Lizz Roe:
Dear Friends, beloveds, what does the Lord ask of us? That we are the salt of the earth, that we would be a light unto the world, that we would be streams of living water, that we would feed God’s people. Earth, light, water, nourishment - we are asked to tend God’s garden, we are asked to tend God’s community of heaven, we are asked to tend all God’s people.
In getting ready for today I have come to realise, mine is a quiet voice, my form of prophetic witness is usually without words. I think it is often so that the truth is more easily shown than narrated. Having something to say today about finding the prophetic voice for our time is for me based on having endeavoured, with God’s grace, to let my life speak. I am going to start by saying something about prophecy and prophets.
In my own experience, a prophetic life is one that is full of grace, grit, grief and growth. I think there are five parts to living this kind of life and each part needs to be absolutely grounded in God. The first three parts, seeking and expectant waiting, being ready to change; we can think of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, that pivotal movement of change, George Fox on Firbank Fell, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The second part is discerning God's call, though it might be costly, challenging or unpopular. Think of the prophets, Samuel, Jonah (he had a bad time), Isaiah, or the disciples walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee who gave up friends and family and their own place.
The third is being willing to use our gifts and acknowledge them. Being willing to live in the fullness of them with gladness and with joy and also with humility. Francis of Assisi, Elizabeth Fry, Caroline Fox, Nelson Mandela. These three stages are a kind of preparation for living a prophetic life.
The next two stages are really living up to the light, witnessing to God’s call in the way that you are led. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Margaret Fell, James Naylor and John Woolman. This means to actually be a prophet but recognition by others might come a lot later, be rather half-hearted or come not at all - and not to be concerned about that recognition, but to rest in the knowledge of a connection with God, of speaking the good news, of living it.
The last is remembering to nourish that witness and find balance in your life. Jesus celebrated at the wedding feast in Cana, he walked into the desert to be separate and to pray and be tested. He talked with his friends and he worked like the rest of us. This prophetic life is a life of discipline, devotion, divestment, discipleship and also, sometimes, of delight. Friends, are we ready to live like this? I believe that this is what God invites us to. If we live this kind of committed life it will be a life that is a countersign to the spirit of the age in which we live. There will be blessings and rewards but we should be under no illusions; there are times of great loneliness and prophets are singularly unpopular in their own communities, whether with friends or the place where you live. Prophets can die in the wilderness and their message can be lost.
So what does prophecy look like today? Prophets can be bracing, gritty, challenging, what they have to say and do can make us uncomfortable. They may sound full of shoulds and oughts and guilts and sorrows. They might be loved and respected, but they may not be liked very much. But prophets can also be joyful, encouraging, hopeful, they can speak of God’s love and live it amongst us. They can be a blessing to their community, affirm our choices and aspirations, feel easy and pleasurable to be around and bring us a deep sense of connection with the spirit at work in the world.
These are holy people, saints perhaps. Maybe we call some people saints or describe their holiness so that we might feel less worried about failing to live as they do. As though it is their saintliness that has enabled them to live as they are doing rather than seeing that it is endeavouring to live up to the light that has led them to live a life we might call holy or blessed by God.
Amongst Friends we have a tradition and theology as living as though the kingdom of heaven is at hand, of living like it’s heaven on earth in holy obedience to that reality. Not just as though it might come as some unspecified time in the future, but is an experience of Christ already present amongst us. This means that holy obedience to God's call is open to us all if we stand in the way of it, if we listen.
This manner of living in holy obedience answers the question, ‘what are Quakers for?’ Just as early Friends were, so we are still all called to be ministers, priests and prophets, answering the call to heal the world. We might tell when we are getting it right by testing ourselves against the fruits of the spirit as listed in Galatians chapter 5 verse 22.
If our prophetic life is grounded in God then these fruits will be present: love, joy, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Paul obviously thought hard about this, he talks about it too in Colossians chapter 3 verse 12 and there he speaks of compassion, humility, meekness, patience, and something that is so important, forgiveness.
To me, living a prophetic life means not just being able to see the future and what it holds, it means being willing to see what is right here, right now and to see what is needed to answer the needs of now.
In listening for God's call, in answering the needs of now, I have been challenged and I have been changed. My experience of endeavouring to live up to the light I have is that more has been given to me. I say that with humility and with gratitude and also with a clear understanding that I might just as easily have stoppered my ears and my heart and gone a different path. The word obedience comes from the Latin, which means to ‘hear’. It has been a willingness to listen that has been crucial for me in finding and expressing a prophetic voice.
I do believe that we are all called to listen through the prophetic voice within ourselves and to mediate God’s love to the world. That together we are called to be a countersign to what is happening in our world. Perhaps out of compassion for the planet, an understanding of the human condition or maybe an urgent sense of willingness to act, to act on God’s call.
There are many different ways of doing this: some of us are called to speak out, to build or demonstrate the alternative, to celebrate, pray and praise, to take symbolic or practical action or to hold to a vision of the kingdom come.
I have realised my kind of prophetic voice is one that is lived, danced and expressed with tenderness through action rather than through words. I am neither driven by fury at evil times nor forced on by anger or fear. Love has overcome these things. I have been angry and fear has whispered in my ears, it has closed my eyes and held me rooted to the spot. But I say again, love has overcome these things.
I have a short rule to live by; it is adapted from Micah, chapter 6 verse 8, to act justly, to love tenderly, to walk humbly and to live joyfully. This is mainly about how I am led to be in the world rather than what I am led to say. It is my form of testimony, how I let my life speak.
Our testimony, our own form of prophetic voice will vary because we are each different, unique, precious, a child of God. What we feel led to witness about will be different too. What matters is that we pay attention to God’s call and that we do it. It is not the thought that counts.
So far, I have mainly been speaking about finding the prophetic voice, more widely and in my own life. I am going to endeavour to convey to you four things now: I am going to try and find the words to invite you to hear what it is that I have been led to live about and what I witness to. I am going to share with you something that moves me to action and the form that this takes. I am also going to speak of antidotes to despair and grief and temptation.
We live, dear Friends, in an extraordinary time. We are greatly blessed to have an opportunity before us to listen to the ministry of both people and the planet. We have the chance to hear God's will for us and to live truly as though the kingdom of heaven were already here.
Across the globe, communities, individuals and ecologies are all in crisis. We have the chance to recognise and connect these in a new and different way. We have the opportunity to acknowledge our place and our current role in this crisis and to respond. We are all invited to listen to God’s will for us, to respond in love and to reconnect to ourselves, to one another and to the earth, which is our home.
The threats posed by climate change are not a future theoretical possibility; for millions of people, for many people here, they are already a lived reality. Drought, food scarcity, violent conflict over dwindling resources, floods, forced migration and displacement, changes in weather patterns, altered biological relationships, all these are just some of the effects experienced now.
In the future, we will see a global rise in temperature, sea level rise, increased loss of species diversity and mass population movements. Consequently there will also be increased levels of violent conflict over materials, territory and resources.
There are a number of responses open to us – ones I encounter amongst Friends include grief, despair, hopelessness, and sometimes apathy and denial or a sense that it is now too late to make the necessary changes in our own lives to have any meaningful impact on levels of carbon emissions.
In the latter part of the 20th century Friends were moved to witness against nuclear weapons. In many ways this was simpler to tackle. We petitioned governments, or them out there, to act.
Climate change is different. The science is complex, there is a wealth of misleading and inaccurate information and propaganda and we are all implicated, responsible and required to change. In the rich northern hemisphere we are in the midst of living out an entitlement theology that has developed strongly over the last 100 years. Many of us seem to worship in shopping malls, and many of us regard what we buy and consume as a primary source of status, happiness, self-expression, identity and fulfilment.
In the industrialised world it is hard to give up this sense of entitlement – we may think of it in terms of stewarding, sharing, or using the gifts of God's creation. In the industrialising world it is hard not to want this level or form of consumption and the corresponding lifestyle it brings. This has all kinds of costs attached.
If we are to continue with this kind of consumption, then I believe that this level of production and consumption will have to be available to all, and those of us with the financial means should put our money where our mouths are. If we truly believe in equality then we in the north should be willing to financially support sustainable technology and renewable fuel sources. Those of us who live in countries which have mostly exported industry to countries with low wage overheads, cheaper energy and raw materials should invest in making sure that the environmental and social consequences are not unevenly borne.
If in the north we want this kind of lifestyle we should pay the full costs and not expect to be subsidised by the health, well-being or lives of the poorest nations, nor the health, well being and life of the planet. I say “if” about this kind of lifestyle and these sorts of levels of consumption because I think as Friends we know a different way. This is important because there are costs beyond the physical and material of this addiction to energy and material consumption.
In the northern hemisphere many are slaves to work that bring no satisfaction, perhaps because we are tied into cycles of credit, debt and mortgage repayments. We are slaves to our diaries and schedules with no room for the spirit or inspiration, where Meetings for Worship are scheduled for an hour on Sunday with 45 minutes of fellowship afterwards.
We may be absorbed by the false idols of status symbols, a car, different clothes, a house, different work, so much so that we can have the hope and happiness sucked out of us, we don’t have time to recognise or celebrate what we already have and who we already are.
We in the rich countries also export our addictive attitudes and behaviours around the world without a health warning, a warning that this kind of behaviour promotes happiness at neither personal, local nor global levels.
We think we have it all, but what it has turned out to be is an addiction to unsustainable and unhappy lifestyles. As we consume we should be under no illusion. We are also consumed by a world that is full of fakery and falsity.
Consequently, I believe that people in the northern hemisphere need to be supported in letting go and recovering from an addiction to energy and to oil. In our lives I believe we need a loving reminder of the alternatives. When we recall our testimonies: peace, equality, truth, simplicity, justice, integrity and community, when we use these as the touchstone for our activities and our lives, when we inhabit these so that we become them and they are not merely abstract concepts then we may live truly in the promise of God’s love. This is an inspiration to others and it is such consolation to know them truly.
I believe we need to show great compassion and kindness and forgiveness to one another and help free each other and ourselves from this addiction into the freedom of truly living like the community of heaven on earth. This is both the freedom from and a freedom to. It is the freedom promised by God. It should not be confused with licence. It is the freedom to accept and live up to the responsibilities laid upon us, to be willing to take up difficult and challenging roles and even be unpopular.
It is true liberty to give service to something greater than worldly concerns and power. It means living in such a way that those we meet can see what this liberty has wrought in our lives. God is the blacksmith of our hearts who breaks the chains that have made us slaves and fettered us. Living in the fullness of grace, all things become possible. I now understand the words of the hymn, “our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace’. Lives lived under God’s ordering are at peace. We have been reconciled to God’s way.
When I endeavour to go my own way I struggle; when I go God’s way that struggle ceases. In my own life I try to show what such liberty is like. Over the last 25 years I have paid attention to different aspects of my life that contribute to climate change and with God’s help my life has been transformed. I have been led to a place where I have committed myself to living a more sustainable life, more sustainable for the planet, more sustainable for communities and more sustainable personally too.
A sustainable life reconnects us to each other, to ourselves, to the planet and to God. What I am going to describe is particular to my context living in Britain. If I lived elsewhere and had been so led my witness to sustainability would be different.
My testimony to the integrity of creation means not driving a car. I never learned. I gave up flying six years ago. It meant I had to change jobs and the work that I could do, and that there are some parts of my family across the globe I may never see again in person. I became a vegetarian when I was 14, I gave up dairy and eggs five years ago and I now use no animal products at all. I have moved house this year to be close to work so that I no longer have to commute by train and bus. This has meant letting go of the worshipping community that I love. I use renewable electricity in my home. Overall I use very little energy or water. I compost and recycle 99% of my rubbish. There is no such place as away, you can’t throw “away”. I grow some of my own food and I cook from scratch. I do lots of knitting and sewing; I make some of my own clothes. I don't own a television or a mobile phone or a microwave.
I am involved in my local community. My local MP sometimes comes to tea and we correspond regularly. The movement in the United States which said ‘what would Jesus do?” he says he has transformed into ‘what would Quakers do!’ I have worked at both the grass roots and at national policy level speaking truth to power and with love.
This year, I have endeavoured to give up spending beyond utilities, food and travel. That has been a really hard learning. I have my own integrity gaps and weaknesses and this year has highlighted them.
I want to say again this has taken me 25 years to be able to live God’s will for me as well as I am able. I continue to learn both obedience and joy.
There are times of feeling truly I am living as I am called to live, answering the design of my creation and I don't do any of this with a heavy heart, I do it with hope. I don't do it with a frown on my face, but with joy. I don’t wear a hair shirt. I see my life as an experiment in faith, of really endeavouring to live faith fully and that means for the most part it is a life that it is filled with grace and gratitude for what I have and what I am led to.
All of these small things I do are about demonstrating what it is possible to do; it is practical, it means I have a small carbon footprint – tiny by western standards –but it is also a symbolic life. It is a life I have been led to, a life freely answering God. It is such liberty.
It is not something I talk about a lot. This is probably the first time I have put it all together. In my head and my heart I hear a prophetic song and it is this I dance my life to.
Grounded in worship and prayer I have been able to let my life speak truly and to live more faithfully and with spirit. It is this grounding in worship that is part of what helps all and any of us go against the tide and live adventurously.
There are other things that are antidotes to despair and grief and temptation. One of these is being part of a community of shared values; another is the giving and receiving of friendship and love. I rejoice in opportunities for celebration. Times of learning and unlearning are important too. Finally I suggest that the opportunity to work together with others on something that is meaningful is also crucial to our spiritual and social well-being.
We can learn to be the change we wish to see in the world. These things can help sustain us when grief, gracelessness and hard grind threaten to overwhelm us.
The prophetic life, dear Friends, is one that can have a profound impact on the world and those around us. Living like this will change us for the better too. Living in the fullness of God’s grace and what we are called to is a blessing both to us and to the world.
Dear Friends, beloveds, I believe we have hands, hearts and voices to speak of the continuing creation of the world. We have the capacity and the potential to be a prophetic song for this time. All we need to do is open ourselves to the prophetic call and then give voice to it joyfully.
Lizz Roe, Britain Yearly Meeting, August 2007
Speaker: God wants us to live joyful lives. For me the prophets have influenced me the most. While in some cases they may have been filled with righteous anger, they have also been sources of great joy and they have moved forward in joy. Whether it’s obstacles that others have put before us or challenges that we give ourselves, the key to overcoming is joy.
New speaker: Friends, I feel led to speak on this again. I am from Uganda. In the letter of Paul, I am quoting, to Timothy, chapter 6, verse 10 it says the love of money is the source of all evils. According to the message delivered this morning from the speaker I feel that God has blessed us all. Some be rich and some be poor. Those who are rich they are blessed, it is not a sin. Those who are poor God has put them in that category. We have a rich man in this world called Bill Gates. He has a lot of money, but he has sent out to developing countries to help people who are affected by natural disasters like famine, earthquakes. He is in the USA, but he has sent his hand to the affected people so I feel Friends, if we are really touched and someone is in need I think we need to reach him. We were told that Africans are beggars, but I am impressed by this Triennial with the Irish friends, the way they are coming to us, they have seen that we need warm clothing, and they gave it to us. They don’t say we are beggars. Actually begging is not a sin and – to be a beggar is not a sin.
