It does seem a little odd not to be leading worship today.. I usually try to get a free weekend just before Advent so that I am fresh and ready for the hurly-burly run up to Christmas.  This year it just didn't work out that way - I had the Sunday off but was needing to take at least one a month  to get my quota in!!

Advent 2 carries with it the themes of The Prophets and, in some older schemes, Bible Sunday.  A lot of people who read this stuff will remember that for me it is also "Calling Sunday"... for it was on the second Sunday of Advent 1997 that I heard very clearly God's call, in the night, to ordained ministry and had the weirdest most disturbed Christmas ever as I wrestled with what to do about it.  Golly, that's a long time ago now, yet it is still important, the sign-post to which I return when the going gets tough, my clay feet crumble to dust, and my spirituality is as parched as Sahara sand.  Fifteen years (plus a few days) since that 'epiphany' (in its proper sense not its contemporary one); fifteen years of working out what it all means day by day, day-to-day.

I suppose the prophets of ancient times would have understood some of this - the sense of "here I am, I can do no other." The sense of "who? me!"  The reality of "me? oh dear..."

I could not have begun to imagine, fifteen years ago, where the path would lead.  Could not have coped if I had known, I'm sure.  Prophets aren't sooth-sayers, aren't necessarily mystics who see visions, aren't always those who denounce the status quo... they are people who are alert to the hints and glimspes of what God is saying in and through the ordinary stuff of life.

To be clear, I am not styling myself as a prophet or even as having prophetic gifts (and certianly neither as understood in some more conservative Christian circles) but it must have some significance that the liturgical anniversary of my call to ordained ministry, and indeed my ordination some six years later, fell on the second weekend of Advent.

God of Jeremiah, Micah, Amos, John

(and men both minor and major)

God of Deborah, Miriam, Huldah, Anna

(and the daughters of Philip)

God of wise ones, strange ones

God of scary ones, gentle ones

God of those who gave themselves

To watching and waiting

To seeing and hearing

To weeping and raging

To enacting and expounding

God of those who live for you

Because they could do no other

Show me - show us -

How to see and hear

To listen and discover

Your words, your signs, your decrees

Spoken through each other

This day

Amen