I always made an effort early in the semester to lay down clear parameters and guidelines so that there would be no question why a student did not fare well in class and end up failing. Early warnings are always safer than weak excuses at the end of the semester.

In retrospect, I have thought of that method as prophetic, not prophetic as in predicting the future, but prophetic as a warning that if this action continues to happen, or if such and such a behavior persists, certain sure results will follow. Actually, the method worked pretty well over the years, in fact it has been used in matters religious or moral for centuries.

You just heard a description of it in the first and third scripture readings for this current liturgy. Plainly, it is called prophecy or prophetic speech.

It is a special gift or insight that certain people have and use, not to threaten their neighbors but rather to help them discern the times in which they live and make them better.

The ones we know best from the Jewish scriptures are Isaiah (quoted today) and Jeremiah. The Christian testament, of course, claims Jesus Christ as a divine prophet and inheritor of the prophetic mantle of the great men of old.

So, what makes prophets, whether of ancient times or today, so great, so worthy of remembrance. I think it is a sort of intuition or insight about the future. Others may be distracted by contemporary worldly matters, but the prophet sees through those dangerous habits and gets to the core of what the world could be like if we were to look at life like the prophets do.

Here I suggest some contemporary types of prophets without citing names: Those who were brave enough to see into the future and warn us about our spending habits and the present recession. Others who warned about the harm to young people that smoking can bring. Others warn us that without some spiritual base on which to build our society, we will drift and lose focus. Yet others warn us about our careless spending habits. Finally, others predict that unless we in our times try to find a middle ground between our poles of conservative and liberal, our country, indeed, our expressions of faith will suffer disintegration. You readers will know of many other similar problems we face today. The issue of abortion is no doubt the most serious.

So, prophets are not simply persons who mouth pious platitudes but rather individuals who are deeply in touch with the secular world and love the it so much that they are willing to take some “heat” for the warnings they give in their particular age.

However, one of the great misapprehensions regarding prophecy, I believe, is that many feel it is the gift of the pious-minded or specially gifted. Not so, in fact, there are not very many extraordinary people we could name prophets. For that reason we ordinarily drag out the safe ones, the ones who have been most prominent in the history of our times: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, founders of religious communities, et cetera. To limit prophetic speech to a few people, however is to take a great risk.

The true prophet, to my mind is the man or woman in the neighborhood who is willing to sit on the city council, the parish council, the one who is willing to speak up at meetings that discuss community needs or problems. One might not readily describe such folks as prophetic, but prophecy is what they are practicing. They have looked into their times and spoken courageously even critically about it.

Ideally, I suppose, we should not need specially gifted people to guide our times. They arise only when the folks of the neighborhood do not themselves arise to question the issues that mean most to their neighbors.

So, I would like to believe that we are all called to be prophets: It’s our world, our city, our village, our church, and our neighborhood we should be concerned about. If we don’t care, who will?

The critical issue is that we are all called to confront our times whether anyone listens or not.

Indeed, there is a beautiful line at the conclusion of the Isaiah reading today in which God speaks directly Isaiah and predicts that this stiff-necked people will not listen. But no matter, God says: Just go out there and do what I command you. If nothing else, at least they will know that prophet has been among them.

Perhaps that is what our age needs today: People who will stand forth and speak to their times whether anyone listens or not; at least they will know a prophet has been among them.

The scriptures: Ezekiel 2: 2-5; 2 Corinthians 12: 7-10; Mark 6: 1-6