The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Volume 2

Walter Brueggemann

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781611645637
  9780664260415
• eBook ISBN:
  9781611645637
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

This collection presents over fifty powerful sermons from one of the most trusted preachers today, Walter Brueggemann. In it, Brueggemann continues his task of making the biblical text available to the church. He sees preaching as a performance of God's good rule that, in an act of utterance and receptive listening, mediates the truthful, joyous reality of that rule. The sermons are organized according to the church year, starting with sermons for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany and followed by sermons for Lent and Easter and then Pentecost and Ordinary Time. Sermons for other occasions, such as ordinations, weddings, and graduations, are also included, along with a Scripture index. Whether a pastor or a person in the pew, the reader will find inspiration, reflection, and wisdom in Brueggemann's powerful words.

PART ONE

Sermons for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany

1

The What and the When of the Christ Child

PSALM 25:1–10
LUKE 21:25–36

People like us have careful work to do in Advent, to weave our way between two big dangers. On the one hand, there are dangerous people floating around the church who specialize in times and dates and schedules, who know with precision the time of Christ’s coming and who speak confidently of millennia and pre-millennia and post-millennia.... They know too much and reduce God’s freedom to the timetable of their ideology. On the other hand, there are dangerous people floating around the church who are offended by those people, and who in reaction are in love with their comfortable affluence and who imagine that it will not get any better than this, and who expect no gospel arrival at any time ever. People like us live in that awkward place amid those who know too much and those who expect nothing.

But we, in our theological tradition, occupy a different posture about Advent as we ready for Christmas. We are the ones who know what is coming but do not know when.

The what for which we wait at Christmas and for which we prepare in Advent is that God’s rule of starchy justice and generous mercy will arise in the earth, and all that seek to negate abundant life will be overruled and nullified. That is how we pray every time we are together. We pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” We pray that God would show God’s self so that the power of chaos and death, of greed and brutality, of selfishness and hate would end, for such negators cannot stay when God comes among us. We pray always in confidence, for we end and say, “For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory”: ... it belongs to no one else.

But we do not know the when. We do not know when because the coming of God is not our doing. God’s way is a mystery that has not been entrusted to us. It is hard for us to imagine that the regime of violent death will finally not prevail, and we do not know when or how it will end, because we trust all of that to God.

So we have this work before Christmas, to think deeply and pray hard and face passionately the “what” of God’s way, without any anxiety about “when.” We confess the “what” against those who expect nothing who are left in ultimate despair because they think it will finally not change at all. We confess no “when” against those who know too much and reduce the mystery to political ideology. We have passionate preparation to do in Advent so that we may be ready, and of course you know that that preparation has nothing to do with the consumer fever of American society. My modest gift to you today, as you gather around what and shun when is this Psalm 25, a delicate, passionately confident prayer that can give us a way to the “what” as we arrive at Christmas,

• Rested up for the “what,”

• Not exhausted with shopping,

• Not undone by too many parties,

• Not stressed by family quarrels over Christmas decorations, just on the alert!

The prayer of Psalm 25 is all about waiting:

Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame.

You are the God of my salvation,

For you I wait all the day long.

(v. 3, 5)

Thus the one who speaks the Psalm is waiting. But this waiting is not dormant, passive inactivity. It is being on active alert in hope, watching for signs, the kind you see at small airports where people gather to meet planes with big signs and flowers and happy waving, not knowing when the plane will arrive, but already elated well ahead of time, because it is someone we so want to see and hold and welcome. Advent is for getting our lives and our money and our energy and our time and our future and our outlook attuned to the one who is coming soon.

I.

What strikes me about this prayer in Psalm 25 is that it is so God centered. It begins:

To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul.

O my God, in you I trust ...

You are the God of my salvation.

The life of the Psalmist is focused on the God who is a reality of faith and prayer and worship known in Israel’s past for wonders of steadfast love and miracles of faithfulness.

Now all of that is obvious, except it is not an obvious practice for assertive, effective people like us. We are mostly preoccupied with the world, with the parade of crises that claim our energy and attention. And if we are too self-centered to focus there, we may focus more closely on ourselves, on our family, our money, our sexuality or whatever. The world is very much with us!

What this Psalmist knows, moreover, is that when the world is too much with us, we are talked out of hope, and the future feels like more of the same stuff that leaves us exhausted. But Christmas is not about us. It is about this God who erupted amid the Roman Empire. It is about the God who birthed this vulnerable Jesus just at the instant when a decree went out from Caesar Augustus to sign up for the taxes and the military draft of the empire. It turned out in Bethlehem that the world was not about Caesar’s taxes or Caesar’s draft or Caesar’s war or Caesar’s failed economic policies, but about the baby who confounded the powers of this age. Perhaps Christmas is about refocusing our lives away from all those forces that diminish us, to focus instead on this one who is our hope and our trust, our future and, indeed, our present.

II.

The Psalmist prays:

Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame.

(v. 3)

If you spend your time advocating the things of God, you will look like and sound like an innocent who does not know the ways of the world. The world is all about power and force and money and control. And those who live that way easily dismiss those who gather around the Christ child who specialize in neighborly love and unwanted children and needy widows and illegitimate outsiders of a dozen kinds. The people of the gospel keep up this alternative advocacy and we are left out of the main power games; it seems obvious that the rulers of this age will win, and our little gospel claim is so weak and so marginal and we ourselves doubt it sometimes. The “shame” is the impression that we back a loser when we bet on the future of the world.