New speaker: I am from Kenya. I have heard the representation of the speaker. In the country I come from, Kenya, I am grieved when I see the gap between the poor and the rich. When I see thousands and thousands of young people going from school, trained, and they have no jobs. And in Romans chapter 8, we hear who shall separate us from the love of Christ, shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger. Friends, I want to appeal to this gathering here to pray for us that those that have shall share with those that don’t have because God has a purpose to create resources for those that have that they may also give to those that don't have.
New speaker: I am moved to sing and if anybody would like to join me I want to sing 'Amazing Grace'. It is on page 4 of the songbook.
(Song sung)
New speaker: Yesterday in our session we made a very important decision that in five years time we will, as Friends from around the world, be meeting in Nairobi and our time together now can be regarded as a time of preparation. Recently when I was in Kenya what came across is the faith and the zeal and the passion that Friends have to do God’s work, to be faithful. Everywhere there is work that is done to relieve suffering, to bring new truth, to study and I think it beholds us in the West to prepare our hearts for those of us who will be there in five years time. While we are here let us learn from our African Friends how we can share our resources wisely and well. I believe that this is such a God-given opportunity for the world of Friends to move forward in great power and great strength and I give thanks for that.
New speaker: Martin Luther King said true compassion is more than just flinging a coin to a beggar. True compassion comes to see that a society that creates beggars needs restructuring. We often focus on the suffering created by lack of resources as hunger and disease for lack of food and medical resources. This is helping us to see the suffering on the other side from those who have too many resources and spend our time too focused on the material world. We can all benefit from a restructuring.
New speaker: The Bible in Luke chapter 9 from verse 23. These are the words of Jesus himself: if anyone would come after me he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world and yet lose or forfeit his very self. If anyone is ashamed of me and my words the son of man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the father and of the holy angels.
New speaker: Yesterday in my worship group I shared on the prophetic voice and I shared about what happened to myself. After my graduation from the university I went to attend an interview in a church of Uganda programme, the Compassion International Programme. I was short-listed and then when I went back home I heard that still voice calling to me. The voice said I could do something other than maybe going to get the employment. I did not know what I was to do, but then after a while I discovered that there were many displaced children within the location and that was where I was led. At the moment the way I am talking I thank God because the programme has grown and the programme has registered 200 children in one location and 250 children in another location. The way we are sharing the resources I really thank God for that because we have at the moment 200 sponsors, some of the sponsors are from Canada and some of the sponsors are from America. We are still seeking for more sponsors and I know we shall get them. I also want to thank God because with the same still voice the Friends have been very helpful, the programme and the sharing of resources have been very helpful. They have constructed a vocational institute for those children and at the moment we have nine classrooms, although more are needed.
New speaker: I thank God for the Friend who read the book of Romans chapter 8 verse 35 and when he read it a song came into my mind we used to sing it at home, I don’t know whether my colleagues from Kenya know this song, it is just a short one, it is not a long one, because it talks of all those things that are written in Romans, chapter 8 verse 35.
(Song sung)
I don't want to continue, you can continue mentioning all these things that will stop you from loving your God, that will stop you from seeing Jesus Christ, those were the things I wanted to share with you which are in Romans chapter 8 verse 35, thank you.
New speaker: Friends, I would like to give you a time I experienced sometime earlier this year. I was walking along, listening to the voice in the depth of my mind and this is why it is. One day I was walking towards the town and I met a friend waiting at the door of the police station and he was very deep in thought. When I approached him and asked what had happened to him he said his daughter had burned his house and she had nowhere to go and she was expectant and he had taken her to the police. She was only remaining with four weeks to delivery. I was very deeply touched and I believe you can feel the same at this time. But the voice came in my heart and said tell him this – forgiveness. I asked him and I told him that forgiveness is the art of releasing anger and it’s a way of solving a problem so that the hand of the Lord can touch you. We shared together and we prayed together. Many people were passing around and they saw us really in deep prayer and I am sure everywhere they went they were very surprised. Praise the Lord.
After five days I made a follow-up. I also felt relieved because he felt exactly what was in my mind with my Lord; he had actually got the daughter released from the police and went back home. It took only two days and she had her baby. After some time he has joined the theological college and he told me, ‘you helped me and the Friends have helped me put up another house’. Really, forgiving is one way of solving a problem in our daily life.
New speaker: The Lord has blessed us today with joy and with sorrow, with praise and with thanksgiving. Let us continue to worship God in our hearts as the day goes on, in our hearts and in our actions and in our words and in our love for one another and may the blessing of God, the creator, the redeemer and the inspirer of our world remain with us supporting, encouraging us today throughout this conference and throughout our lives. Amen.
Friends, if I could just have your attention just for a few notices. First of all, I would like to rejoice in the arrival of the final participant from Africa last night, who has, like many here (applause), has undergone tribulations with visas, with travel, with changes of travel and with lost luggage and I would like to thank the team that has made these travels and arrivals possible. We thank Loretta, I would like to thank Christine Birch and Helen Fanning and Seán McCrum who spent the last four days at the airport. I would like to thank Irish Friends for making the warm clothes available yesterday.
Nancy Irving would like to ask if there are two or three typists who would be prepared to help her with the transcripts following on from yesterday's session. If so would they make themselves known to her either in the coffee break or by leaving a note in her pigeonhole.
Two notices about announcements! Just to say could we be considerate to the interpreters, they do need their breaks and at meal times, we are not expecting them to interpret so could all announcements either be made via the daily bulletin – and Harry Albright is looking for contributions by 2:30 every day – or via the notices which come through the office. We will be putting up a notice board for informal notices and that will go up sometime later today.
My last announcement is that we are beginning to get questions about, I hate to say this, departures and we will be making more serious announcements about this on Thursday. Arrangements are in hand and there will be an announcement this afternoon about the final arrangements for the excursions, thank you, Friends.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Monday morning session: Bill Medlin
[John Sheldon]
Friends, today's programmed worship will proceed in this manner. You already know about the hymns we will be singing and after those we will have Bible readings in English, Spanish and French and then the second hymn Breathe on Me Breath of God followed by Bill Medlin our Indiana Friend on the theme of his Triennial. This will be followed by a time for open worship and we will have a closing hymn In Christ There is no East or West, followed lastly by announcements.
Our first hymn is Spirit Song and if we can have the words.
(Spirit Song sung)
(Reading in French, Spanish and English)
The reading is from Luke, chapter 4, verses 16 to 21.
Jesus came into Nazareth where he had been brought up and as was his custom on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue and he to do stood up to read. There was handed to him the book of the prophet Isaiah and having opened the book he found the place where this is written. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor and he has sent me to announce release to the captives and sight to the blind and to send the oppressed in freedom and to announce the jubilee year of God”. Having closed the book and given it back to the attendant he sat down and the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened upon him and he began to say to them "today in your hearing this scripture has been fulfilled."
[John Sheldon]
If you would turn in your song books to page 12, Breathe on me Breath of God, and we will sing all four verses.
(Breathe on me Breath of God sung)
Bill Medlin:
Good morning, Friends.
A prophetic word is not an isolated thing.
It never begins with a prophet, but always with the living God.
After all, a prophet is just one who is called by God and directed by God to deliver a message from God.
That message might be to an individual, to a church or gathering for worship such as we have today, or to some other group. It might be to a community or a people, to a nation or its ruler or government or even to humanity itself.
It can be a message about most anything, as long as it’s God's message and not the message of the prophet. The prophetic word is always a word given by God.
Among the recurring themes in recorded prophetic messages of our Judaeo-Christian tradition, some stand out strongly - social justice, idolatry, the present and coming Kingdom of God, and obedience to God. But an even more frequently recurring theme is the assurance of the steadfast loving kindness of God, in Hebrew called Chessed.
Closely connected to it is the theme of covenant.
Many prophetic messages in scripture confronted God's people about injustices or other intolerable sin against God, or against fellow humanity. These usually included a warning about the consequences of continued sin and disobedience. Sometimes there was also an encouraging word, a word of promise of God's blessings that would follow repentance, the turning that was described yesterday.
Sometimes the prophetic word was a direction NOT to do something that looked tempting, as when God sent Jeremiah to warn the king not to go to war against Iraq. (The consequences of disobedience that God warned and then imposed for the willful disobedience of this king should have given some of the world's present day leaders pause to reflect before they acted.) I believe we are experiencing some of the consequences of that disobedience and it falls heavy upon us.
In these recorded prophetic examples from scripture we can see an emphasis on how patient and gentle God has been because of His loving kindness towards His people. This loving kindness does not end just because human defiance causes painful consequences. Watching His people suffer from the promised consequences of their disobedience brings sadness and suffering to God. His heart aches for his beloved, even as they betray Him.
Sometimes the prophetic word was to give a hopeless people hope, as in the many Messianic prophecies that should have prepared people for the coming of Christ and of his Kingdom of Love, Peace, Joy, Light and Life. It is nothing short of amazing that religious leaders still miss the nature of His Peaceful Kingdom that is so clearly and beautifully described by the prophets. They also give us some insight into the heart of God and the values God considers most important. Most of those values were opposite to the values of that day in which the prophet first spoke and they are also opposite to the prevailing values of our own day.
That should also give us cause to think. As previous speakers have said, the purpose of most Biblical prophecy seems to be God's loving desire to restore His people to faithful relationship with Him. It is unfortunate that usually this comes only after a lesson painfully learned by suffering the natural consequences of disobedience.
Few of the prophets are very eager to take on this task of being God's messenger. They’ve heard of past experiences of other prophets and usually things get pretty messy, especially for them.
No one applies for the job of prophet at least if they really are a prophet. The man or woman God calls is anointed by God's Spirit and sometimes also by someone God sends to confirm their call. At the right moment God places His own words in the prophet's mouth. God initiates the prophetic relationship and sometimes meets stern resistance from the prophet. I get very uneasy with self-appointed or self-proclaimed prophets, especially if they claim some special status that entitles them to recognition and if they claim the right to exercise authoritarian power over any church or group. There are other warning signs to notice. The false prophets of the Bible are the ones that usually agree with the government and the establishment and the prevailing values of the day. They are the ones who attack the critics of the status quo. We call these false prophets 'court prophets' because they like to hang out at the royal courts of the Bible. We have our share of these court prophets today. They have today radio and television shows where they sing the praises of the powerful and brag about all the great things God is doing through them. They are surrounded by wealth and glitter and seem to bask in what they call God's blessings of prosperity to them. I do not find that among the faithful prophets of scripture.
These prophets may receive lots of praise and lots of money, but they are false prophets. Remember that a false prophet can be sincere, but misguided or deluded - even Friends have had some false prophets among us.
If they suggest that they alone have the answers from God or that they enjoy a unique relationship with God that no-one else can have, or that they somehow have God's ear uniquely, and can get God to do their bidding, then those so-called prophets sound very much like leaders of a cult. As someone said yesterday, a true prophet is not impressed with his or her own importance. Prophets demonstrate great humility if they are true prophets.
The New Testament teaches that prophecy is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit that should flourish in the church's worship and witness today. Indeed, it seems to be one of the most important gifts. I believe it to be critically important today. As a spiritual gift, prophecy has a very specific and limited meaning, much more limited than the way we are using that phrase this week.
Using the understanding of prophetic word as God's message delivered through a prophet, I want to share with you a few examples of what looks to me like prophetic witness among Friends.
At a Triennial of Friends World Committee many years ago held in Kenya (I think sometime in the early 1960s) Friends World Committee received an invitation to hold a World Conference at Guilford College in North Carolina in 1967. Some of you were there. A great deal of preparatory work had been done by Friends prior to submitting this invitation for approval. Then out of the silence one Friend from Scandinavia rose with a deeply led, prophetic concern.
Guilford, like almost every college in the South at that time did not admit black students to its classes. How could FWCC meet on a racially segregated campus? Even if the college accepted Africans and other black Quakers for this conference, the college practiced racial discrimination in student admissions. This Scandinavian Friend made an important prophetic witness, for the college officials immediately contacted the governing board and obtained a commitment to end racial discrimination and begin admitting black students to Guilford on an equal basis. Friends approved the invitation. Today Guilford is a leading institution of higher education in the southern part of the United States with a strong commitment to racial justice and racial diversity. North Carolina Friends are very thankful from the prophetic word of a lone Friend from another nation enabled them to stake this historic stand for equality ahead of almost other southern colleges. God spoke through one Friend in FWCC and changed history.
A second example happened in my own experience in 1965. I had been attending a small unprogrammed Meeting that gathered for worship each week in a home in Philadelphia - a house church. I was not yet a Quaker. After a few months, one First Day morning I received a clear leading to speak in the worship. The leading was detailed, with specific words I was told to say. I was horrified. I disobeyed the leading by remaining silent. Within five minutes a young man named Russell Johnson stood up. He gave exactly the message to that meeting that God had directed me to give, including the specific details. We had never discussed anything about the subject together. Then, I was even more horrified, for I knew from many years of Sunday School lessons that it was not good to disobey God. God had given me a specific message to deliver to that group and I disobeyed him. It taught me a lesson, and confirmed that these Quakers must really be God's people, after all.
The third and last example is about a historic Quaker testimony. We are well known for Quaker leadership in the work to free slaves throughout the world. That witness began when George Fox wrote a letter to friends in Barbados, but it lay dormant. It began to really be effective when John Woolman made his gentle but persistent prophetic witness against slavery both at his preaching but also in his quiet words with slaveholders one family at a time. John Woolman, more than any other American, made a prophetic witness that provided the foundation for the antislavery movement in that country that eventually freed the slaves.
But Woolman is only half of the story. Slavery has raised its ugly head again in the world and more people are held as slaves today than before the American Civil War. Over 27 million human beings are owned, and their lives totally controlled by someone else who pays them nothing for their labour.
I became aware of this problem of modern slavery when helping young Friends prepare for a model United Nations. I immediately contacted Quaker social witness organisations in several countries to find out what they were doing to oppose this evil. I found they were doing nothing and did not seem even interested. Then I discovered one man named Kevin Bales. He was born in the United States and is a member of Britain Yearly Meeting though he now lives in Mississippi and teaches at Ol Miss, the site of racial violence. He is the leading expert in the world on modern slavery and has dedicated his life to abolition. He is a committed Friend who started a new Friends’ meeting in Oxford, Mississippi.
Someone mentioned yesterday that our lives should be a prophetic word. Kevin Bales seems to do that. I hope some of you invite him to speak at your Yearly Meeting and begin to make a prophetic witness against this evil of slavery. I believe it is one of the things that cries out for prophetic word today.
George Fox and early Friends certainly had profound prophetic witness in their day. Many people believe that had Fox may have had a spiritual gift of prophecy, but what Fox emphasised about prophecy in his day was the biblical teaching of Christ as the great prophet of all time. Of course Christ was much more, the saviour of the world. The same Christ indeed has a prophetic role if we allow him to work within us. It is Jesus Christ today as the prophet Who still preaches and proclaims the prophetic word of life through the silence of the gathered Meeting for Worship.
George Fox asks “why should we not sit under Christ our prophet, shepherd, bishop and priest and hear him?” In another document he is referring to Jesus when he declares that “we can hear our prophet in [the] silence” of worship if we really listen.
