Remember You Are Dust

Brueggemann, Hanson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621893608
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Walter Brueggemann is the master of finding fresh and compelling dimensions of meaning in texts so familiar they barely scratch the surface of our consciousness. In this exciting collection, Brueggemann finds that when we admit we are dust, we can be liberated. Why? Because we are free from acting like God. We are free to choose obedience to the one living, true Sovereign. The idols lose their grip on us and we live faithfully and in authentic joy.--Ronald J. Allen, Christian Theological SeminaryAccording to Walter Brueggemann, the autonomy, secularity, and individualism that characterize modernity have 'exiled' the contemporary believer. Always concerned with the manner in which one is to live in the world, he argues for a subversive imagination similar to that found in the biblical wisdom writings, the Psalms, and the Prophets. One comes away from this book both energized by the vision presented and challenged to make it a reality.--Dianne Bergant, Catholic Theological Union in ChicagoThere is a reason why Walter Brueggemann remains, for preachers and pastors, the most loved and trusted of all biblical scholars--and that is simply because he writes for us. In every season and heartbreak of life and ministry, he writes for us. And over the years, we have come to see that when Brueggemann goes to the text before God, with his signature passion, candor, and ferocious energy, he goes not for our enlightenment or edification, but for our life and for his. Read this book and take off your shoes, because you will enter onto holy ground. --Anna Carter Florence, Columbia Theological Seminary

1

The Last Enemy Is Death

Biblical faith is, of course, resolutely covenantal, with both parties—God and God’s people—deeply engaged in interactive communication with each other. That covenantal dialogue of engagement, moreover, is conducted in the conviction that utterance to the partner does impact the partner in important ways. That is, such communication is, according to biblical faith, genuine engagement. Harold Fisch, in resisting the temptation that such faithful utterance is mere subjectivity, judges:

This becomes an article of faith for D. Robertson, who declares that “the Israelite community knows what Shelley knows, that no petition from them is going to lead God to make human life basically different.” This is not what the Israelite community knows: it knows that, mysterious though the ways of God are, there is still a potency in prayer, a power not to be rigidly separated from outer events in the “world”—“this poor man cried and the Lord heard, and saved him out of all his troubles” (34:6) . . . Against the purity of the inner dialogue, or rather in addition to it, we have the emphasis repeated here, as in many other psalms, on the comforts of the Temple worship, where the well-tried and well-established forms of ritual observance bring to the dialogue with God an institutional basis and framework.1

The meeting between God and God’s people is precisely for such interaction.

Given such a dialogic assumption, it is conventional that God’s word to God’s people is in the sermon (the burden of the preacher) and the word of God’s people to God is in prayer. For the most part, that seems a responsible and adequate way to understand the dialogue. It is clear, however, that the word of the sermon tends to be proclaimed with much more authority and clarity than the word of God’s people to God in prayer, so that the communication tends to be quite one-sided; in such a practice the word of God’s people in prayer may become so deferential and mute that it does not hold up its end of the transaction.

For that reason, I have suggested that on occasion it is appropriate in preaching that the preacher should not address the church with God’s word, but the sermon might well be “our turn” to speak the word of the church that might be addressed even to God. Such an articulation might be especially appropriate in times of bewilderment and deep anxiety when a clear word from God is not readily available. Such communal utterance via the pastor might be an occasion for candor that in turn creates an environment of receptivity for what might then be uttered of the gospel.

I suspect that in the cluster of circumstances stretching from 9/11 to the self-indulgent U.S. invasion of Iraq, there might be a circumstance for such a slot on preaching. On such an occasion, the preacher might well voice the bewilderment and anxiety, the anger and confusion, as well as the faith of the church. In...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Last Enemy Is Death
• Chapter 2: Praise to God Is the End of Wisdom—What Is the Beginning?
• Chapter 3: The “Turn” from Self to God
• Chapter 4: Cadences That Redescribe: Speech among Exiles
• Chapter 5: The Secret of Survival
• Chapter 6: To Whom Does the Land Belong?
• Chapter 7: Remember, You are Dust
• Bibliography