I used to crave a book deal.
As a young, “Christian” writer, I felt that if only I could sign a publishing contract, then I could really be used by God. If I had a platform from which to speak, something that people paid attention to, then I could do some good in the church and the world.
It’s a good thing I never got that book deal. I was young and immature and still finding my writing voice. It’s not that younger people shouldn’t get book deals. Some do, and some have something good to say. They work hard and craft something solid. It’s a good thing to hear young voices beside more established or aged thoughts.
But I was too young to say what I wanted to say. I didn’t have any sense of maturity behind my head full of ideas and a heart full of passion. Suffering and pain hadn’t tempered me. I hadn’t seen what fruit these ideas would produce in my life. I hadn’t had experiences enough to help me see the reality of situations, the complexity of life.
Truth be had, I still want a book contract, but my desire has waned as I’ve gotten older. I’m wondering now how good it would actually be to be able to sell an idea. After all, book contracts are betting on a return of investment from the book. Questions like, “is it marketable” and, “whose the target audience” loom large in the creation of these books that everyone involved hopes to sell.
Marketability is about palatability. Is it what people want to hear? Does it meet a felt need? Can it help expand someone’s life? These questions are about comfort, about what people want.
We all want comfort. We naturally gravitate towards people like us, people that we can agree with, people in our demographic. If we aren’t careful, this natural drift can end us up in an echo chamber, where all we hear is a resounding, “YES!” to all our thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
This drift towards familiarity and comfort is real, and we can even see it in what books we gravitate towards, what music we listen to, who we choose to follow, emulate, and learn from.
Everyone likes comfort. Everyone likes to be right. Everyone likes the familiar.
No one wants to listen to the prophetic voice.
The prophetic voice is disruptive and sharp. It makes us squirm. It makes us examine those places in our thinking and our actions that an echo chamber conveniently hides and glosses over. The prophetic voice creates dissonance between our lives and the truth.
Oh, people might applaud the prophetic voice, but only when it agrees with them, critiques the people, systems, and structures that we find lacking, toxic, and in need of change. But when the prophetic voice swings our way, revealing our participation in those same structures and systems, showing us just how alike we are to “those people,” we squirm and justify ourselves with anger and denial that the truth has been voiced.
That’s why the prophetic voice will never have a book deal.
The prophetic voice, the real, true, unwavering prophetic voice isn’t marketable. It’s challenging. It’s revealing. It’s apocalyptic. The prophetic voice isn’t entertaining. The prophetic voice isn’t sellable. The prophetic voice isn’t discriminatory. It is brutal towards our comfort and participation in oppressive empires. The prophetic voice is comforting, but it is comforting to the people we harm, we oppress, we overlook. The justice demanded by the prophetic voice is the cry of the least of these, those under foot and burdened.
Church, let me be blunt: our obsession with celebrity pastors, platforms, congregational numbers, money, and fame has robbed us of our prophetic voice. We no longer are the voice in the wild crying out, “repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” We are the ones saying, “peace, peace, peace” when there is no peace. We are the ones pushing the poor, the orphaned, the widowed, and the alienated to the side because they don’t serve our path towards success. Because they don’t look like us, because their existence makes us uncomfortable, because awareness of the oppressed is the prophetic voice thundering in our ears, we move them out of the way, assigning them to places where we can control their participation in our lives.
Church, we are the oppressors. We are the religious elite in collusion with politics making power plays that eventually kill Jesus. We are the empire built on the back of people of color and diversity. We are the crusaders, wielding a sword and collecting riches in the name of converting heathens and taking back some idea of a holy land.
There is a way out, though. We are not doomed to remain enmeshed in the world’s toxic systems of power and oppression.
We need to tune into the guerilla radio of the prophetic voice.
Outside the mainstream “successful” celebrity machine exists a place the gatekeepers of power can’t control. There is a wildland, away from what is marketable and easy to digest. There’s are the places we call the margins. The outskirts. The back alleyways and trash heaps. And this is where we find the clearest articulation and accusations of the prophetic voice.
We won’t hear the call to solidarity with the powerless on Christian radio. We won’t see the marginalized on Christian T.V. We won’t read about true revolution and true resurrection in Christian books.
The poetry and power of the prophetic voice must be heard where the other voices are silenced. It is truly action taken without authorization. It is guerilla peace making and justice seeking.
So where are we listening for this guerilla radio? What are we doing to silence the shouting of comfort and false peace? When are we taking time to listen for the message of the Holy Ghost that speaks against the empire we are so willing to support? The sounds of liberation are found in the margins. They are found when we silence the centering of ourselves and listen to hear the stories and experiences of others, even when those stories and experiences make us feel uncomfortable, convicted, and guilty.
The more and more we look to our proclaimed experts to lead us out of this place where the winds of death blow, the more we will sink into the quicksand of sin. It is up to us to help each other listen for the Spirit’s breath, brooding over the beloved masses, because that voice, that guerilla radio, is where we will hear the prophetic call to solidarity with the least of these. This is a call to leave behind the comfort of consumption. We are called to carry on the mission of John the Baptist and the prophets who came before him. We are the witnesses against the death that is the wages of the sinful world systems… even the ones that have taken root in the church herself.
So, will we do more than listen? Will you broadcast these waves of justice that are calling for righteousness to come crashing down from on high, that are calling for repentance and revolution? In the words of Rage Against the Machine:
It has to start somewhere.
It has to start sometime.
What better place than this?
What better time than now?
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