I am reading a book right now entitled, Finally Comes the Poet, by
Walter Brueggemann. It’s not a new book. It was actually written in 1989, but
so far it has truly captured me. Brueggemann writes with such elegance and
fluidity that it seems like I can’t read enough of his stuff. The book is about the daring and
important work of preaching the word of God.
A couple of days ago while Robi and I were driving to Seattle, I read a portion of the book to her out loud. It was a strong experience – I literally was gushing as I read, being moved by the ideas. In the book he talks about the need for the poetic in preaching. When he says poetic, however, he is actually referring to the idea of being prophetic. He relates the poet to the idea of the prophet in the Old Testament.
He identifies four partners in the preaching event. He writes, “The meeting of the community of faith is a speech meeting. We gather for speaking and listening of an odd kind. That meeting has the potential of evoking the new humanity. There are four partners who need to be present in the meeting so that the new reality can be birthed.”
He says the first partner is the text. Part of the problem for most Christians is that they gather with too much familiarity with the text. They’ve heard it before, so they have become desensitized to its effect. Brueggemann writes, “All week the ideology of our nation, our class, our sect, our sex has seemed closed, settled, and ready for defense. We trust excessively and vigorously in our ideological commitments, which we accept as a rendering of the text.” In other words the text gets co-opted, or reduced to fit into our ideological framework. We see that all to readily with folk from the political right and left seizing the text to squeeze it into their small-box, small-headed perspectives.
The second partner is the baptized. He refers to the gathered people who are weary, but needful of the recalibrating of their lives to a different, wilder story. He writes, “The community gathers to be shaped by text that addresses us, an articulation of reality that lies outside of us that we cannot conjure and need not defend. The ones gather have been baptized.”
The third partner, he would call the specific occasion. Brueggemann explains; when the music stops and the rheostat (I have no idea what a rheostat is, but the context seems to suggest the idea of lighting or heating – your guess is as good as mine) is turned down, then there is this precious, awesome movement of speech. It is not time for cleverness or novelty. It is not time for advise or scolding or urging, because the text is not any problem-solving answer or a flat, ideological agent that can bring resolve. This moment of speech is a poetic rendering in the community that has come all too often to expect nothing but prose. It is a prose world for all those who must meet payrolls and grade papers and pump gas and fly planes. When the text, too, has been reduced to prose, life becomes prosaic that there is a dreaded dullness that besets the human spirit. We become mindless conformists or angry protesters, and there is no health in us. We become so beaten up by prose that only poetic articulation has a chance to let us live.”
The last partner, he would say is this better world given as fresh revelation. He explains, “Something is revealed, we know not how: a probe behind the closed parameters of religion too-long settled and politics too easily comfortable. It is not only truth disclosed, but it is life disclosed… As I am addressed by the Gospel, I hear anew that possibility overwhelms necessity in my life. The only available absolute given me is a fiction to which I must trust myself–a gracious fiction on which I stake my life, authored by God who also authors the text and speech.”
He breaks out in this beautiful picture of what happens in
this preaching event when he declares, “…again, as the word is spoken one more
time, we move through the wearisome death ridden days of our life and come back
once again to Easter to be stunned in disbelief, and then beyond disbelief, to
be stunned to life, now filled with fear and trembling.” He goes on, “The meeting involves this
old text, the spent congregation believing but impoverished, the artist of new
possibility, the disclosure. The Prince of Darkness tries frantically to keep
the world closed so that we can be administered. The Prince has such powerful
allies in this age. Against such enormous odds, however, there is the working
of this feeble, inscrutable, unshackled moment of sermon. Sometimes the Prince
will win the day and there is no new thing uttered or heard. Sometimes,
however, the sermon will have its say and the truth looms large–larger than the
text or the voice or the folk had any reason to expect. When that happens, the
world is set loose toward healing. The sermon for such a time shames the Prince
and we become yet again more nearly human. The Author of the text laughs in
delight, the way the Author has laughed only at creation and Easter, but laughs
again when the sermon carries the day against the prose of the Dark Prince who
wants no new poetry in the region he thinks he governs. Where the poetry is
sounded, the Prince knows a little of the territory is lost to its true ruler.
The newly claimed territory becomes a new home of freedom, justice, peace, and abiding
joy. This happens when the poet comes, when the poet speaks, when the preacher
comes as poet.”
It seems so often; in today’s church the preaching of God’s Word takes a backseat to many other things. In fact, for many it just isn’t cool to teach the Word of God, but I think that we may be missing something in this regard. Something genuinely mystical and sacramental happens when the Word of God is declared with clarity and beauty. It doesn’t have to be cutesy, or clever, or funny, but it does have to be truthful and passionate. When a person speaks from the Scriptures people should come away from the meeting having truly grappled with text…the mystery of God spoken in the body of believers.
