Our community group this year is listening to various podcasts and focusing on the meditation and reflection sparked by those podcasts.  If you’d like to follow along with us, you can check out my notes here on the blog each week.

February 7

Last week was #AwkwardTuesday and it felt like particularly good timing given the political climate in the country.  Our food group brought “comfort food” for our meal, we lit candles and wrote out prayers, sang It is Well and Amazing Grace, and talked about what things, if any, are currently bringing us comfort.

This week we’re back to our podcast reflections and we listened to Krista Tippett’s interview with Walter Brueggemann on On Being.  Brueggemann is an American Protestant Old Testament scholar and theologian, widely considered one of the most influential Old Testament scholars with dozens of books to his name.

Noteworthy…

Given Up or Taken In

One of the first things to strike me in this interview was when Brueggemann mentioned that as a scholar who reads the Biblical texts over and over and over again, you end up going one of two directions.  You either give up on it or you get taken in by it.  I’m not a Biblical scholar but I found that particularly telling as someone who grew up in the Church and can spout Bible passages and memory verses with the best of them.  So often when I hear a passage, I tune out.  Old hat.  Been there, done that.  But as I listened to Brueggemann read a few of his favorite passages, I was struck anew by their aesthetic and poetic qualities.  Listening to him speak with such affection for these sections of scripture made me want to revisit them with new eyes and a renewed spirit of exploration and discovery.

Losing the Transformative Power

Protestant churches typically characterize the prophets of the Old Testament as simply moral teachers.  That’s certainly how I’ve always thought of them.  But they were so much more than that.  They were poets.  Poetry and metaphor is how we think outside the box.  It’s how we circle around something and examine it from every possible side.  Without poetry, the prophetic voice loses its transformative power.

“What the church does with its creeds and its doctrinal tradition, it flattens out all the images and metaphors to make it fit into a nice little formulation and then it’s deathly.”

So we have to communicate to people, if you want a God that is healthier than that, you’re going to have to take time to sit with these images and relish them and let them become a part of your prayer life and your vocabulary and your conceptual frame.

Otherwise, you’re just going to be left with these dead formulations, which, again, is why the poetry is so important because the poetry just keeps opening and opening and opening whereas the the doctrinal practices of the Church tend to just close and close and close… more metaphors gives more access to God and one can work one metaphor awhile, but you can’t treat that as though that’s the last word. You’ve got to move and have another and another… It’s just amazing. From Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, there are just endless metaphors.

A Path of Death

I’m still thinking through Brueggemann’s thoughts on current society.  He believes we’ve chosen a path of death.  We’ve reduced everything to a commodity and we believe there are technological solutions to every problem we face.

This, in turn, means that the Church rarely touches on our over-reliance on technology or our mad pursuit of commodities or our passion for violence expressed as war policies.   All of these things, Brueggemann believes, are interrelated, and few of us want these things exposed as inadequate and/or dehumanizing ways to live.

The Church must speak to this.  Like the poets of the Old Testament, pastors and preachers need to constantly find new ways to talk about old things.  Their job is to reframe the conversation so that we can re-experience the social realities that are right in front of us from a different angle.  Churches are too often focused on issues rather than on the metaphors and poetry that we find in the Bible that hold the power to alter how we see and understand God and others.

Lament, LGBTQ & more

Brueggemann also spoke about our lack of understanding and interaction with lament.  He believes that because we’ve done away with lamentations and do not address it in our churches, we are ill-equipped for the losses we face as a society.

At one point, Tippett took a bit of a detour to ask Brueggemann briefly about his thoughts on LGBTQ people in the Church and I found his response really interesting.  Brueggemann believes that this particular issue brings with it a sense of impending chaos.  He has frequently wondered why the question of gays and lesbians in the Church has such adrenaline.  He thinks its because most of what we are arguing about is not actually about gays and lesbians but about the world not being the way we thought it was going to be.  Therefore its almost futile to have the old theological arguments on the subject because the conversation is really about this amorphous anxiety we feel about the old world disappearing.   This, of course, goes right back to what he was saying about the job of the Church to reframe our conversations and find new ways to talk about old things.

For further meditation & reflection…

Toward the end of the podcast, the two of them talked about one particular passage (just one passage) from Isaiah that included these metaphors for God…

• A demolition squad
• a safe place for poor people who have no other safe place
• the giver of the biggest dinner party you ever heard of
• the powerful sea monster, he will swallow up death forever
• a gentle nursemaid who will wipe away every tear from all faces

Our group finished by reading the following passages, dwelling on the metaphors found within, and then taking time to come up with our own metaphors for God.

How lonely sits the city
That was full of people!
She has become like a widow
Who was once great among the nations!
She who was a princess among the provinces
Has become a forced laborer!
Lamentations 1:1

Here are some of the ones we came up with…

• God is a levy against a rising tide of waves and wind.  The levy will hold.
• God is like turning around in a crowded party, where I am overwhelmed trying to find someone I know or muster the energy to start a conversation with someone I dont, to discover a friend who has been there all along.
• God is a quiet confidant.
• I am one snowflake in a valley of 10 feet of snow yet God knows me.
• God is a constant.  A lighthouse in a storm.
• God is a lonely widow wandering through an empty house wondering where her loved ones have gone.
• God is a rare beam of light in spaces that are unexpected.
• God is a good canoe partner, who keeps us upright and allows me to nap in the back when I get too tired to paddle.
• God is a mystery. Like outerspace, I am completely enveloped yet there is no physical intervention.
• God has weaned me.  I am no longer stuck to the breast.  I am independent now.

Our true home

And finally we closed with this prayer by Brueggemann from his book of prayers, Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth:

God before and God behind,
God for us and God for your own self,
Maker of heaven and earth,
creator of sea and sky,
governor of day and night.
We give thanks for our ordered gift of life to us,
for the rhythms that reassure,
for the equilibriums that sustain,
for the reliabilities that curb our anxieties.
We treasure from you,
days to work and nights to rest.
We cherish from you,
days to control and nights to yield.
We savor from you,
days to plan and nights to dream.
Be our day and our night,
our heaven and our earth,
our sea and our sky,
and in the end our true home.  Amen

 

---

Image credit

Past Weeks

Post-Inauguration Liturgy (January 24)
Is America Possible? (January 17)
Alternative Orthodoxy (January 10)