The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 21 - 30 September 2012
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 21 - 30 September 2012 Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29 Psalm 19:7-14 James 5:13-20 St. Mark 9:38-50
Background: Ecstatic Prophecy In the first reading for today we have an instance that may reflect the time in which it was actually composed, or we may have an early memory of first instances in Yahwism in which there is ecstatic prophetic utterance. Certainly at the time of the Isaiahs, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others there were plenteous examples of prophetic ecstasy in which the prophet goes into a type of trance and offers visions of what God was saying. This is not like divination, which uses some other object to “divine” what the god was saying. Here it is language or even movement (cf. II Samuel 6:14) that mediates the message. Oddly enough, the prophets that grace one of the scenes in Monty Python’s Life of Bri