Two weeks ago I looked with you at the first part of the document known as the "Sources of the Living Tradition". That "first source" was "direct experience. Today we're looking at the second of the sources, or influences on our personal and collective beliefs, and it's this (you can look it up in the hymnbook, if you like, on the page before Hymn # 1):

"Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love."

What prophetic women and men have contributed to your beliefs and outlook on life, I wonder? "Prophetic" in this sense isn't so much about predicting the future as it's about "teaching as one inspired " or "speaking publicly for a cause or a religion", to use definitions from a dictionary. Take a few moments to think about some of the people from the public domain (that is, people from outside your personal acquaintance) who've prophetically influenced your thinking and your life. They could be people from the ancient past or from recent times. Some of the possibilities - people who've influenced many of us - are Gautama Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Martin Luther, John Calvin, William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Pierre Trudeau, Cesar Chavez, Peter Gzowski, Svend Robinson ....... oh, an endless list! Some of those I've mentioned are familiar to all of us; others may not ring a bell with you at all - that's because any list of people we consider prophetic or influential is very personal and individual indeed. Consider who you'd include on your own list. And I'll tell you my own top three, which will almost certainly be different from yours but which may stimulate you to consider some personalities you might have forgotten. Afterwards, I'll do the same with some personal acquaintances who've been prophetic for me - but first, those in the public domain, people I never actually met.

My top three prophetic influences from the public sphere, as far as I can tell, have been Jesus of Nazareth, Winston Churchill, and Mahatma Gandhi. Any surprises there? (No women, alas - but wait till I get to the private sphere.) I certainly surprised myself when I put Winston Churchill on this list ....... but let's look at them in order. First, Jesus, which won't have surprised you at all. When I led a course on "The Six Sources of Our Faith" last Fall, I asked people in the group to consider when and how they first came to know about the prophets they chose and why they'd made such an impression. I first heard about Jesus when I was very young indeed, in what was called the "Cradle Roll" class at Methodist Sunday School in England - equivalent, I suppose, to our "Babies and Toddlers" room. Later, I would hear about lots of other Biblical characters, but Jesus was the one who made the first and strongest impression on me. When I started school, a Roman Catholic school where I was taught by Dominican nuns, I encountered the same person, although he went by a different name and it took me a little while to figure out that "Our Lord" was just an alias for Jesus.

The fact that I encountered Jesus so early is, I'm sure, the main reason why he's been my major prophetic influence. If I'd been born to a Hindu or Confucian family, or if I were starting with a blank slate of a mind today, the story would be very different. I can't, though, can I? I find it important to realize that we actually can't start with a blank slate, and that our earliest influences nearly always remain the most powerful ones. I couldn't replace Jesus with another prophet, even if I wanted to; I'm stuck with him, just as I'm stuck with my parents and the way they raised me. Well, let me modify that to take account of what you're probably thinking. I don't believe we're prisoners of our upbringing or our early learning: we can, as adults, come to rational decisions about what's true and good, and we can reject beliefs and former heroes we no longer find valid, but I don't think we can simply remove them from our deepest consciousness. People I know who've become practising Buddhists, for example, after being brought up as devout Christians, have found that to adopt a new way of thinking and seeing the world requires an enormous amount of dedication and study and self-discipline, and that it isn't helped by denying their earlier outlook but by becoming as aware of it as possible and integrating it's reality into their new way. I rather think that people who become atheists or simply non-believers can also be helped by being as aware as possible of their earliest influences and trying to integrate them rather than expunge them.

You may have noticed that I haven't yet said anything about how the prophet Jesus has influenced me. I'm going to explore that a bit more when we deal with the fourth source, Jewish and Christian teachings, so I'll simply say for now that the main influence which the words and deeds of Jesus have had on me can be summed up in one of the stories about him in the gospels. Jesus is said to have got into trouble with the religious establishment because he healed someone on the Sabbath. When he was confronted about this, he's reported to have said, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." In other words, no rules or traditions or principles can ever take precedence over human needs and loving actions. Everything that Jesus apparently taught and did seems to me consistent with this overall philosophy. We sometimes call it "situation ethics" these days, and it's my kind of ethics. I'm grateful for the words and deeds which helped me to find this outlook; they are words and deeds I now choose to appreciate.

The second of my top three prophetic influences was Winston Churchill, and I was truly astonished when I found myself including his name so prominently in this talk. He was a conservative politician and I'm a socialist; he was a great wartime leader and military strategist and I'm totally turned off by anything related to war and military affairs; he was a macho member of the British aristocracy and I'm a middle-class woman who gave up allegiance to Britain when I became a Canadian citizen, without even a second thought. What on earth is the connection here?

I think it has to do with what I said earlier about Jesus; it's about how I grew up. I was born one month after the outbreak of the Second World War in England, and although I was hardly conscious of wartime, and certainly knew nothing of political leaders, the atmosphere was all round me. Although Churchill was ousted from office almost as soon as the war was over in 1945, his words and influence had not only dramatically affected the outcome of events but had permeated the thinking of the whole population, even those who voted successfully for another, socialist, government. There was a sense in which Churchill had revived a spirit of righteous self-confidence which had almost died in the aftermath of the First World War and the Depression and which I don't think has been seen in Britain in more recent years, though it certainly has in America. And I think (though this may be a flight of fancy on my part, and it's certainly only my personal thought) that it had to do with a long history of patriotism that was embodied by someone I nearly named as one of my top three prophets: William Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote about England as

This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war, .......
This precious stone set in the silver sea ......
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England .......

