Brueggemann Sermons

Working Preacher Presents
WALTER BRUEGGEMANN
ON PREACHING
Working Preacher Presents: Walter Brueggemann on Preaching
The following works are reproduced by permission of the author:
Getting Smashed for Jesus. Sermon delivered May 19, 2014, at the Festival of
Homiletics, Minneapolis; published on TIME.com <http://time.com/110732/sermon-
series-getting-smashed-for-jesus/>. Posted May 25, 2014. Used by permission of TIME.
All rights reserved.
A Fourth-generation Sellout. Text of sermon delivered July 2000, Columbia

Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga.; first published on GoodPreacher.com and
subsequently published in Walter Brueggemanns Collected Sermons, Vol. 1
(Westminster John Knox, 2011). Used by permission of Luther Seminary, Saint Paul,
Minn., and Westminster John Knox Press. All rights reserved.
World Unraveling. Notes for a sermon on Jeremiah 18. Published September 2007 on
GoodPreacher.com. Used by permission of Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, Minn. All rights
reserved.
Preaching the Old Testament. Adapted from a lecture delivered September 2014 at
Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, Minn. Not previously published. Text copyright 2015
Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, Minnesota. All rights reserved.
Will Our Faith Have Children? Adapted from an inaugural address upon induction to
the Evangelical Chair of Biblical Interpretation at Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis,
Mo., on February 10, 1983; published in Word & World, July 1983. Copyright 1983 by
Word & World, Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, Minn. All rights reserved.
Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this book may be
reproduced, in any form, without the prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by
copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher at the following address:
Working Preacher
Luther Seminary
2481 Como Avenue
Saint Paul, MN 55108
email: wp@luthersem.edu
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version
Bible, 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in
the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
WorkingPreacher.org
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Working Preacher Presents:
Walter Brueggemann on Preaching

Contents
Getting Smashed for Jesus .........................................................................................................................................3
A Fourth-generation Sellout .................................................................................................................................... 10
World Unraveling .................................................................................................................................................... 13
Preaching the Old Testament .................................................................................................................................. 15
Will Our Faith Have Children? ................................................................................................................................. 22
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Sermon on 2 Corinthians 4
Getting Smashed for Jesus

Delivered May 2014 at Festival of Homiletics, Minneapolis, Minn.
H
ave you ever, as a preacher, had a good idea, and then looked for a good biblical text to fund
it? I thought so. Well, you are probably not the last preacher who will do that. And you are
certainly not the first to do it. Consider Paul. He wanted to write his vexed church in Corinth.
He saw that they had confused major matters and minor items, majoring in minor stuff to the neglect
of major stuff. They were preoccupied with class distinctions, differences between Jewish and Gentile
folk, arguments about circumcision, right food, insiders and outsiders, even some lawsuits, all the usual
stuff that makes for church quarrels. Paul wants to call them out. But you could not just do that,
especially from a remote distance by a letter.
He had to find a biblical text. You can picture him leafing through the book of Jeremiah, one of his
favorites, looking for a good text that would support his good idea. And he found it! In Jeremiah 18!
That prophet had gotten himself a perfect sermon illustration by a visit to a local potter. So Jeremiah
goes on and on about the potter being God and Israel being the clay. He saw that if the clay pleased
the potter, the potter would value and keep the pot that the clay had become. But if the clay was
resistant to right shaping, the potter would smash the clay and start again to get it right. The
performance of the clay would determine the way of the potter with the clay. Jeremiah used the
imagery to comment on the coming smashing of Jerusalem, smashed clay that had displeased the
potter for much too long.
And then, just to be sure he had enough material to work with, Paul flipped back to the book of Isaiah.
He came to chapter 45.That old prophet had just told the exiled Jews that they would be saved by a
goi, by the Gentle, Cyrus the Persian. This was Gods new way to save Gods chosen people. Apparently
some of the Jews said, No, we will not be saved by a goi. We refuse that rescue and will wait for a
good Jewish Messiah. Isaiah responds to that refusal with the same imagery of clay and potter:
Woebig trouble coming

Woe to you who refuse the way of God,
Who strive with your maker.
Woe to the clay that disputes the potter.
Does the clay say to the potter, What are you doing?
Does the clay say to the potter, You forgot the handles?
No, the clay just turns compliantly in the hands of the potter,
yielding to the artistry of the potter.
And then, just to add a more daring figure, Isaiah adds,

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Does the semen say to the father, What are you on about?
No, the semen just keeps moving.
Does the fetus say to the mother, Why are you in such agony?
No, the fetus just keeps tracking along. Israel is like clay, booked to the potter.
Like semen obeying the father,
like fetus responsive to the mother.
So shut up your Jewish mouth; this is my future for you.
Paul got these two texts on clay and potter from Jeremiah and Isaiah. He got them on Monday. By
Wednesday he thought they would work. But then he realized he had to work some to make them
work. Like we do with texts, he had to jiggle them a little. Because the problem in Corinth was not
disobedience to God as with Jeremiahs folk in Jerusalem under threat or resistance as with Isaiahs
folk in exile. The problem was majoring minor stuff and neglecting major stuff.
So Paul adjusts the text. He makes the issue not clay and potter. That would be too obvious. He
makes it clay pot and the contents of the clay pot. Neither Jeremiah nor Isaiah had thought to
comment on the contents of the clay pot. But that just shows what holy imagination can do, especially
at a festival where you can use texts you cannot use anywhere else. Paul has ample imagination and
lots of chutzpah, the kind required to do a good sermon. He extends the imagery beyond his text.
We have this treasure in clay jars.
We have the container and the stuff contained. And we have confused them! We think the clay pot is
the real thing and have neglected the stuff inside. And when we do that, being the clay pot, we think
that we are the treasure. We might, in a moment of great eloquence, even dare to think that the
extraordinary power belongs to us. We might think that the church, the clay pot that holds the
treasure of the gospel, is a big deal. We might think that all the little stuff that so preoccupies us and
uses up our energy is more crucial than the stuff inside the jar. We might! And then we would be like
Corinth!
S
o if Paul can imagine out from Jeremiah and Isaiah, you will not mind of I imagine out from Paul.
The treasure is the news of the gospel, the news of God enacted in Jesus Christ, the one who
reconciles us and liberates us to new life. This God shows up with what we most desperately
must have to live an abundant life. The treasure is:
forgiveness in order to start again in a society that never forgives and keeps score forever;
generosity that overwhelms our lack in a society based in scarcity and getting more for
ourselves;
hospitality that welcomes us in a society that is inhospitable to all but our own kind; and
justice that protects the vulnerable in a social system that is deathly in its injustice.
It is the old, old story of Gods self-giving graciousness to us and to all creatures. That is the treasure!
Everything else is a clay pot that is designed to hold and transmit and enact the treasure. Everything
else!the church and its ministers, its hymnals and catechisms, it budgets and programs, its pension
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funds and mission boards, its conference offices and dioceses and ordaining councils, its congregations
and middle judicatories, its church bells and bulletins and candles and music programs, its seminaries
and their curricula, its research and commentaries and learned articles, its youth groups and mission
trips and church camps, its mission festivals and quarrels and acts of mercy. Everything else is a clay
potfragile, likely to break, never fully able to contain the truth and richness of the treasure.
In the text, Paul writes to a church that is afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down. That is a
standard position for the faithful church; no surprise there! We now know about being afflicted,
perplexed and even struck down, though mostly we are not faithful enough to be persecuted. We all
know now that the church is in big trouble. Everyone knows that. My own pastor says regularly, You
know, people dont just come to church anymore! And my own Episcopal Bishop in Cincinnati says
that he will only ordain folk to the ministry of Word and Sacrament who are theologically grounded
and have enough of an entrepreneurial capacity to do something new, missional, and generative. It is a
new day that evokes new responses.
The temptation for the churchwhen it is afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, and struck downis to give
in to being crushed, driven to despair, forsaken, and destroyed. It is enough to push us over the edge,
to despair of the future. But we make this move,
from afflicted to crushed,

