Jan 31 2016

It was not an auspicious start for someone destined to change the world.  No one would have guessed that Joseph Smith, a poor, uneducated farm boy from New England would someday be ranked by the Smithsonian magazine as the most influential American religious figure of all time.  We all know the basic outline of Joseph Smith’s history; the religious revivalism he experienced as a 14 year old boy, his first vision, the appearance of the Angel Moroni and translation of The Book of Mormon.  We know about the founding of the church in 1830, the settlements at Kirkland and Missouri, the publication of the Doctrine and Covenants, being tarred and feathered, hunted, and imprisoned, the founding and flourishing of Nauvoo and his eventual martyrdom in Carthage in 1844 when he was only 38 years old.

Much has been written about Joseph Smith.  There has been everything from hagiographies that treat him as a nearly perfect man whose worst fault was occasional light mindedness to slanderous diatribes based on extremely dubious evidence and wild suppositions.  Over the past few years this discussion has moved to the internet and like most things on the internet the discussion tends to degrade to an irrational shouting match.   At the same time, the official church history has tended to become a little more open.  With the publication of the Joseph Smith Papers and the emergence of what appears to be reliable evidence from reliable sources, the portrait of Joseph Smith that has emerged is of a much more complex individual who made mistakes, who did not always understand new doctrines fully at first, and whose path to greatness was sometimes rocky.  To me the fact that the prophet of this dispensation was an imperfect and very real person is reassuring and not even very surprising.  However, we need to be careful what we believe.  Much of what is out there is mere speculation and the fact is we often simply don’t know many things because there is no reliable evidence or the evidence is contradictory.  Much of what is on the internet is just garbage based on prejudice and hatred.  And some of it really makes no difference to our belief that Joseph Smith was a prophet.

It is a little strange that we sometimes expect modern day prophets to be perfect when the prophets we read about in the bible are far from perfect.  Moses couldn’t resist taking credit for producing water from a rock.  Peter denied Christ three times.  What makes a person a prophet is not having a perfect character and having lived a flawless life, but having received revelation from God.  Of course throughout the ages many people have received inspiration for themselves and their families.  But a prophet is different.  He receives revelation for all of God’s children.  Despite his flaws, Moses was a prophet for the children of Israel.  He received the 10 commandments and the Levitical law from God in order to create a people, teach them to follow Jehovah, and lead them to the promised land.

Prophets are unique and remarkable people.    Sometimes I think we are like geese flying in a V.  Each of us flies in the slip stream of the bird in front of us.  This gives us smoother air and helps pull us along.  But the prophet is flying at the point of the V.  He has to bear the full brunt of the buffeting winds as well as steer the course to the destination.  Only the strongest birds can fly at the point and they often don’t last for long.

It must take tremendous strength just to be in the presence of the Lord.  Taking the responsibility for delivering a message to God’s people and often for leading them both spiritually and physically through perilous times and circumstances must be overwhelming.  It is not surprising that many of the prophets both in ancient and modern times have gone through a “why me” moment.

But as hard as it might be to be a prophet, being the first prophet of a dispensation is an order of magnitude harder.  Modern presidents of the church only become the prophet after having served in the quorum of the 12 apostles for many years.  They have been meeting regularly with the prophet and other members of the quorum and the doctrine and practice of the church are well established and fairly stable.  Make no mistake, being the prophet is still a hugely difficult and daunting task.  There are new challenges and problems every day and the need for revelation is as great as ever.  But they have at least had some training and have the examples of people they have known and worked with for years to follow.  Even Peter had walked and talked with the Savior for three years.  Prophets of an existing church are like builders doing additions or remodeling an existing building to protect it from new threats and to increase its usefulness.

But the first prophet of a dispensation has a much more difficult task.   At best he has the dilapidated ruins of an old building which he must somehow restore to its full splendor.  Moses had no training to be a prophet.  He probably had a vague sense of the traditions of the Hebrews, but he was raised in the house of the Pharaoh and probably knew a lot more about the Egyptian gods than about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.   He may have been taught some by his father-in-law.  But the burning bush, like the first vision 3500 years later, was a fresh start.  Moses had to create an entirely new religion from scratch.  More properly, he had to restore a lost religion from a vague and corrupted memory.  For every dispensation after Adam was essentially a restoration.

Joseph Smith had a similar task.  He had to restore the original church of Christ.  At least Moses was an educated man of privilege.  Joseph Smith was an uneducated farm boy.  To understand how truly unique this is we might compare Joseph Smith to Martin Luther.    Luther was 34 years old when he posted his 95 Theses on the church door.  He had been to good schools as a youth, had attended university, and finally become a monk and then a professor of theology.  While payer and inspiration undoubtedly played a role is his developing ideas, his study and scholarship also played a major role.  Joseph thought Luther’s translation of the bible into German was the best translation he had seen.  It was the bible we used in the mission field in Germany and I loved it.  Again there must have been inspiration there, but much of Luther’s translation was the result of superb scholarship.

