Alderperson Martyn Smith’s Invocation At 02/19/2025 Common Council Meeting – “[T]here are principles that are larger than our small moment in time, and when it comes to those principles, we should ourselves be fortified walls of bronze.”

Mayor Woodford: Please rise for the invocation which will be delivered by Alder Smith.

Alderperson Martyn Smith (District 4): This term, I’m teaching a course on the Hebrew Bible, and we spent some weeks reading through the great writing prophets. This time around, I read them with the experience of living in a time of change, and as I participate in the work of leading this city. I thought I’d draw out three universal statements sentiments.

Within the camp–within the campus of the United Nations, is a statue of a muscular man swinging a hammer. He aims to strike with that hammer an object that looks like a sword as he holds it in his one hand, but on the ground, we see it transforming into something else. The statue makes sense as we read the lines on its base from the prophet Isaiah. “He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

We’re still waiting for that moment to come, but those words remind us of the importance of imagining new and better versions of our shared future. The prophets spoke out against what they saw as injustice. The prophet Amos leveled the sharpest critique against the injustice he saw in his society, and as a result of that, he spoke these words, “Take away from me the noise of your songs. I will not listen to the melody of your harps, but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

If that line about justice rolling down like waters sounds familiar, it’s because Martin Luther King, Jr, includes that those words in his I Have a Dream speech, another example of how this centuries old ethical vision infuses our shared civic language.

My final example is from the prophet Jeremiah. At several points, the prophet breaks away from his subject and into something more like personal reflection. Scholars have labeled these sections the confessions of Jeremiah. At one point, Jeremiah appears to regret the social isolation that he experienced because of his pointed and critical message. God speaks to him. “It’s they who will turn to you, not you, who will turn to them, and I will make you to this people a fortified wall of bronze. They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you to save you and deliver you.” May that be a reminder to us that there are principles that are larger than our small moment in time, and when it comes to those principles, we should ourselves be fortified walls of bronze.