God does speak today and He speaks a prophetic word to His people to deliver directly as He commands. The spirit of Christ is alive and well and still frees people to be His vessels to carry His light, to shatter the darkness of our present world.
Listen for the still small voice within you, perhaps confirm it with the witness of Christ in scripture, and obey the call to prophetic witness if it is given to you.
Not everyone is called to be a prophet, but we all have received in the Gospel the call to be peacemakers, to give generously to the poor, to free the oppressed, to oppose evil and to share the Good News that Christ indeed has come and is at work in our midst and is the answer ultimately to the world's problems.
Let the world around you know that there is today indeed a Living Light that can free them from darkness and give them the hope and joy of new and everlasting life.
Let the nations of the world know that the people of God called Friends have arisen to the call of their Great Prophet, Lord and King and will not rest until the kingdoms of this world become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, and peace does reign.
Maranatha!
Speaker: The Kingdom of God was the first priority in Jesus' teaching and in many ways he demonstrated what that meant: inclusiveness, compassion, spiritual power, a way of life that embraced people of all kinds, no boxes to shut people out. Our hearts burn for the Kingdom of God. We might call it the realm of God, God's vision for the world, but Jesus taught the Kingdom is among you, the Kingdom is within you.
I realised a few months ago I am not going to see the end of poverty and injustice in my lifetime. I wept.
It must sound naïve when we look through the whole course of history that we are called at least to work faithfully towards the growth and establishment of that kingdom and by the very fact of our burning desire we are a prophetic community.
New speaker: I am a pastor from Uganda, Africa. I want to share with you a scripture taken from the letter of Hebrews, chapter 1, verses 1 and 2. “God has spoken and asked by his son whom he has appointed heir of all things and through whom he made the worlds.” I believe the speaker has shared with us and that God has spoken through him.
We are witnessing to this prophetic voice and I particularly am grateful for Friends having witnessed this prophetic voice before we came here. The privileged countries who contributed towards less privileged countries and enabled us to share together in this Triennial. Therefore, Friends, let us not ignore the gift in each one of us. He has helped us to be obedient. What are the qualities of being obedient to God and what are the qualities of being disobedient to God?
(Song)
Lee Taylor: Good morning, Friends. I just have a few notices. First of all, could the people who volunteered to help with the transcription meet with John Fitzgerald briefly now after this session. Secondly, I wanted to remind you that the craft and book shops are open, both at lunchtime and at the supper break; and to thank the friends who have set those up.
In your bulletin you will find it that it says Reflections are in sections, actually we are all going to be all together for Reflections tonight in the chapel.
If any Friends are finding it a little chilly today and would like to take advantage of some warm clothes, the office has some spare warm clothes which you can have!
Some more office-related notices: First of all, could people check their volunteer assignments; there was a note in your registration envelope if you had offered and had been assigned a volunteer role. Would you mind just checking those and please turn up if you said you would do it and had been assigned.
There are some frequently asked questions turning up in the office now. First of all, wi-fi and computer access. We know that the computer rooms are going to be open once again at lunchtime and at supper time and that will be all week. We will put a notice about wi-fi access on the flip chart which is outside the hall going towards the dining room, that's the best place to look out for few announcements.
Another key announcement is going to be about laundry facilities. Something will be in the daily bulletin tomorrow and we will also put a note up. If Chris in the office is finding she is getting a number of people asking about a particular item I think that flip chart is the place that we will try and stick up the particular information.
Thank you, Friends.
Nancy Irving: Friends, we have a very full schedule and it is essential that you arrive on time and be in your seats so that we can begin on time and end on time. So please anticipate, don't be in the coffee break until your worship and sharing group should start - be at your worship and sharing group when it should start and do that for everything please. Thank you.
Friends, today's programmed worship will proceed in this manner. You already know about the hymns we will be singing and after those we will have Bible readings in English, Spanish and French and then the second hymn Breathe on Me Breath of God followed by Bill Medlin our Indiana Friend on the theme of his Triennial. This will be followed by a time for open worship and we will have a closing hymn In Christ There is no East or West, followed lastly by announcements.
Our first hymn is Spirit Song and if we can have the words.
(Spirit Song sung)
(Reading in French, Spanish and English)
The reading is from Luke, chapter 4, verses 16 to 21.
Jesus came into Nazareth where he had been brought up and as was his custom on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue and he to do stood up to read. There was handed to him the book of the prophet Isaiah and having opened the book he found the place where this is written. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor and he has sent me to announce release to the captives and sight to the blind and to send the oppressed in freedom and to announce the jubilee year of God”. Having closed the book and given it back to the attendant he sat down and the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened upon him and he began to say to them "today in your hearing this scripture has been fulfilled."
[John Sheldon]
If you would turn in your song books to page 12, Breathe on me Breath of God, and we will sing all four verses.
(Breathe on me Breath of God sung)
Bill Medlin:
Good morning, Friends.
A prophetic word is not an isolated thing.
It never begins with a prophet, but always with the living God.
After all, a prophet is just one who is called by God and directed by God to deliver a message from God.
That message might be to an individual, to a church or gathering for worship such as we have today, or to some other group. It might be to a community or a people, to a nation or its ruler or government or even to humanity itself.
It can be a message about most anything, as long as it’s God's message and not the message of the prophet. The prophetic word is always a word given by God.
Among the recurring themes in recorded prophetic messages of our Judaeo-Christian tradition, some stand out strongly - social justice, idolatry, the present and coming Kingdom of God, and obedience to God. But an even more frequently recurring theme is the assurance of the steadfast loving kindness of God, in Hebrew called Chessed.
Closely connected to it is the theme of covenant.
Many prophetic messages in scripture confronted God's people about injustices or other intolerable sin against God, or against fellow humanity. These usually included a warning about the consequences of continued sin and disobedience. Sometimes there was also an encouraging word, a word of promise of God's blessings that would follow repentance, the turning that was described yesterday.
Sometimes the prophetic word was a direction NOT to do something that looked tempting, as when God sent Jeremiah to warn the king not to go to war against Iraq. (The consequences of disobedience that God warned and then imposed for the willful disobedience of this king should have given some of the world's present day leaders pause to reflect before they acted.) I believe we are experiencing some of the consequences of that disobedience and it falls heavy upon us.
In these recorded prophetic examples from scripture we can see an emphasis on how patient and gentle God has been because of His loving kindness towards His people. This loving kindness does not end just because human defiance causes painful consequences. Watching His people suffer from the promised consequences of their disobedience brings sadness and suffering to God. His heart aches for his beloved, even as they betray Him.
Sometimes the prophetic word was to give a hopeless people hope, as in the many Messianic prophecies that should have prepared people for the coming of Christ and of his Kingdom of Love, Peace, Joy, Light and Life. It is nothing short of amazing that religious leaders still miss the nature of His Peaceful Kingdom that is so clearly and beautifully described by the prophets. They also give us some insight into the heart of God and the values God considers most important. Most of those values were opposite to the values of that day in which the prophet first spoke and they are also opposite to the prevailing values of our own day.
That should also give us cause to think. As previous speakers have said, the purpose of most Biblical prophecy seems to be God's loving desire to restore His people to faithful relationship with Him. It is unfortunate that usually this comes only after a lesson painfully learned by suffering the natural consequences of disobedience.
Few of the prophets are very eager to take on this task of being God's messenger. They’ve heard of past experiences of other prophets and usually things get pretty messy, especially for them.
No one applies for the job of prophet at least if they really are a prophet. The man or woman God calls is anointed by God's Spirit and sometimes also by someone God sends to confirm their call. At the right moment God places His own words in the prophet's mouth. God initiates the prophetic relationship and sometimes meets stern resistance from the prophet. I get very uneasy with self-appointed or self-proclaimed prophets, especially if they claim some special status that entitles them to recognition and if they claim the right to exercise authoritarian power over any church or group. There are other warning signs to notice. The false prophets of the Bible are the ones that usually agree with the government and the establishment and the prevailing values of the day. They are the ones who attack the critics of the status quo. We call these false prophets 'court prophets' because they like to hang out at the royal courts of the Bible. We have our share of these court prophets today. They have today radio and television shows where they sing the praises of the powerful and brag about all the great things God is doing through them. They are surrounded by wealth and glitter and seem to bask in what they call God's blessings of prosperity to them. I do not find that among the faithful prophets of scripture.
These prophets may receive lots of praise and lots of money, but they are false prophets. Remember that a false prophet can be sincere, but misguided or deluded - even Friends have had some false prophets among us.
If they suggest that they alone have the answers from God or that they enjoy a unique relationship with God that no-one else can have, or that they somehow have God's ear uniquely, and can get God to do their bidding, then those so-called prophets sound very much like leaders of a cult. As someone said yesterday, a true prophet is not impressed with his or her own importance. Prophets demonstrate great humility if they are true prophets.
The New Testament teaches that prophecy is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit that should flourish in the church's worship and witness today. Indeed, it seems to be one of the most important gifts. I believe it to be critically important today. As a spiritual gift, prophecy has a very specific and limited meaning, much more limited than the way we are using that phrase this week.
Using the understanding of prophetic word as God's message delivered through a prophet, I want to share with you a few examples of what looks to me like prophetic witness among Friends.
At a Triennial of Friends World Committee many years ago held in Kenya (I think sometime in the early 1960s) Friends World Committee received an invitation to hold a World Conference at Guilford College in North Carolina in 1967. Some of you were there. A great deal of preparatory work had been done by Friends prior to submitting this invitation for approval. Then out of the silence one Friend from Scandinavia rose with a deeply led, prophetic concern.
Guilford, like almost every college in the South at that time did not admit black students to its classes. How could FWCC meet on a racially segregated campus? Even if the college accepted Africans and other black Quakers for this conference, the college practiced racial discrimination in student admissions. This Scandinavian Friend made an important prophetic witness, for the college officials immediately contacted the governing board and obtained a commitment to end racial discrimination and begin admitting black students to Guilford on an equal basis. Friends approved the invitation. Today Guilford is a leading institution of higher education in the southern part of the United States with a strong commitment to racial justice and racial diversity. North Carolina Friends are very thankful from the prophetic word of a lone Friend from another nation enabled them to stake this historic stand for equality ahead of almost other southern colleges. God spoke through one Friend in FWCC and changed history.
A second example happened in my own experience in 1965. I had been attending a small unprogrammed Meeting that gathered for worship each week in a home in Philadelphia - a house church. I was not yet a Quaker. After a few months, one First Day morning I received a clear leading to speak in the worship. The leading was detailed, with specific words I was told to say. I was horrified. I disobeyed the leading by remaining silent. Within five minutes a young man named Russell Johnson stood up. He gave exactly the message to that meeting that God had directed me to give, including the specific details. We had never discussed anything about the subject together. Then, I was even more horrified, for I knew from many years of Sunday School lessons that it was not good to disobey God. God had given me a specific message to deliver to that group and I disobeyed him. It taught me a lesson, and confirmed that these Quakers must really be God's people, after all.
The third and last example is about a historic Quaker testimony. We are well known for Quaker leadership in the work to free slaves throughout the world. That witness began when George Fox wrote a letter to friends in Barbados, but it lay dormant. It began to really be effective when John Woolman made his gentle but persistent prophetic witness against slavery both at his preaching but also in his quiet words with slaveholders one family at a time. John Woolman, more than any other American, made a prophetic witness that provided the foundation for the antislavery movement in that country that eventually freed the slaves.
But Woolman is only half of the story. Slavery has raised its ugly head again in the world and more people are held as slaves today than before the American Civil War. Over 27 million human beings are owned, and their lives totally controlled by someone else who pays them nothing for their labour.
I became aware of this problem of modern slavery when helping young Friends prepare for a model United Nations. I immediately contacted Quaker social witness organisations in several countries to find out what they were doing to oppose this evil. I found they were doing nothing and did not seem even interested. Then I discovered one man named Kevin Bales. He was born in the United States and is a member of Britain Yearly Meeting though he now lives in Mississippi and teaches at Ol Miss, the site of racial violence. He is the leading expert in the world on modern slavery and has dedicated his life to abolition. He is a committed Friend who started a new Friends’ meeting in Oxford, Mississippi.
Someone mentioned yesterday that our lives should be a prophetic word. Kevin Bales seems to do that. I hope some of you invite him to speak at your Yearly Meeting and begin to make a prophetic witness against this evil of slavery. I believe it is one of the things that cries out for prophetic word today.
George Fox and early Friends certainly had profound prophetic witness in their day. Many people believe that had Fox may have had a spiritual gift of prophecy, but what Fox emphasised about prophecy in his day was the biblical teaching of Christ as the great prophet of all time. Of course Christ was much more, the saviour of the world. The same Christ indeed has a prophetic role if we allow him to work within us. It is Jesus Christ today as the prophet Who still preaches and proclaims the prophetic word of life through the silence of the gathered Meeting for Worship.
George Fox asks “why should we not sit under Christ our prophet, shepherd, bishop and priest and hear him?” In another document he is referring to Jesus when he declares that “we can hear our prophet in [the] silence” of worship if we really listen.
God does speak today and He speaks a prophetic word to His people to deliver directly as He commands. The spirit of Christ is alive and well and still frees people to be His vessels to carry His light, to shatter the darkness of our present world.
Listen for the still small voice within you, perhaps confirm it with the witness of Christ in scripture, and obey the call to prophetic witness if it is given to you.
Not everyone is called to be a prophet, but we all have received in the Gospel the call to be peacemakers, to give generously to the poor, to free the oppressed, to oppose evil and to share the Good News that Christ indeed has come and is at work in our midst and is the answer ultimately to the world's problems.
Let the world around you know that there is today indeed a Living Light that can free them from darkness and give them the hope and joy of new and everlasting life.
Let the nations of the world know that the people of God called Friends have arisen to the call of their Great Prophet, Lord and King and will not rest until the kingdoms of this world become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, and peace does reign.
Maranatha!
Speaker: The Kingdom of God was the first priority in Jesus' teaching and in many ways he demonstrated what that meant: inclusiveness, compassion, spiritual power, a way of life that embraced people of all kinds, no boxes to shut people out. Our hearts burn for the Kingdom of God. We might call it the realm of God, God's vision for the world, but Jesus taught the Kingdom is among you, the Kingdom is within you.
I realised a few months ago I am not going to see the end of poverty and injustice in my lifetime. I wept.
It must sound naïve when we look through the whole course of history that we are called at least to work faithfully towards the growth and establishment of that kingdom and by the very fact of our burning desire we are a prophetic community.
New speaker: I am a pastor from Uganda, Africa. I want to share with you a scripture taken from the letter of Hebrews, chapter 1, verses 1 and 2. “God has spoken and asked by his son whom he has appointed heir of all things and through whom he made the worlds.” I believe the speaker has shared with us and that God has spoken through him.
We are witnessing to this prophetic voice and I particularly am grateful for Friends having witnessed this prophetic voice before we came here. The privileged countries who contributed towards less privileged countries and enabled us to share together in this Triennial. Therefore, Friends, let us not ignore the gift in each one of us. He has helped us to be obedient. What are the qualities of being obedient to God and what are the qualities of being disobedient to God?
(Song)
Lee Taylor: Good morning, Friends. I just have a few notices. First of all, could the people who volunteered to help with the transcription meet with John Fitzgerald briefly now after this session. Secondly, I wanted to remind you that the craft and book shops are open, both at lunchtime and at the supper break; and to thank the friends who have set those up.