from perplexed to despair,
from persecuted to forsaken,
from struck down to destroyed
we make this move only when we give too much credence to the clay pot and confuse the clay pot
with the treasure. It is easy enough, when you are a pastor or a responsible lay person, to worry
excessively about the clay pot of the church: whether we will have enough dollars, enough members,
enough ministers, enough seminary students, enough young people, enough journal articlesto keep
it all going.
But we know, when we think carefully, that the church is not the treasure. The church is a fragile,
transitory vehicle for the gospel, nothing more. Nobody thought, did they, that our old hymnals would
last forever? Nobody thought, did they, that our favorite seminary would endure to perpetuity?
Nobody thought, did they, that our preferred liturgy or catechism or organizational chart would persist
in eternity? Nobody thought, did they, that present arrangements in our conference or diocese would
abide? Nobody thought, did they, that any form of the church would last on and on and on? Because
clay pots are fragile, transitory, and passing. So the church, with its vested interests and greed and
anxiety and foolish judgments and ideological advocacies, is not durable in any form or manifestation,
not even the ones we most value.
But, says Paul, the treasure prevents us from taking the vessels with ultimate seriousness. It is the
treasure of the gospel, the news of reconciliation and emancipation, that is the abiding reality that
does not fail. It is the treasure that draws the line against our over-investment in clay pots. It is the
truth of the gospel that permits us to live freely in this vexed context,
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afflicted but not crushed,

perplexed but not driven to despair,
persecuted but not forsaken,
struck down but not destroyed.
It is the treasure that lets us see clearly and love dearly and follow nearly. It is this but not that
matters. When we fall into despair and panic cynicism and romanticism, it is because we have
confused the treasure with the clay pots, when we regard our capacity to make it work as a life or
death matter. We have been seduced by a can-do American consumerism or by works righteousness
to bet inordinately on our work and our imagination, our skill and our wealth. And none of it will abide.
So my work in this hour is to consider with you treasure and clay pot, gospel and church arrangements,
To be sure that we do not confuse the treasure with the vessels,

To be sure that we do not take the vessels too seriously,
To be sure that we recognize that the extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come
from us!
Extraordinary power concerns self-giving forgiveness, hospitality, and generosity. Transcendent

power does not come from good management or good planning or good scholarship, but from
vulnerable self-giving.
Our moment of crisis in the church is a moment to consider among us the richness of the treasure and
the fragility of the vessel in the presence of the treasure. It may be a moment to decide yet again to
give ourselves over to the truth of the treasure and let God manage much of the rest for the sake of
the vessel. I have in mind specifically vexed church treasurers, exhausted pastors, and worried church
leaders. I have in mind all of us who have taken on the burden of the church, the cost of discipleship as
it takes church form. I have in mind that we pause to recognize that more is going on than us, that in,
with, and under us and our efforts is this buoyant fidelity that abides and sustains, no matter what. I
have in mind that we not be talked out of the truth of the gospel that is the only warrant for the
vessels we so value.
We are watching while the clay pots are being smashed like Jeremiah imagined old Jerusalem to be
smashed, smashed maybe for being disobedient and irrelevant, smashed for being too self-
preoccupied, smashed for being too comfortable with privilege and national ideology and middle class
morality. So I had the thought, the clay pots are being smashed for the sake of Jesus, that the power of
Jesus in his generosity, forgiveness, hospitality, and justice can break loose in the world to make for
healing and newness.
Paul writes this fourth chapter around the gospel of Friday and Sunday. He writes that we carry in the
body the death of Jesus. We are marked by vulnerability, exposed for the sake of the gospel. We are
always being given up to death for the sake of Jesus, always having life sucked out of us because we
have embraced the gospel. But then he asserts,
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that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you
into his presence (verse 14).
The church, says Paul, reperforms the death and the new life of Jesus. We are now facing some dying
in the church in order that we may be raised to new life.
This argument from death to new life is reflected exactly in Pauls first letter to Corinth. In
1 Corinthians 1, Paul writes of the cross of Friday:
For Gods foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and Gods weakness is stronger than human
strength (verse 25).
And then in the very next verse he says to the church,
Consider your call: God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to
reduce to nothing the things that are.
At the end of this same letter, in chapter 15, he testifies to Gods victory in the resurrection:
Death has been swallowed up in victory.

