Prophesy!

​Our reading from Acts has me thinking about prophecy.
 
As we just heard, on the first Christian Pentecost, the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages. People who heard them didn’t know what to make of all the ruckus. The more skeptical thought the Christians were just babbling drunks.
 
Peter stood up to explain. What they thought of as drunken babbling was God pouring out the Holy Spirit “upon all flesh.” In response, here Peter is quoting the Old Testament prophet Joel—“your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women,…[God] will pour out [the Holy] Spirit; and they shall prophesy.”
 
The first Pentecost was a scene of universal prophesying.
 
Now, this is a strange scene, not the kind of thing that happens very often in Episcopal Churches!
 
But Pentecost is one of the great holy days of the Christian year. Pentecost is the birthday of the Church. And at the center of the Pentecost experience is the question of prophecy. According to Peter, Pentecost was the fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy about Christians prophesying!
 
So, what does this strange scene mean for us today? Are there still prophets among us? If so, who are they?
 
How we answer that question depends largely on how we define the term “prophet.”
 
The first thing most people say is that prophets are people who predict the future. But that definition is too broad.
 
For example, Nostradamus famously made future predictions. I tend to be skeptical of Nostradamus’ claims. But even if we assume Nostradamus got it right, still he was not a prophet in the biblical sense of the term. Nostradamus based his predictions on astrology, not divine inspiration. Nostradamus was not speaking for God or by God, and, whatever else we say about prophets, it is clear that prophets speak for God.
 
But we also shouldn’t define prophecy too narrowly.
 
The prophets we know from the Old Testament, prophets like Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, have books in the Bible. The Bible is all set at this point, so if that’s what we mean by prophecy, then it isn’t happening any longer.
 
But this is where Acts gets interesting. Peter doesn’t limit prophecy to what we might think of as the A-list of prophets. Peter says that God poured out the Holy Spirit on all flesh, so that men and women, old and young, slaves and free, all prophesied. Peter understands every single member of the Christian community to be a prophet.
 
That’s because every single member of the Christian community was called to share God’s word, to speak God’s message, to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ in whatever way they could.
 
That hasn’t changed. The calling to prophesy, in Peter’s broad sense of the term, continues today. As Christian people, we are members of the body of Christ. We are sealed in baptism by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are commissioned to make disciples of all nations. And that means we are called to prophesy.
 
To be clear, I am NOT suggesting that we have the divine authority to “reveal” new things beyond what we are taught in Scripture and our tradition. Certainly I don’t!
 
But, I say again, we are, all of us, empowered by the Holy Spirit to proclaim the good news, to “prophesy” in that broad sense of the term. So, if you want to know who the prophets of today are, just look around. It’s us. It’s us along with lots of other people.
 
And the message we are supposed to proclaim hasn’t changed much in 2000 years.
 
Unfortunately, we are still doing many of the things the prophets denounced centuries ago. So, we are called to declare what God does NOT like. It’s not rocket science.
 
God does not like wars of conquest or genocide or ethnic cleansing. God does not like it when people hate each other. God does not like violence.
 
God does not like us to prioritize the interests of our narrow group over the good of the whole community.
 
God does not like some people to have billions of dollars while others can’t afford food, shelter, or medicine.
 
God doesn’t like those things. And, the prophets are clear, it’s not a good plan to do things God doesn’t like.
 
If we continue to engage in these behaviors, it does not take special revelation to know where we are headed. If we embrace violence and hatred and selfishness and greed, we will experience collective disaster. A world of warfare, and mutual hostility, and human suffering. In fact, we are already experiencing that world. We just have to look around us to see it.
 
We can think of our problems as God’s punishment for our sins. We can also think of our problems as the natural consequence of the decisions we collectively make every day. Either way, if we persist in violence and hatred and selfishness and greed, disaster is our present and our future.
 
None of that is news. The news, the heart of the prophetic message, is what comes next.
 
No matter how badly we botch it, no matter how bad things get, there is hope, hope that is rooted in the faithfulness of God.
 
Our task as God’s prophets in this generation is not to condemn what is wrong with our world. Plenty of people are doing that, from the left and the right.
 
Our task is to embrace God’s vision of what our world could be, if only we would turn from our sin. And then to share that vision with everybody.
 
Last week, I watched a docudrama on Netflix about Moses. A rabbi commentator noted that the Hebrew people Moses was sent to liberate were beaten down by oppression and slavery. They had lost the capacity for hope because they had lost the capacity to envision a future different and better than their present. They could not see beyond their suffering.
 
Moses’ first task, according to the rabbi, was to give his people hope, to share with them a vision of what was possible with God, a vision of a future world that was better than they could imagine. That is the task of a prophet.
 
People in our world have also lost hope. Many cannot imagine a bright future.
 
Our task is the same as Moses’: to embrace and to share God’s vision of a better world.
 
So we prophesy that God loves us. That God loves all of creation. That God longs to bless us, and that Gid will bless us.
 
The gift of the prophets is vision and dreams, visions and dreams of a world of peace and justice and prosperity and love. A world that we can’t see around us right now. But a world that we know is possible, indeed inevitable, because of who God is.
 
As people of faith, we hold fast to God’s vision of a better world than what we can see. We hold fast to the vision, and we commit ourselves, in whatever ways we can, to advancing that vision, with God’s help. 
 
And because our vision falters, as it inevitably does sometimes, we come together to be nourished, to hear the words of Scripture, to pray for God’s world and God’s future, to share the sacrament, to renew our vision. And then we go back out to prophesy once again.
 
And so my prayer for us, on this birthday of the Christan Church, is that we can be the prophets our generation needs us to be. In Christ’s name. Amen.