In your bulletin you will find it that it says Reflections are in sections, actually we are all going to be all together for Reflections tonight in the chapel.
If any Friends are finding it a little chilly today and would like to take advantage of some warm clothes, the office has some spare warm clothes which you can have!
Some more office-related notices: First of all, could people check their volunteer assignments; there was a note in your registration envelope if you had offered and had been assigned a volunteer role. Would you mind just checking those and please turn up if you said you would do it and had been assigned.
There are some frequently asked questions turning up in the office now. First of all, wi-fi and computer access. We know that the computer rooms are going to be open once again at lunchtime and at supper time and that will be all week. We will put a notice about wi-fi access on the flip chart which is outside the hall going towards the dining room, that's the best place to look out for few announcements.
Another key announcement is going to be about laundry facilities. Something will be in the daily bulletin tomorrow and we will also put a note up. If Chris in the office is finding she is getting a number of people asking about a particular item I think that flip chart is the place that we will try and stick up the particular information.
Thank you, Friends.
Nancy Irving: Friends, we have a very full schedule and it is essential that you arrive on time and be in your seats so that we can begin on time and end on time. So please anticipate, don't be in the coffee break until your worship and sharing group should start - be at your worship and sharing group when it should start and do that for everything please. Thank you.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Sunday morning (2) Marion McNaughton
DUDUZILE MTSHAZO:
Good morning, friends. Welcome back. We are still continuing with worship and exploring around the theme. I would like to introduce to you a friend of a friend, Marion McNaughton, a grandmother of two and another one to come! She has been a tutor at Woodbrooke, but now she is doing much more important work, having retired she is now a volunteer gardener at Woodbrooke! Talk about caring for the earth. We are going to worship and when Marion is ready she will rise to the podium and will give us her message. May we then Friends go into worship.
MARION McNAUGHTON ADDRESSED THE TRIENNIAL AS FOLLOWS
Doreen's ministry to us this morning in our morning worship touched on many of the things that I have been thinking and praying about in the last few months as I prepared what I wanted to say to you today. When she sent me her text I realised that she and I had been drawn to speak along very similar lines which of course is not surprising, but is always wonderful when it happens. So I invite you to stay in the place that she brought us to so we may explore it more deeply.
I believe that we are part of a very long tradition of being a people of God. It has its roots in the Jewish tradition. Jesus who was a Jew carried many of the elements of his tradition into the new Christian world and we as Quakers carry all this forward in a very special way today. To understand prophecy we must understand where we come from.
Many people have helped me understand this over the last year and I would like to thank them. Rabbi Margaret Jacobi of the Birmingham Progressive Synagogue for her knowledge of the Hebrew prophets, Rabbi James Baaden for his understanding of the ending of Jewish prophecy. Timothy Peat Ashworth of Woodbrooke for his insights into the early Christian communities and my colleagues on Britain Yearly Meeting Testimonies Committee who more than anyone else have taught me what it is to live faithful prophetic lives.
I would like to begin with the elements that are there in what we are naming as prophecy.
• In both Jewish and Christian theology prophecy is understood as a spontaneous human response to a transforming encounter with God through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
• The response can take the form of words, signs, actions or a way of life.
• It can be exercised by men, women, children, individuals or groups. It is a gift from God, it speaks God's truth.
• It is rooted in known values, the religious values of its community.
• It pinpoints the behaviours, attitudes and events that reveal where a people or a ruler are being faithful and where they have gone astray.
• It affirms and it criticises.
• It warns of the consequences of continuing on the wrong path, it foretells disasters. So the prophet both belongs and challengesIt calls repeatedly for what is known in the Hebrew tradition as Teshuvah, turning: turning away from the world and returning to God.
• It is awesome and unmistakable. We hear the voice of God. We should not use the word prophecy lightly or seek to be comfortable with it. Prophecy is always challenging and usually uncomfortable.
Our task this week is going to be to find the prophetic voice for our time. So I would like to look briefly at the prophetic tradition we stand in and what riches and contradictions it brings with it.
I shall begin with the Hebrew tradition, because this is where it began for us, and this was the tradition that Jesus inherited. Then I shall look at how prophecy died away in the Jewish tradition, but came alive in the ministry of Jesus and then again in the early Christian communities. And then see how we as Quakers practise and affirm prophecy and what our prophetic calling might be as a people of God.
I will also be asking, because this is important to me in my own life, why prophecy has so often failed or proved to be ineffective. We know that prophets encounter resistance and apathy. The prophet Ezekiel was told by God, “I send you to them and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ And whether they hear or refuse to hear for they are a rebellious breed they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.”
People do know when there has been a prophet among them, but that does not mean they do what the prophet tells them. The prophet Jeremiah, one of the great Hebrew prophets, complained, “For 23 years… the word of the Lord has come to me and I have spoken persistently to you, but you have not listened.” I shall come back to Jeremiah.
We need to ask “Why. Why did they not listen, why do they not listen today?” because we need to know the answers to this.
In choosing to use the word prophecy today we are acknowledging that we are part of a continuing sacred tradition. In the Hebrew bible, what we call the Old Testament, prophecy comes through the great figures of the prophets. The prophet in Hebrew is referred to ish haruach which means a person filled with the spirit of God. The prophets are giants in the landscape of the Hebrew scriptures, a series of extraordinary inspired men and women. Doreen has already reminded us that there were women as well as men, thoughostly the women's words have not been preserved and apart from one or two like Huldah and Miriam, we do not even know their names.
In the Hebrew tradition the prophet is someone who is chosen by God. Their task is to stand in the presence of God, hear God's pain and love for the world and transmit it to God's people. The prophet does not decide to be a prophet. He or she is called and responds to God's call often hesitantly or even unwillingly. The prophet is then filled with God's spirit, ish haruach and then speaks in God's voice. God told Ezekiel: 'I will make your tongue cling to the roof of your mouth so that you shall be speechless…. But when I speak with you I will open your mouth and you shall say to them, “Thus says the Lord God'. And Jeremiah cried out “There is in my heart as it were a burning fire… and I am weary with holding it in and I cannot.”
So the prophet utters God's words because he can do no other. But who must he speak them to? This is the crucial element, the absolute essence of Hebrew prophecy. He must prophesy both to his own community and to those in power. This triangular relationship with God, the prophet, the people and the kings is at the heart of what the Hebrew prophet is about strengthening his community and speaking truth to the power of the kings. This is a courageous and a daunting role to play.
He names where the people and the ruler are being faithful and where they have gone astray, he affirms them, but he criticises. He calls repeatedly for Teshuvah, returning to God. He warns of the consequences of continuing on the wrong path, he both belongs and he challenges. The prophet is of the people, speaking the words of God from among the people both to the people and to the king. He recalls the people and their rulers to what is at the heart of their beliefs: this is who we are. nd “what does the Lord require of us?”
This role of standing both within and apart from the tradition, of belonging and constantly challenging, makes a prophet a strange and isolated person. Abraham Heschel who was a great Jewish philosopher, mystic, and activist of the 20th century has described it in this way. "The prophet is a lonely figure, his standards are too high, his stature too great and his concern too intense for other men to share. Living on the highest peak, he has no company except God."
Now, this is worrying if what we are looking for is a model of prophecy that is both inspired and effective, that reaches those it intends to change. Because what we often find in the Hebrew model with a few exceptions, is almost a builtin distancing. As Heschel has described it, God on the highest peak with the prophet and the people and the king a long way off.
In Deuteronomy we read that after God had spoken out of the fire and given Moses the Ten Commandments, the elders and heads of the tribe, shaken by what they had overheard of the encounter, said to Moses, “If we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer we shall die. For what mortal ever heard the voice of the living God speak out of the fire as we did and lived. You go closer', [this is to Moses] 'you go closer and hear all that the Lord our God says, and then you tell us everything that the Lord our God tells you and we will listen and do it.”
You can almost hear them shrinking back. The people felt that having heard God speak once they had gone to the limits of what they could endure. To hear God's voice directly exposed them to the heart of the divine fire and they wanted to withdraw to a safe distance, to have God's word in future mediated to them through someone else. This is familiar to us today, but there is a builtin difficulty for the prophet. The purpose is to connect, to transmit. If the people are reluctant to come close to God's presence how can the prophet reproduce God's fire for them. And if people miss the fire do they also miss the force of the message?
This is the paradox of biblical prophecy. It is a challenge from God to do God's work in the world. It takes over the prophet's whole life and it may fail. We inherit a legacy of inspiration, courage, and spiritual power, but also a role model with builtin limitations. Sometimes the prophets influenced those in power as Nathan the prophet did with King David. |At other times they were ignored. Living on the highest peak with no company except God, they sometimes failed to transmit their message. We, too, in our own times can be faithful for long periods without apparently succeeding in conveying God's word. We know the heartbreak of this. And we can be successful, and we know that joy.
We need to reflect this week on why this happens, what we can learn from it and what if anything we are doing about it.
But after generations of Hebrew prophets we have a mystery: The line of prophets suddenly came to an end in the late 6th century BCE after the Jews who returned from captivity in Babylon had rebuilt the temple. No new prophets emerged. Noone understood why. The power of the Holy Spirit that enabled the prophets to speak the word of God seemed not to be active amongst them. The rabbis eventually told the people, “Since the death of the prophets Haggai, Zachariah, and Malachi the Holy Spirit departed from Israel.”
The Holy Spirit departed from Israel. The effect of this on the continuing Jewish tradition has been profound. Prophecy now belonged to the past, what needed to be revealed had been revealed. New selfproclaimed prophets were regarded with suspicion. This is something that Jews still believe today, though they have no single explanation for why it should be said. They give many reasons. They will tell you, as my Jewish friends and teachers tell me, “Prophecy ended when the Holy Spirit departed from Israel.”
So today the Jewish community turns to the bible and their holy texts for inspiration, to be studied and prayed with and explored, but they do not expect contemporary human prophcsy. As a Quaker I feel some sadness at this and some bewilderment and I asked one of the rabbis, “But why? Why after all those years did God suddenly stop trying to communicate with God's people? Why did the Holy Spirit abandon them?” The rabbi smiled at this impertinent Quaker and said, "That's a very good question, Marion, and we don't know the answer."
We don't know the answer either and I would reject the Christian supersessionist belief that God switched God's favour from one chosen people to another. I think it is a desolate and a courageous place for a people of God to stand in because it means they are listening only for God's voice. And it raises for us the ongoing question of the truth of scriptural revelation and the truth of contemporary revelation, because as Quakers we want to have both and we need to ask where do we feel the Holy Spirit at work?
So into this extraordinary absence of Jewish prophecy came Jesus. Would we want to name Jesus as a prophet? Most Christian commentators now say, yes, this would be how Jesus would understand himself and how he was seen by his Jewish followers during his lifetime - as a prophet in the Hebrew tradition, mediating God's word to God's people and to the authorities. Christians of course would want to add that Jesus was much more, that he was divine, that he was the redeemer, but at the time the role he played was in line with the Jewish prophetic tradition. The people felt his authority. As we have seen, people know when there has been a prophet among them. The people heard the true voice of God through Jesus and acknowledged him as a prophet.
His role may have been familiar, but his teaching was new. The Sermon on the Mount offers us a radical and empowering way to realise the kingdom of heaven. It begins with a blessing and it ends with a call to action. So the way was opened for something to come into being which moved on from the old prophetic tradition and challenged the idea that after hundreds of years the Holy Spirit was no longer active and alive.
Beginning with the extraordinary events of Pentecost the followers of Jesus began to experience the Holy Spirit for themselves in a transforming and empowering way. Not just a few lone individuals but as a gathered group. The spirit flowed among them. It is difficult to overestimate the wonder and significance of this.
They understood this spirit to come from God, it empowered them to teach and expand their beliefs. Prophecy was alive among them again, but the single prophet had become the prophetic community.
Paul told the Corinthians, “Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts and especially that you may prophesy… those who prophesy speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation… those who prophesy build up the church.. I would like all of you to prophesy.” This is an extraordinary development. Paul's phrase, “I would like all of you to prophesy” takes us into a new way of being a community of prophecy. Instead of being the fearful community of Moses, standing a long way off, unwilling and unable to hear the word of God directly, dependent on their prophet to mediate God to them, we have an empowered prophetic community, sharing the gift, able to hear and respond to the Holy Spirit directly.
But is this the same kind of prophecy that we find in the Hebrew scriptures? Are we right to use the same word for it?
It has many of the traditional characteristics, it is inspired by the Spirit, it empowers and builds the community, it challenges, it recalls us to God. But it is no longer dependent on lone voices to lead and expound, it is instead collective and egalitarian. This understanding of prophecy is what Christians developed, what the Jewish tradition stands apart from and what early Quakers rediscovered 350 years ago as they felt the Spirit moving among them.
So as Quakers today we have inherited a long prophetic tradition of richness and complexity and it is all ours to use. Today in the Quaker family we interpret prophecy in different ways. Yet I believe there is an underlying unity in our practice and if we understand our tradition as a whole we can make this diversity a gift and not a stumbling block. Here are some of the key elements:
• Quaker prophecy is the experience of the Word of God alive among us,directly felt and recognised. It can come out of silence, speech, scripture or song, however we worship, however we minister.
• There is always a message of some kind: enlightening, clarifying, and demanding.
• The message is intended for us and for others. Who they are may be familiar- those in our meetings, or still unknown- those we must reach out to. These are the tasks of teaching and of mission.
• There can be both individual Quaker prophets and also prophetic Quaker communities, both have their strengths and their limitations.
• George Fox never felt he needed to verify his leadings, but he noted that whenever he consulted scripture he found them confirmed. After the fall of James Nayler Friends came to understand that prophecy must be tested and we still do this today. Some of us choose to confirm leadings by reference to scripture, others by reference to the collective discernment of the gathered meeting, but the leading from God is always primary for all of us.
• Quaker prophecy today, as in the Hebrew tradition, has the same dual purpose, the same triangular relationship with God - to enlighten, nurture, and extend the spiritual community and also to speak truth to those in power, to take prophetic action, to press for change in the world. We can do both. We must do both, both are holy.
Abraham Heschel, a Jew, marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King in 1965. It was a bloody confrontational event, but it was for him a deeply spiritual occasion. When he returned, he told his daughter, “I felt as if my legs were praying.”
There is a whole spectrum of prophetic possibility open to us as Quakers calling for our attention. Do we practise it all, or do we settle for just a part, just one place on the spectrum? I see our diversity as an uncomfortable challenge that we hold out to each other for all of us to be more than we are being at present. Some of us concentrate on silent waiting, some on proclamation, some on mission, some on social action. All of these things are part of the prophetic tradition and maybe none of us fulfils them all. So we serve as uncomfortable reminders and loving prompts to each other; Friend, is there something you are neglecting?
So what kind of Quaker prophetic voice is needed today? What will enable people to hear the voice of God, what will bring the changes we long to hear? Let us go back to Jeremiah for a moment, prophesying for 23 years without anyone listening to him. His name has been immortalised for this. The dictionary says:
a Jeremiah: someone who is pessimistic about the present and who foresees a calamitous future; a person given to woeful lamentation and complaining.
