Their inability (or unwillingness) to walk with God becomes a terrifying thing when reading Kings. Often these days, people feel disconnected from those in power and powerless to change anything. This powerlessness is translated into apathy. In Kings, the people are punished along with the King because the King belongs to the people and vice versa. I wonder if this relationship inspired prophets to come forward, to risk their own lives to speak Truth to power. The disconnection that we feel as a society to those in power is what might be the first step towards national sin. And I am as guilty as the next person in this dynamic.
If sin can be understood as “missing the mark,” and we have a responsibility as a people to hold our leaders accountable for their actions in the world and their faithfulness to God’s will, then we have sinned beyond comprehension. This relationship of holding leaders accountable for their actions takes the spotlight off them and shines it on all the rest of us. How then, are we as a nation (Canadians or Americans) responsible for the wars that our leaders have ignited? How are we responsible for the torture of human beings by the government? The list of ways in which our hands have been stained with another’s blood is close to endless. We have reached such a terrible level of apathy that we no longer even see the pain. We no longer open ourselves to the visions that we are given from God of how we have walked off the path. We no longer put ourselves in true harm’s way in order to change what we know to be truly wrong.
All this begs the question: how were things different in biblical times? Were they? Or have these stories been given to us in order to inspire us into action? Into seeing from a longer term perspective than the eighty years (or so) that we are given on this earth what damage can be done by those who are in a place of power and do not act from a place of Divine guidance? We are all guilty for being a part of this terrible dynamic. And the privilege that we have in North America satiates us to a place of lethargy and apathy.
The first thing that Samuel had to do as a prophet was to open himself to hearing God’s message. Then he had a responsibility to share it as he was led. Those are two of the hardest things to do: to open oneself to being used for Divine purposes (knowing that the attempts to control one’s life look drastically different afterwards) and then to follow through (knowing that one would not be the same if they heard the call and ignored it).
How are we keeping ourselves from hearing God’s call as a people? How have we turned away from the path? How have we missed the mark? And what responsibility do we have to follow through with our callings no matter what the personal cost may be?
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Some further thoughts on the subject are the questions of what this means to the Religious Society of Friends specifically. Often, Quakers find themselves in leadership positions in the world. How are we holding each other accountable for following God's will in our work? Are we?
This also raises questions about the dynamics of leadership within the Religious Society of Friends. I have heard it said (and sometimes said it myself) that Quakers have a difficult time accepting leadership when it challenges the faith body. (Disclaimer: this is not always the case - and in my experience, sometimes Friends are deeply grateful for those who pose challenges and questions to the faith body to inspire growth. Sometimes we welcome prophets with open arms.)
But sometimes, we don't welcome those messages. Instead, we question those prophets who speak Truth to power, we find ways of discounting the Truth that they have brought before us. I wonder if we are questioning our leaders out of a place of nudging from the Divine - and wanting to hold them accountable ... Or if we are questioning them (and sometimes disabling them) from a place of fear, not wanting to be crucified along with them? Are we, as a religious body, willing to come under fire from others when one of our own speaks Truth to power ... and pays for it? Or do we disable leadership in order to shirk the responsibility that may come with radical calls back into faithfulness?
Let me be clear that I don't know the answers to these questions that I am posing, nor do I have any set opinions. I am merely posing the questions, with the hopes that it inspires responses for others. Food for thought, if you will.
It seems to me that no matter what the one's personal relationship with authority is ... the world needs prophets. And if you are being called to speak Truth to power, it is not just yourself or God that you are failing if you refuse to do so, but your global community.
Blessed be, dear F/friends. May we all find the strength to open ourselves to the messages we are given by the Divine, the courage to speak them and the wisdom to discern the right path forward.
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Comments
Since you're asking questions, I'd add another: do we have much in the way of prophetic leadership (or any kind of authentic leadership) in the RSoF these days? My worry is that we've built up a lot of bureaucratic institution whose first allegiance is the maintenance of the organization. We spend a lot of energy publicizing new initiatives (look at what we're doing!, give us money!) but not much time worrying if they're really doing anything important. Maybe it's actually important that they don't do anything important, in that any real stance would cause a conflict that no one wants (we're not controversial!, give us money!). A lot of the people who survive long enough to become established leaders in the institutions are people good at saying nothing in a way that sounds deep. In my experience they rarely have a long-term vision or understanding how their decisions affect Quakerism.