Where, O death, is your victory?
Where O death is your sting? (verses 55-56)
And then he says to the church:
Therefore my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord,
because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain (verse 58).
From crucifixion in chapter 1 to resurrection in chapter 15, the church is between that Friday and that
Sunday, on this gray Saturday, not knowing, waiting, trusting, not crushed, not in despair, not forsaken,
not destroyed. Here is the Friday mandate:
Consider your call.
Here is the Sunday mandate:
Be steadfastabounding in the work of the Lord.
And we between, with our clay pots, but sure about the treasure.
A
visit to the potters house permits the prophet to ponder that the potter can make and
unmake and remake the pot. And he sees that in exile, in its time of displacement, Israel is
being unmade and remade in a new form according to Gods purpose. Israel will and must
become who it was not for the sake of Gods intention. No, the clay does not get to question the
potter. For Paul this same imagery from the prophets pertains to the church. God is the same potter.
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We have this clay pot of church life. We like clay pots a certain way. We like the handle and the design
and the color the way we like them. We like worship to be a certain way and music to be a certain way
and mission to be done in a certain way, etc., etc., etc.
And then we have this moment of stunning attentiveness. The pot is being reshaped before our very
eyes because it no longer pleases the potter. Some folk do not like the change and its new
requirements. Well, none of us like it very much. We want to resist the potter and have it the way we
want it. But that is to confuse the treasure with the vessel.
So my word to youas a white, tenured, retired male who has no risks to runis to care more for the
treasure. Because this is the truth about the treasure: there is not any single personnot old or young,
not rich or poor, not gay or straight, not conservative or liberalnot anyone who does not eagerly
hope for the news of Gods reconciling, liberating love. Not one! The treasure must be enacted in new
forms. It must take many new forms. But the forms, those we prefer and those forms that we resist,
are not the treasure. The clay pots include our salaries and our health care coverage and our family
security. And we worry about them as we worry about all of our preferred clay pots. But they are not
the treasure!
My friend Henry Zorn, an ELCA pastor where I live, tells of a colleague complaining that in his church
there were only sixty members. Henry remembers that their seminary teacher chided his friend: Just
think, sixty people hearing the news and ready for ministry. Think of that and do not say only. This is
not a proposal for church shrinkage. It is rather that the usual indices of church health are not
pertinent. The relevant matter is the treasure and its power to transform. The impact of the news is
not through gimmicks that the clay pots might conjure; it is the truthful richness of the treasure that
makes all things new.
You may know this story of an Anglican diocese in Canada. It was sued for a long-term practice of
sexual abuse of children in their parochial schools that had happened long ago. The diocese lost the
suit and had to declare bankruptcy. Penitence was seriously enacted; payments were made; serious
apologies were enacted. Then the day after bankruptcy, the bishop called a press conference. He said,
(get this!):
We have a book and a towel, a table and a cup. And we are back in business.
We have a book that tells the story of Gods transformative power.
We have a towel whereby in vulnerability we enact transformation.
We have a table where all are welcome.
We have a cup of life poured out in forgiveness.
What we have is a small vessel! But it is an adequate vessel! The bishop authorized the clergy of the
diocese to depart from the diocese if they wanted a vocation elsewhere. Not one left! They all stayed.
Because they were back in their proper business, glad to be fragile clay pots for the treasure. It was like
a wake-up call for the church that had confused the treasure with its own clay pots. So it is with us
now, as Paul writes:
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That Gods grace may extend to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory
of God.
What a menu: grace, thanksgiving, glory! So Paul to us:
Consider your call for the sake of the cross.

