Who are the prophets in your life? These are people about whom we seldom speak. These are the people who have helped you to take, through their words or actions, a hard look at what needs to be let go of, corrected, put in line—so that your life could begin to have the energy to move ahead in more life-giving ways.

At Parables: All-Abilities Inclusion Worship in March 2025 we will be embracing the value of this dimension of our faith. Prophets are everywhere in every age! They are not just people like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or Malachi who have had books in the Bible named after them. They may be our mentors, coaches, teachers, therapists, spouses, children, neighbors—even our opponents. In fact, maybe it’s with our opponents that we should begin.

Opponents are folks we are tempted to call “enemies”—or worse. We don’t like them. At all sometimes. But in their own way, they sometimes show us what we don’t want in our lives so clearly, that we are driven to make changes for ourselves we wouldn’t otherwise have the patience and perseverance for. My own father, late in his life and reflecting on the many regrets he had, said to me: “Some people are given fathers who are good role models for them. But even a bad-role-model father would have helped me out ’cause I would have been able to at least see what I didn’t want to become. I had no role model at all, and that’s been hard.” Indeed. For my sister and me, as well. Prophets are invaluable to the well-being of not just families, but the very fabric of our society.

Father Richard Rohr has described prophets as those who help us (individually and collectively) to take one step back so that we can better take two steps forward (https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-prophetic-path-of-scripture/ ). He describes the prophetic way as one with 3 movements:

Confront, Convert, and Console

That’s what we hear in these last few words, in what Christians call the First Testament, from the prophet Malachi: “Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can withstand his appearance? He is like the refiner’s fire or the cleaner’s soap”(verse 3:2). And Malachi 4: 5-6a: “Look, I am sending Elijah the prophet to you, before the great and terrifying day of the Lord arrives. Turn the hearts of the parents to the children and the hearts of the children to their parents.”

Prophets are often called troublemakers by many. They are made into scapegoats. They are blamed for stirring up trouble where there wasn’t any before, as we saw during the Civil Rights Era when people began to non-violently protest and parade, sit-in and stand-up for a broader sense of human dignity in the world. These prophets were called “agitators” and labelled and arrested and fined and killed.

But the Spirit of prophets never dies with them. It is forever present with us. And many of us are looking with new eyes and listening with new hearts for their wisdom. This month at Parables we’ll be taking a closer look each week at what today’s prophets are telling us about the state of the world we’re in and how to find our place in responding and directing our energies and focus.

We don’t like to be told that we must let go, loosen our grip on what we’ve always known, release what is familiar and known. It always feels like death—and it is. That’s why change is often so hard. Change always involves loss of some kind, and with loss there is inevitable grief. But the prophetic path is the Christian path, as it contains the Paschal Mystery we honor every year at Lent and Easter:

Holy Week: After confronting what needs to be surrendered to Love

Good Friday: (and the feelings and experiences of loss and death that brings)

Holy Saturday: is the experience of being converted or transformed into seeing oneself and the world anew.

Easter: What consolation, joy, and connection it is to experience this very human phenomenon, just as it has been experienced by creation for billions of years!

To every thing there is a season. A time for planting and a time for uprooting what was planted, a time for keeping and a time for throwing away, a time for searching and a time for losing, a time for killing and a time for healing (Ecclesiastes 3, selected verses).

But our “thinking minds” can’t see this Paschal Mystery of wholeness. Our small selves only see life as moments of either pleasure or displeasure, good or bad. This is why we need the vision of the prophets among us in active ways: Prophets remind us that everything belongs, even if we can’t quite understand what that means yet.

One of today’s prophets is an American Sikh woman named Valarie Kaur. Her Revolutionary Love Project (https://revolutionarylove.org/)is a swelling force for good and peace through the power of inclusion, not exclusion. During this season of Lent for Christians and Ramadan for Muslims, may we all be blessed to find our hearts opened again and again by the voices of prophets among us. May the grace of the divine allow us all to be prophets for one another in life-giving ways, as well. Amen.