Walter Brueggemann Column
Church Anew is honored to welcome Walter Brueggemann as our featured weekly columnist. We look forward to sharing Walter’s work with church leaders and faithful people worldwide. May his powerful and reflective writings inspire, energize, guide, and comfort you.
Humanity Erased?
We remain before the tricky question, “What is a woman or man”? What is humanity? The answer we give to that question is that we humans are “lord of all, servant of all.” I suspect that Kirsch and his company would and could to some great extent share that conviction. The hard part is living it out, and thereby creating futures that are beyond technological rationality. That hard work is the reason we gather regularly around the news of dying and being raised to new life.
The End of Imagination?
Imagination is the capacity to host a world other than the one that is in front of us. Such an act of hosting an alternative world is inherently subversive, as it serves to question and override the world in front of us that we too easily take as given.
Trees: Signals of Hope and Defiance
The children’s book by Franck Prevot is entitled Wangari Maathai: The Woman Who Planted Millions of Trees (2015) has led me to think about trees and the role they play in the Bible for a viable creation (and a viable economy). That crucial role played by trees has been played since the appearance of trees on the third day of creation (Genesis 1:11-13). This is some of what I learned about trees in the Bible.
Singing the Counter-Culture
We know and trust that the force of this other world does not evaporate when we close our hymnals. It persists. Our signing into that other world may also persist. We return to our more mundane worlds close at hand. But the singing persists and so that world persists among us, deabsolutizing the world in front of us, permitting us to host that other world and sign on for “a more excellent way” marked by faith, hope, and love.
We Count Our Days
Maybe, as the TV ad has it, “Age is simply a number.” But I think not. It is our best human way of marking our reliance on God’s grace and living it back to God in gratitude as best we can.
Defying Erasure
In Christian confession, the ultimate moment of imperial erasure is on Good Friday. By sundown on that Friday, the emperor, the governor, and the Jewish king, Herod, all thought they had effectively erased and eliminated the threat of the alternative governance that Jesus embodied.
The City as “Container”
For the writer of the Book of Revelation, this promise is not in a never never land of another world; it refers to a new city that will displace the tired violent city of Babylon (Rome).
Deserves to be Paid
It cannot be unimportant to the church that the long-running story of God’s engagement with the human economy begins in the narrative of a labor dispute.
Money Talk in the Church
It is unmistakable that the Torah designation of covenantal economics persists in the narrative reflection of the New Testament. It remains for the church to recover this awareness about the economy in our tradition, and to recover the courage necessary to contest the predatory practices of our economy that have become normative in our society.
The Unending Work of Contradiction
Twice in the gospel narrative Jesus declares the ultimate either/or of his life and teaching: “You cannot serve God and wealth.”
Pathetic Imagination
Pathetic imagination is incapable of hosting an alternative world and remains quite satisfied to have its sphere of possibility circumscribed to the small world in front of us. Thus in the confines of pathetic imagination, the claims of prophetic imagination are outrageous and incredible.
A Revolution Hurried Along
We prefer to have “only God.” But the God of the gospel is not on offer in that way. That is why Jesus insisted that we cannot have only one “great commandment.” There are always two.
The Fundamental Dilemma
The crisis to be addressed is the elemental recognition that we are double-minded, and the double-mindedness is ultimately exhausting: You cannot serve God and wealth.
The Dispossessing Power of Violent Greed
Naboth continues to cry out in every verdict of dispossession. His cry sounds among us in many different cadences and in many different dialects, including among us the cadences and dialects of Black Americans. What a work for the church to be listening and responding to that shrill cry!
Start Me with Two!
The wealthy, the powerful, and those who produce the poison of our planet count on the rest of us to be compliant, even if in dissent. The spell of such fearful compliance can be and will be broken only by the few good women and men who dare to march to a different drummer, work from a different script, and act in ways congruent with their conviction of a world held in the good hands of the creator.
An Iconic Act of Civil Disobedience
The absolute prohibition and the qualification that follows together exhibit the characteristic work of Torah teaching that must mediate between absolute theological, covenantal claims and the reality of lived life.
On Seeing “the Enemy” a Second Time
It is the work of the church to bear witness to the unnoticed reality of war: every soldier has a mother. Every family grieves the death of a son-soldier, even enemy families.
On Gerrymandered Texts
Such an accent on the power of God, moreover, has been a long-running seduction for the church, as we have imagined the power of God to be not unlike the worldly power of mighty empires and imperial rulers. Insofar as the church has been seduced in this regard, attentiveness to the “weakness of God” may be a deep and significant corrective.
Saved in and through Weakness
Such an accent on the power of God, moreover, has been a long-running seduction for the church, as we have imagined the power of God to be not unlike the worldly power of mighty empires and imperial rulers. Insofar as the church has been seduced in this regard, attentiveness to the “weakness of God” may be a deep and significant corrective.