The prophetic voice is one that calls the people of God to cease going the wrong way and return to God. When the people of God are going the wrong way they usually have a mindset that they really are still living in faith, which is why the prophetic voice is resisted so belligerently. Cultures that have security, affluence, and general well-being are not inclined to self-examination, or to the news they are going the wrong way. The prophetic voice calls people to find security in dependence upon God, not in a complacent sense of comfort derived from blessings that may or may not be of God.
From Preaching Jeremiah by Walter Brueggemann:
Such a stable, settled community gathers around itself an illusion of security, legitimacy, and well-being, an illusion that by liturgy and ideology, by propaganda and reiteration, is made to be guaranteed long into the future by the holy fidelity of God. This preaching task of truth-telling that breaks denial is so important among us preachers now because the force of technology (permeated with therapeutic denial of a seductive kind match to a limitless consumerism that is reinforced by the certitude of militarism) has indeed produced a bubble of illusion, a totalising environment of certitude, entitlement, and privelege. That enterprise renders the steadfastness of God irrelevant. It is remote from the weakness, foolishness, and poverty of Christ.
Preaching Jeremiah, Walter Brueggemann, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2020, pg 87.