Be steadfastabounding in the work of the Lord in the wake of Easter.
We are indeed afflictedbut not crushed;
We are indeed perplexedbut not driven to despair;
We are indeed persecuted when faithfulbut not forsaken;
We are indeed struck downbut not destroyed.
The right vessels will be given in due course. The treasure provides that for us, and for many others
through us. Paul writes at the end of his clay pot paragraph: We do not lose heart! We lose heart
only when we value the clay pots excessively. But we do not lose heartwe do not! Because of the
treasure!
This sermon was published on TIME.com May 25, 2014. Used by permission of TIME.
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Sermon on Genesis 41:11-32, 46-49; 47:13-26; Acts 26:1-3, 12-21
A Fourth-generation Sellout
Preached July 2000, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga.
Authors note: This sermon was prepared for seminary chapel and intended for seminary students. I had been
thinking for some time that it is odd in the recital of The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that Joseph is never
mentioned. The usual explanation is that the Joseph tradition developed in a distinctive way, and so never was in
the same formulary. Still, it is odd, it seems to me, that in belated formulation, Joseph remains absent. That is my
biblical pondering.
In the life of the seminary, it is now an acute and recurring question about how the church (and its pastors) relate
to dominant forms of power, with a huge seduction toward sellout. My sermon seeks simply to make a
connection (albeit not an obvious one) between the absence of Joseph in the final formula and the capacity to
sell out to power. The connection seems to me a provocative one, even if the exegetical assumption behind it is
far from sure or, perhaps, even far from convincing. The deep issue the sermon tries to address is that faith is
characteristically practiced in the face of immense Pharaonic power, in the presence of which intentionality
among the faithful is important.
A
very strange thing happens in the memory of Israel. In the book of Genesis, things are clear
and sequenced about our ancestors. In Genesis 12-24, Abraham with Sarah; 25-26, Isaac with
Rebekah; 27-36, Jacob with Rachel; and 37-50, Josephfour generations of promise. But then
Israel reduced this long narrative to a mantra; it comes out in the long form, The God of Abraham, the
God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, or in the short form, The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is
astonishing that in neither long nor short form, does anybody ever say, the God of Joseph. The guy in
the fourth generation of Israels memory drops out of the mantra. I am going to talk about that
dropout and invite you to listen carefully. Because while I talk about Joseph, I may not be talking about
him at all, but about someone closer to our own time and place.
J
oseph is the guy, in the memory of Israel, who had everything, everything his family could give him,
and everything that God could give him, through his family and in spite of his family. He was the
beloved, long-awaited son of the beloved Rachel, after all of his less wanted half-brothers. He was
the family pet of whom, when born, his mother exclaimed, God has taken away my reproach
(Genesis 30:23). His very birth is the end of family shame! As the pet he had, as you know, a bright,
many-colored coat, an emblem to his brothers that his father doted on him. He had a dream, a dream
that grew out of the family promise of preeminence from God. He would be first, even as his great-
grandfather, his grandfather, and his father had such a promise from God. Beyond these gifts, he is the
object of Gods providential care. He is protected by God, rescued from the pit and later rescued from
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an imperial prison. He is a survivor and a winner, much admired in the family story. And beyond all this,
he has extrasensory perception, can interpret dreams, and has access to secret knowledge, a truly
valuable commodity in any time. With such special investment from God, one would imagine we would
speak of the God of Joseph, for this guy had it all, grounded in the richness of his familys faith,
ultimate recipient and prize exhibit of this family-protecting God.
S
o whats the problem that Joseph drops out of the theological mantra of Israel? Well, the
problem in the narrative is Pharaoh, the cipher in the Old Testament for all that is a threat to
Israels faith and existence. Joseph, for palace hanky-panky, is in prison, but is summoned out of
prison by Pharaoh because of his reputation as a dream interpreter. That is, this fourth generation
Israelite has intelligence not available in the empire. The foolishness of Israel is wiser than Egyptian
wisdom (see 1 Corinthians 1:25)! Joseph hears the dream of Pharaoh and interprets it...his reputation
is justified in the empire!
The dream of Pharaoh is a nightmare. He dreams of seven cows fat and sleek; seven cows poor, very
ugly, and thin. He tells Joseph, Never have I seen such ugly cows in all the land of Egypt (Genesis
41:19). No Egyptian academic could explain the nightmare to the king. But the case is easy for Joseph.
You dreamed famine! You dreamed scarcity! You dreamed your empire under threat! You have a
nightmare that will deconstruct your power.
Joseph proceeds to do more than interpret. He advises. He is a consultant. Quite quickly, brazenly
perhaps, he nominates himself to handle Pharaohs nightmare of scarcity that will be the undoing of
the empire. He becomes the manager and chaplain of the nightmare of the empire.
Then we are told, six chapters later in the narrative, that Joseph acts in his new royal power, to
administer the empire in its scarcity. Joseph achieves for Pharaoh, by his rapacious, ruthless wisdom, a
monopoly of food that becomes for Pharaoh an economic tool and a political weapon that leverages
the Egyptian population (Genesis 47:13-20). In three years, we are told:
Joseph seizes all the money of Pharaohs subjects, in order to dole out food from Pharaohs
monopoly.
Joseph confiscates all the livestock of Pharaohs subjects, in order to dole out food from
Pharaohs monopoly.
Joseph takes in hock the bodies of Pharaohs subjects, in order to dole out food from Pharaohs
monopoly, and so reduces citizens to slaves with irreversible economic dependence upon the
central economy.
And then the narrative adds laconically:
So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh. All the Egyptians sold their fieldsand the
land became Pharaohs (Genesis 47:20).
Remarkably, through this entire process Joseph does not blink, does not express any compassion or
signal any regret or any ambivalence about his harsh actions on behalf of the empire. It is all, as Marlon
Brando said in his famous role, just business. Nor, indeed, does the narrator offer any signal of regret
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on behalf of Joseph. In the end we do not know if this narrative report is pure admiration for Joseph or
if it is quiet irony. We cannot tell, for we get no signal.
J
oseph senses no moral dilemma in his imperial work. The narrative signals nothing. But Israels long
and wise memory knows, and so drops him from the theological mantra. This Joseph, willed by
Gods providence and rooted in Israels oldest, deepest promises, has, in these chapters, sold out.
He has distanced himself from old covenantal dreams, trading them for the deep nightmare of the
empire, sinking deeply into its fear of scarcity.
He might have countered Pharaohs nightmare with Israels promise, had he cherished his roots more.
He might have invited Pharaoh out of his phantom of scarcity with the abundance of the land-giving
God of Israel. Clearly, however, he holds the old Israelite promises and old Yahwistic abundance
loosely, perhaps thinking such old cadences are weak and embarrassing in the environment of the
growth economy of Pharaoh. As a consequence, he never utters a word about his own identity, giving
himself so completely to Pharaohs defining nightmare, so compliant to it that he himself might have
had disturbing nightmares of scarcity, enacting imperial power by day and imperial threat by night.
I think he is, in the end, dropped from Israels theological summary because Israel was unclear about
his God. Israel might confess the God of Joseph who then turned out to be the Egyptian author of
slavery. Joseph had to be dropped because he understood so little and valued so thinly the God of the
promise that he served greedy interests that victimized his own people.
At this distance from the narrative, we are left to ponder:
a trade-off of promise for nightmare

a trade-off of abundance for scarcity
a vocation as manager and chaplain for the imperial nightmare
It did not need to be so. I have introduced Paul before Agrippa, faith before power, as a counterpoint
to Joseph. Paul attests, according to the narrative, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, the
vision that got him in a peck of trouble. He was led by his vision to new openness, in trouble with old
powers that resisted new vision, powers that craved nightmare but rejected vision. That is Paul who
did not yield to the empire, as did Joseph.
The people who hold to the vision and to the promise with courage and steadiness remain in the
theological mantra. But there is always a choice between an evangelical vision and an imperial
nightmare. Joseph was not a bad man, not especially coerced, more likely seduced, evidently
excessively eager, too accustomed to success, and dropped as a sell-out in the fourth generation. The
tradition is wise and knowing enough in its judgment that it makes one wonder about the fifth and
sixth and seventh and umpteenth generations.
This sermon was published on GoodPreacher.com and subsequently in Walter Brueggemanns Collected
Sermons, Vol. 1 (Westminster John Knox, 2011). Used by permission of Luther Seminary and Westminster John
Knox.
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Sermon notes on Jeremiah 18:1-11; Deuteronomy 30:15-20; and Luke 14:25-33
World Unraveling
Published on GoodPreacher.com, September 2007
I
begin my pondering with the Jeremiah text, because Jeremiahs time is like our own with a world
unraveling. While the metaphor of potter is useful, too much should not be made of it, because
the text moves beyond that image. The remarkable claim of verses 7-10 is that Israel (the clay) can
impact YHWH (the potter). The accent point is that even though YHWH makes decisions about the
future according to hard norms, Israels fresh decision can change Gods mind. In context, God has
decided to pluck up (destroy) Jerusalem; but Israel can now decide differently. (The preacher can
peek beyond the lectionary verses to verse 12 to notice that, in context, Israel refused a new decision
that could have saved its life: It is no use. Stubborn resistance will bring divine trouble, according to
the prophet.)
If we read backward from Jeremiah we reach Deuteronomy 30, in which Moses enjoins Israel to decide
for life or for death. The issue is a distinct Torah identity in an ocean of Canaanite technological
manipulation and consumer indulgence (sound familiar?). The alternative is Torah that, in
Deuteronomy, means viable neighborly relationships enacted as economic generosity toward the
needy.
If we read forward from Jeremiah, we come to the Gospel reading in Luke 14. In the middle of the
textual unit, Jesus offers two examples of intentionality, the building of a tower (verses 28-30) and a
king going to war (verses 31-32). The point of the two images should not be lost: intentionality in
running risks for the sake of the future. These two images are sandwiched in the narrative in verses 27
and 33 by two summons to discipleship that consists in the sacrifice of the self on the cross and the
divestment of all your possessions. Clearly Jesus is summoning large crowds to new intentional
decisions that invite to a new life alongside Jesus.
The theme recurs:
Jeremiah: new decisions can change God;
Deuteronomy: a decision is required for life or for death; and
Jesus: a decision to follow a new life is on offer.
T
he preacher can reflect, from these texts, on (a) the state we are in in our social crisis; (b) the
past decisionssocial, economic, political, militarythat have gotten us there; and (c) the new
decisions in the Gospel that might reverse the current mess. The text has immense implications
for public policy; it also makes an ecclesial bid that the people close to Jesus have an alternative
identity that has concrete implications.
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The awareness at the Jordan (Deuteronomy), in Jerusalem (Jeremiah), and with large crowds (Jesus) is
that we may keep on doing business as usual on the way to a shriveled life. The preach-able good news
is that we can decide againabout Torah, about Jesus, about the way of our society and the chance to
be different. The preacher could wind up talking about baptismal identity and life under the promise in
obedience. It is a very hard wordbut it surely is an urgent word among us just now.
These sermon notes were published on GoodPreacher.com. Used by permission of Luther Seminary.
14
Lecture delivered September 2014 at Luther Seminary
Preaching the Old Testament

