Our Sacred Stories ~ Being a Prophetic People: Fired by the Spirit to Change Our World

It takes a village to raise a child. How true this old adage is. It might also be said that it takes a host of prophets to move and lead a people. In every age, we need prophets. We need people of vision who draw us into an uncertain future. Such persons share the gift of vision and hope with us. They instill in us the confidence and the courage to move forward. We need such prophets in order to make sense of our lives and to live in peace and harmony as a common humanity.

We have some misconceptions regarding prophets. Perhaps the most significant is that prophets are predicters of the future, that they tell us what is going to happen. In fact, this is not what a prophet is at all. A prophet is very much in the present and helps us to understand what is going on. What might be regarded as future-focused is that such a person will help us to move into the future with a better sense of how to deal with it.

Whether we are concerned about the global situation of our times or about our personal lives there is a role for our prophets. They help us to look at what is happening in the broader context of God’s relationship with us. The prophets of our lives offer us the vision that God’s love has always been with us, is with us now and will ever be with us. We are not alone in what we experience.

For our Jewish and Christian tradition, a prophet is someone who speaks for God, someone whose voice expresses God’s message of love and hope in the world. In the Old Testament, there was a strong tradition of prophecy in which various persons or even groups were the voice of God to God’s people. In the New Testament, Jesus is a prophetic figure. His very coming is an experience of God’s coming and presence. Jesus is Emmanuel (God-is-with-us).

In the Christian the tradition, Jesus Christ is the Incarnation of God. Our God so loves us that God takes on our humanity in the person of Jesus. What a prophetic image of God’s love this reveals. In Luke’s Gospel we hear of this prophetic role of Jesus coming to the world: I have come to set the world on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing! There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished! (Luke 12:49-50)

Jesus is filled with the spirit of God and goes out into the world on the mission of spreading the reign of God. This is the prophet’s role – to spread God’s dream and message to all. In doing so, there is an anguish. Jesus had to sacrifice himself for the sake of the mission. A prophetic mission involves something of a dying to self for the mission. It also involves a longing that the mission take root in our world. The prophet speaks not his own message, but that of God for the sake of others.

If Jesus accepts the baptism which the spirit brings to him and goes on mission, this is precisely what must happen to disciples of Jesus. Every Christian at baptism is given the gift of the spirit. This is confirmed and further acknowledged in the Sacrament of Confirmation. It is celebrated in the setting of community, the gathered disciples of Jesus, in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. As we gather in Eucharist, we need to see that we come together as the Body of Christ. More than individual disciples in private prayer, in Eucharist, we are together, the Body of Christ for our world.

So it is that the words of Jesus are our words. We are called as prophets, to be the voice and action of God in our world. Filled with the spirit of God we are, like Jesus to set the world on fire – the fire of God’s love in our words and in our actions. Such a fire from the disciples of Jesus has the capacity to change our world, one human step at a time. We are a prophetic people, a community of prophets.