I don't know about you, but I find it incredibly hard to listen to someone filled with woeful lamentation for 23 minutes, let alone 23 years. The Hebrew prophets were always ready to blame the people for refusing to hear the word of God. But I have to wonder, was it something to do with the way the word of God was being preached? Did the prophets fall into the trap of expressing their own frustration and anger? Did their own despairing voices sometimes speak louder than God's?
I was recently at a conference when a Friend who was deeply concerned about a matter of great spiritual importance stood up and lectured us all for a long time about how urgent this was, how we must all stop what we were doing and turn our energies to this one problem. We listened with sinking hearts. When he finished and sat down the person next to me leaned across and whispered “This nagging has to stop”
I am sure there is a word in everyone's language for nagging. It is persistent, useless scolding and we all do it. How can we help each other from falling into this trap? Let us think for a moment of the selfappointed prophets that we all know, that we all turn away from. They are well intentioned, but they drown us in their urgency and their fear. They make us feel guilty and inadequate, they blame us, they depress and immobilise us, they are doing their best, but they are having no effect. This nagging has to stop.
If we want to bring the kingdom of heaven we must have insight, skills, compassion, abounding love, and methods that work. We must be people who fill other people with hope, not despair. It is no good being right for 23 years if noone is listening to us.
Effective prophecy energises and encourages, it acknowledges people's failures and inadequacies but it doesn't blame, it comforts and consoles. It believes in people. It is an invitation to return to God. |And because it is deeply rooted in God it can bring others to God's presence. Open Isaiah at chapter 40 and hear the unknown prophet we called 2nd Isaiah pour out love and consolation: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.” This is a prophetic voice that we can respond it to, it lifts our hearts and renews our strength, we can as 2nd Isaiah says, we can “ount up with wings like eagles.”
So what do we need in prophecy that will enable people to hear the voice of God?It is very simple: Jean Leclerq, a Benedictine, has said: "We must love the age we live in. From the point of view of faith the best age for each of us is the one God has placed us in, the one He has given us which we must give back to Him".
We must love the age we live in. Sometimes this is very hard to do, but it is our task.
"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. Andif I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing".
Effective prophets work from a place of love. They nurture us, they inspire us to engage with our faith in deeper and deeper ways. We lead committed lives which return us always to our spiritual core. It is circular. Our outward lives are shaped from within, our actions in the world bring us closer to God and we live God's truth in the world.
Because whatever form it takes, prophecy is essentially mystical. God breaks through. The world is imperfect. Dudu has described it in our programme as a broken and still breaking world. But it is wholly of God, wholly divine. The prophets are those that enable us to see that God is always available to us, the kingdom is always about us. Rosa Parks, one of my inspirations, one of the enablers of the American Civil Rights Movement, sat down in the middle of a bus and enacted the kingdom of heaven, a world of justice and equality. And God's voice was heard. One of the people sitting at the back, unable to move, said later: “It was holy in that bus."
When we can prophesy with this kind of love, this kind of clarity, this kind of holiness, God's voice will be heard.
We have come a long way as a people of God, we have grown and changed, we have found new ways and held on to old ways. We are still gathered, still waiting to hear God's voice, waiting for prophecy to flourish amongst us. We will hear God's voice again and again this week saying familiar and comforting things, saying challenging and uncomfortable things. In love. Let us listen with open hearts.
There is a Hebrew blessing for absolutely everything, and there is a special blessing for a moment like this, and I would like to end with it. It acknowledges that we have come on a long journey to arrive where we are today, we have been held safe, like a child in the womb, nurtured and fed, and now delivered safely into this moment to do what we are called to do next. I will say it in Hebrew and then in English.
Baruch atah, adonai eloheinu, melech ha ‘olam, shehechianu, v’kimanu, v’higianu, lazman hazeh.
Blessed are you Lord our God creator of the universe who has kept us alive, sustained us and brought us forth to this moment.
DUDUZILE MTSHAZO: We will remain in worship and we will respond as the spirit leads us.
[Ministry out of open worship]
Speaker 1
Among the first words of Jesus recorded in our gospels after he began his ministry was when he was asked to read in his own synagogue. As he read the very words of this morning from Isaiah, the people were astonished, but some of the leaders were angry enough to want to throw him over a cliff, or to drive him out of Nazareth. That did not stop Jesus in his ministry and prophecy. May we not falter as we encounter sometimes that anger, but let us also move on in our ministry and prophecy.
Speaker 2
The prophets who wrote the words reveal what God has inspired them to say thousands of years ago, but if I look at my life now today I find many of their words very applicable in my life today describing exactly the situation of many people in the Middle East and in Palestine. I find the message of the prophet is a message that is courageous, stating the grief about the situations in our world at the same time insisting on exposing the principalities and powers and what is happening which is not in line with God's will. I mean if I go to Lamentations or if I go to Ezekiel, “ They mislead my people when they say ‘peace, peace’ when there is no peace. For me these words when they are repeated again and again and again, for me I don't see them as maybe nagging or making others feel guilty, it's the reminder, it's a constant reminder that our situation is unbearable and we should do something about it. The prophets were not just nagging about it, the cry of grief and lamentation was a cry coming from the heart, a cry that led to action and the action led to hope so it was an act of subversion and an act of hope, an act of liberation and an act of unifying the community to act together to transform the structures of domination, oppression and violence. May we all be strengthened today to really hear the cries of those who lament, lament their situation and not get upset by it. If it is difficult for us to hear it, how much more difficult it is for them to live with it, to bear with it in their lives day in day out.
Speaker 3
I have been reminded this morning of the words of a chorus that I learned while I was a child and I was thinking that I cannot change other people or anything else, but the words of this chorus came to me.
Let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me, all his wondrous compassion and purity, oh thou spirit divine, all my nature refine until the beauty of Jesus be seen in me.
Speaker 4
I am not a biblical scholar, I read the bible and ask questions and I would like to ask the help of others who know more in helping me to discern. As I was reading one day in the book of Samuel, there is a part that seems to me a complete critical turning point in the history of Israel, although I don't find the commentators seeing it as significant so maybe I am totally off. In Samuel 8 starting with verse 4 it says: So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Rammah, they said to him you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways, now appoint a king to lead us such as all other nations have. But when they said give us a king to lead us this displeased Samuel so he prayed to the Lord. And the Lord told him, Listen to all that the people are saying to you, it is not you that they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods so they are doing to you. Now listen to them, but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king will do. Samuel told all the words to the people who were asking him for a king, he said this is what a king will do: he will take your sons, and make them serve with his chariots in horses and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of 50s and others to plough his ground and reap his harvest and others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots; he will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers, he will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your men servants and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes you will cry out for relief from the king that you have chosen and the Lord will not answer you in that day. But the people refused to listen to Samuel. No, they said, we want a king over us, then we will be like all the other nations with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.
Up until this time in the Bible, Israel had no king, they were led by prophets and judges. For me I see God in this chapter like a loving father with a rebellious teenager saying "this is not the right way" and the teenager says "this is really what I want" and so he do not force Israel to the right way, he lets them find out for themselves. He tries, God tries to ameliorate the consequences, he helps to chose a king that is more humble, he sends prophets to help advise the king when the king is taking wrong action, but I see a change here in that the prophets start to kind of lobby the king rather than to bring the voice of God to the people. I used to be very upset by calling God king, there was a time when in all of my worship and prayers I took out all male language, but now when I see it in the light of this verse in Samuel, I see that it is taking away the earthly kingship. When we say God is king, it is saying we have no other king.
I wondered if Jesus coming is a culmination of this part of history, that Jesus is king of the Jews affirming that God is our king, we have no other king.
Speaker 5
We have been alerted to the power of love and what it can do for each of us, I am less concerned with what the leaders plan to do or are doing, but more concerned with those of us who belong to the first world population of the world, roughly about 1.2 billion people out of 6.2 billion -- what we can do? It is historically true that each of us were nurtured, educated in a form of exclusion morality in which we say that certain things are right for us in the group and we shall pursue that with vigour and those same things do not apply for those outside our group and we shall exclude them. Every group seems to do this all over the world and as a result it has contributed to a class of people who may be called poor, who live on less than $2 per head per day and who have to forego about 30,000 of their own people daily to poverty deaths. When we get to know about this we immediately say that is not something which I want to happen, it is not something that I wish to contribute to, I never knew that anything which I did was bringing this about. But there is something we can do and that is that we can ask ourselves, are we ready to include them on their minimum needs for the future, forget about the past? Sure we were not there, we did not know about it. Now we know about it, are we prepared to include their minimum needs for the future and am I addressing the problem intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually under worship -- prepared to bridge the gap between my own conditioned morality and this new type of morality I may affirm. One way to address that particular situation is to say, no poverty deaths in my name. No poverty deaths in my name. It is easily said, but am I really in a position to make that transition from where I am currently placed? This is a question which a person who takes their spiritual responsibility extremely seriously could perhaps consider looking at and, further, try to extend it to other groups.
So one question we could address is, are we prepared to meet the minimum needs through worship? Thank you.
Duduzile Mtshazo: Friends, we have come to the end of this session. You may shake the hand of the Friend next to you.
Good morning, friends. Welcome back. We are still continuing with worship and exploring around the theme. I would like to introduce to you a friend of a friend, Marion McNaughton, a grandmother of two and another one to come! She has been a tutor at Woodbrooke, but now she is doing much more important work, having retired she is now a volunteer gardener at Woodbrooke! Talk about caring for the earth. We are going to worship and when Marion is ready she will rise to the podium and will give us her message. May we then Friends go into worship.
MARION McNAUGHTON ADDRESSED THE TRIENNIAL AS FOLLOWS
Doreen's ministry to us this morning in our morning worship touched on many of the things that I have been thinking and praying about in the last few months as I prepared what I wanted to say to you today. When she sent me her text I realised that she and I had been drawn to speak along very similar lines which of course is not surprising, but is always wonderful when it happens. So I invite you to stay in the place that she brought us to so we may explore it more deeply.
I believe that we are part of a very long tradition of being a people of God. It has its roots in the Jewish tradition. Jesus who was a Jew carried many of the elements of his tradition into the new Christian world and we as Quakers carry all this forward in a very special way today. To understand prophecy we must understand where we come from.
Many people have helped me understand this over the last year and I would like to thank them. Rabbi Margaret Jacobi of the Birmingham Progressive Synagogue for her knowledge of the Hebrew prophets, Rabbi James Baaden for his understanding of the ending of Jewish prophecy. Timothy Peat Ashworth of Woodbrooke for his insights into the early Christian communities and my colleagues on Britain Yearly Meeting Testimonies Committee who more than anyone else have taught me what it is to live faithful prophetic lives.
I would like to begin with the elements that are there in what we are naming as prophecy.
• In both Jewish and Christian theology prophecy is understood as a spontaneous human response to a transforming encounter with God through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
• The response can take the form of words, signs, actions or a way of life.
• It can be exercised by men, women, children, individuals or groups. It is a gift from God, it speaks God's truth.
• It is rooted in known values, the religious values of its community.
• It pinpoints the behaviours, attitudes and events that reveal where a people or a ruler are being faithful and where they have gone astray.
• It affirms and it criticises.
• It warns of the consequences of continuing on the wrong path, it foretells disasters. So the prophet both belongs and challengesIt calls repeatedly for what is known in the Hebrew tradition as Teshuvah, turning: turning away from the world and returning to God.
• It is awesome and unmistakable. We hear the voice of God. We should not use the word prophecy lightly or seek to be comfortable with it. Prophecy is always challenging and usually uncomfortable.
Our task this week is going to be to find the prophetic voice for our time. So I would like to look briefly at the prophetic tradition we stand in and what riches and contradictions it brings with it.
I shall begin with the Hebrew tradition, because this is where it began for us, and this was the tradition that Jesus inherited. Then I shall look at how prophecy died away in the Jewish tradition, but came alive in the ministry of Jesus and then again in the early Christian communities. And then see how we as Quakers practise and affirm prophecy and what our prophetic calling might be as a people of God.
I will also be asking, because this is important to me in my own life, why prophecy has so often failed or proved to be ineffective. We know that prophets encounter resistance and apathy. The prophet Ezekiel was told by God, “I send you to them and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ And whether they hear or refuse to hear for they are a rebellious breed they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.”
People do know when there has been a prophet among them, but that does not mean they do what the prophet tells them. The prophet Jeremiah, one of the great Hebrew prophets, complained, “For 23 years… the word of the Lord has come to me and I have spoken persistently to you, but you have not listened.” I shall come back to Jeremiah.
We need to ask “Why. Why did they not listen, why do they not listen today?” because we need to know the answers to this.
In choosing to use the word prophecy today we are acknowledging that we are part of a continuing sacred tradition. In the Hebrew bible, what we call the Old Testament, prophecy comes through the great figures of the prophets. The prophet in Hebrew is referred to ish haruach which means a person filled with the spirit of God. The prophets are giants in the landscape of the Hebrew scriptures, a series of extraordinary inspired men and women. Doreen has already reminded us that there were women as well as men, thoughostly the women's words have not been preserved and apart from one or two like Huldah and Miriam, we do not even know their names.
In the Hebrew tradition the prophet is someone who is chosen by God. Their task is to stand in the presence of God, hear God's pain and love for the world and transmit it to God's people. The prophet does not decide to be a prophet. He or she is called and responds to God's call often hesitantly or even unwillingly. The prophet is then filled with God's spirit, ish haruach and then speaks in God's voice. God told Ezekiel: 'I will make your tongue cling to the roof of your mouth so that you shall be speechless…. But when I speak with you I will open your mouth and you shall say to them, “Thus says the Lord God'. And Jeremiah cried out “There is in my heart as it were a burning fire… and I am weary with holding it in and I cannot.”
So the prophet utters God's words because he can do no other. But who must he speak them to? This is the crucial element, the absolute essence of Hebrew prophecy. He must prophesy both to his own community and to those in power. This triangular relationship with God, the prophet, the people and the kings is at the heart of what the Hebrew prophet is about strengthening his community and speaking truth to the power of the kings. This is a courageous and a daunting role to play.
He names where the people and the ruler are being faithful and where they have gone astray, he affirms them, but he criticises. He calls repeatedly for Teshuvah, returning to God. He warns of the consequences of continuing on the wrong path, he both belongs and he challenges. The prophet is of the people, speaking the words of God from among the people both to the people and to the king. He recalls the people and their rulers to what is at the heart of their beliefs: this is who we are. nd “what does the Lord require of us?”
This role of standing both within and apart from the tradition, of belonging and constantly challenging, makes a prophet a strange and isolated person. Abraham Heschel who was a great Jewish philosopher, mystic, and activist of the 20th century has described it in this way. "The prophet is a lonely figure, his standards are too high, his stature too great and his concern too intense for other men to share. Living on the highest peak, he has no company except God."
Now, this is worrying if what we are looking for is a model of prophecy that is both inspired and effective, that reaches those it intends to change. Because what we often find in the Hebrew model with a few exceptions, is almost a builtin distancing. As Heschel has described it, God on the highest peak with the prophet and the people and the king a long way off.
In Deuteronomy we read that after God had spoken out of the fire and given Moses the Ten Commandments, the elders and heads of the tribe, shaken by what they had overheard of the encounter, said to Moses, “If we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer we shall die. For what mortal ever heard the voice of the living God speak out of the fire as we did and lived. You go closer', [this is to Moses] 'you go closer and hear all that the Lord our God says, and then you tell us everything that the Lord our God tells you and we will listen and do it.”
