What does it mean for us as people of faith, to 'reclaim the prophetic voice'? Ask any rabbi, minister, imam or priest and they will tell you it's a challenge to answer that question even within the small framework of a single faith tradition. Within a context like this one, with many people gathered from many different faiths, it might seem quite impossible.

The prophets and teachers from our historic traditions have spoken different languages and lived in diverse cultures, sometimes many centuries apart. They have offered us various practices of prayer and meditation and worship, and different names to use when we address our God, or sometimes no name at all for the Mystery of Mysteries.

There are real differences among us in what we believe and in how we practice our faith, and sometimes they have become divisions that have led our people into mortal combat against each other. Our differences should not be ignored or sanitized or boiled down into some bland and meaningless common denominator. But there is also some common ground, or we would not find ourselves gathered together today. And one of the places in which I believe we can find common ground is in listening, together, for how the prophetic voice is sounding out for us today.

We are living in troubled times. There is war raging in our world that we know implicates us -- a war fought in the name of our safety, and a war born of deep historical troubles to which we're bound, one way or another. It is mostly far away from our daily lives, but not at all far from our minds and hearts. And as the impulse to a larger war steadily moves forward, with no clear idea of where it will take us next, it's hard to know how to think about what's happening and what is asked of us. There isn't much room for public debate: little chance for us to scratch our heads together, to think about other choices, to ponder the consequences. Voices for peace or for restraint are scoffed at as naïve or condemned as unpatriotic.

In times such as these, what does our faith require of us? We hear a lot about what our nation might require of us, or what we might have to do or give up because of what security might require of us. But what does our faith require? That question, difficult though it is to answer, should hold a peculiar urgency for us, no matter what faith we profess. Because if our faiths have nothing to say to us in these times of confusion and hard choices -- no word of guidance, no hint of direction -- then surely they are only collections of habits and empty rituals, ashes in our hands. But I believe -- and I suspect you believe -- that our faiths are vital and alive and have some word to speak into the troubled times in which we find ourselves. Our task, therefore, is to listen; and through that listening, discern and reclaim the prophetic voice that is calling to us.

There are many people around us, in our towns and communities, who are not involved in any congregation and who don't generally give a whole lot of thought to what they believe or where they stand in regard to their faith. But I think that even many of them are hungry right now, starving even, for a word that speaks a different truth, a word that could point the way to a different place to stand.

In times of conflict, especially in times of war, everything becomes intensely polarized. You're with us or you're against us; you're good or you're evil; you support the President or else you're helping the terrorists, and so on. But these divisions never capture the truth of the world in which we live, and in their hearts people know this. They are searching for a place to stand that feels right and true. They are listening for the voices that might point the way. And I believe it's the voice of faith that can point the way, because through all our diversity, what we know, as people of faith, is something -- a very little bit -- about that broader ground that is always there beneath our divisions and hostilities, our narrow vision and our grudges.

The great Jewish teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote these words about the prophets of his tradition, the Hebrew prophets: "Others have considered history from the point of view of power, judging its course in terms of victory and defeat, of wealth and success. But the prophets look at history from the point of view of justice, judging its course in terms of righteousness and corruption, of compassion and violence…"

The prophets and great teachers of our various faith traditions were not soothsayers or predictors of the future. They were people who heard the voice of their faith calling to them, and that voice compelled them to speak a fundamental word of warning and compassion. Through whatever language it was that moved across the tongues of our teachers, through every shape that our human faith has taken, the prophetic voice has had one fundamental message for us: Wake up!

Wake up! Remember who you really are, and the power that brought you to life. Remember the star-dust out of which your bones were crafted. Remember that the salt-water of ancient oceans flows through the blood in your veins. Remember that you are kin to every living thing on this earth. Remember that you are holy, that you are born of holiness and walk on sacred ground all the days of your life. We so easily forget! We so often move like sleep-walkers through the precious days of our lives -- solitary little bundles of longing and complaint, content within the safety of our tribe, soothed by our routines, surprised every once in a while to see how quickly the time is passing, and that we are aging.

