Poetry, Prose, and Prayer

            Former New York governor Mario Cuomo once observed, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” After the soaring rhetoric of the stump speech comes the elbowed awkwardness of putting promises into practice.

            Isaiah prophesied in poetry, but it fell to Nehemiah to govern in prose.

The latter portion of Isaiah is all vision – lowered mountains and exalted valleys, deserts like the Garden of Eden, and flocks fattening in what was once a wilderness. Moreover, even gentiles and eunuchs get an all-access pass as the temple becomes a house of prayer for all nations.

The book of Nehemiah is all policy. If the “valleys” in Jerusalem’s wall were going to be exalted, the work would be by the weary backs of the Jewish remnant. Instead of a house of prayer for all nations, he found all the nations out to get him. He had to make hard decisions about economic exploitation and mixed marriages. He researched family trees to make sure priests were sufficiently pure. Some of his actions exemplify Isaiah’s dreams; some seem to undo them. In the end the wall went up and the staggering nation toddled forward into God’s future.

We theologize in poetry. We practice in prose. Those who express disdain for the flaws and failures of the local church would do well to read Nehemiah. The actions of redeemed-but-sinful believers will always be, at best, a blunt instrument in the effort to express Christ’s Kingdom. Those who criticize their fellow-Christians for applying their faith in different ways would do well to read Nehemiah. The choices of sincere-but-incomplete saints will often land those with the same convictions on different sides of a choice. We need the poetry – without it vision perishes, cynicism reigns, and we cease to desire a better world. We need the prose – without it poetry dissipates into complete impracticality and we fail to touch the actual world.

This is why, whether we theologize in poetry or practice in prose, we need to do everything in prayer.