Walter Brueggemann: The Importance and Future of Preaching in an Age of Social Turmoil 

Deep,edifying and enlightening words.

This is wonderful. Walter Brueggemann articulates the real alternative, moral, social and political to the terror of totalizing materialist modernism.

3:58 "You cannot do it but you must" He speaks the truth, and we laugh because we know it to be a hard truth.

NOTES FROM HIS LECTURE: 0:52 - “I take preaching to be a word of life in a world that is bent on death.” The first half of Brueggemann’s remarks will be centered on the context for preaching and then the second half on a response to that context for preaching. 1:30 - Brueggemann begins unpacking his six points on context for preaching 1:35 - Defines totalism as an absolute regime of something, a centralizing of power, i.e. when there is a monopoly of imagination that is coercive with aims of squashing all dissent. 2:30 - We live in a totalism, in the United States, of market ideology in that nothing is imaginable outside of the reach of the market. The market is a regulatory principle that governs all social relationships. Persons are cast as commodities. Inevitably there are dispensable persons in a monetized system, rooted in racism. 3:30 - The United States’ totalism relies on a uncriticable military. Brueggemann claims we cannot critique the military in a congregation, but we must. 4:48 - Anyone who suggests that we are made for desires other than a market totalism is a threat to the dominant ideology ruling the day. 5:50 - This totalizing ideology is fueled by a conviction of scarcity. There is a created fear of not having enough. This causes neighbors to become threats. 6:00 - The narrative of scarcity, fear, greed, and violence is as old as Pharaoh from Genesis and Exodus. Pharaoh had all the food and resources in the world but he had two nightmares about scarcity. 6:50 - The gospel of Luke presents Jesus as frequently teaching against this economic totalism. 8:00-10:00 - Brueggemann lists several “pioneers of modernity” who pushed for seeing creation as a commodity and therefore ushered in this economic totalism which has produced scarcity, fear, greed, and violence. 10:15 - “White, male, European authority became objective arrogance packaged as white racism, so that white European males knew the best, and knew the most, and that in turn led to harsh colonialism and patronizing missionary work.” 11:00 - This narrative is the governing ideology of our society. This has created a hierarchy of wealth that robs society of wealth, creating wonderful success at the expense of the neighbor. This is the context of our preaching today. 12:10 - This perverse ideology is supported by important theological underpinnings. This ideology traces itself back to Cotton Mather, the early puritan theologian, who made the case that the American whites were the replay of the Israelites conquering the promised land in the Old Testament. 13:00 - These theological underpinnings view God as someone who simply “blesses” and does not judge. It casts God as passive without agency. 14:40 - The liturgy of passive without agency takes two forms: TV ads that assure us the right commodity will give us the good life and spectator sports such as the NFL. 16:45 - Totalism imposes rigorous requirements: we must subscribe to ideological of military consumerism. 18:40 - The preferred mode of communication for totalism is domineering memos. We see this in the church as limiting the mystery of the gospel to simple creedal reductions. 19:50 - Totalism discourages wonder and imagination in worship. 20:30 - Totalism makes huge promises to us: the good life is available for all who participate, but this is a trick. Safety and happiness is always yet to be acquired in totalism. 21:45 - “The promises of safety cannot be kept by investments of violence.” 22:23 - Totalism is the defining social reality of our context for preaching. Our audience is contained in this totalism, as we are. 23:00 - The word of the gospel is indeed foolishness to this totalism. 23:20 - Brueggemann switches to the second half of his lecture: how a preacher responds in this context of totalism. 23:25 - The preacher’s response is to imagine and speak a word from outside the totalism, that contradicts the totalism, that asserts livable reality outside the totalism. Totalism has established the claim that there is nothing outside the totalism, but a preacher rejects this. Preaching requires imagination. 24:40 - Brueggemann lists several preachers and theologians who were masters of this type of imagination. 26:40 - The God of whom we speak is not a creature or product of the totalism but is a life other than that permitted by the totalism. This is good news for those bound up in totalism. 29:30 - “That is how preaching is: utterly exposed without credentialled grounding but occupied with dangerous words that refuse the totalism.” 32:10 - Christ died at the hands of the totalism, but he defeated the totalism. 32:28 - “Totalism thrives on scarcity but the gospel attests to the abundance of God.” 33:30 - Totalism has no reluctance to use violence. It uses legal violence: war against the poor, incarceration of dispensable people, and a regressive tax system, all of which is violent. The gospel claims that violence has no good outcome. 34:07 - The preacher bears witness of abundance against scarcity. 34:24 - The preacher also takes trouble to parse the negatives of a commitment to totalism. Unless they are visible, they cannot be renounced. 34:45 - The bible itself is an arena for contestation. It is a map of our self-awareness because we are an ongoing contest between the power of fear, greed, and violence versus the generosity, goodness, peace-ableness, and hospitality. 35:35 - The totalism depends on an anemic God who does nothing, but the gospel God entrusted to preachers has this dangerous, subversive God who refuses membership in the totalism. 38:15 - The gospel claims that this dynamic God is the central character in the life of the world. 39:20 - Totalism leads to restless exhaustion. 40:35 - Jesus says come to me, all of you who are exhausted by totalism. 41:45 - Brueggemann argues it as if Jesus says, “Woe to you who meet the rigors of the totalism but neglect the mandates of the covenant.” 42:15 - “The weightier things of the Torah mean investment in the neighborhood is a recipe for easy freedom that does not end in woe but ends in blessed.” 44:15 - Totalism speaks in language of certitude and leaves nothing to chance. The gospel is full of playful narratives, poetry with thick imagery, and songs. 45:40 - “Why is the gospel cast in such art? It is because holiness cannot be packaged. Mystery cannot be reduced to explanation. The reality of God be slighted away from freedom.” 47:30 - Brueggemann quotes Karl Barth as saying, “The human possibility of knowing is not exhausted by the ability to perceive and comprehend. Imagination, too, belongs no less legitimately in its way to the human possibility of knowing. A man without imagination is more of an invalid than one who lacks a leg. But fortunately, each of us is gifted somewhere and somehow with imagination, however, starved this gift may be in some or misused by others.” 49:18 - We are invited in freedom to hear as we will and interpret as we may … we are invited to refuse the coercion of the totalism and to resist the received ideologies of market, race, nation and gender. 51:50 - The totalism makes promises of safety and happiness that cannot be kept. The gospel contradicts these promises of safety and happiness that cannot be kept. It makes its own remarkable promises. 54:07 - Brueggemann talks about the future of preaching. 54:30 - Preachers must insist on living and preaching an alternative narrative to the totalism. We must also confess our lives are still shaped by the totalism. 55:25 - Preaching also depends on the faithfulness of the church of being fed by sacraments, being surrounded by contemporary saints, and rejection of the totalism. 56:00 - The church must claim to they are not their own, but God’s. He references the beautiful first question of the Heidelberg Catechism in closing.

THIS is Christianity.

@Genesis 12:3 = Matthew 25:31-46 Abraham God's Friend Jesus goats sheep Matthew 6:20-21. (20. But lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven...(21. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. God bless you!!!

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