You can almost hear them shrinking back. The people felt that having heard God speak once they had gone to the limits of what they could endure. To hear God's voice directly exposed them to the heart of the divine fire and they wanted to withdraw to a safe distance, to have God's word in future mediated to them through someone else. This is familiar to us today, but there is a builtin difficulty for the prophet. The purpose is to connect, to transmit. If the people are reluctant to come close to God's presence how can the prophet reproduce God's fire for them. And if people miss the fire do they also miss the force of the message?
This is the paradox of biblical prophecy. It is a challenge from God to do God's work in the world. It takes over the prophet's whole life and it may fail. We inherit a legacy of inspiration, courage, and spiritual power, but also a role model with builtin limitations. Sometimes the prophets influenced those in power as Nathan the prophet did with King David. |At other times they were ignored. Living on the highest peak with no company except God, they sometimes failed to transmit their message. We, too, in our own times can be faithful for long periods without apparently succeeding in conveying God's word. We know the heartbreak of this. And we can be successful, and we know that joy.
We need to reflect this week on why this happens, what we can learn from it and what if anything we are doing about it.
But after generations of Hebrew prophets we have a mystery: The line of prophets suddenly came to an end in the late 6th century BCE after the Jews who returned from captivity in Babylon had rebuilt the temple. No new prophets emerged. Noone understood why. The power of the Holy Spirit that enabled the prophets to speak the word of God seemed not to be active amongst them. The rabbis eventually told the people, “Since the death of the prophets Haggai, Zachariah, and Malachi the Holy Spirit departed from Israel.”
The Holy Spirit departed from Israel. The effect of this on the continuing Jewish tradition has been profound. Prophecy now belonged to the past, what needed to be revealed had been revealed. New selfproclaimed prophets were regarded with suspicion. This is something that Jews still believe today, though they have no single explanation for why it should be said. They give many reasons. They will tell you, as my Jewish friends and teachers tell me, “Prophecy ended when the Holy Spirit departed from Israel.”
So today the Jewish community turns to the bible and their holy texts for inspiration, to be studied and prayed with and explored, but they do not expect contemporary human prophcsy. As a Quaker I feel some sadness at this and some bewilderment and I asked one of the rabbis, “But why? Why after all those years did God suddenly stop trying to communicate with God's people? Why did the Holy Spirit abandon them?” The rabbi smiled at this impertinent Quaker and said, "That's a very good question, Marion, and we don't know the answer."
We don't know the answer either and I would reject the Christian supersessionist belief that God switched God's favour from one chosen people to another. I think it is a desolate and a courageous place for a people of God to stand in because it means they are listening only for God's voice. And it raises for us the ongoing question of the truth of scriptural revelation and the truth of contemporary revelation, because as Quakers we want to have both and we need to ask where do we feel the Holy Spirit at work?
So into this extraordinary absence of Jewish prophecy came Jesus. Would we want to name Jesus as a prophet? Most Christian commentators now say, yes, this would be how Jesus would understand himself and how he was seen by his Jewish followers during his lifetime - as a prophet in the Hebrew tradition, mediating God's word to God's people and to the authorities. Christians of course would want to add that Jesus was much more, that he was divine, that he was the redeemer, but at the time the role he played was in line with the Jewish prophetic tradition. The people felt his authority. As we have seen, people know when there has been a prophet among them. The people heard the true voice of God through Jesus and acknowledged him as a prophet.
His role may have been familiar, but his teaching was new. The Sermon on the Mount offers us a radical and empowering way to realise the kingdom of heaven. It begins with a blessing and it ends with a call to action. So the way was opened for something to come into being which moved on from the old prophetic tradition and challenged the idea that after hundreds of years the Holy Spirit was no longer active and alive.
Beginning with the extraordinary events of Pentecost the followers of Jesus began to experience the Holy Spirit for themselves in a transforming and empowering way. Not just a few lone individuals but as a gathered group. The spirit flowed among them. It is difficult to overestimate the wonder and significance of this.
They understood this spirit to come from God, it empowered them to teach and expand their beliefs. Prophecy was alive among them again, but the single prophet had become the prophetic community.
Paul told the Corinthians, “Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts and especially that you may prophesy… those who prophesy speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation… those who prophesy build up the church.. I would like all of you to prophesy.” This is an extraordinary development. Paul's phrase, “I would like all of you to prophesy” takes us into a new way of being a community of prophecy. Instead of being the fearful community of Moses, standing a long way off, unwilling and unable to hear the word of God directly, dependent on their prophet to mediate God to them, we have an empowered prophetic community, sharing the gift, able to hear and respond to the Holy Spirit directly.
But is this the same kind of prophecy that we find in the Hebrew scriptures? Are we right to use the same word for it?
It has many of the traditional characteristics, it is inspired by the Spirit, it empowers and builds the community, it challenges, it recalls us to God. But it is no longer dependent on lone voices to lead and expound, it is instead collective and egalitarian. This understanding of prophecy is what Christians developed, what the Jewish tradition stands apart from and what early Quakers rediscovered 350 years ago as they felt the Spirit moving among them.
So as Quakers today we have inherited a long prophetic tradition of richness and complexity and it is all ours to use. Today in the Quaker family we interpret prophecy in different ways. Yet I believe there is an underlying unity in our practice and if we understand our tradition as a whole we can make this diversity a gift and not a stumbling block. Here are some of the key elements:
• Quaker prophecy is the experience of the Word of God alive among us,directly felt and recognised. It can come out of silence, speech, scripture or song, however we worship, however we minister.
• There is always a message of some kind: enlightening, clarifying, and demanding.
• The message is intended for us and for others. Who they are may be familiar- those in our meetings, or still unknown- those we must reach out to. These are the tasks of teaching and of mission.
• There can be both individual Quaker prophets and also prophetic Quaker communities, both have their strengths and their limitations.
• George Fox never felt he needed to verify his leadings, but he noted that whenever he consulted scripture he found them confirmed. After the fall of James Nayler Friends came to understand that prophecy must be tested and we still do this today. Some of us choose to confirm leadings by reference to scripture, others by reference to the collective discernment of the gathered meeting, but the leading from God is always primary for all of us.
• Quaker prophecy today, as in the Hebrew tradition, has the same dual purpose, the same triangular relationship with God - to enlighten, nurture, and extend the spiritual community and also to speak truth to those in power, to take prophetic action, to press for change in the world. We can do both. We must do both, both are holy.
Abraham Heschel, a Jew, marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King in 1965. It was a bloody confrontational event, but it was for him a deeply spiritual occasion. When he returned, he told his daughter, “I felt as if my legs were praying.”
There is a whole spectrum of prophetic possibility open to us as Quakers calling for our attention. Do we practise it all, or do we settle for just a part, just one place on the spectrum? I see our diversity as an uncomfortable challenge that we hold out to each other for all of us to be more than we are being at present. Some of us concentrate on silent waiting, some on proclamation, some on mission, some on social action. All of these things are part of the prophetic tradition and maybe none of us fulfils them all. So we serve as uncomfortable reminders and loving prompts to each other; Friend, is there something you are neglecting?
So what kind of Quaker prophetic voice is needed today? What will enable people to hear the voice of God, what will bring the changes we long to hear? Let us go back to Jeremiah for a moment, prophesying for 23 years without anyone listening to him. His name has been immortalised for this. The dictionary says:
a Jeremiah: someone who is pessimistic about the present and who foresees a calamitous future; a person given to woeful lamentation and complaining.
I don't know about you, but I find it incredibly hard to listen to someone filled with woeful lamentation for 23 minutes, let alone 23 years. The Hebrew prophets were always ready to blame the people for refusing to hear the word of God. But I have to wonder, was it something to do with the way the word of God was being preached? Did the prophets fall into the trap of expressing their own frustration and anger? Did their own despairing voices sometimes speak louder than God's?
I was recently at a conference when a Friend who was deeply concerned about a matter of great spiritual importance stood up and lectured us all for a long time about how urgent this was, how we must all stop what we were doing and turn our energies to this one problem. We listened with sinking hearts. When he finished and sat down the person next to me leaned across and whispered “This nagging has to stop”
I am sure there is a word in everyone's language for nagging. It is persistent, useless scolding and we all do it. How can we help each other from falling into this trap? Let us think for a moment of the selfappointed prophets that we all know, that we all turn away from. They are well intentioned, but they drown us in their urgency and their fear. They make us feel guilty and inadequate, they blame us, they depress and immobilise us, they are doing their best, but they are having no effect. This nagging has to stop.
If we want to bring the kingdom of heaven we must have insight, skills, compassion, abounding love, and methods that work. We must be people who fill other people with hope, not despair. It is no good being right for 23 years if noone is listening to us.
Effective prophecy energises and encourages, it acknowledges people's failures and inadequacies but it doesn't blame, it comforts and consoles. It believes in people. It is an invitation to return to God. |And because it is deeply rooted in God it can bring others to God's presence. Open Isaiah at chapter 40 and hear the unknown prophet we called 2nd Isaiah pour out love and consolation: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.” This is a prophetic voice that we can respond it to, it lifts our hearts and renews our strength, we can as 2nd Isaiah says, we can “ount up with wings like eagles.”
So what do we need in prophecy that will enable people to hear the voice of God?It is very simple: Jean Leclerq, a Benedictine, has said: "We must love the age we live in. From the point of view of faith the best age for each of us is the one God has placed us in, the one He has given us which we must give back to Him".
We must love the age we live in. Sometimes this is very hard to do, but it is our task.
"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. Andif I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing".
Effective prophets work from a place of love. They nurture us, they inspire us to engage with our faith in deeper and deeper ways. We lead committed lives which return us always to our spiritual core. It is circular. Our outward lives are shaped from within, our actions in the world bring us closer to God and we live God's truth in the world.
Because whatever form it takes, prophecy is essentially mystical. God breaks through. The world is imperfect. Dudu has described it in our programme as a broken and still breaking world. But it is wholly of God, wholly divine. The prophets are those that enable us to see that God is always available to us, the kingdom is always about us. Rosa Parks, one of my inspirations, one of the enablers of the American Civil Rights Movement, sat down in the middle of a bus and enacted the kingdom of heaven, a world of justice and equality. And God's voice was heard. One of the people sitting at the back, unable to move, said later: “It was holy in that bus."
When we can prophesy with this kind of love, this kind of clarity, this kind of holiness, God's voice will be heard.
We have come a long way as a people of God, we have grown and changed, we have found new ways and held on to old ways. We are still gathered, still waiting to hear God's voice, waiting for prophecy to flourish amongst us. We will hear God's voice again and again this week saying familiar and comforting things, saying challenging and uncomfortable things. In love. Let us listen with open hearts.
There is a Hebrew blessing for absolutely everything, and there is a special blessing for a moment like this, and I would like to end with it. It acknowledges that we have come on a long journey to arrive where we are today, we have been held safe, like a child in the womb, nurtured and fed, and now delivered safely into this moment to do what we are called to do next. I will say it in Hebrew and then in English.
Baruch atah, adonai eloheinu, melech ha ‘olam, shehechianu, v’kimanu, v’higianu, lazman hazeh.
Blessed are you Lord our God creator of the universe who has kept us alive, sustained us and brought us forth to this moment.
DUDUZILE MTSHAZO: We will remain in worship and we will respond as the spirit leads us.
[Ministry out of open worship]
Speaker 1
Among the first words of Jesus recorded in our gospels after he began his ministry was when he was asked to read in his own synagogue. As he read the very words of this morning from Isaiah, the people were astonished, but some of the leaders were angry enough to want to throw him over a cliff, or to drive him out of Nazareth. That did not stop Jesus in his ministry and prophecy. May we not falter as we encounter sometimes that anger, but let us also move on in our ministry and prophecy.
Speaker 2
The prophets who wrote the words reveal what God has inspired them to say thousands of years ago, but if I look at my life now today I find many of their words very applicable in my life today describing exactly the situation of many people in the Middle East and in Palestine. I find the message of the prophet is a message that is courageous, stating the grief about the situations in our world at the same time insisting on exposing the principalities and powers and what is happening which is not in line with God's will. I mean if I go to Lamentations or if I go to Ezekiel, “ They mislead my people when they say ‘peace, peace’ when there is no peace. For me these words when they are repeated again and again and again, for me I don't see them as maybe nagging or making others feel guilty, it's the reminder, it's a constant reminder that our situation is unbearable and we should do something about it. The prophets were not just nagging about it, the cry of grief and lamentation was a cry coming from the heart, a cry that led to action and the action led to hope so it was an act of subversion and an act of hope, an act of liberation and an act of unifying the community to act together to transform the structures of domination, oppression and violence. May we all be strengthened today to really hear the cries of those who lament, lament their situation and not get upset by it. If it is difficult for us to hear it, how much more difficult it is for them to live with it, to bear with it in their lives day in day out.
Speaker 3
I have been reminded this morning of the words of a chorus that I learned while I was a child and I was thinking that I cannot change other people or anything else, but the words of this chorus came to me.
Let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me, all his wondrous compassion and purity, oh thou spirit divine, all my nature refine until the beauty of Jesus be seen in me.
Speaker 4
I am not a biblical scholar, I read the bible and ask questions and I would like to ask the help of others who know more in helping me to discern. As I was reading one day in the book of Samuel, there is a part that seems to me a complete critical turning point in the history of Israel, although I don't find the commentators seeing it as significant so maybe I am totally off. In Samuel 8 starting with verse 4 it says: So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Rammah, they said to him you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways, now appoint a king to lead us such as all other nations have. But when they said give us a king to lead us this displeased Samuel so he prayed to the Lord. And the Lord told him, Listen to all that the people are saying to you, it is not you that they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods so they are doing to you. Now listen to them, but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king will do. Samuel told all the words to the people who were asking him for a king, he said this is what a king will do: he will take your sons, and make them serve with his chariots in horses and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of 50s and others to plough his ground and reap his harvest and others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots; he will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers, he will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your men servants and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes you will cry out for relief from the king that you have chosen and the Lord will not answer you in that day. But the people refused to listen to Samuel. No, they said, we want a king over us, then we will be like all the other nations with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.
Up until this time in the Bible, Israel had no king, they were led by prophets and judges. For me I see God in this chapter like a loving father with a rebellious teenager saying "this is not the right way" and the teenager says "this is really what I want" and so he do not force Israel to the right way, he lets them find out for themselves. He tries, God tries to ameliorate the consequences, he helps to chose a king that is more humble, he sends prophets to help advise the king when the king is taking wrong action, but I see a change here in that the prophets start to kind of lobby the king rather than to bring the voice of God to the people. I used to be very upset by calling God king, there was a time when in all of my worship and prayers I took out all male language, but now when I see it in the light of this verse in Samuel, I see that it is taking away the earthly kingship. When we say God is king, it is saying we have no other king.
I wondered if Jesus coming is a culmination of this part of history, that Jesus is king of the Jews affirming that God is our king, we have no other king.