What does it take to wake us up and make us pay attention? Well, for most of us death does it pretty well. There's nothing like a bracing dose of mortality to shake us out of our dullness and light our eyes with wonder at the extraordinary miracles that wash through each of our days: the sweet air that fills our lungs, the voices of our children, the taste of ripe berries, the touch of a friend's hand, the gentle sound of the rain on a roof, the rich smell of earth alive in the summer. The sudden reminder of death, when one we love has died or when we ourselves receive a grim prognosis, can do the trick -- but then the path of our lives is already nearly finished, one long stumble of sleepwalking and a few last moments of alert gratitude and regret.

The purpose of our religious faiths, through all of their diversity, is to wake us up a little bit sooner, while it can still do us some good, while we can still do some good on this sweet earth. That's the word that sounds out in the voices of our prophets and teachers: Wake up to who you are! Remember! We are called to something more than the habits of living that surround us. We are called to lift our gaze beyond the promotion that might come tomorrow or the flattering fit of our clothing, beyond the make and style of the car we drive or the worrisome wrinkles we find in the mirror, beyond the power we command over others or the petty gripes we hold against those who wrong us.

Why? Because, say the voices of our faiths, all is not as it seems. At the level that really matters, we are not the identities we hold so dearly and guard so closely. We are not our possessions, we are not our professions. We are not our national identity of American or Iraqi, Israeli or Palestinian. We are not Jew and Muslim and Christian, an old man or young woman, black or white, Latino or Asian. These are all so partial and temporary, so small a part of the truth, that they are more like costumes and disguises than a true self. They all have to come off at the end, don't they? None of them matter very much in the face of our common suffering, do they? If we see a woman or man weeping over the body of a child, don't all of these barriers and disguises of ours fall away in the breaking of our hearts?

We are not even our thoughts or our bodies, as intimately as we hold these things. We are something precious and mysterious and holy that reaches beyond all these small notions of self. As soon as we begin to recognize this, even in the faintest glimmer of our dim minds, our lives begin to change. Our divisions begin to dissolve, as we awaken, and we start to recognize one another as what the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart called 'God seed'. God seed resides in every one of us, and its singular and unerring purpose is to grow us toward God.

It is, I think, a bit scandalous to remember who we are, to wake up to who we really are, in a time when our nation is marching into war. It's a bit scandalous and more than a little bit dangerous, because if our eyes are open we cannot avoid difficult questions.

For instance, when we are told that this war against terrorism is a fundamental struggle of good against evil and that evil will be eliminated, we must blink for a bewildered moment and then ask: Is that true? Surely it is evil -- an evil choice of action -- to deliberately kill or maim another human being. But is it true that evil resides only on that side, and that only good resides on this side? We know in our hearts that the truth is much more difficult and painful than that. We know that there is only one human tribe, across all the earth. We know that within each confused and yearning one of us is the seed of great goodness, and the ability to visit unspeakable cruelty on each other.

What does it mean to wake up to this truth? We don't know yet, because most of us haven't awakened to it. But surely there is no way forward, no way to make choices that are good and sound and righteous, no way to make a true security for ourselves, no way to make peace and justice in our world, no way to walk any sort of path to God -- without holding to this most fundamental truth. Will people still visit grievous harm on us sometimes? Yes. Is there a path of response other than visiting grievous harm on someone else, in our turn? Yes. Oh, yes. In his book The Great Divorce, Christian writer C.S. Lewis described a vision of hell as a place where people continually move away from each other because of their fear and mistrust, their inability to touch and join into community. They leave behind them empty houses and eventually entire empty blocks, as they turn away from each other and build houses at the outer edges. The abandoned centers grow as the distance between people widens, and by their own actions the people create an ever-expanding circle of hell.

This vision is troublingly similar to the real-life migration away from our cities into the suburbs. But more than that it captures the ways in which our efforts to turn from each other, to avoid real engagement and deep connection, can be seen as feeding the growth of hell. If there is any merit or truth in this vision, then the opposite must also be true: if hell is created and expanded by our refusal of relationship, then some sort of heaven is surely made by our willing touch, the choice to reach across barriers -- even across violence -- and recognize one another.