Imagining a world that is steadily and communally good

Or, 3 Ways Walter Brueggemann's work mattered to me

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Hi friends,

This past week, heaven welcomed a real one. The Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann, a much-beloved and highly respected socio-political theologian and Old Testament scholar has died at the age of 93.¹ I offer my deep condolences to all who knew and loved him. What a loss for us all and what a legacy he leaves behind. I suppose in a time when I’ve been pretty disappointed with a lot of leaders, I figured it was worthwhile to spend some time this week honouring one who changed me and so many others for good.

I’m one of countless people who never met The Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann and yet count him among my important teachers. I was introduced to his work by my friend Kelley Nikondeha² about fifteen years ago and well, let’s just say that his impact on my faith, my understanding of scripture, and especially how I seek to show up in the world has been profound.

I remain so grateful that even those of us who weren’t able to actually sit in classrooms with teachers like Brueggemann have been able to read, learn, study, and be shaped by his work through his books, sermons, studies, and broader work in the world. (It’s no secret that I haven’t attended seminary or been able to pursue higher theological education myself but hey, I did have a library card, a voracious appetite for learning, and an insistence that everyone gets to participate in wrestling with God.) Brueggemann’s work has mattered a lot in my life.

If you read my 2015 book, Out of Sorts: Making Peace with An Evolving Faith, you may remember his name popping up throughout the pages here and there, but particularly near the end of the book in a chapter entitled “Evangelical Hero Complex: On Vocation and Calling.” Throughout the book, I shared glimpses into many areas of my life that I deconstructed and then rebuilt on a foundation of Love - the notion of work, ministry, vocation, and what sort of “callings” matter to God was a very key one for both myself and my husband, Brian. In that chapter, I wrote,

“Few theologians have influenced me the way that Walter Brueggemann has, from my political and economic engagement to my vocation as a writer to even my personal discipleship. His work on the “liturgy of abundance” versus the “myth of scarcity” is primarily for the big picture - the empire, economics, justice for the poor, war - but because I am one woman with a fairly small life and realm of influence, I find that his words illuminated even here in the individual and communal ways.

The myth of scarcity tells the powerful to accumulate and take and dominate, to be driven by the idea of not enough and never enough. We make our decisions out of a fear that there isn’t enough for us. These core beliefs can lead us to the treacheries of war and hunger, injustice and inequality. We think we must keep others down so we can stay on top. We stockpile money and food and comforts at the expense of one another and our own souls. Throughout Scripture, we see the impact of the myth of scarcity on - and even within - the nation of Israel. The prophets wrote and stood in bold criticism against those who - out of the fear of not enough - built their empire on the backs of the poor and oppressed.

But the Kingdom of God is more than enough. It is an act of faith to live with the narrative of abundance instead of the fear of scarcity.

As the Church, we are called to exist in a prophetic community, an alternative to the narratives of the world, living out the Kingdom of God in our right-now lives. There isn’t scarcity. There is more than enough in Christ.

Scarcity tells us to work until we drop. We’ve got to hustle, hustle, hustle to get ours and then to keep it. But in the liturgy of abundance, we can practice Sabbath. Exhaustion and burn-out are symptoms of our fear of scarcity, but wholeness, joy, and rest are hallmarks of a life lived within abundance. In fact, Bruggemann calls the practice of Sabbath an act of resistance because we are saying no to “the culture of now.”³

To this day, I use the language of ‘myth of scarcity’ and ‘liturgy of abundance’ almost weekly.

There are so, so many aspects of The Rev. Dr. Bruggemann’s work that have stayed with me - God, his work on Isaiah or on the Sabbath is LIFE CHANGING - but this morning, as I sit down to write to you, I am thinking of three things in particular.

First of all (and perhaps most personally), I am thinking of how fortunate I was to come across his work right at the crossroad moment of my own. My understanding of theology and faithfulness was rather narrow and limited⁴ and it was then informed by a consumeristic, prosperity-focused, selfish form of faith and yet I had a hunch that Jesus was as good as I hoped and that God’s dream for the world did not include things like patriarchy and war and injustice or my own personal tax return.

