Do we kill our prophets? What do you think?
Yes or No?
Life for the ‘truth speakers’ or death?
Once upon a time, not so very long ago,
we used to send canary’s down mine shafts to see if the air was safe.
If the wee yellow birds stopped singing, then the men knew that there was: ‘trouble down at mine’.

In a recent article from the Times newspaper the following was reported:
‘Scientists have for the first time found evidence that polar bears are drowning because climate change is melting the Arctic ice shelf.
The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food. They are being forced into the long voyages because the ice floes from which they feed are melting,
becoming smaller and drifting farther apart.

Although polar bears are strong swimmers,
they are adapted for swimming close to the shore.
Their sea journeys leave them vulnerable to exhaustion,
hypothermia or being swamped by waves.
According to the new research, four bear carcases were found floating
in one month in a single patch of sea off the north coast of Alaska, where average summer temperatures have increased by 2-3C degrees
since the 1950s.

The scientists believe such drownings are becoming widespread across the Arctic, an inevitable consequence of the doubling in the past 20 years of the proportion of polar bears having to swim in open seas.’

‘There’s trouble down at mine’
In the reading from the gospel of Luke that we heard today,                          

Jesus is clearly aware that his time,
like the canarys and the polar bears,        
will soon be up.

He has been swimming and singing as fast as he can,
for as long as he can
but the gases are circling, the ice floes are far apart
and the Roman Empire is getting anxious.

Do we kill our prophets?                                       Ghandi, Bonhoeffer, Bishop Romero, Martin Luther King.       
Do we kill our prophets?
Of course we do, we always have.

Etymologically the prophet is the one who ‘speaks for another’
and in the Judaic Christian tradition the prophet has always been understood
as the one who speaks for God. Traditionally the prophet is the truth teller,
the one who can see what others choose not to, 

the one who warns that we have lost our way.

Jesus understands his ministry as one which follows in the footsteps
of the great Jewish prophets (prophets like Isaiah and Ezekial and Amos)
who have gone before him. And in this passage, according to Uniting Church theologian William Loader:
‘Luke is linking Jesus (ministry) with the prophets and his death with their deaths…and he is also associating Christ with ‘Wisdom’. In Jewish literature ‘Wisdom’ (or Sophia) was pictured as God’s treasured companion, who sent the prophets and brought God’s Word to expression’.

Christ, in Luke, goes on to give us the picture of himself as mother hen.
Soft, brooding, brave and vulnerable,
gathering us chicks and keeping us safe.
Christ, in other words, sees himself, as compassionate and caring mother.
Thus we are given the prophet as not only one who sees, warns and protests
but he or she
is also the one who cares.

A few weeks ago on ABC radio, Professor Tim Flannery,
an expert in scientific research on the effects of climate change,
told Margaret Throsby he was "heartsick" at the number of politicians
prone to talk down the effect of global warming.
In a later interview Flannery told ABC television's Lateline
"What we've seen in the Arctic over the last two years has been such breathtaking change that you have to worry about stability for sea levels and for the entire northern hemisphere climate system.
The rate of ice melt in 2005 increased by about five times over what it was previously. It's been very, very large again in 2006”.
Do we kill our prophets?

Interestingly, the answer to this question may be changing.
Professor Tim Flannery has, as most of you know,
been voted our new Australian of the Year,
he is being listened to and taken seriously, even, finally, by self described ‘climate change realists’ like John Howard.
And even more recently American Democrat politician, Al Gore,
has won an Oscar for his controversial film on global warming
‘An Inconvenient Truth’

And all over the world, communities large and small are having their own little epiphanies about how desperate this situation is becoming and how real the need for change truly is.

Maybe, just maybe, the polar bears and canaries and mother hens of this world might just, finally, have begun to be heard.

 

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