry of prophetic imagination and proclaim truths that defy our own understanding and false perceptions about ourselves.

Virgilio Elizondo refers to Jesus as the Galilean mestizo Jew, a mixed-breed Son of God who defied the pedigree and social location and expectations of a messianic prophet. I like to think of him as a person of the border precisely because he was from Galilee and because as Elizondo reminds us: he was a mestizo, a mix-breed kind of person who probably spoke a mixture of Greek and Aramaic, and whose Hebrew was probably not as refined as the Jewish scholars of the time. So to think that he might be a prophet for the nation, well I guess that would stretch the prophetic imagination. It is into this kind of narrative that we are invited to participate in and to follow after as living stones and yes, even rocks of offenses, who exercise the prophetic imagination of our baptized life. So this morning, when you come to the communion table, I invite you to dip your hand in the baptismal waters at the font and stir up your prophetic imagination that calls you to this place. Amen.