At the most tender moment of dismantling of all that I knew, when I was floundering for answers and likely an easy mark for bad theology and worse practice, Brueggemann was one of a handful of powerful and humble teachers that I stumbled across and whose work set me on a path of liberation, communal good, and healing. (I mean, I could have become one of those casualties of the Young, Restless, Reformed movement like so many of my peers in the early-aughts which pretty much created a direct feeder pipeline into the heinous Christian nationalism that contributes mightily to our current hellscape but instead…) I was metaphorically seated at the feet of teachers like Brueggemann, insisting on common good and a prophetic imagination, a solidarity with victims and an insistence on justice. Walter Brueggemann gave me language and rich full bodied scholarship that assured me of compassion, justice, and the joyfulness of common good. He helped to set me on a path that wanted to see God’s kingdom come and will be done now, as in heaven. (I could never live up and into all I have learned there from him.)

Deconstruction can break so many different ways for many good reasons but I’m grateful that at the moment of crisis, I was caught and taught by people like him who loved Jesus and loved their Bibles and loved this story enough to insist on an alternative world centred on Love.

Secondly, I am so grateful for Brueggemann’s insistence on imagination as a key aspect of prophetic work. As he wrote in one of my favourite of his books, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation, “reduced speech leads to reduced lives. Sunday morning is the practice of a counter life through counter speech. The church on Sunday morning or wherever [emphasis mine] it engages in its odd speech, may be the last place left in our society for imaginative speech that permits people to enter into new worlds of faith and to participate in joyous, obedient life.”

We are creating worlds with our words and the world we create matters.

His unflinching language, his insistence on the prophetic work of our imaginations, and his consistent calling out that ‘the emperor has no clothes’ profoundly shaped me, my work, and my way of seeing our old world. I’m one of so many who could say that.

Now? I don’t think we can engage in healing, in the repair of the world, without repairing our imagination.⁵

I’m so grateful for his insistence on imagination as part of our sacred work. We must imagine a world that is just and joyous in equal measure; a world that is steadily and communally good. That takes such guts to imagine, doesn’t it? Our imagination can be the catalyst for healing. It can be the beginning of change. It can plant the seeds of possibility and mending, of evolution and liberation and peace in us and through us. God, I want to believe in something beautiful and good, subversive to empires and true, whole and just. Don’t you? Brueggemann taught me that cultivating my imagination, letting the Gospel and the prophets shape my imagination, was good and holy work, too.

He woke me up out of the numb cynicism of our age. He honoured grief’s role in hopefulness, which again, changed my life. He insisted that “all will be made well” was not a salve but a promise and an invitation to participate. He gave voice to life “from the other side” and reminded me, as a woman of incredible privilege, where I actually stood in the story (hint, I am not the hero).

And finally, I can’t stop thinking today of how incredibly relevant his work is for our moment in time. Right now. The world is undergoing great groaning yet again, in devastating and unjust ways. The very things that the prophets cried out against through the Old Testament are happening among us again. So work like his, voices like his, crying out in the desert, are once again an opportunity to equip us for what lies ahead. I think his work needs a revisit, precisely because of the oppressive social policy, wicked high control cultures, and numb selfishness unfolding across the world right now.

Of particular note during this Pride Month perhaps, he also wrote a wonderful article for LGBTQ+ inclusion in Outreach Magazine, which is still available here.

For his relentless hope, fierce intellect, lively alternative to empire, and disciplined scholarship, I am grateful. Bruggemann’s work and witness deeply mattered to me and I’m so grateful that we have his work to continue shaping us all at this moment in time.

With gratitude,

S.

Check out all of my books | Field Notes | Instagram | Facebook | SarahBessey.com

P.S. You can’t go wrong with any of Brueggemann’s work but for what it’s worth, my personal favourites have been:

• The Prophetic Imagination

• Finally Comes The Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation

• Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

• Journey to the Common Good

• Or, if audio is more your thing, check out his 2018 interview with Krista Tippett for On Being.

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1. You can read his obituary to learn more about his incredible legacy and also leave a comment for his family here at his website.

2. Kelley’s work is well worth a read. I have a soft spot for her book, Defiant: How the Women of Exodus Teach Us About Freedom but all her books are wonderful.

3. from Out of Sorts: Making Peace with An Evolving Faith, page 226-7.

4. It probably still is in many ways! I imagine few of us don’t have our own blind spots still.

5. I wrote a lot about this in Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for An Evolving Faith and now I think I may have been unconsciously channeling all I learned from him there.