Does God still speak? If so, how would you or I know that it is God, and not our own imagination? The answer is complex, and it requires a careful study of how God has spoken in the past. Probably we are most familiar with the stories in Genesis, of God speaking to Abraham and to Moses. But there are two other groups in the Bible to whom God has spoken: the prophets, and the early Christians. The prophets are notable because they each received a call from God, and many of them struggled with the task they were given.

It is important to remind ourselves that Hebrew prophecy is not about prediction of the future, despite the fact that the words of the prophets are interpreted that way. Prophecy is a message from God, telling what the requirements of justice and mercy in the present situation, will lead to. It is open-ended and conditional, because if the people take the prophets’ words to heart, they will act, they will change, and God will respond to their actions. On the other hand, all the pagan practices which attempt to predict the future: divination, soothsaying, oracles, augury and astrology, are explicitly forbidden in the Books of Moses. Those practices are based on a different understanding of reality, namely the idea of fate, that events are predestined and inevitable.

The clear difference in Hebrew prophecy is that God and God’s people are in a covenanted relationship. When the people turn away from the covenant, the Word of God comes to the prophet, to remind people of their covenant obligations, and to give them opportunity to repent, before the punishment falls upon them. Paradoxically, the best-known example of this occurs not with the Hebrew people, but with the Assyrians of Nineveh. In the Book of Jonah, the prophet did not want to bring God’s word to Nineveh, precisely because he knew that if the people repented of their evil ways (which they did), God would change His mind about the punishment he was planning (which He did!). The purpose of prophecy, therefore, was to tell people what the immediate consequences of the present situation would be, in the near future. The goal of prophecy was either to restore the covenant relationship when it was broken, or, to assure the people that God’s deliverance is on the way.

Therefore the message of deliverance and salvation was always welcome; but the message of judgment was not welcome. Few people like to be told that what they are doing is wrong, especially if we feel our choices are limited. Most human beings are highly resistant to changing our ways, even when we know it would be better for us to exercise more, or to eat less, or to reduce the stress in our lives. Many times the prophets who brought these messages of judgment were ridiculed, rejected, thrown into cisterns or into jail, and run out of town. Their messages were generally disregarded. Jeremiah had a particularly difficult time of it, because he seems to have felt God’s anguish over the sins of the people, and to have felt the people’s anguish as well. It was, and is, a lonely task.

With all this as background, let us consider the prophet John the Baptist, and then go on to ask whether anything like prophecy still exists today. Did you know that John’s famous clothing: the camel’s hair skin and the leather belt, was the distinctive clothing of the prophet? Elijah, for example, was recognized as a prophet even before he spoke, because he wore a “hairy mantle” and a leather belt. Now, we know from the Gospel of St. Luke, that John was the son of a priest, which meant that he also could have served as a priest in the Temple, yet clearly he rejected that office. He publicly challenged the Jewish people to forget two of the beliefs on which their special status was based: first that they were descendants of Abraham, and second, that God had chosen them in the wilderness to be his holy people, and given them the promised land. In order to be saved, John said, you need something else: personal repentance, and lives, which reflect justice and mercy. A whole new beginning is what God wants.

When I began to explore the sources of John’s preaching, I discovered much of it goes back to the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah was the first one to say that sinners are like vipers, and God will cut them down like trees are felled. Isaiah was the first one who said the people would be threshed and winnowed by God. Above all, it was Isaiah who gave this prophecy of salvation in today’s first lesson: that “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped, and the lame shall leap like a deer...” John offered a process of repentance and washing both as the way to survive the judgment, and as the proper preparation for the coming salvation. And he offered it to tax collectors, to women, and to many others considered impure by the standards of the Pharisees. Both the authors of the Gospels, and the historian Josephus, report that John was highly regarded by the ordinary people, many of whom were baptized, and that he was surrounded by crowds in the wilderness.