Speaker 5
We have been alerted to the power of love and what it can do for each of us, I am less concerned with what the leaders plan to do or are doing, but more concerned with those of us who belong to the first world population of the world, roughly about 1.2 billion people out of 6.2 billion -- what we can do? It is historically true that each of us were nurtured, educated in a form of exclusion morality in which we say that certain things are right for us in the group and we shall pursue that with vigour and those same things do not apply for those outside our group and we shall exclude them. Every group seems to do this all over the world and as a result it has contributed to a class of people who may be called poor, who live on less than $2 per head per day and who have to forego about 30,000 of their own people daily to poverty deaths. When we get to know about this we immediately say that is not something which I want to happen, it is not something that I wish to contribute to, I never knew that anything which I did was bringing this about. But there is something we can do and that is that we can ask ourselves, are we ready to include them on their minimum needs for the future, forget about the past? Sure we were not there, we did not know about it. Now we know about it, are we prepared to include their minimum needs for the future and am I addressing the problem intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually under worship -- prepared to bridge the gap between my own conditioned morality and this new type of morality I may affirm. One way to address that particular situation is to say, no poverty deaths in my name. No poverty deaths in my name. It is easily said, but am I really in a position to make that transition from where I am currently placed? This is a question which a person who takes their spiritual responsibility extremely seriously could perhaps consider looking at and, further, try to extend it to other groups.
So one question we could address is, are we prepared to meet the minimum needs through worship? Thank you.
Duduzile Mtshazo: Friends, we have come to the end of this session. You may shake the hand of the Friend next to you.
Sunday morning (1) Worship and Doreen O'Dowd
Morning session, Sunday 12 August (1) Worship and Doreen O’Dowd
Good morning.
Dear Friends, my name is John, and I am helping facilitate the music during this week. We thought it would be good, useful if just before the worship each time we could just go through the hymns or songs that are going to be used so that you are familiar with them when the time comes. This morning I think the first hymn that is going to be sung is Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. We shall be singing it to a tune well known in Europe which Irish friends have asked us to use, it is different from the one in your song book.
Song: Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.
(Song sung)
Thank you. The Spanish words are in the song book, but in general the hymns and songs we will be using in the plenary worship will be projected and are not in the book. The other hymn which is being used for this worship is Be Thou Our Vision. It's a lovely Irish tune so let's sing that when we have got the words.
Song: Be Thou Our Vision
Let's try verse 2!
Thank you very much, Friends.
Good morning, friends. Can I just say before we start if you have a mobile phone, now would be a good time to make sure it is switched off because we don't want any mobile phones going off during our worship. Welcome, Friends, to this morning's worship organised by Irish Friends. Irish Friends have always worshipped through the unprogrammed meeting; however, this morning will be a little different. The worship has been arranged to incorporate the various ways in which Friends worship around the world.
We also hope it will have an Irish flavour to it. Our worship will involve singing hymns, something which is not unfamiliar to Irish Friends. The Irish who attended Young Friends Gatherings will know that singing is at the heart of our gathered worship. Just a word about those hymns, John has already explained a little bit. Some of you may think you know the song, but you realise when the music starts you don't know the tune, but we will try and keep everybody happy. We will sing an Irish hymn, Be Thou Our Vision with the American version of the words. We will also sing Dear Lord and Father of Mankind by an American Quaker, but we will use the tune more familiar to Irish Friends!
We hope we won't confuse Friends too much.
We are also going to hear a harp solo from Lynn again. Also our Friend, Doreen Dowd, from Dublin will offer us an address on the theme for the Triennial. Doreen's message will be followed by 30 minutes of unprogrammed worship where all Friends are invited to share as the Spirit moves them. I would now like to invite you to sing Dear Lord and Father of Mankind and you can find the Spanish words on page 15 of the FWCC songbook.
Song: Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.
A reading from the book of Isaiah chapter 61 verses 1 to 3.
"The spirit of the Lord God is upon me. He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour and the day of vengeance of our God, to provide for those who mourn in Zion the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory."
Isaiah. (Reading in French and Spanish)
Harpist: Rivers of Babylon
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight oh Lord my rock and my Redeemer.
Doreen Dowd addressed the Triennial as follows
“Good morning, Friends.
“It is a privilege and a responsibility to speak to you during this meeting for worship. I am sure there were other Friends who shared my reaction on hearing the theme for this Triennial, 'Finding the prophetic voice for our time'. I immediately thought of the Old Testament prophets whose words and deeds are recorded in the Bible. Presumably those who chose the theme were not expecting to set Friends up as prognosticators or seekers with an unusual ability to foretell the future. Rather, in this context prophetic has the meaning, as my dictionary confirms, of inspired by God.
“I am reminded of our Meetings for Worship for attention to business when we use not just our intelligence or our expert knowledge, but rather seek to find God's will in organising the affairs of the church.
“It seemed a good starting point to look at who some of these men were. They were prophets, but we don't know very much about them. Firstly, some of them came from very humble origins. Moses, David and Amos were all minding sheep when they received their divine call. Elijah was ploughing, Ezekiel, Nehemiah and some of the others were prisoners of war.
“Secondly, several of them felt unequal to the task. Moses complained so much to God about his lack of eloquence that he was finally given Aaron to be his spokesman. Jeremiah said 'I am but a child'. Isaiah confessed 'I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell amongst a people of unclean lips', but when he accepted the forgiveness and cleansing offered by God he was able to say 'here am I, send me'.
“The environments in which they prophesied were very varied. At times Israel was materially wealthy, complacent that its military might could not be challenged, while the civil society was corrupt and promiscuous. Intermarriage with neighbouring tribes had introduced temple prostitution and worship of nature and fertility gods.
“At other times, the prophet was speaking to a people in captivity in exile, wondering if they would ever again see their native land let alone fulfil their destiny of bringing to birth the messiah. Did you recognise the music By the waters of Babylon I sat down and wept?
“The messages of the prophets were very specific to the people to whom they spoke, but at the same time carried a universal message that can still speak to us today. So this Triennial can produce a message that is applicable to all the yearly meetings represented here, although some of us live in countries racked by hunger, by poverty, by AIDS, while others of us are surrounded by wealth and materialism. The common factor in the message of the prophets is restoration of the relationship between God and those who would worship Him in spirit and in truth. Those of you who think the Old Testament is only about battles and bloodshed should look again at some of its images of God: A faithful husband, a bird protecting its nestlings and of course 'the Lord is My Shepherd'.
“It is interesting that the only reference I could find in the New Testament to the purpose of prophecy is 'so that the church may be edified'. Although we have few details of New Testament prophecy, the young church needed divinely guided insights in how to deal with its internal structure and how to deal with the pagan world around it as it explored the meaning of the gospel of Jesus.
“There are undoubtedly some Friends who are already thinking this is all about words and ideas whereas I just want to feed the hungry, reduce dependence on arms, care for the environment, so that future generations can have clean air and water, but the prophets often inspired practical action. Nehemiah comes over like the rather bossy clerk of a large Premises Committee obsessed with rebuilding Jerusalem, abandoning his donkey so that he could clamber over the rubble to inspect enemy damage to the city walls. More than once, the words of the prophet led to the removal of pagan shrines. Although priests and prophets had specific roles in Israel, all of the people were expected to behave as children of God, farmers and merchants were to trade honestly and to treat their employees well - surely good Quaker principles.
“These are some impressions of some biblical prophets. They were ordinary people, aware of their weaknesses, but willing to be used by God and to share insights with their communities. Have these ancient Hebrews a message for our 21 century world? To bring the question a little nearer in time, I believe the New Testament is also about restoring the relationship between God and human kind. Isnot Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son about restoring communication between our Heavenly Father and his child?
“Here also in my experience lies the huge challenge for present day Friends. Can we with our enormous diversity of outlook still find a united message for the 21st century? You are here as guests of Ireland Yearly Meeting and for a variety of historical and social reasons Friends in Ireland reflect the breadth of diversity that is found amongst Friends across the world. I know that even amongst the small group of Irish Friends here this morning, there is a great range of understanding about who Jesus is and his significance for the world today. How should we interpret the Bible, was Jesus an inspired Jewish teacher, even a prophet, but only one of the people who have had a special perception of the nature of God or is he the only begotten son of God the father, fully divine, fully human, who died on a cross as an expression of God's profound love for us and our need of restoration to wholeness and who rose again triumphing over death?
“Personally, I claim Jesus as my saviour, my guide, my enabler; and that is not a creed, it is an experience. There are Irish and other Friends who cannot use such language, perhaps even find it offensive, yet they are very committed to living their lives according to gospel order and their integrity constantly challenges my way of life. Irish Friends have recently had to confront our different interpretations of the gospel as we updated our Book of Christian Experience, but we have managed with tears and with struggles to agree to continue worshipping together and sharing our search for God's will. I hope this Triennial will witness such love and grace also.
“Early Friends and those who have followed them believed that authentic Christian faith has to find expression in action feeding the hungry, freeing the slaves, seeking reconciliation of conflicts. In the words of William Penn "true godliness don't turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavours to mend it".
“I wonder if doing good works can sometimes become a ploy to occupy our minds and keep us too busy to consider our relationship with God? Is it true godliness that is enabling us? The best loved chapter in the Bible tells us that if I give all my goods to the poor but have not love, I gain nothing. It is not just head knowledge that we need but heart knowledge. It would be well to remember during the coming week that even the gift of prophecy is nothing, it is useless if it does not spring from love.
“1 John 4:19 tells us that we love because God first loved us.
“What then is our or God's prophetic message of love to the refugee mother watching her child die of hunger or malaria, to the politician promising bread and circuses or cheap oil with a view to re-election, to your workmate who thinks happiness is a new car, to the friend sitting quietly in the corner of your meeting. You are going to spend the next week seeking to hear more plainly the message that God has for Friends in these days, for our society and to share with the wider world.
“While we value our heritage we should not be burdened by tradition. We cannot relive the experiences of previous generations, but we can learn from them. George Fox was a Seeker, but started finding truth when he heard a voice which said "there is one even Christ Jesus that can speak to thy condition".
“Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, I don't know how many times in my life I have sung that hymn, I have prayed that prayer, but the words are just as important to me today as they were when I first learned them 50 or 60 years ago. Most of us came today or yesterday or the day before, probably in a rush, fussing over airlines and that we haven't got everything ready for those people who are coming, in various different guises we were all uptight. The words of that poem or prayer are just as important now. ‘Drop thy still dues of quietness until all our striving cease, take from our souls the strain and stress and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace’.
“One of the problems for the prophets in the Old Testament was how do you tell a true prophet from a false prophet? There were so many prophets, some of them were professional prophets. Even with Jeremiah there was a great argument after the city of Jerusalem had fallen and Jeremiah told the people that it had fallen because they didn't worship God and the people said all these troubles came upon us because we stopped worshipping the queen of heaven. How do we tell the true from the false? It is our problem too. There is such a clamour of voices, journalists, politicians, religious leaders. The New Testament says test the spirits. We have to be able to test to hear what is true. Love is one of those tests.
“One test I have been thinking of is humility, the true prophets weren't saying 'look at me, look at me, listen to what I am saying’, they were saying ‘listen to God, listen to the voice of God in your own heart, see what is being said to you'. Another test I think is persistence and patience.
“If you look at the people who worked for the abolition of the North Atlantic slave trade, they worked for years and years and years doing the work, believing, hoping, converting people until finally it happened. I think another test is whether people live it themselves, if you look at John Woolman, he lived what he was teaching. Fox said ‘let your lives preach’.
“If we are to be a prophetic people we have to be the message we are preaching.”
[End of Doreen’s introduction]
[MINISTRY OUT OF OPEN WORSHIP]
Speaker 1:
“This is from Jeremiah chapter 4. "If you will return oh Israel return to me, declares the Lord. If you put your detestable idols out of my sight and no longer go astray and if in a truthful, just and righteous way you swear as surely as the Lord lives then the nations will be blessed by him and in him they will glory". This is what the Lord said to the men of Judah and to Jerusalem "break up your unploughed ground and do not sow among thorns, circumcise yourself to the Lord, circumcise your hearts".
“Jeremiah was also and always a bit foul-mouthed. We do not swear and circumcision hurts. There is a lot of words in here that would turn Friends off, but glory be to God, he came to us as an interpreter in the heart. A few days ago I thanked God to have been given a liberal universal translation of foul-mouthed Jeremiah. Please take a look at chapter 4 of Jeremiah with me and let's remake it in our hearts.
“If you will return to me oh Friend return to me and return me to your heart, declares the Friend of friends. Some world Friends may be surprised to know that some world Friends are allergic to some names of God. I will tell you for instance King of kings. There are good decent democratic Friends who hear the words King of kings and go oh -- and the Spirit is in them.
“If you put away the world's busyness that separates us, that separates you from the Spirit, you will no longer go astray. If in a truthful, just and righteous way you affirm, why swear? Surely as the Friend of friends lives in the heart then the nations will be blessed by that friendship and the glory will dwell in each of our hearts. Break your unploughed ground and do not throw the seed of God's love on those hard bits of the heart that won't receive it. Cut out from your heart those hard bits of the heart and put the seed in the wounds. Then you will grow, irrigate it.
“Friends, we have to interpret not just for each other, but we have to interpret in each other's heart. We have to gather and we have to let ourselves speak all the names of God that makes our heart go a-flaring. We have to confess that some names of God are difficult because of our history. If you come from a Latin Americanindigenous community and you felt that an empire came over with a cross and took your land whacking the cross about, there is a truth in that and it has to be recognised. We also have names of God, of the God that makes our heart take fire and there are names of God we say that hurt other people of goodwill and we have to know that all and circumcise our hearts. May we continue together to sing out the names of God and to learn how it is that the Friend of friends calls us to say his name to each other.”
[End of first spoken ministry]
Speaker 2:
“When I was reading the study guide and meeting with Friends in the Netherlands and working with the theme for this Triennial, I found not only in myself, but I also heard through the words of Dutch Friends that we have difficulty in attaching the word prophet or prophecy to our own personal lives, to bring these words down to ground level. I have heard names of Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King or Gandhi several times, but I also have a name and how do I visualise prophecy in my own daily life. It seems such a big word and I have two feet on the ground. This past week I had the privilege of taking part in the pre-Triennial in Northern Ireland and one of the questions that arose was how to see this thing of serving cups of tea to wives of prisoners who want to visit their husbands? They have to wait, possibly quite a long time, and Friends in Belfast started pouring cups of tea and they organised a mini bus to shuttle these wives to the prison gate and back again. As participants in a Triennial we, I think, most of us were surprised, amazed to hear that in almost 40 years’ time this has grown to an organisation with 40 employees, Quaker cottage and a Quaker house, in all a huge organisation.
“We were pondering, Is this the way to do it, start with a cup of tea and just see how it grows? Maybe we didn't answer that question, but I am very impressed with this example.”
[John Sheldon]:
“Now, Friends, we will conclude our worship this morning with the hymn Be Thou My Vision”.
(Song sung)
[Charles G. Lamb]:
“I wonder just before we separate, could we have a moment of prayer.