Adapted for publication in 2015 by Luther Seminary with permission of the author.
A
ll of us have established habits and passionate convictions about preaching. I have several. The
first is that preaching is hugely urgent at this time. I believe that the health and well-being of
our civil society depends on courageous, faithful preaching.
The second follows from that. Its about as hard a time for preaching as it can be. It may not be true in
the Lutheran church, but in many traditions the authority of the pastor has completely collapsed so
when you get up and say things, people imagine that you have no more right to make a claim than
anyone else does in the church, and that makes preaching very hard, indeed.
A third conviction I have is that we all have our own way of preaching and I wouldnt want to talk you
out of that. I believe there isnt any one right way to preach (other than my way, but you know what I
mean).
I suppose the main point that I want to make this morning is that I think all of the schematic attempts
to relate the Old Testament to the New Testament by way of promise and fulfillment or by way of Law
and Gospel are hopelessly reductionist and do not help us at all. Brevard Childs has insisted that we
have to read every text according to the canon and by the time Brevard Childs gets done it all sounds
like Calvins Institutes, which isnt good for Lutherans or Presbyterians. So my advocacy is that you take
a text and let the text be the text1 and sit with the text and let the faithful have the text, because I
believe that Gods spirit works in, with, and under the text. And preaching is in the detail of the text, if
we have patience with the text.
T
he way I want to begin is to talk about totalism. By totalism, I mean a system or ideology that
contains all possible options. The notion of totalism comes to us from the Jewish philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote a book titled, Totality and Infinity. By totality he means this
[gesturing arms in a closed circle] and by infinity he means this [arms extending outward]. So he thinks
totality is a bad thing and infinitys a good thing.
But I learned about totality by reading Robert Lifton. I dont know whether you know Robert Lifton; he
is a scholar who has spent his life studying atrocities. He studied the Holocaust and its outcomes; he
studied Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombs; he studied what the nuclear threat was doing to the
American psyche. What he observed about the Nazis and about the Japanese war system and about
1
Authors note: If, for example, you take the corpus of Emily Dickinson, you don't want canonical generalizations about
Emily Dickinson's work; what you want to do is track the words in the text.
15
American bombers is that every one of those systems was a totalizing system that thought it ought to
have total control. You get total control not only by controlling all the economic and political resources
but by having a monopoly of imagination so that nothing is thinkable or imaginable outside the
dominating system.
Now if I were to do a history of totalisms, you would recognize them: Pharaoh in the Old Testament is
the first totalizing system. Theres nothing outside of Pharaohs totality except the wilderness where
there are no jobs and when we went to the wilderness, we didnt know whether there would be any
food or water or bread.
Likewise, in the main chronology of the Old Testament, the Jerusalem elites of the kings and the priests
and the scribes established an ideological totalism in which Gods presence was in the temple. The
temple was the media center that monopolized imagination, and the way you got along in the world
was to subscribe to the totalism.
In the period of the New Testament, the Roman Empire organized and administered such a totalism so
that ordinary people were able to say, We have no king but Caesar. We have no way to live in the
world except to subscribe to the Roman Empire.
Now this is all a setup for what I want to say to you about our preaching. Heres my proposal: that the
totalism in which U.S. Christians live is the totalism of market ideology that is connected to U.S.
exceptionalism, that is supported by an aggressive military, that wants to control world markets under
the guise of globalism so you get nationalism, militarism, consumerism andsee if you think this is
trueall totalisms end in violence.2
The test of the extent to which it is a totalism is the extent to which you may or may not critique it.
I know many pastors who can critique many things: they can critique the Bible, they can critique the
violence of God, they can critique the canon because it left out all the good gnostic documents; but
you cannot critique the American enterprise system.
M
y second point is that totalisms always silence. They stop all critical dissenting voices. So I
tried to think about silencing in the Bible and the text that drew me most is the
confrontation in Amos 7 between Amaziah, the high priest at Bethel, and the prophet Amos
(see Amos 7:10-17). You may recall Amos was a considerable dissenter with his visions, and the priest at
Bethel says to Amos: If youre going to talk that way, go south. You cannot talk that way here because
this is the kings chapel where never is heard a discouraging word, so just preach grace, pleasejust
preach grace.
It was a silencing. And so the temple apparatus in the Northern Kingdom (surely like the temple
apparatus in the Southern Kingdom) tried to silence the prophets. In Amos 5 there is this one little
2
Authors Note: Right now [in 2014] we're having a big NFL discussion about totalism, and the National Football League
doesn't intend to do anything about it. It intends to hold a few press conferences until it goes away because what could
they do about it? It is a sport that depends upon violence, and what I read about these players who are paid to be violent is
that they can't just flip a switch and turn [that violence] off when they go home.
16
verse that sits there and says, It is a time when the prudent keep silent. So many prudent pastors
know where the edge of silence must be. I think that word can also be translated, It is a time for the
prosperous to keep silent. Why rock the boat?
Or I remember this verse at the end of Habakkuk 2, The LORD is in his holy temple, let all the earth
shut up! For a long time I thought this verse was written by a librarian, but then I had the thought that
the more affluent a congregation is, the more it likes order, solemnity and quiet. No speaking in
tongues here; the first thing you know, people will get out of controlso be silent in the temple.
In the New Testament I remembered that when Bartimaeus in Mark 10 cried out, Son of David, have
mercy on me! the disciple tried to shush him. But he cried out a little louder, Son of David, have
mercy on me! and Jesus said, What? Jesus heard, but the disciple didnt want the routine upset. Or
in Luke 19, I remember, If you keep silent the stones will cry out. But I didnt get the context of it; its
Palm Sunday and theyre saying Hosanna, hosanna! and they tried to stop the disciples from having a
parade. If John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg are right, the reason they tried to stop the parade
was that there was a Roman Empire parade on the other side of town and you dont want to distract
from the big parade of Caesar. But the stones will cry out!
And then I remembered that when John Paul the Second came to Central America and one of the
liberation theologians tried to take communion at the altar, the pope said to him, Silencio, you
Marxist! Well, the church when it needs to be can be a big silencer.