Churchill capitalized on both that nationalistic spirit and that love of words, and called the nation to great sacrifice for a great good. He said,

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

He said,
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

What a lot of dangerous rhetorical jingoism, you may be thinking. And yes, you're probably right - but this was what I imbibed with my mother's milk. And Winston Churchill also said, later, To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war. I absorbed that from my early years, too.

As I said, I've rejected Churchill's conservatism, and any interest whatsoever in military strategy or the waging of war, and the sense that he shared with Shakespeare that England is a nation superior to all others, but his words and deeds have influenced me in profound ways nevertheless. I believe that I grew up in a very, very privileged country - temperate and beautiful, with a proud history and self-esteem. I believe it is a fine and noble thing to commit so strongly to an ideal that we swear we will never surrender - even if we do, in the end, through our own fragility. I believe that it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war - to talk and negotiate and discuss and explore rather than to take up arms, even in a good cause. Winston Churchill was a prophet who, in the words of the document called "Sources of the Living Tradition," challenged me to confront powers and structures of evil, with justice, certainly, and with compassion, and the transforming power of love, though he almost certainly wouldn't have used those words. And it's probably not necessary to tell you that his respect for the English language also impressed me, and that I do believe that ultimately the pen is mightier than the sword.

The third of my top three prophets was Mahatma Gandhi. I didn't encounter him nearly as early as the other two, and I can't say he's as much a part of me, or has been as much of an influence, but he is more nearly my chosen hero. The concept of non-violent resistance which he taught and embodied is to my mind and heart the highest and most wonderful of ways in which to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love. And Gandhi's non-resisting death, by an assassin's hand, ties in for me with the death of Jesus as a transformative moment in history. I have spoken to people who have argued persuasively that it would be better for the world if Jesus, and Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and so many other heroes had lived rather than been killed, and I applaud (of course) their wish that the acts of execution had not taken place. But I can't seem to escape an inner conviction that these are cases which embody the truth that the one who loses life shall find it, and that the deaths of these prophets, not through their own will but through their willingness, were the acts which gave their words ultimate power. "Words and deeds of prophetic women and men ......." - well, the deeds, sometimes, are done to them rather than by them, but are consistent with their very being, indeed the fulfilment of their very being.

At the beginning of these reflections, I noted that while prophets are often thought to be only at the public level there are also private people in our lives who have been prophetic for us.
I invite you now to consider who those personal prophets might be for you - those people who have influenced the course of your life in a way related to confronting the powers and structures of evil. How has your faith been shaped by the teachers or preachers or parents or friends who have been outstanding influences in your life? What are your first memories of this person, and why do you think they made such an impression on you? Is it what the person said, or how they interacted with you, that has been most important in influencing you? How has this special person helped you confront evil and brought justice, equity and compassion to your life?

If I try to name three personal prophets of my own, they have to include the Methodist minister - I have no memory at all of his name - who said during a sermon I heard when I was probably about twelve years old, "Always remember that people are more important than principles." That struck me with the force of an explosion - the explosion of previously accepted notions. My rather priggish adolescent mind had always thought that proper adherence to the rules, the guidelines, the principles of behaviour, was the most important thing to aim for. Here was a respected teacher telling me, as Jesus told his disciples, that the rules were made for us - to help us! - we weren't made to keep the rules! I've never forgotten what he said, and it has certainly stimulated me to confront the powers and structures of evil, so many of which seem to be about measuring the extent to which we conform to the rules, and condemning us for the ways in which we don't. I want always to remember this great humanist teaching: people are more important than principles.

The second of my personal prophets is, at last, a woman. She was my grandmother, my father's mother, who provided a safe haven for me when my parental home was far from happy, and who always welcomed me as if I were the most favoured of her nine grandchildren, all living in the same small town. Maybe I was her favourite, but it's more likely, I think, that she just made me feel that way. It was her great gift to be able to make me, and perhaps all the others too, feel special and specially loved. She had a deep, quiet, Methodist Christian faith, and she helped me to believe that I had it in me to to confront powers and structures of evil and to transform them with love. I never heard her say words of that kind, as far as I remember, but I heard her say, "You're always welcome here. You're important to me. I have faith in you," and those were some of the most empowering words I ever listened to. They were prophetic, not that they predicted my future - she'd have been surprised, I think - but that they taught me deep truth.

My third prophet in the private sphere is a woman I feel profoundly privileged to have as a friend. Her name's Elizabeth Beckett and I've known her for close to twenty years - considerably less than half my life, and yet she's had a huge influence on me. The word "challenge" which appears in these words about the sources of our living tradition - that word is a perfect description of what Elizabeth does for me. She's so different from me in personality - much more like my husband John, and I think that's why I love them both - so different that she constantly challenges me to think about why I think as I do, what the foundations of my faith are, and why I can't practise it as naturally and lovingly as she does. Elizabeth, like everyone else I know, is totally unique, and yet I recognize that she's just one of the people who can be a prophetic person for me, one of those people whose words and deeds encourage me to confront the powers and structures of evil which include my own apathy and indifference.

I'm grateful to all the prophets, in the public and private domains of my life, who have influenced and challenged me in the formation of my beliefs and in my own contribution to this living tradition which is the Unitarian Universalist movement. I hope that you have had, and will continue to have, such wonderful human gifts in your life. And I hope even more that you'll take the time to think about the ones you know, and to discover the ones you've forgotten or buried in your memory or your unconsciousness. Recognize these sources of your faith; pay attention to what they've taught you; pay them the honour of questioning their teachings, of sifting them and retaining only what is good in your eyes now. And then, most important of all, honour them by taking up their challenge, confronting the powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love. So may it be.