“The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me,” announces the prophet Isaiah in our first reading today. This is the prototypical pronouncement of the gift of prophecy in the Old Testament. Jesus uses these very words concerning his own mission and ministry when, in the Gospel of Luke, he announces “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

But what is a prophet really? In modern times we use the word prophet to describe people, who with some alleged success, predict the future: Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, Jean Dixon and the like. Wikipedia defines prophecy this way: “in religion, a prophet (or prophetess) is a person who has encountered the supernatural or the divine, often one who serves as an intermediary with humanity....having a role in society that promotes change due to their messages and actions.”

The Hebrew word for prophet is “navi.” It means spokesperson or mouthpiece and comes from a root meaning hollow or open. Rabbi Abraham Heschel in his book, The Prophets , identifies the unique gift of the Hebrew prophets compared to the seers in the cultures that surrounded them. “The Hebrew prophets are characterized by their experience of what he calls theotropism — God turning towards humanity. He argues for the view of Hebrew prophets as receivers of the ‘Divine Pathos,’ of the wrath and sorrow of God over his nation that has forsaken him.”

Heschel writes: “Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profane riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet's words.”

St. Paul, in the First Letter to the Corinthians, tells us to seek the gift of prophecy. How do we do this? How are  we to make ourselves the voice God lends to silent agony, to the plundered poor, to the profane riches of the world?

The answers might be found by examining the examples of the saints. William Wilberforce was a member of the British Parliament from the middle of the eighteenth century the opening years of the nineteenth century. You have heard me mention him repeated in different sermons. I recently read his biography by Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the heroic campaign to end slavery. He is given credit for single-handedly drawing the British Empire to abolish the slave trade and free those held in captivity. But this is really a simplification of a very complex interaction between a core group of committed Christians in late eighteenth century England.

Wilberforce was a very small man, barely five feet tall, at one point in his life after a protracted illness he weighed only 89 pounds. Yet he had a powerful voice and was a great singer. He once gave a speech that held several hundred men in rapt attention while he was speaking during a severe rain storm in York.

Early in his life, he was drawn to the “methodist” movement of his time; this was really an evangelical reform of the Church of England which drew people to gospel living and to be concerned about the needs of the poor. This early inclination toward faith was frowned on in the upper classes of Great Britain and alarmed his grandfather and mother so much that they worked very hard with some intermediate success to turn his attention to worldly pursuits and ambitions. After he had been in Parliament for a few years he experienced what might be called his second deep conversion, turning toward God in a deep and personal way and reexamining his life in the light of faith. He became immersed in a community of like-minded Christians who dissuaded him from resigning his seat in Commons and two greater goals in his life than simple personal ambition. His major goal, the one for which he is remembered, was the abolition of the slave trade. The group of people collaborating with him in this effort are referred to as the Claphamites, because they had all chosen to live near each other in tbe small village of Clapham about eight miles out of London. The fact is he didn’t single-handedly work for the abolition of the slave trade; he collaborated with this close group of friends and fellow believers who shared with him this vision for change in the society of his time.

Wilberforce and his collaborators were appalled by the atrocities of the slave trade being undertaken by Britain in their time. Ships would take British trade good to Western Africa, trade them for slaves transporting them against their will in horrific quarters across the Atlantic to the British West Indies, selling them and purchasing goods from the New World which would in turn be transported to Britain to complete the triangle of ghastly commerce. The “Middle Passage,” the route from Africa to the Caribbean, as it was called, was a living hell for the men, women and children transported their. Their lives in the sugar plantations of the British West Indies, were no better, where they were literally worked to death simply to be replaced by fresh boatloads of natives mercilessly ripped from their lives in Africa.

Wilberforce and his companions changed the world in the course of about fifty years so that after their time, slavery was inconceivable, as it is to us today.

To do this, they practiced what we might call “community organizing.” They sponsored public lectures and books exposing the inhumanity, the depth of cruelty inherent in the slave trade. They invented the idea of petitions (so familiar to us in our political system of today). They inundated the British Parliament over and over with thousands upon thousands of signatures condemning the slave trade. Wars and rumors of wars interrupted their progress; royal scandals every bit as titillating as the saga of Queen Elizabeth’s children interfered with the accomplishment of their goals but they persevered not over years, but over decades, struggling with discouragement but never losing touch with the vision of justice that moved them.

And they ended up changing the world.  Metaxas writes: “We seethe with moral indignation at [slavery] and we can't fathom how anyone or any culture ever countenanced it. But in the world into which Wilberforce was born, the opposite was true. Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe for five thousand years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.”

So how did Wilberforce and his companions create this sea change in human history? The tools they used (or rather, in some sense, used them) were deep conversion, open-hearted attention to the Gospel and the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, immersion in a community of faith and action, and dogged persistence against all odds and in the face of repeated defeat; deep conversion, open-hearted attention to the Gospel and the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, immersion in a community of faith and action, and dogged persistence against all odds and in the face of repeated defeat. deep conversion; open-hearted attention to the Gospel and the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, immersion in a community of faith and action, and dogged persistence against all odds and in the face of repeated defeat.

So what, then, are we called to do? How are we to be the voice God gives to silent anguish and to the plundered poor? There isn’t a single answer to this question. There are many ways that we can singly and in community live out this call to be the Divine Pathos in this suffering world that surrounds us.

Are we called, like the Claphamites, to take on one task to change the world from the way we think it has to be into the way  we believe God wants it to be?

I’m sorry to be a disappointment to you, but I do not have the answers these questions. They are not mine to answer, except for perhaps for myself alone in the silent depths of my heart before God. What are your answers? What are our answers going to be?

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