Let the One Who Has My Word Speak My Word Faithfully

I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, “I have dreamed! I have dreamed!” How long? Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back—those who prophesy lies and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart? They plan to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another, just as their ancestors forgot my name for Baal. Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat? says the Lord. Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?
(Jeremiah 23: 25-29, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

I shared a message earlier this year about Jeremiah’s prophetic witness to ancient Israel, a kingdom “facing a disaster it had brought upon itself” by abandoning its covenant with God. I observed then how Jeremiah’s warnings must have resonated with early Friends like Edward Burrough, who told his neighbors in the “Distracted and Broken Nation of England” their troubles had come about because “the Men that should Rule thee, and which have pretended to Govern thee, do not walk in the Way of thy Peace.”

Some would say Jeremiah and Burrough speak to our condition.

The recently deceased theologian Walter Brueggemann did say as much, in fact, a few years ago. Describing Jeremiah’s prophecies as “a sustained pondering of the defining trauma of the loss of familiar Jerusalem,” he suggested that the United States, after 9/11, was facing its own traumatic loss “of the old certitude of American chosenness to privilege and dominance.”

“If Jeremiah is any adequate guide,” Brueggemann reflected, “we may conclude that our world is indeed being reduced to naught. And when the world goes, what remains is only an orb of anxiety.” As those anxious, chaotic conditions set in, false prophets emerge, telling us they hold the key to making things great again.

Jeremiah warned us about such charlatans. “They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD,” he said. “They keep saying to those who despise the word of the LORD, ‘It shall be well with you,’ and to all who stubbornly follow their own stubborn hearts, they say, ‘No calamity shall come upon you.’” (23:16-17) His words remind me of the steady stream of tweets and other pronouncements coming from the highest levels of the American government, desperate to declare 2025 an annus mirabilis under their reign. Does it feel like a miraculous year to you?

God calls Friends to bring truthful testimony to our present circumstances.

As the secular world pursues capital rather than grace, we should speak out with the directness of Burrough when he cried out to England that “the men that have sitten on thy Throne… have left thee groaning under great Oppressions, wounded with the Spirit of Tyranny yet un-cast out.” We should show no fear in identifying the principalities and powers responsible for violating God’s greatest commandments, and exposing their promises of prosperity as lies.

Beyond that, we should make our own lives, and our own religious society, a counterexample, challenging evil rather than accepting complicity. It will not come easy. At best, we might hope the mainstream culture will treat our rebellion with polite dismissal: “It’s all well and good to preach peace, but some of us have to live in the real world.” 

If they cannot succeed at portraying Quakerism and similar testimonies as irrelevant, however, they will escalate to more hostile tactics. They will, for example, reframe empathy and love for our neighbors as sin. They will elevate principles like “God helps those who help themselves” to the level of doctrine.

Perhaps they will move to accuse us of acting against the national interest. Perhaps they will accuse us of sympathizing with terrorists, or becoming terrorists ourselves. (You might consider that hyperbolic, and I might have agreed with you—before the federal government began prosecuting a young Quaker activist for allegedly assaulting an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer during a protest at an ICE facility this summer.)

No matter how much they strive to ostracize us, we should hold firm.

“Jeremiah hated his prophetic mission,” the rabbi Abraham J. Heschel wrote in The Prophets. “To a soul full of love, it was horrible to be a prophet of castigation and wrath.” But the intensity of God’s call prevented Jeremiah from taking any other course of action: “In spite of public rejection, in spite of inner misery, he felt unable to discard the divine burden.”

The path of prophetic ministry has always held great challenges for Friends. Edward Burrough died in prison before his thirtieth birthday; before then, he’d achieved notoriety for protesting the hanging of Mary Dyer and other Quakers in Puritan Boston. Parliament had James Nayler tortured and mutilated before throwing him in prison for blasphemy, where his condition deteriorated further; he died on his way home to reunite with the family he left behind to answer God’s call to ministry.

But they could not abandon, nor even water down, their ministry any more than Jeremiah could. We may do well, in the times ahead, to keep their example close to our hearts.