Quotes about Prophets

I guess prophets are those who do not care whether you are ready to hear their message. They say it because it has to be said and because it is true.

God did not just start talking to us with the Bible or the church or the prophets. Do we really think that God had nothing at all to say for 13.7 billion years, and started speaking only in the latest nanosecond of geological time? Did all history prior to our sacred texts provide no basis for truth or authority? Of course not. The radiance of the Divine Presence has been glowing and expanding since the beginning of time, before there were any human eyes to see or know about it.

Without some deconstruction, everything becomes idolatrous. The prophets were religious deconstructionists.

To know the Lord and his ways," as the Jewish prophets put it,250 has very little to do with intelligence and very much to do with a wonderful mixture of confidence and surrender. People who live in this way tend to be the calmest and happiest people I know. They draw their life from the inside out.

Prophets of Nature, we to them will speakA lasting inspiration, sanctifiedBy reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,Others will love, and we will teach them how;Instruct them how the mind of man becomesA thousand times more beautiful than the earthOn which he dwells.

The truth is that we are not good people who make mistakes; we are sinful people in need of mercy. Because it requires humility to accept what our hearts are truly like, those same hearts will tend to prefer to be deceived by preachers of self-esteem and self-confidence rather than listen to prophets such as Jeremiah.

Behold how Christ is the foundation of the church and the apostles are the foundations! Christ is by a figure of speech - antonomastice - the foundation because the edifice of the church begins from him and is finished in him and through him. But the prophets and apostles are the foundations because their authority bears up our weakness.

Why have the writings of the prophets endured? Because they fearlessly speak truth to power. They call out the injustice and oppression of the system gone wrong. They hold those in leadership accountable for the decisions they make.

This participation is important, because Jesus and the prophets lived with an awareness that God has been looking for partners since the beginning, people who will take seriously their divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving, sustainable ways.

I read more of the prophets, these poets and sages who spoke all kinds of truth to power. Another of the ways they explained why they'd been taken into exile was because there was a widening gap between rich and poor in their society, and whenever that happens, the entire system is in danger of imploding. Again and again prophets like Amos announce that if more and more wealth ends up in fewer and fewer hands everybody will suffer. How had I missed this?

This insistence that God will be united and reconciled with all people is a theme the writers and prophets return to again and again. They are very specific in their beliefs about who God is and what God is doing in the world, constantly affirming the simple fact that God does not fail.

We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.