Or I learned from reading William Cavanaugh that the Pinochet regime in Chile silenced everybody and
created an environment of such mistrust that no one would say anything to anyone and what the
bishops finally figured out was that the only antidote to that totalizing silence was the Eucharist.
Or do you remember the Black Power sit-ins in churches that frightened white congregations? There
was a strange confrontation in a big Methodist church in Saint Louis when the local representative
James Foreman stood up in the middle of the church servicethey knew he was comingand the
Methodist pastor said, What do you want here? Foreman responded, Weve come here to pray,
and the pastor said, You cant pray here, this is a worship service!
Now the silencing in our society happens by shriveling humanities in college curricula and cutting out
arts programs in public school because we cant afford them. We can afford anything that is important,
but we cant afford anything that is dangerous because if you invite people to critical thought and
artistic direction, who knows where theyll go with it. So that is my second point: Totalism kills.
M
y third point is that because silence kills, the silence must be brokenand breaking the
silence is very risky. My thesis is that prophetic preachingin a church that is not hospitable
to prophetic preaching, I know thatprophetic preaching is the breaking of the silence of
totalism. It utters words and images and narratives and songs that are not permitted, but said anyway.
What I want us to think here is that such prophetic utterance that breaks the silence of totalism is a
voice from elsewhere. Think about it so that when you hear it, you ask, Where did that come from?
I want to think for a minute about what it means to have a word that comes from elsewhere.
17
On the one hand, we know that prophetic speech in the Old Testament is human speech. Its right on
the lips of the men and women who talk that way. It grows out of lived, human experience so that we
spent a great deal of time on what Fleming James called prophetic personalities, and we thought we
could recover and reconstruct those prophetic personalities beginning with Hoseas marriage and
running through Jeremiahs laments and all of that. Now we are told that is all constructionbut
whatever.
So I have the sense that Amos strictures about justice were human speech by this speaker who found
the practices of oppression and exploitation simply intolerable. The justice utterances come out of the
sense that the system is wounding, and it is speech that is coming out of wounded-ness.
Or, if one reads out of Ezekiel, which we hardly ever do, I think that the repulsion that Ezekiel speaks
about is, in some great measure, his own utter disgust with the violations of holiness that he couldnt
tolerate and he imagined that God couldnt tolerate.
So when you say it is a voice from elsewhere, it is a voice from outside the totalism that is un-
credentialed and unwelcome and without pedigree. But the prophetic tradition also wants to claim, on
the other hand, This is not human speech. This is a word from the Lord.
You have the sense in hearing the artistry and the urgency of prophetic utterance that these words
have been given; and one senses their transcendent force that is beyond the force of personality. What
you get in this word from elsewhere is imagery and metaphor that hardly ever discusses an issue. They
dont take up the Panama Canal or abortion, or any of the things that we think we have to be prophetic
about. But they are simply words that are bearing witness to the fact that totalism does not account
for everything that is lively in our common life.
You get language that is elusive, hyperbolic, offensive, disjunctive, amazingall of which is in contrast
to a memo. Because totalism lives by memos, and the more the church depends on memos, the more
it has conformed to the totalism of market assumptions.
But the word that breaks the silence of totalism creates historical possibility. It transposes a venue of
silence, which is likely to be conformist either in despair or in self-sufficiency, into new possibility. Have
you ever been in a psychotherapeutic conversation where your partner says something that takes your
breath away? And you say, I never saw that. I never had that awareness before that lets me entertain
new possibilities; that lets me make some new decisions and move in some new directions.
So this speech from elsewhere, that is human speech that comes from God (Thus saith the Lord ),
tends to be welcome because it breaks the totalism, or tends to be unwelcome because it threatens
the totalism. And what they regularly do, Claus Westermann has shown us, is that they speak judgment
(which is Friday speech) or they speak hope (which is Sunday speech). And if you think about it,
what you discover is that totalisms do not believe in judgmentthey dont believe we ever have to be
accountable to anybody, and totalisms do not believe in hope, because they think that there are no
new possibilities that we dont already administer.
18
Preaching is this strange breaking of the silencesometimes its welcome because the silence is
oppressive, sometimes its threatening because the silence feels betterto speak judgment and hope,
so that the great prophetic books are arranged as judgment and hope. Thus, you get First Isaiah
followed by the beginning of chapter 40 where you get hope; Jeremiah is not quite so clean, but in
chapter 28 you get Hananiah and in chapter 29 you get promises for new possibilities after
deportation. Ezekiel is very symmetrical, so the first twenty-four chapters are judgment by-and-large
with some intrusions, some hints of hope, and then chapters 32 and following are all hope and new
possibility.
P
reaching out of this tradition is a dissenting voice that refuses the silence and invites us to think
about the deathly choices that our totalism is making that will end in deathliness, and invites us
to think about hope that totalism cannot entertain.
I want to talk about judgmentbecause I know you cant preach judgment; Terry Fretheim and I would
agree theres no supernatural intrusion of judgment from God in the skybut this is the way I want to
phrase itand I just want to give you these two phrasesthats my gift to you today. Prophetic
preaching is the articulation of non-transgressable limits. You cannot transgress them with impunity.
You cannot transgress holiness with impunityI have come to think in our society that the opposite of
holiness is pornographyby which I do not mean naked women; but by which I mean, the
pornography of homeless people on the street is treated as normal; by which I mean, torture is now
acceptable policy in the interest of our security; by which I mean, all of those pathological processes
that we have come to think are simply acceptable because we are Gods chosen people in the world
and we have to do those things to get along with our destiny as Gods beacon of freedom and all of
that good stuff.
Or prophetic justice is an articulation of non-transgressable limits that have to do with the violation of
the neighbor. I think when you come to speak about judgment, the deathly practices contain within
themselves the seeds of our destruction.
One of the wonderful speeches of judgment that I take to be the quintessential expression is the
incredible poetry in Hosea 4, the Lord has a lawsuit against Israel, and the indictment is that there is
lying, stealing, killingits the Decalogue, thats what it isand then the third verse says Therefore
the land mourns, which is an idiom for drought. Therefore you get drought and the birds and the
beasts and the fish are all disappearing. The succinct poetry that doesnt explain anything, is that the
