Walter Brueggemann - Inscribing the Text: Sermons and Prayers of Walter Brueggemann

Inscribing the Text

Inscribing the Text

Sermons and Prayers of

Walter Brueggemann

Edited by Anna Carter Florence

F ORTRESS P RESS / M INNEAPOLIS

INSCRIBING THE TEXT

Sermons and Prayers of Walter Brueggemann

First Fortress Press paperback edition 2011

Copyright 2004 Fortress Press. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Visit http://www.augsburgfortress.org/copyrights/ or write to Permissions, Augsburg Fortress, Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440.

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover image: Detail from the Madonna of the Magnificat by Sandro Botticelli (14451510). Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS. c. 14801481. Tempera on panel. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy. Used by permission.

The full painting shows Mary with the infant Jesus on her lap surrounded by angels. Marys hand is dipping a pen into an inkwell as if she is about to inscribe words on the page, while Jesus hand is pointing ot the words already inscribed in the Magnificat in .

Jacket and book design: Zan Ceeley

eISBN 9781451419634

ISBN 978-0-8006-9827-0

The Library of Congress cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN 978-0-8006-0532-2

In Memory of August L. Brueggemann

In Expectation for Emilia Mary Brueggemann

Contents

In at least one respect, preaching students are not so different from acting students. They dont begin with the text. They begin with imitation.

Hand a fledgling actor a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire, tell him you want him to read the part of Stanley, and brace yourself, because any moment Marlon Brando is going to come charging into the room. Give a budding actress the score to Sweeney Todd, ask her to sing through it, and what you will hear is her best impersonation of Angela Lansbury. This is inevitable; it is also, frankly, a little tiring for teachers and can make for a dreary few weeks at the start of the term. Teachers understand, however, that this is part of the process: beginning students do not play the scene that is written; they imitate the actors they admire. If they want to act, they have to learn the difference between interpretation and imitation. They have to peel back the layers of caricature until they encounter the text.

I can always tell when my students have been listening to Walter Brueggemann, because I begin to feel like Judi Dench and Robert DeNiro have invaded my classroom. The students dont step into the pulpit; they grab it. They dont open their Bibles; they snap them. Shoulders hunched, eyebrows arched, they growl and glare and toss their heads like lions. Their scripture readings sound like a cross between a live radio sportscast and the Queens annual Christmas address. There are trios of adjectives and torrents of verbs. It is hard to make it to the end of this kind of sermon with a straight face, but I know the students do not mean to be funny. They are sincere. Brueggemann is one of their preaching heroes, and they are looking for role models. My job is to gently pull them back to the task at hand without taking all the wind out of their sails. I am sure, I tell them, that Dr. Brueggemann would be flattered by how closely you have been paying attention to him, and, yes, he is an extraordinary and incomparable preacher; but dont confuse preaching like him with imitating him. If you want to preach like Brueggemann, dont copy his mannerisms. Follow his example. Preach the text.

This volume contains the most recent collection of Walter Brueggemanns sermons and prayers. That would be notable in itself: another dazzling set of words from a man whose sheer energy and creativity make us wonder if he is climbing Sinai every morning, for dictation. Yet this book is more than a collection. The opening article lifts up a startling new metaphor for preacher: that of scribe. Adapted from a lecture Brueggemann delivered at the Festival of Preaching in 2002, this relatively short piece distills years of textual studyso much of it in direct service to proclamationinto a concise homiletic that proposes a radical shift in the way we think about and embody the act of preaching.

Students and readers of Brueggemann will hear cadences of familiar themes: in the scribe, we hear poet and prophet, testimony and resistance, truth and power, exile and captivity. The scribes work is repetitive and rhythmic: to stand up, week after week, and offer texts to people who cant remember their own story for longer than five minutes, people who have bought into a fiction of power and money and scarcity of resources. Text after text, week after week. On the surface it doesnt look like much. But this work of inscribing is how one re-texts a community with Gods truth, and the scribe trusts that it is enough; the texts are enough. Grass withers, flowers fade, but texts linger; they de-center; they explode. Inscribe the text, and it ignites fireworks of alternative imagination. Preach the text, and it sets the people on fire.

Brueggemanns homiletic of the scribe is, in my view, a landmark in the field. It stands with Karl Barths Homiletics as another brief but passionate call for the strange, new world of the biblical text to have its say, as free as possible from the preachers reductive instincts to embroider and protect. And that is no surprise: Brueggemann, like Barth before him, has devoted a lifetime to the study of word and text for preachers. His ideas, like Barths, remain big enough, expansive enough, to open up or join conversations far beyond his own contextor even the contexts of those who would harden the words in opaque orthodoxies. In time, I believe, we will look back over the last century and see the work of these two scholarsone a systematic theologian, the other a biblical theologianas having made the most important, the most enduring, and indeed the most generative contributions to the act of preaching than any others we might name. The scribe may indeed be a Sinai-inspired and Sinai-inscribed homiletic. And the sermons and prayers of this particular scribethough in this form they can only be read, not experiencedwill linger to re-text and re-ignite another generation of preachers.

A NNA C ARTER F LORENCE

C OLUMBIA T HEOLOGICAL S EMINARY

I am glad to record my thanks to my colleague Anna Carter Florence, who worked mightily to transpose my sermons into this book. It is clear to me that she and I are on the same page about preaching, and that encourages me greatly. I am also grateful to Tia Foley, who has the uncommon gift of turning my random words into manuscript pages that permit my preaching. My thanks to K. C. Hanson, Zan Ceeley, and the other good people at Fortress Press is deep and abiding.

I am glad to dedicate this book to my father, August Brueggemann, and to my youngest grandchild, Emilia Mary Brueggemann. My father, as my teacher and pastor, was the first and primary one who inscribed the text on my heart. My granddaughter awaits such inscription. He would have wanted that for her.