Back in 2007 I took a group of twenty to Central Zimbabwe for two weeks. The day after we arrived we walked to a farm and saw with our own eyes the desert that had once been a thriving and fertile farm. It has to be remembered that this was a time when the Zimbabwean economy was in free-fall and inflation at a mere 10,000%. We experienced constant power cuts, water stoppages and harassment from Zanu PF’s dodgy police.

While walking around the arid farm, and wondering how on earth a future might be shaped out of this disaster – the breadbasket of Africa become the basket case of Africa – my misery was interrupted by something easily missed and apparently trivial. It was a single rose, about twelve inches high, planted and watered in a small hole in the dry soil. It looked feeble and misplaced – almost futile. But, as everything else seemed to be closing down and smelling of death, here was a prophetic symbol of hope. It seemed to be saying that the is a future – that there is more to reality than what appears as the immediate evidence of your eyes. It was placing a question mark over the dominant gloom, whispering a new melody over the grinding music of doom.

In my presidential address to the Bradford Diocesan Synod this morning I called for our diocese to be ambitious and prophetic and I said it like this:

We should be ambitious. We should be confident about our vocation and the God who gives us it.
In all these matters we are being invited to be prophetic. I know the word is over-used. (I remember the Archbishop of Canterbury saying that when people ask him to be prophetic, what they really mean is: ‘Say loudly what I want to hear you say!’) But, to be prophetic in the biblical tradition is to catch a glimpse behind the curtain of our time and place – a glimpse of the glory of the God who, in the face of our pessimism and gloom, always whispers words such as ‘resurrection’, ‘renewal, or (in Walter Brueggemann’s memorable phrase) ‘newness after loss’. Being prophetic is to plant a seed when everyone else tells us the ground is dried up. It is to build a house when everybody else is demolishing and leaving. It is to sing a song when everybody else has gone silent. It is to build a boat when there isn’t any water… yet.
It is to be a sign of hope – assuming a future. As Rowan Williams says of Dostoyevsky, there is never a final word in the conversation; there is always more to be said. Just as there is nothing new under the sun, there is never an ‘end’ in the economy of a God for whom even death doesn’t finish everything off.

The Occupy movement does not have a monopoly on prophetic action. Every action, word or symbol that defies ‘endings’ by holding out even a tiny promise of a new beginning – a future beyond the loss – is prophetic. And hopeful.

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