The other group, to whom God has spoken, is the early Christians. It is clear from the story of Pentecost, that God’s Spirit was poured out on all who accepted Jesus as Lord. The book of Acts, and the rest of the New Testament, gives many examples of individuals who heard a message from God. Sometimes that message was for the Christian community, and sometime it was for the individual who received it. In Acts, and in his letters, St. Paul clearly said that God had told him both to bring financial aid to the church in Jerusalem, and also that he would be in danger in Jerusalem. So this experience of receiving a message from God does continue in the new covenant, in which we stand.

Although we can never be sure at the time, there are some simple questions we can ask when we believe God has given us a message. The first one is, does this message accord with God’s love, God’s justice, and God’s mercy? In order to answer that question, familiarity with the Bible, the whole Bible, is essential. Finding one or two verses, which seem to apply is not good enough. Any message, which harms an individual, is not likely to be from God. A second question to ask, is whether this message is for me personally, or for the whole church community? And a third question is: am I really the one called to deliver this message?

I’d like to give you three examples of how God’s messages have come to people at St. Thomas; they are all messages of God’s love and mercy requiring action. The first one came through Harold Anderson, in that famous Bible study he led in 1982. Harold was given a glimpse of God’s compassion for those who are hungry and homeless; and so he led a Bible study of the parable of the Sheep and the Goats, and asked how we ought to respond to it. As a result, members of St. Thomas decided they ought to feed the hungry, and made a Thanksgiving meal for 11 people who were hanging out at Washington Park. Then they made a plan to feed the hungry 3 days a week, as long as there would be hungry people. They certainly did not imagine that it would still be necessary 25 years later. Our 25th anniversary of the beginning of Our Daily Bread is next March, and the need has grown; right now we are often serving 250 people each day we serve. The second example must have occurred in 1999 or 2000, when we were making plans for the renovation of our kitchen, and the conversion of our Family room into a dedicated space for food preparation. Bob Williams came to the Board meeting of Our Daily Bread, and proposed with some passion, that we expand the mission of ODB to include social services for our diners, such as job counseling, housing referrals, and medical evaluations. The Board debated his proposal at some length, but eventually decided that we did not have the resources, either of space, or of volunteers, to expand the mission beyond the feeding of the hungry. Now here we are seven years later, with a grant from the Satterberg Foundation, which provides for an Outreach Worker to give simple social service help, in the form of information, referrals, and help filling out applications. The Satterberg grant was given to St. Thomas, not to Our Daily Bread, so it is an outreach provided by the church, and does not expand the mission of ODB; yet it fulfills at least some part of the message Bob brought seven years ago.

The third example arose out of our common discernment of New Objectives, which began in 2005. One of our new objectives was a new ministry of outreach to children. This meant both increasing the things we do with and for the children who come to church, and also finding some way we could minister to children in our community who do not come to church. At the Vestry retreat in 2006, Bob Williams spoke to the Vestry very strongly of his hope that our outreach to children would be a preschool. Out of that meeting, came the decision to explore 3 possible outreach ministries, and eventually, in November last year, we chose to begin our outreach to children by creating the Safe Haven Transfer Center.

I draw three important conclusions from these three examples. First, that Bob Williams stands in the prophetic tradition, of delivering a message from God, and of finding that the message was not welcomed by those who heard it! And yet, those messages have been fulfilled, not as Bob hoped or imagined, but in specific new projects we have undertaken as a parish. Isn’t this situation similar to the one described in today’s Gospel? In his prison cell, John had heard about the healings Jesus had done, and the good news Jesus had proclaimed, and he urgently wanted to know whether or not, Jesus was the fulfillment of his prophecy. John didn’t know whether the answer was Yes or No: what he had heard was not exactly as he had imagined and preached . . . yet it was close enough. My second conclusion is, that we must listen carefully whenever a single person is proposing a challenging course of action, for he or she might be a prophet. At the same time, we must be responsible in our decisions about the talents and resources we have. So third, I believe God does still speak, both to individuals in answer to prayer, and to the church, calling us to new understandings, to new ministries, and even to new ways that we might grow into the full stature of Christ. If you agree with me, consider the possibility that God may speak to you, and listen very carefully, both when you are praying, and when you are living your life. For we worship the living God, who asks us to participate in his purposes for this world.