When you wrote "one of our coming under fire" I thought about Tom Fox and about how most Quaker leaders ignored what was happening to him (I wrote about it here). If we can't transcend business-as-usual and MOBILIZE in such a classic religious witness (and such a perfect outreach opportunity), then what are we doing? Long-term I'm hoping the dynamics of the internet will help us connect, communicate and mobilize without the need for cumbersome bureaucracies and their self-defeating compromises.
Thanks for the post,
Martin @ Quaker Ranter
Thank you for your comment ... and my apologies for taking forever to comment back. Your asked, "do we have much in the way of prophetic leadership (or any kind of authentic leadership) in the RSoF these days?" I have mixed responses to that question. I agree that the institutionalization of Quaker work has silenced many of those voices ... and the institutions themselves have become burdensome in many ways instead of being the empowering organizations they were meant to be. It seems to me that we have a bad case of the "old-boy dynamic" within our institutions. We are so busy protecting what we have built that we are no longer working for God's will but our own.
That having been said, I believe that there are prophetic voices within Quakerism. I have heard them. But these voices are isolated in their work, and often are ignored long enough that they lose the ability to continue to challenge the structures that are holding us back. I see prophetic voices being silenced by fear and power. And it breaks my heart.
I think you are right about the power of the internet to continue to grow this movement of Truth-telling. But I think it, also, has some serious dangers in becoming institutionalized. I think the more we rely on one thing to feed us within our spiritually community, the more likely we are to defend it when it is challenged, and the more likely it is to become stagnant. The challenge then, is how to feel fed by the communities we are involved in, supported enough to continue to push our comfort edges and to continue to find enough resources that we don't put all our eggs in one basket.
A healthy meeting with access to what we might call the full Quaker toolbox would recognize the gift of ministry and encourage and challenge them in that role. But we've largely stripped ourselves of "gifts" language and institutionalized the roles of ministry and eldership into committees. "Gifts we must tend to" become "appointments we must serve" and the message gets blunted. Committees work well for some meeting functions but it seems like the nature of prophetic ministry for it to start with the lone individual.
At it's most basic I think of prophetic ministry as a message to the faith community that: 1) we're doing something wrong; and 2) we must change as a body if we're to conform to God's will. I've seen Friends with a gift of ministry and a sense of isolation from their meeting find the blogosphere, flower with the realization that they're not alone, get frustrated when they realized they didn't have a way to share this with their physical meeting, then finally leave the Society of Friends. That's a loss to us all.
The Inward Christ is the only worthwhile basket (whatever color we paint it, whatever name we give Him). The internet is just an easy way to break through the isolation and/or do an end-run around any institutional roadblocks. You can start a Facebook group in five minutes and quickly start organizing your friends. The most read Quaker publication in the world is surely Quaker.org.
@Truth Be Told: no one's getting rich doing Quaker work and even the highest paid staffers could easily have picked more lucrative careers. I may never have reached the inner sanctums but with eight years of professional Quakerism under my belt I can report that there's not that much interesting stuff happening behind the doors.
@Marshall: I wonder if the test isn't having the right prophecy but delivering the prophecy we've been given. When God instructed Abraham to sacrifice his son surely He wasn't doing so out of blood lust but out of a desire to instruct and test Abraham's faith. It's possible that God might have reason to give individuals the wrong prophecies as a way to instruct and test the church body.
Do not get your hope up about the internet. The internet allows people to connect and share important ideas in new ways but the internet does not gets us "behind the doors" and into the White "good old boy" network that dominates Quakerism and the world. The internet aids in grassroots activism (usually an extremely weak and useless form of activism) but cannot replace activism "on the street,' in communities, and in the "real world" outside the internet to promote a radical attack on Quaker nonactivism and Quaker leaders' "money grubbing."
I like your questions, and I agree that they are essential ones that we ought to be asking ourselves more frequently as the power of civilization (and of people in general) escalates further and further beyond what it was that nature bestowed us with.
Possibly, however, if you look I believe you will find prophets, just prophets of a different nature. Today volunteering is up to the highest levels it's been since Kennedy was president. Perhaps the people who engage in these sorts of behaviors aren't exactly preaching religion, but they are preaching action, and (one would like to think) compassion. In the end isn't that what religion is all about?
I agree with you that people feel more disconnected now than previously from their ability to change the world around them. But I doubt this is new. The fundamental structure of society is based on the notion that is more efficient to have many individuals with specialization of talents than an entire community of people working to perform the same skills (i.e. farming/hunting).
