The Role of a Modern Prophet

What does it mean to be prophetic today?  I came across this article, an interesting conversation between Walter Brueggemann and Kenyatta Gilbert.

At first I felt a bit of despair when I read Brueggemann's comments early in the conversation:  "I think a prophet is someone that tries to articulate the world as though God were really active in the world."  I thought, I'm not sure I feel that God is active in the world the way that Old Testament prophets did.

But I'm not sure that Brueggemann does either.  Later, he clarifies:   "I think what we believe is that God energizes and empowers human agency and human agents, when they are empowered, can change this. So, what happens to well off people like me? We don’t want to exercise human agency; we like it the way it is and if we are terribly disadvantaged, one can be in such despair that you don't undertake any human agency. So, it seems to me that the point of preaching is to say that God’s hopes are to be performed through human agency and it seems to me that the promise of the gospel is that the powers and principalities will yield to human agency that is authorized and empowered by God. And, that’s a hard piece of news because on the one hand, we want to despair or on the other hand, we want to wait passively and have God do something for us."

I like the idea of human agency energized and empowered by God, agency dispatched with a vision of healing human suffering.  The prophet should be the one who names the human hurt, but also the one who inspires us to remember the world that God envisions for us all.  The prophet should be the one who calls and inspires us all to action.

That's a view of a modern prophet that I can believe in.