Preaching from the Old Testament

Walter Brueggemann, Walter Brueggemann

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781506458557
• eBook ISBN: 9781506458564
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this new volume, prolific scholar Walter Brueggemann seeks to show Christian preachers how to consider the faith witnessed in several Old Testament traditions and to help them discover rich and suggestive connections to our contemporary faith challenges. The author also assumes that a wholesale sustained engagement with the Old Testament is worth the effort for the preacher. He recognizes what he calls the "sorry state" of Old Testament texts in the Revised Common Lectionary, which he claims often constitute a major disservice for the church and its preachers. The lectionary gerrymanders the Old Testament to make it serve other claims, most of the time not allowing it to have its own evangelical say. Brueggemann hopes that his exposition in this volume will evoke and energize fresh homiletical attention to the Old Testament, precisely because he believes the urgent work of the gospel in our society requires attentive listening to these ancient voices of bold insistent faith.

3

Preaching from the Prophets

A curious thing happens to most of us when we think about texts for “prophetic preaching.” Almost invariably we imagine that we are cast in the role of the prophet, most particularly the role of Amos. That is why we have countless paraphrases of the book of Amos. We imagine that we are to give voice to the impatient righteous indignation of Amos or the weeping of Jeremiah, or that we are the one who, alongside Isaiah, said, “Here am I, send me.” Here I will suggest that when we face a prophetic text, we face a text, not a role. Our task is to exposit the text with all of the imagination that we can muster, but we are text interpreters, and not a reiteration of the prophet himself.

Speaking in a Silencing Culture

Every prophet in ancient Israel, from Elijah in the ninth century to Malachi in the fifth century, operated under a regime of steady and intense domination. In the ninth to seventh centuries, from Elijah to Jeremiah and Zephaniah, the regime of dominance was the monarchy, whether of northern Israel in Samaria or the Davidic dynasty of Judah in Jerusalem. After the fall of Jerusalem and its monarchy, the prophets, notably Ezekiel and Second Isaiah, were situated in the Babylonian empire; subsequently Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi were located in the Persian regime. Of course, each of these regimes—Samaria, Jerusalem, Babylonia, Persia—was distinctive. But they all shared a common commitment to order and control. That order inevitably served its beneficiaries in political and economic ways, regularly sanctioned by a priestly authority. In each case the regime did what it could to maintain itself to perpetuity. Every dominant regime imagines itself to continue without disruption and takes steps to guarantee that continuation.

The sine qua non for such continuation is the articulation of a self-justifying ideology that is all-comprehensive and all-explanatory, that allows for no social possibility or economic alternative outside the domain regulated by the regime. Such maintenance, however, is not finally accomplished by overt force or coercion. It is accomplished by the establishment of a monopoly of voice that limits what is said, and that silences voices that are too dissonant from the claims of the regime.

In the Old Testament, it is clear that the royal regime took steps to silence prophetic utterance that was unbearable for the regime and that disrupted the unchallenged and unchallengeable claims of that ideology. Thus Elijah is termed by King Ahab “my enemy” (1 Kgs 21:20); Hosea is dismissed as a madman (Hos 9:7), and Jeremiah is accused of treason (Jer 38:4). These strategies of intimidation aim to discredit the prophet. The most dramatic case of such silencing is that of Amos, who had announced judgment on the royal regime in Samaria. The senior pastor of the biggest church in Samaria, with a clear stake in the well-being of the regime, takes steps to silence Amos:

O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, and earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom. (Amos 7:13)

The silencing, of course, is not just an ancient phenomenon; it continues in our own time. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, a young East German pastor told me that every sermon he preached was life-or-death, because he knew there was always an observer from the government present in the congregation. It is not so patently so among us. But the notable case of Jeremiah Wright would indicate that the National Security State among us is vigilant indeed to silence voices that are “out of sync” with claims of the dominant ideology. Recent leaks of national surveillance, moreover, put us on notice that we are monitored and, where necessary, silenced in the interest of maintaining the status quo.

Of course, it is not so among us in our congregations. Except that every preacher knows about the silencing that is enforced by the congregation. Every preacher knows about the limit of what can be said, and what must not be said. There are many strategies for silencing in the congregation, most dramatically maneuvers to fire the pastor, but also staying away, cutting pledges, or simply covert hostility. The first line of assault is to say at the door of the church after service, “Better to stay with religion than to tamper with politics and economics.” The silencing is real. It is, in its many modes, simply a replay of the old moralistic way of one’s mother washing our mouths out with soap after you have learned to say an unacceptable word, even before you knew what it meant. The punishment was not that the soap was so very bad; it was rather the humiliation and the awareness of being vulnerable and finally helpless before the force of silence.

I came to this matter of silencing through a statement of Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet who died recently. He quoted the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard:

What is the source of our first suffering?

It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak.^[1]

Heaney goes on the say that poetry is the art of breaking the silence. We hesitated to speak because we were not sure. We hesitated to speak because it felt too risky. We hesitated to speak because we had too much to lose. The silence was first broken, in our tradition, when the slaves in Egypt finally “groaned under their slavery and cried out” (Exod 2:23). The slaves did break the silence and cried out. And their cry initiated a new historical possibility. But that report begins, “After a long time.” After a long time of silence. After a long time of brutality simply swallowed and humiliation ingested. After perhaps too long a time, the silence is broken. Someone, as you may know, in a cool reflection on the text of Amos, has inserted this remarkable verse in Amos 5:13:

Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time;

for it is an evil tim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Preaching from the Torah: Genesis
• Preaching from the Torah: The Tale of Moses
• Preaching from the Prophets
• Preaching from the Psalms
• Preaching from the Wisdom Traditions
• Notes
• Scripture Index
• Working Preacher Books