The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Volume 3

Walter Brueggemann

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780664265816, 9780664265816
• eBook ISBN: 9781611649765
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

This collection features sixty sermons by Walter Brueggemann, preached mostly in the last five years. For his final public appearances, he preached at various churches and the Festival of Homiletics, including his last address there in 2018. Most of these are based on lectionary texts, with numerous sermons on Advent-Christmas and Lent-Easter texts. Preachers will find inspiration in the handful of sermons covering special occasions or themes, including confirmation, evangelism, and funerals.

PART ONE

Sermons for Advent and Epiphany

1

Disciplines Shared in Gratitude

Second Sunday of Advent, Year C

MALACHI 3:1–4

PHILIPPIANS 1:3–11

LUKE 1:68–79; 3:1–6

I can imagine Tom Rice, twenty years from now, writing a letter of farewell as he retires from Worthington Presbyterian Church. That letter will be like the one that Paul wrote to the church in Philippi, the congregation that was dearest to him and that had supported him most fully in his risky ministry as an apostle. Paul’s letter might be a model for Tom’s letter to you some years from now.

I.

Paul writes: “I thank God every time I remember you.” He is grateful to God for that congregation

• because we shared the good news of the gospel,

• because God is doing a good work among you,

• because you hold me in your heart through all my tough times, and

• because I long for you with compassion and I pray for you.

Paul (or Tom) does not focus on the recognition that this congregation was “good to me,” but rather that you were a church in faithful mission. What Paul knows and what Tom knows, is that thankfulness is the primary mark of the Christian life. Thankfulness is an acknowledgment that every important benefit to us is a pure gift. So Paul does not report here on his achievements or his missionary accomplishments, but speaks of God’s good gifts. Tom will be able in time to come to thank God because God has been at work here doing wondrous things in your midst.

I can imagine that Tom need not wait a long, long time to write that letter. He could write it tomorrow. Because he knows very well that the good stuff in this church will not have started with his arrival. Rather God’s spirit has been at work here for a very long time, and God’s work has been done here for a very long time before now. Tom, and you with him, is situated in a long memory of faithfulness that evokes gratitude. The existence of the church in this place is nothing to take for granted. It has entailed much faithful work. But finally, it is a gift from God for which thanks to God may be given.

II.

Tom’s mandate in his new assignment is as minister of discipleship. He is to provide guidance, leadership, and imaginative programming that more and more the life of this congregation will be as followers of Jesus who do Jesus’ work. Paul can write to this congregation, “that your love may overflow more and more.” What a mouthful! Love of a self-giving kind is so countercultural in our society of fear and anxiety. It was countercultural in Paul’s first century as well, because love of a gospel kind means to get our minds off ourselves and to care about the neighbor who is in front of you that you would otherwise not notice, to get our minds off our own well-being and security and achievement, and be attentive to the structures and practices of justice that make it possible for neighbors far and near to prosper.

Tia and I went to a family wedding recently. The bride and groom are not church people, and the ceremony had a sense of “spiritual but not religious” about it. But like almost every wedding these days, part of 1 Corinthians 13 was read. That reading seems to be a necessity now at every wedding:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (vv. 4–7)

No doubt as we listened, some had in mind love between bride and groom, recognizing that a good durable marriage requires giving one’s self to the other.

But of course Paul is not thinking about love of a couple already in love. He is thinking of the life and work of the church to care for what he calls in 12:7 “the common good.” This love, he writes, is “a . . . more excellent way” (12:31), more excellent than the usual ways of greed, anxiety, pettiness, and all the stuff that turns up, even in the church. When he writes to his favorite congregation, that “your love may overflow more and more,” he means a way of being church that is more excellent. This love does not insist on its own way. The performance of God’s love as a more excellent way means more excellent than greed, more excellent than self-advancement, more excellent than fear or anxiety, more excellent than our several ideologies that propel us to stubbornness, selfishness, cynicism, despair, or anger.

It is this love to which Jesus calls his disciples. It turns out that the substance of discipleship is not some idea or some creed or some liturgy, or some piety, or some political conviction. Rather it is that the blind may see, that the lame may walk, that the deaf may hear, that lepers may be healed, that the poor may have their debts cancelled. That is what Jesus did with his life, and then he would have his disciples do that same transformative work by the power of the spirit. That work of love cannot be done, as Paul understood, when we are busy with self-advancement, and self-securing, and self-sufficiency, and having our own way. It is no wonder that in giving thanks Paul prays that “your love may overflow more and more.”

III.

Such gratitude and such missional love do not happen in a vacuum. The church is always in a context. The Gospel reading for today situates John the Baptist, the carrier of Advent, in his immediate context. The report on his appearance begins this way:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas . . . (Luke 3:1–2)

Luke knows the big players. He names the emperor, Tiberius; he names the governor. He names the high priests who in a cynical deal had purchased the highest priestly office. He knows the entire power structure. He identifies those who had made it to the top of the power heap and the top of the money heap. In the narrative of Luke, this enumeration of powerful people is not innocent reportage. It is rather a recognition of the way in which the dominant values of society have been arranged according to money and power that depend on violence. This list bespeaks a coalition of money and power, a consolidation of greed and a predatory economy that is propelled by fear and anxiety and scarcity, a practice of greed and confiscation that eventuates in violence against the vulnerable. All of that, moreover, is legitimate according to the law. But it stacks the cards against the needy, the vulnerable, and the powerless.

It takes no imagination to transfer that list of power brokers to our own society, for the headliners of political power, economic leverage, the stars of entertainment and sport spectacle, as a systemic force, embody these same dimensions of predatory greed that are grounded in anxiety and that eventuate in violence against the poor and vulnerable. The power structure of that ancient Roman world that Luke lays out, with its predatory greed, counts on cheap labor and ends in fearful self-protection.

And right in the middle of that, says Luke, “the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” It is that way with God’s word. That word is a disruption. It is demanding. It is displacing. It is summoning. It is scary. It is a truthfulness that exposes the flow of conventional power and contradicts that flow of power with the counterflow of love.

So imagine that contest that Luke sets up: the power structure of fear versus the word of newness, the power structure of greed versus the word of generosity. The power structure of scarcity versus the word of abundance. And we, readers of Luke, are plunged into that contest, always asked to decide. In the short run, we would bet on the power structure of greed, fear, and scarcity, because it has all the visible resources. In the long run, however, in the providence of God, it turns out that Tiberius and Pilate and Herod and Annas and Caiaphas—those whom he names—are very temporary folk. They vanished and never left a track in the sand. But the word that came to John persisted. It is the word become flesh among us. It is the word of life that we know in Easter resurrection. It is the word of fidelity that empowers us beyond ourselves. It is the word of life entrusted to this congregation in the face of an economy of greed and a politics of violence.

IV.

So now you install Tom as “Minister of Discipleship.” It is a strange portfolio. It is not a familiar assignment in most congregations. I suspect it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Also by Walter Brueggemann
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Barbara Brown Taylor
• Preface by Walter Brueggemann
• Part 1: Sermons for Advent and Epiphany
• Part 2: Sermons for Lent and Easter
• Part 3: Sermons for the Season after Pentecost
• Part 4: Sermons for Special Occasions
• Scripture Index