“Our dear loving Heavenly Father, we thank you for having brought us here safely. We thank you for the knowledge of your presence here with us. We remember those that we have left at home, some unwell, some in hospital, we ask you Lord to be with them and with the many who are remembering us who are privileged to be here. We pray Lord that as we read in John's gospel that the true light which lighteth every man to cometh into this world might shine upon us here as we gather, that our hearts may search, that we may be tried, yes, for some of us possibly even in the fire, that during our time here we might experience a cleansing of our ways, a changing of our ways, that our eyes might be opened, and that we might be found obedient to walk to your foot steps. You have said 'I am the way, the truth and the life'. We pray Lord that that might be all of our experience as we gather here and that we might hear that still small voice which corrects us, which challenges us, and guides us in the right direction and so Lord we come before you this morning with thankful hearts. Renew our right spirit within us and fill us with the presence of thy Holy Spirit. This we ask in Jesus' name. Amen.”
Thank you very much, friends, for joining with us in worship this morning. I understand there may be some notices; is that correct? No notices at the moment. So there is tea and coffee next door and we are back here again at 11:00, thank you.
Short break.
Good morning.
Dear Friends, my name is John, and I am helping facilitate the music during this week. We thought it would be good, useful if just before the worship each time we could just go through the hymns or songs that are going to be used so that you are familiar with them when the time comes. This morning I think the first hymn that is going to be sung is Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. We shall be singing it to a tune well known in Europe which Irish friends have asked us to use, it is different from the one in your song book.
Song: Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.
(Song sung)
Thank you. The Spanish words are in the song book, but in general the hymns and songs we will be using in the plenary worship will be projected and are not in the book. The other hymn which is being used for this worship is Be Thou Our Vision. It's a lovely Irish tune so let's sing that when we have got the words.
Song: Be Thou Our Vision
Let's try verse 2!
Thank you very much, Friends.
Good morning, friends. Can I just say before we start if you have a mobile phone, now would be a good time to make sure it is switched off because we don't want any mobile phones going off during our worship. Welcome, Friends, to this morning's worship organised by Irish Friends. Irish Friends have always worshipped through the unprogrammed meeting; however, this morning will be a little different. The worship has been arranged to incorporate the various ways in which Friends worship around the world.
We also hope it will have an Irish flavour to it. Our worship will involve singing hymns, something which is not unfamiliar to Irish Friends. The Irish who attended Young Friends Gatherings will know that singing is at the heart of our gathered worship. Just a word about those hymns, John has already explained a little bit. Some of you may think you know the song, but you realise when the music starts you don't know the tune, but we will try and keep everybody happy. We will sing an Irish hymn, Be Thou Our Vision with the American version of the words. We will also sing Dear Lord and Father of Mankind by an American Quaker, but we will use the tune more familiar to Irish Friends!
We hope we won't confuse Friends too much.
We are also going to hear a harp solo from Lynn again. Also our Friend, Doreen Dowd, from Dublin will offer us an address on the theme for the Triennial. Doreen's message will be followed by 30 minutes of unprogrammed worship where all Friends are invited to share as the Spirit moves them. I would now like to invite you to sing Dear Lord and Father of Mankind and you can find the Spanish words on page 15 of the FWCC songbook.
Song: Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.
A reading from the book of Isaiah chapter 61 verses 1 to 3.
"The spirit of the Lord God is upon me. He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour and the day of vengeance of our God, to provide for those who mourn in Zion the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory."
Isaiah. (Reading in French and Spanish)
Harpist: Rivers of Babylon
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight oh Lord my rock and my Redeemer.
Doreen Dowd addressed the Triennial as follows
“Good morning, Friends.
“It is a privilege and a responsibility to speak to you during this meeting for worship. I am sure there were other Friends who shared my reaction on hearing the theme for this Triennial, 'Finding the prophetic voice for our time'. I immediately thought of the Old Testament prophets whose words and deeds are recorded in the Bible. Presumably those who chose the theme were not expecting to set Friends up as prognosticators or seekers with an unusual ability to foretell the future. Rather, in this context prophetic has the meaning, as my dictionary confirms, of inspired by God.
“I am reminded of our Meetings for Worship for attention to business when we use not just our intelligence or our expert knowledge, but rather seek to find God's will in organising the affairs of the church.
“It seemed a good starting point to look at who some of these men were. They were prophets, but we don't know very much about them. Firstly, some of them came from very humble origins. Moses, David and Amos were all minding sheep when they received their divine call. Elijah was ploughing, Ezekiel, Nehemiah and some of the others were prisoners of war.
“Secondly, several of them felt unequal to the task. Moses complained so much to God about his lack of eloquence that he was finally given Aaron to be his spokesman. Jeremiah said 'I am but a child'. Isaiah confessed 'I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell amongst a people of unclean lips', but when he accepted the forgiveness and cleansing offered by God he was able to say 'here am I, send me'.
“The environments in which they prophesied were very varied. At times Israel was materially wealthy, complacent that its military might could not be challenged, while the civil society was corrupt and promiscuous. Intermarriage with neighbouring tribes had introduced temple prostitution and worship of nature and fertility gods.
“At other times, the prophet was speaking to a people in captivity in exile, wondering if they would ever again see their native land let alone fulfil their destiny of bringing to birth the messiah. Did you recognise the music By the waters of Babylon I sat down and wept?
“The messages of the prophets were very specific to the people to whom they spoke, but at the same time carried a universal message that can still speak to us today. So this Triennial can produce a message that is applicable to all the yearly meetings represented here, although some of us live in countries racked by hunger, by poverty, by AIDS, while others of us are surrounded by wealth and materialism. The common factor in the message of the prophets is restoration of the relationship between God and those who would worship Him in spirit and in truth. Those of you who think the Old Testament is only about battles and bloodshed should look again at some of its images of God: A faithful husband, a bird protecting its nestlings and of course 'the Lord is My Shepherd'.
“It is interesting that the only reference I could find in the New Testament to the purpose of prophecy is 'so that the church may be edified'. Although we have few details of New Testament prophecy, the young church needed divinely guided insights in how to deal with its internal structure and how to deal with the pagan world around it as it explored the meaning of the gospel of Jesus.
“There are undoubtedly some Friends who are already thinking this is all about words and ideas whereas I just want to feed the hungry, reduce dependence on arms, care for the environment, so that future generations can have clean air and water, but the prophets often inspired practical action. Nehemiah comes over like the rather bossy clerk of a large Premises Committee obsessed with rebuilding Jerusalem, abandoning his donkey so that he could clamber over the rubble to inspect enemy damage to the city walls. More than once, the words of the prophet led to the removal of pagan shrines. Although priests and prophets had specific roles in Israel, all of the people were expected to behave as children of God, farmers and merchants were to trade honestly and to treat their employees well - surely good Quaker principles.
“These are some impressions of some biblical prophets. They were ordinary people, aware of their weaknesses, but willing to be used by God and to share insights with their communities. Have these ancient Hebrews a message for our 21 century world? To bring the question a little nearer in time, I believe the New Testament is also about restoring the relationship between God and human kind. Isnot Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son about restoring communication between our Heavenly Father and his child?
“Here also in my experience lies the huge challenge for present day Friends. Can we with our enormous diversity of outlook still find a united message for the 21st century? You are here as guests of Ireland Yearly Meeting and for a variety of historical and social reasons Friends in Ireland reflect the breadth of diversity that is found amongst Friends across the world. I know that even amongst the small group of Irish Friends here this morning, there is a great range of understanding about who Jesus is and his significance for the world today. How should we interpret the Bible, was Jesus an inspired Jewish teacher, even a prophet, but only one of the people who have had a special perception of the nature of God or is he the only begotten son of God the father, fully divine, fully human, who died on a cross as an expression of God's profound love for us and our need of restoration to wholeness and who rose again triumphing over death?
“Personally, I claim Jesus as my saviour, my guide, my enabler; and that is not a creed, it is an experience. There are Irish and other Friends who cannot use such language, perhaps even find it offensive, yet they are very committed to living their lives according to gospel order and their integrity constantly challenges my way of life. Irish Friends have recently had to confront our different interpretations of the gospel as we updated our Book of Christian Experience, but we have managed with tears and with struggles to agree to continue worshipping together and sharing our search for God's will. I hope this Triennial will witness such love and grace also.
“Early Friends and those who have followed them believed that authentic Christian faith has to find expression in action feeding the hungry, freeing the slaves, seeking reconciliation of conflicts. In the words of William Penn "true godliness don't turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavours to mend it".
“I wonder if doing good works can sometimes become a ploy to occupy our minds and keep us too busy to consider our relationship with God? Is it true godliness that is enabling us? The best loved chapter in the Bible tells us that if I give all my goods to the poor but have not love, I gain nothing. It is not just head knowledge that we need but heart knowledge. It would be well to remember during the coming week that even the gift of prophecy is nothing, it is useless if it does not spring from love.
“1 John 4:19 tells us that we love because God first loved us.
“What then is our or God's prophetic message of love to the refugee mother watching her child die of hunger or malaria, to the politician promising bread and circuses or cheap oil with a view to re-election, to your workmate who thinks happiness is a new car, to the friend sitting quietly in the corner of your meeting. You are going to spend the next week seeking to hear more plainly the message that God has for Friends in these days, for our society and to share with the wider world.
“While we value our heritage we should not be burdened by tradition. We cannot relive the experiences of previous generations, but we can learn from them. George Fox was a Seeker, but started finding truth when he heard a voice which said "there is one even Christ Jesus that can speak to thy condition".
“Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, I don't know how many times in my life I have sung that hymn, I have prayed that prayer, but the words are just as important to me today as they were when I first learned them 50 or 60 years ago. Most of us came today or yesterday or the day before, probably in a rush, fussing over airlines and that we haven't got everything ready for those people who are coming, in various different guises we were all uptight. The words of that poem or prayer are just as important now. ‘Drop thy still dues of quietness until all our striving cease, take from our souls the strain and stress and let our ordered lives confess the beauty of thy peace’.
“One of the problems for the prophets in the Old Testament was how do you tell a true prophet from a false prophet? There were so many prophets, some of them were professional prophets. Even with Jeremiah there was a great argument after the city of Jerusalem had fallen and Jeremiah told the people that it had fallen because they didn't worship God and the people said all these troubles came upon us because we stopped worshipping the queen of heaven. How do we tell the true from the false? It is our problem too. There is such a clamour of voices, journalists, politicians, religious leaders. The New Testament says test the spirits. We have to be able to test to hear what is true. Love is one of those tests.
“One test I have been thinking of is humility, the true prophets weren't saying 'look at me, look at me, listen to what I am saying’, they were saying ‘listen to God, listen to the voice of God in your own heart, see what is being said to you'. Another test I think is persistence and patience.
“If you look at the people who worked for the abolition of the North Atlantic slave trade, they worked for years and years and years doing the work, believing, hoping, converting people until finally it happened. I think another test is whether people live it themselves, if you look at John Woolman, he lived what he was teaching. Fox said ‘let your lives preach’.
“If we are to be a prophetic people we have to be the message we are preaching.”
[End of Doreen’s introduction]
[MINISTRY OUT OF OPEN WORSHIP]
Speaker 1:
“This is from Jeremiah chapter 4. "If you will return oh Israel return to me, declares the Lord. If you put your detestable idols out of my sight and no longer go astray and if in a truthful, just and righteous way you swear as surely as the Lord lives then the nations will be blessed by him and in him they will glory". This is what the Lord said to the men of Judah and to Jerusalem "break up your unploughed ground and do not sow among thorns, circumcise yourself to the Lord, circumcise your hearts".
“Jeremiah was also and always a bit foul-mouthed. We do not swear and circumcision hurts. There is a lot of words in here that would turn Friends off, but glory be to God, he came to us as an interpreter in the heart. A few days ago I thanked God to have been given a liberal universal translation of foul-mouthed Jeremiah. Please take a look at chapter 4 of Jeremiah with me and let's remake it in our hearts.
“If you will return to me oh Friend return to me and return me to your heart, declares the Friend of friends. Some world Friends may be surprised to know that some world Friends are allergic to some names of God. I will tell you for instance King of kings. There are good decent democratic Friends who hear the words King of kings and go oh -- and the Spirit is in them.
“If you put away the world's busyness that separates us, that separates you from the Spirit, you will no longer go astray. If in a truthful, just and righteous way you affirm, why swear? Surely as the Friend of friends lives in the heart then the nations will be blessed by that friendship and the glory will dwell in each of our hearts. Break your unploughed ground and do not throw the seed of God's love on those hard bits of the heart that won't receive it. Cut out from your heart those hard bits of the heart and put the seed in the wounds. Then you will grow, irrigate it.
“Friends, we have to interpret not just for each other, but we have to interpret in each other's heart. We have to gather and we have to let ourselves speak all the names of God that makes our heart go a-flaring. We have to confess that some names of God are difficult because of our history. If you come from a Latin Americanindigenous community and you felt that an empire came over with a cross and took your land whacking the cross about, there is a truth in that and it has to be recognised. We also have names of God, of the God that makes our heart take fire and there are names of God we say that hurt other people of goodwill and we have to know that all and circumcise our hearts. May we continue together to sing out the names of God and to learn how it is that the Friend of friends calls us to say his name to each other.”
[End of first spoken ministry]
Speaker 2:
“When I was reading the study guide and meeting with Friends in the Netherlands and working with the theme for this Triennial, I found not only in myself, but I also heard through the words of Dutch Friends that we have difficulty in attaching the word prophet or prophecy to our own personal lives, to bring these words down to ground level. I have heard names of Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King or Gandhi several times, but I also have a name and how do I visualise prophecy in my own daily life. It seems such a big word and I have two feet on the ground. This past week I had the privilege of taking part in the pre-Triennial in Northern Ireland and one of the questions that arose was how to see this thing of serving cups of tea to wives of prisoners who want to visit their husbands? They have to wait, possibly quite a long time, and Friends in Belfast started pouring cups of tea and they organised a mini bus to shuttle these wives to the prison gate and back again. As participants in a Triennial we, I think, most of us were surprised, amazed to hear that in almost 40 years’ time this has grown to an organisation with 40 employees, Quaker cottage and a Quaker house, in all a huge organisation.
“We were pondering, Is this the way to do it, start with a cup of tea and just see how it grows? Maybe we didn't answer that question, but I am very impressed with this example.”
[John Sheldon]:
“Now, Friends, we will conclude our worship this morning with the hymn Be Thou My Vision”.
(Song sung)
[Charles G. Lamb]:
“I wonder just before we separate, could we have a moment of prayer.
“Our dear loving Heavenly Father, we thank you for having brought us here safely. We thank you for the knowledge of your presence here with us. We remember those that we have left at home, some unwell, some in hospital, we ask you Lord to be with them and with the many who are remembering us who are privileged to be here. We pray Lord that as we read in John's gospel that the true light which lighteth every man to cometh into this world might shine upon us here as we gather, that our hearts may search, that we may be tried, yes, for some of us possibly even in the fire, that during our time here we might experience a cleansing of our ways, a changing of our ways, that our eyes might be opened, and that we might be found obedient to walk to your foot steps. You have said 'I am the way, the truth and the life'. We pray Lord that that might be all of our experience as we gather here and that we might hear that still small voice which corrects us, which challenges us, and guides us in the right direction and so Lord we come before you this morning with thankful hearts. Renew our right spirit within us and fill us with the presence of thy Holy Spirit. This we ask in Jesus' name. Amen.”
Thank you very much, friends, for joining with us in worship this morning. I understand there may be some notices; is that correct? No notices at the moment. So there is tea and coffee next door and we are back here again at 11:00, thank you.
Short break.
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