“Your Sons and Your Daughters will Prophesy” (Acts 2:17 & Joel 2:28)
Loving greetings!
I so look forward to being with Friends at Pacific Yearly Meeting this summer. After nearly 30 years of wandering in the eastern parts of this country, I am especially blessed to be invited “home” to the yearly meeting where I was raised. I grew up in Orange Grove Monthly Meeting in Pasadena. My first formal travel in ministry was under the care of Pacific Yearly Meeting. In 1982, with a minute from Santa Cruz Monthly Meeting endorsed by the Yearly Meeting, I took part in a cross-continental bicycle peace pilgrimage called the “Peace Peddlers.” Six west coast adult young Friends, all of us in our 20s, rode from San Francisco to Washington DC (touching Mexico and Canada), listening to the American people for the spiritual grounding that would lead to nuclear disarmament.
Leaving California in 1984, I moved with my spouse, Minga Claggett-Borne, to Greensboro, NC, where we helped organize the 1985 World Gathering of Young Friends. Minga and I then came to New England to serve the Friends Meeting at Cambridge as Resident Friends. From 1991 to 2013, I was the lead staff person for New England Yearly Meeting.
The Annual Session’s theme “Youth and Prophecy: Awakening to a New Creation” highlights my own call to name, encourage and live out our prophetic witness, fulfilling our divine purpose, dismantling the domination system, tearing down the religion of empire, building alternative communities and bringing all of us, all of creation home to the unconditional love of God. I have drawn the title for my talk, “Your Sons and Your Daughters will Prophesy” from Peter’s speech on the day of Pentecost—”these people are not drunk. It is only 9am in the morning!” (Acts 2:14-38). Peter goes on to quote the prophet Joel:
“In the last days, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your old ones will dream dreams, your young ones will see visions.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
And they will prophesy” — (Joel 2:28-29)
The Yearly Meeting Session’s theme acknowledges that like the early Friends—who were mostly people in their 20s and 30s, even teenagers like James Parnell, age 16 when he died in prison—adult young Friends in Pacific YM and elsewhere in the Quaker world are rising up with a strong, prophetic message and witness. We will receive that message at the YM Annual Session on Wednesday morning.
Again, even in this phase of my life—as I dream dreams—I am still and always will be a child of Pacific Yearly Meeting. I am so glad to be coming home…
In the infinite love of God,
Jonathan Vogel-Borne
jvb@thebornes.org