violation of the Decalogue will lead to the destruction of Creation. Hosea is tracing non-transgressable
limits. You cannot violate the neighbor without losing your habitat.
Market ideology believes that you can do anything if youre smart and rich, fast and well-connected.
And if you want to play the market game, youve got to get your kids to soccer practice on Sunday
mornings, because getting your kid to participate in the market is surely more important than
participating in the other liturgy around Jesus.
19
So its required that there be no Sabbaththat you stay busy getting ready for market ideology all the
time or you will be left behind. It is required. And the dots are not connected. So prophetic preaching is
connecting the dots about how our participation in totalism is an option for death.
Prophetic preaching has to do with hope. The most dangerous thing that a prophetic preacher can do
is say, Christ is risen, which means that by the power of God Christ has outflanked the execution by
the state. So we dont think enough about prophetic preaching as the preaching of hope. Heres my
second formula: Prophetic preaching is witnessing to the originarywhich means, comes from
nowherestirrings of divine fidelity that are inexplicable, in which newness occurs where there was
no reason to expect newness. Every pastor sees that. Every pastor can resonate with Second Isaiahs
poetry, where God says, For a long time, I have kept silent. I held my tongue. But now I will gasp, I will
pant like a woman in labor, I will bring forth newness! Not because Cyrus summoned me, I just am
going to do it!
And the pastoral task is to bear witness to these originary stirrings. So who knew that apartheid could
end? Who knew that the Lutheran church through a little bit of trauma would finally understand that
gay people belong to the Body of Christ? Who knew that the movement of the 99 percent isnt finished
yet? Without these stirrings, Isaiah can say, Have you not known? Do you not hear? Have you not
seen? And people who live in totalism have not known, and have not heard, and have not seen. For
how shall they hear without a preacher?
I often wonder what it was like that day when Isaiah got chapter 65. He just got it. A new heaven and
a new earth, and a new Jerusalem. Not in heaven, but a new Jerusalem where there will be no more
foreclosures on mortgages, no more infant mortality.3 Or Jeremiah, about a new covenant that is
grounded in Gods promise that, I will forgive your sin and remember your iniquity no more. It is a
radical, unexpected newness in the sixth century (BCE). Or Ezekiel, after he had hammered after them
for a while, has this strange imagination in chapter 47 about water coming out from under the altar
that is ankle deep and knee deep and hip deep, and finally, there will be fish in the Dead Sea because
fresh water will come. Who knew?
S
o I imagine Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel standing alongside Martin, and they all say, I have a
dream that will not be produced by totalism. I have a dream that will be given from elsewhere,
and the congregation meets to be receptive to that new originary stirring of divine fidelity. The
church very often colludes in silence about things that must not be talked about because you dont
want to upset the big donors. I did a little Bible study at my church and this really old, conservative,
richest guy in the church came up to me afterward and he said, How long do we have to care for the
poor? And I thought he was joking. He was dead serious. The church is the venue that hosts the Word
from elsewhere. The church is the community where the unthinkable gets thought and the unsayable
gets said. The church is the great violator of the totalism, because the church knows that our life is not
given to us by the powers of the totalism, but our life is given to us from elsewhere.
3
Author note: Cincinnati, where I live, has the second worst infant mortality rate of any city in the United States. Who knew
that it doesnt have to be like that?
20
So I thought of these two texts from Paul, the two times where Paul uses the word being in a
participial form; in 1 Corinthians 1:28 about the foolishness of the cross, and then he says, consider
your callGod chose what is foolish and weak, and God chose to bring to nothing the things that be.
Thats prophetic judgment. It is to show that the claims of totalism are vacuous because totalism
cannot keep its promises. Market ideology cannot make us safe and cannot make us happy, which is
what it promises to do.
The other usage, which is the counterpoint, is in Romans 4:17 about the God of Abraham who calls into
existence things that do not be. Thats originary. So 1 Corinthians 1:28 is about judgment, it is about
the nullification of an illusionary world that in our time comes packaged as market ideology, and
Romans 4 is Sunday news about the newness that totalism cannot generate. So prophetic preaching
has entrusted to it the utterance that comes from elsewhere that exposes totalism as a failed project
that cannot lead to life.
F
inally, I want to comment on the Book of Acts, about which I dont know much. For a long time,
everybody has seen that the Book of Acts is about the church under the powerful leadership of
the Spiritthats clear, Pentecost and all that. But until we began to get post-colonial studies, I
think we did not notice that the Book of Acts is occupied by the Roman Empire. I cant believe that
when I was in seminary we were taught that Luke took great care not to offend the Roman Empire.
Well, they must not have read Luke. Because the apostles, led by the Spirit, are continually preaching
the resurrection that calls into existence things that do not exist. So they are accused of turning the
empire upside down. And invariably when they preach the resurrection, they are hauled into court
under Roman governors: Felix and Festus and Agrippa. Now you understand, they are not hauled into
court to sort things out, they are hauled into court to intimidate them. They are hauled into court to be
pushed back into conformity to the claims of the Roman Empire. But the testimony of the Book of Acts
is that the Spirit is relentless. It is a Spirit that, as Jesus said to Nicodemus, blows where it will, it comes
and goes and the empire cant stop it.
So I have thought that the life of the church and the life of the preacher, now, is something like re-
performing the Book of Acts in which one is urged and pressed by the Spirit to announce that the
Easter juices of life have been unleashed in the world and constantly being checked and called to
account by the voices of totalism that would like that dangerous emancipation to be curbed.
As you know, the Book of Acts ends in Rome, and the last line says that he was preaching the kingdom
of God, teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and unhindered. In Rome. Every
preacher has to preach in Rome. Every preacher has to preach at the center of totalism. I dont know if
youre like me, but I can write a hell of a sermon, but when I get up to preach, I look out there and say,
Uh-oh, I cant say that! I see all these people, Presbyterian elders sitting there [with crossed arms].
Unhindered, because it is a voice from elsewhere.
The lecture and the resulting Q & A session are available to watch on Luther Seminarys YouTube channel. The
lecture was delivered the day after Brueggemann gave the Terence E. and Faith L. Fretheim Lecture in Biblical
Theology, titled Why the Old Testament Must Not Go Away. That lecture is viewable on YouTube.
21
Lecture delivered February 1983 at Eden Theological Seminary
Will Our Faith Have Children?