Many philosophers have noted that there always seems to be a "golden era" in a society's history. One where everything was right and the people had control over what they did, and men and women of power were virtuous and so on. This era almost always exists just outsides the boundaries of memory of a society, right before enough time has passed for historians to determine some of the hidden secrets behind the events that transpired.
Anyway thanks for the food for though. You've made my Monday morning pretty cool.
Yet it is so hard, isn't it, to live prophetically, speaking truth to power with no regard for money or stability? So hard to even hear God, much less say, "Lord, here I am. You called me." I often think to myself that -- were I truly the believing Friend I think myself to be -- my life would be very different, much more given to speaking truth to power. I could start with war tax resistance. But I am afraid, Lord! I don't want to mess up my nice middle-class existence. Or more to the point, I don't want to mess things up for my wife and children. And so I don't take all the stands I might.
I know that a life lived walking with God, ignoring these fears, would be intense and fulfilling and hasten the Kingdom of God here on earth. But it is such a challenge to balance these things, to figure out what God really does require of us -- and do it.
Kent
The problem with real-life prophecy is that it all too easily gets entangled with human limitations:
1) If one person sees a tragedy coming, First-Isaiah-style or Jeremiah-style, and calls to others around her for prompt, meaningful action in response, is she a prophet through whom God is speaking, or might she be honestly mistaken, as human beings so often are?
2) If those other people drag their heels and don't respond as she asks, but say instead, "we need another year to think and pray about the matter, and come to unity on it" — and another year, and another year after that — "we need more studies, more hard evidence that doing as you say is truly necessary" — are they resisting God's call or being reasonable?
3) If the person who has asked for action starts to feel like Cassandra, the Trojan prophet that no one listened to, is that truthful self-perception or excessive self-importance?
As someone who has spent nearly half his life working in the environmental field, and who was organizing workshops on greenhouse warming way back in the 1980s when only a handful of people were paying any attention at all, I've had to wrestle with such questions for more than a quarter century. The answers have never come easily.
In real life, if you see an urgent need, or a disaster in the making, of the sort that requires a response from many more people than yourself, you do have to stand up and call on others to get involved, to take action before it's too late. That is your duty as a child of Jesus's God and a member of the human community.
And if others don't respond to your pleas, that may be tragic —
But if the people you talk to don't respond to your pleas by taking immediate action, it's nonetheless important to remember that the reasons why they don't do so are going to be reasons that seem reasonable to them. Their reasons might even be correct.
In my personal, humble opinion, the tragedy of the human race not listening to environmental prophets today, is a bigger tragedy than any depicted in the Old Testament. The failure of the twentieth-century human community to listen to its prophets on the matter, and to act as they have pled with it to act, has been fairly heartbreaking.
But the flip side is that the people who don't take meaningful action when meaningful action is needed, generally do have reasons that seem good to themselves for not doing so. And prophets have to work with that situation, just like everybody else. Which means that prophets have to hear the seemingly-compelling reasons for not acting promptly that hold back the people around them, and show that they hear and respect those reasons, even as they strive to overcome them. Stephen Schneider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Schneider) and Al Gore have had to do this. Environmentalists dealing with the sometimes purblind behavior of Georgians (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/26/AR2007102602452.html?hpid=sec-nation) in the face of that state's current drought have had to do this. That, too, is part of their duty as children of Jesus's God and members of the human community: they have to respect the testimony of equality, and not just try to force the people around them into compliance.
The Old Testament doesn't talk about that part of the picture. It doesn't apply the testimony of equality to the prophets vis-à-vis everyone else, because it knows, with the wisdom of a later generation, that the prophets were right and the people around them wrong.
But the testimony of equality still applies.
All the best,
Marshall Massey (Iowa YM [C]) (http://journal.earthwitness.org/)
But I wonder if the communities that the prophets are speaking to truly see them as equals ... Or if they are so challenged by the message that they bring that their response is to belittle the prophet (internally, of course) in order to maintain their comfort and sense of superiority. This would explain why the prophet would need to back up their message so fully when the other is only required to be convinced.
Is it equality when there is an internal denial of the Truth another carries for the community? Or is the struggle then about the prophet becoming equal in the conversation ... And then only do the shifts begin to happen.
There are only a handful of Quaker Scholars in the world and Quakers have no school producing religious scholars or leaders. Even that notorious school in Richmond, Indiana produces "leaders" with substandard education as it has substandard academic standards. Quakers.....They need to reappear....307 years is too long for a people to fail to abide by their testimonies!