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.