This Psalmist prays that God should show God’s hand, that God should appear in some sign and validate our faith and our advocacy. It is a good prayer to pray in Advent, to pray it before we lose hope and cease to trust.

III.

The Psalmist revels in God’s mercy, goodness, and steadfast love:

Be mindful of your mercy, O LORD and of your steadfast love.

According to your steadfast love remember me.

All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness.

(vv. 6–8)

It is the same term three times, steadfast love, a term always on the lips of ancient Israel, a term that most fully characterizes the God of Christmas for whom we prepare in Advent. “Steadfast love” means solidarity in need enacted with transformative strength. It is the solidarity enacted with strength that Israel knows in the exodus and in a thousand other life-giving miracles. It is the solidarity in need offered by Jesus to the woman at the well, to the IRS man in the tree, to the blind beggar, to the woman with a bad back. What human persons and human community most need is abiding, committed, passionate transformative solidarity. This Psalmist waits for it in need and knows the place from where it comes.

Truth to tell, that kind of solidarity is not on offer in our world from the big players in power and money and authority. Israel knew that it was not on offer from Pharaoh who always demanded productivity. Jesus knew it was not on offer from Pilate who washed his hands of need. It is not on offer by most of the loud voices of ideology and propaganda among us.

But we are like the Psalmist. We know better; we are not seduced. So we wait with eager longing, for the one thing needful, for the one source that assures, and we will be in readiness.

IV.

But there is more about steadfast love from the God for whom we wait. I just gave you verse 10: “All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness.” The word “path” in the Old Testament means the way of the Torah, the guidance of the covenant, the instruction of the tradition. It is the reason the first Christians were called “followers of the way,” the way of Jesus, the way of the gospel, the way of steadfast love, mercy, and justice. The Psalmist prays:

Make me know ... your ways;

Teach me ... your paths;

Lead me ... in your truth,

Teach me ... Instruct me!

And then the Psalmist says in verses 8 and 9:

Good and upright is the LORD,

Therefore he instructs sinners in the way.

He leads the humble in what is right,

And teaches the humble his way.

(emphasis added)

The Psalmist is aware of the way of the world. The “sin” he talks about is not wild, distorted stuff. It is simply life against the Torah, pretending that God has no purpose for the world, or for us; we are on our own, autonomous agents who must make it all up as we go along. But the ones who wait know better. The ones who wait do not ask for a free lunch of mercy. They ask that we be educated in and for God’s future. They ask to be humble and equipped for the new life of God’s rule, to enact that justice and to enact it now.

So imagine, good church folk, imagine the Advent faith of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. Imagine a whole company of believers in this place rethinking their lives, redeploying their energy, reassessing their purposes.

The path is to love God,

not party, not ideology, not pet project,

but God’s will for steadfast love that is not deterred by fear and anxiety.

The path is to love neighbor,

to love neighbor face-to-face,

to love neighbor in community action,

to love neighbor in systemic arrangements, in imaginative policies.

This Psalmist knows that if we do not prepare for and receive the future God will give, we will be left simply to cope on our own with the world of hurt and hate and violence and selfishness, without a hand to play in an alternative life.

Sometime during this Advent week, somebody will say to you in an open-ended, leading question:

You know what?!

And you can say, “Yes, the ‘what’ is that the gospel world is coming upon us; it will be a new world of well-being without fear.” And they will ask, “When will that be?” And you will say, “I do not know ‘when.’” But I am waiting for it, and already living it. I know the path into the future ... loving God and loving neighbor.

The decrees of Caesar Augustus continue to go out for taxes and for draft and for frantic attempts to keep the world under our control. But the truth is found in the vulnerable village of Bethlehem outside the capital city, the village that disregarded the imperial decree. It will take a village to exhibit this alternative, and we are citizens of that coming society.

December 3, 2006
New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington D.C.

2

The Poem

Subversion and Summons

ISAIAH 11:1–9
MATTHEW 3:1–12

Adults have always known that critical thinking is the best way to manage our life. Adults, since Plato, have learned to trust reason and proceed reasonably with their lives. Adults, since Aristotle, have preferred syllogistic logic that makes things certain. Adults, since the ancient Greeks have, by reason, logic, and critical thinking, been able to reduce reality to a memo, a syllogism, a syllabus, a brief. The Romans took over this Greek way to adulthood, and combined it with ruthless power to accomplish control and wealth and security.

In latter days, we in the United States have replicated Rome with our practice of memo, syllogism, syllabus, and brief ... together with raw power. We have found our way to wealth, security and control. And to sustain that way in the world, we have founded great universities to champion critical thinking, reason, and logic. How is that for a quick summary of Western civilization?!

I.

Except this! Mostly unnoticed and not taken seriously, mostly under the radar in this adult world of control and order, there have been Jews. For the most part Jews have not committed to reason and logic and memo and syllogism and brief. Because the Jews came with their peculiar stories of odd moments of transformation, all about emancipation and healing and feeding and newness, all under the rubric of “miracle.” And behind the stories there were poems ... lyrical, elusive, erupti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Also by the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Thomas G. Long
• Preface by Walter Brueggemann
• Part 1: Sermons for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany
• Part 2: Sermons for Lent and Easter
• Part 3: Sermons for Pentecost and Ordinary Time
• Part 4: Sermons for Other Occasions
• Scripture Index