Who are Prophets Anyway?

Sermon. 12 July 2015. Trinity 6/Proper 10. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford

Amos 7.7-15

Mark 6.14-29

Today, I'd like us spend a bit of time thinking about prophets. I am not thinking of monetary profits, although, what with all that is happening with Greece and elsewhere at the moment, that would be worthy of discussion. In the Lord's Prayer, when we pray 'forgive us our sins [or trespasses]' we are actually praying 'forgive us our debts, as we forgive those indebted to us'. So, at one level or another, Christians should have some important things to say about our systems of money, lending, debt, regulation, lack or regulation, fairness and so on. But that's for another time.

Here and now I am thinking of prophets. P.R.O.P.H.E.T.S. People who prophesy. And to start in the most predictable way: I am asking (and it's a real question): who is a prophet? In the Bible in particular, what is a prophet?

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The common idea of a prophet is someone who can see into the future. In other words, a soothsayer. A fortune-teller. Many, even in our day, use the word with that meaning. A politician if asked what is going to happen may well begin their answer: 'Well, I'm not a prophet, but...'.

Actually, even outside of the Bible, that is not what the word originally meant. The Greek prophetes doesn't mean a 'fore-teller' of the future but a 'forth-teller' – someone who speaks forth uncomfortable truths. 

There were fortune-tellers in the Greek world. But they tended to be called 'sibyls' and they gave 'oracles'. For that matter, the idea of fortune-telling is not entirely absent from the Bible. But it comes in the form of

a) 'divinisation' (supposed contact with the dead) which was heavily frowned upon, or

b) dreams, which were okay.

And there also seems to have been

c) the strange practice of working with the Urim and Thummim. Urim and Thummin formed a barely imaginable contraption with jewels, which we assume you could somehow spin or shake to get an answer to an uncertainty [Ex. 28:15–30; Lev. 8:8]. But the point is, however it worked, the person in charge of the Urim and Thummim was not a prophet, but a priest.

So a prophet is not - not at all – a fortune-teller, but rather someone who, by Gd's grace, authentically senses the way things are going, and speak Gd's will into a situation. As I say, a forth-teller. And this is so, even though another word for a prophet is a 'seer' (and cf. 1 Sam 9.9), as indeed in today's First Reading. A 'seer' in the Bible is the one who can, by Gd's grace, 'see the writing on the wall', as it were and speaks out.

A bit more teaching, if you can bear it (and, bluntly, even if you can't). People do sometimes understand that a prophet is not a fortune-teller but a speaker of Gd's will. And they go on to divide the territory up this way: the priest speaks to Gd on behalf of the people; the prophet speaks to the people on behalf of Gd. This is at best half right.

It is true that a biblical prophet speaks on behalf of another. When Gd charges Moses with leading the People out of slavery (Ex 7.1), Gd says: 'See I have made you [Moses] like Gd to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet.' See? Aaron is Moses's 'prophet', because Aaron will speak on Moses's behalf (because Moses has a speech impediment of some sort). A prophet-as-prophet never speaks for themselves, but always 'on behalf of'.

But! But a prophet can also speak to Gd on behalf of people. The first person to be called a prophet is (any ideas...?) Abraham. And Gd says this to a certain King Abimelech who was on the point of getting it together with Sarah, Abraham's wife (Gen 20.7): 'Now, then, return the man's wife; for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you shall live.' The prophet is one who prays.

Just two more things. Another over-simplification is that priests are always insiders, and prophets are always outsiders. There were also insider-prophets. They actually get a mention in the first reading today. When Amos says 'I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son', he is not necessarily speaking of his family background. The underlying Hebrew says: 'I am not a prophet nor one of the sons of the prophets'. And 'the sons of the prophets' many think is a technical term. In fact it's sometimes translated 'I am not a prophet, nor one of the Guild of Prophets'. So there were professional prophets. Court prophets. Temple prophets. And if you think that these people were probably self-serving yes-men... you may well be right. After all, we hear from Amos the trouble-maker – his message was preserved - and not the professional Guild of the Prophets.

But there is another model of being an insider-prophet. Among the great prophets who have their own books, Isaiah was clearly at home in the Jerusalem Temple, and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Zechariah were actually priests as well as prophets. So, there's no easy way of spotting a prophet by where they stand in society (either way round).

And here is the last teaching point. I've only walked out of church two or three times in my life (and promise not to, today). But one was when a priest was preaching a sermon about keeping women in their place. And, among the false things he said (and I won't tell you who or where he was), he said that all prophets were men and there were no female prophets. So here goes:

In the Old Testament

Miriam

Deborah

Huldah

Noadiah

and Isaiah's wife are all called prophets,

and in the New Testament so are

Anna and

the daughters of Philip.

It is true that we don't know anything like as much about them as we do the great male prophets, like Moses, Elijah and Isaiah. But they must not be written out of the story.

*

So, brothers and sisters, some teaching on prophets in the Bible. Why this, now? - you'll long have been asking. Well, I'll say what I've said before and may well say again: in our cycle of readings, the First Reading and the Gospel echo and mirror and illumine each other. Today, I am suggesting that the passage from the prophet Amos echoes the story of the death of the prophet (and more-than-a-prophet) John the Baptist.

Now, in spite of what I've just said, Amos and John the Baptist were outsiders. Amos denies he's a professional prophet. John the Baptist yet more extremely lived in the wilderness, wearing a hair shirt and eating locusts and wild honey.

The thing about Amos is, for all he criticises the people and their worship, he has little to say about idolatry. The people do, in their own minds, intend to worship the one true Gd. But in the way they organise their life together, outside of worship, they exclude the poor and the marginal. And for that they hear in another place these harsh, harsh words from Amos on behalf of Gd (5.21-24):

I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.'

Tough love, you might say.

We'd be mad to look forward to having a prophet among us. Life would get harder, no doubt. Both for us, and for the prophet. And yet the Church can only be renewed by prophecy. So may we have not the prophets we want, but the prophets we need. 
Amen.