I love reading history.  I usually forget the details, but retain some patterns.  One thing that has jumped out at me is how difficult it is in politics, science, philosophy, or religion to introduce a whole new idea.  What is sometimes called a paradigm shift.  Sometimes the ideas are not even new.  Many of the Greek philosophers believed that the earth revolved around the sun, but when Copernicus introduced the idea in the 16^th century it led to persecution and denouncement.  Joseph Smith’s view of the Godhead although consistent with the bible was a complete paradigm shift from the standard view of the trinity in Christianity.  But there is a big difference here.  Copernicus was an astronomer and made this new model based on exact observations.  Joseph Smith was no more a scientist than a scholar.  So where did his paradigm shift come from?

The simple answer is from God.  Revelation.  I have always been interested in epistemology, the study of what we can know and how we can know it.  There are several sources of knowledge.  Experience, logic, experimentation.  These all work fine for medicine, science and even philosophy, but for religion they are insufficient.  Religion is based on revelation.  This is direct communication with God.  Since most of us do not have the faith and righteousness for such revelation, it comes to us through prophets.  We know that God the Father and Jesus Christ are separate beings because Joseph Smith saw them both together.  Then this was later explicitly revealed to him.  Of course, Luther also believed in revelation.  But he believed it had ceased when John finished the Book of Revelation so that the pathway to truth was by studying the bible and what the early church fathers like St.  Augustine had written about it.

I don’t think Joseph Smith ever read St. Augustine although he had read the bible regularly.  His path to the truth was not led by scholarship, but by prayer.  This was not to say that he was not a remarkably intelligent man with unusual learning abilities, but that the basis for his teaching was not scholarship but direct communication with God.  And what he was learning from God was very different than what he had learned from the prevalent Christian ideas he had grown up with.  It was a complete paradigm shift.  These new ideas must have been difficult for Joseph to grasp all at once.  When something is so new, it takes repetition, exposure, and above all experience to be able to fully grasp it.  So we should not be surprised that some of Joseph’s teachings evolved as he continued to receive revelation and put it into practice leading the church.  I think Joseph was also sensitive to the fact that this was also very new to the early members of the church.  I suspect there was a lot he understood that he did not make generally known until the general church membership became ready for it and probably some he never did reveal.

The sheer volume of recorded revelation and teachings that came from Joseph Smith is astounding.  It has been 16 years since I last spoke in this ward.  Ironically, my assigned topic back then was also Joseph Smith.  In the 16 years between the time that Joseph received the plates and his death he translated and published The Book of Mormon, wrote the revelations that made up the Doctrine and Covenants, and wrote and translated The Pearl of Great Price.  Over this period there were thousands of talks and letters and teachings.  He had introduced radical new (actually ancient) teachings about the nature of the Godhead, the relationship of man and God, and the afterlife. By contrast, I haven’t really done much in the last 16 years.

But Joseph Smith was not just a man of words and new doctrines. Like Moses he was a man of action and the leader of his people.   During this same 16 years he organized the church and guided its evolution into pretty much what we know today.  He sent out missionaries who made thousands of converts, he founded communities in Kirkland, Missouri, and Nauvoo.  He built temples and introduced the temple covenants.  He trained new leaders in Zion’s Camp and the School of the Prophets.  Again all of this was new.  Although there were some correspondences here and there with other religious groups at the time, as a whole it was very different than the religious practices of the day.

As a religious and political leader even with the revelations and inspirations of God, I suspect he sometimes made mistakes.  And sometimes the members were not able to live up to what the Lord asked of them through Joseph.  It is easy to speculate that things would have gone better if Joseph or some other leader had done something or not done something.  But it is not only completely unfair, but also a fallacy to project our outlook and values to such a different time and place, especially under such extreme conditions.  We have no idea of the struggle they had to survive or the very real fear of death and destruction that they lived under.  What is remarkable is not that the Saints made a few mistakes along the way, but that they endured and survived and what they accomplished.  Perhaps the most impressive indication of the greatness of Joseph Smith as a leader was that the church carried on after his death.  Many religious movements die with their founder.

Over the last 5 years I have lost most of the feeling in my feet and lower legs.  When this first started happening I limped a lot and walked very slowly.  But I learned over time that if I just trusted my feet and legs that I could walk almost normally.  Many of you may have seen me walking up and down 1^st North which I do around noon virtually every day.  I am convinced that if I had not done this for the past two years, I would not have been able to walk up onto the stand without a cane.  At my age once you stop and give in, it is all over.

If you could see my spiritual legs you would notice that I sometimes limp rather badly.  Watching parents suffer the ravages of old age, family problems, questions, and being a blue person in a very red state have taken their toll.  But I read my scriptures, I pray, and come to church.  And I give thanks for all that I have been blessed with.  At my age once you stop and give in, it is all over.

It is not in spite of the fact that I believe that Joseph Smith was less than perfect, that I believe he was a prophet, but because of it.  To me this makes him a real person that I can relate to and believe in.  I stand in awe of all that Joseph accomplished as the prophet of this dispensation.  It is all about revelation.  Without the revelations of Joseph Smith, I would not even know about, let alone believe, the things I believe.

The words of section 135 of the Doctrine and Covenants are not hyperbole.

“ Joseph Smith, the Prophet and Seer of the Lord, has done more, save Jesus only, for the salvation of men in this world, than any other man that ever lived in it”

With all my heart I join in the song “We thank thee, oh God, for a prophet. “

In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.