Adapted from an inaugural address upon induction to the Evangelical Chair of Biblical Interpretation at Eden
Theological Seminary, St. Louis, Mo., in February 1983.
I want to consider the claims of evangelical faith around the biblical metaphor of children. In 1976
John Westerhoff asked, Will Our Children Have Faith?1 By this he meant, Will we transmit our faith
to the next generation?undoubtedly an important and serious question. My title plays on that
theme and seeks to turn it around: Will our faith have children? Such a theme might mean with
Westerhoff, Will there be a next generation which still believes? Or it might cut below that to ask, Will
there be a next generation at all? Is there a future, given the precarious reality of our human
community in a nuclear age? In that context the crucial question is not even the survival of faith, but
the survival of the children. I really mean to cut underneath that as well to ask, Will we be open
enough, risking enough, vulnerable enough, that God may give us a future that we do not plan or
control or contrive? By the question, Will our faith have children? I mean to ask, Are we open
enough to receive a future from God which will surprise us?for it is assumed in evangelical faith that
any real future is given us underived, unextrapolated, ex nihilo, by the mercy of God (cf. 1 Corinthians
4:7).
I. SARAHS LYRICAL POSSIBILITY OF NEW CHILDREN
T
he Old Testament is much occupied with the securing of an heir, with the reception of a seed
for the future which assures that our present generation is not the last one. That, of course, is
the main theme of the Abraham-Sarah narrative. But the affirmative use of the metaphor of a
future child is most poignant in Isaiah 54:1-32:
Sing, O barren one, who did not bear;
break forth into singing and cry aloud,
you who have not been in travail!
For the children of the desolate one will be more
than the children of her that is married, says the Lord.
Enlarge the place of your tent,
and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out:
hold not back, lengthen your cords
and strengthen your stakes.
1
John Westerhoff, III, Will our Children Have Faith? (New York: Seabury, 1976).
2
Biblical quotes in this lecture are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952, 1971 by
the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.
22
For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left,
and your descendants will possess the nations
and will people the desolate cities.
The community of believers was in exile. They were without resources, cut off from Jerusalem and the
temple, doubtful of Gods power, enmeshed in a Babylonian life-world that shaped everything in ways
alien to them. And they had no prospect of a way out, no hope for a next generation. They had no
continuing city, no abiding structures, no enduring myths. They were bereft of possibility. (No wonder
that great evangelical preacher of the sixteenth century wrote about the Babylonian captivity of the
church!)
And this poet wants to announce a fresh, inexplicable intervention of God that will liberate, permit
homecoming and evoke the anticipated community of obedience. Isaiah uses many poetic devices, but
none more astonishing than the metaphor of the children. Yes, your faith will have children. The
barren one is Sarah (Genesis 11:30), Rebekah (Genesis 25:21), Rachel (Genesis 29:31) and Hannah (1
Samuel 1:2). Ours is a community of barren women and unproductive men (cf. Hebrews 11:12) with no
possibility of creating a future of their own. The barren one in this poem is exiled Israel, and the church
whenever it reaches the end of its resources, which is often and soon, and surely now.
Precisely to the barren one is the promise, Sing barren one, you who have not been in labor. Rejoice
because from barrenness issues a new generation which will outreach the married, full, affluent,
technologically secure Babylon. The statement is nonsensical unless it is taken as evangelical, i.e., hope
against the reason of the day. It is the same reality given in the Exodus when the Israelite women, with
their midwives, terrified the empire with their many births (Exodus 1:17-22). The births are
inexplicable, caused only by the powerful graciousness of God who will work a newness when all is
lost. The poet resorts to such a domestic, intimate metaphor. But the domestic metaphor, of course,
has political and public freight, as the emperor always recognizes. It concerns the dismantling of all
imperial forms of life. It offers the strange calculus of Gods weakness being strong, of Gods
foolishness being wise, of the humbled folk being exalted in their call (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:26). It is an
utterly absurd, unscientific poem which embarrasses our technical reason and must have embarrassed
those Jews in exile who had compromised with Babylonian modes of reality. A newness not scheduled
in any of the social scientific grids of the day is hardly cause for reorganization and departing, unless of
course the listening community makes a break in its reason.
The metaphor is played out in Isaiah 54 with a marvelously playful picture as getting stronger tent pegs
and tent cords, because the peasant abode will be crawling with children, spreading abroad, seizing the
land, reoccupying the city, no doubt terrifying the emperor as previously done to the Pharaoh. The
force unleashed in this poetic promise brings to naught the things that are (1 Corinthians 1:28). Poetic
metaphor must be used to speak these things, because no other language is adequate to the radical,
surely irrational inversion of the world.3
3
On the crisis of finding an adequate language, see Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964),
chapter 4.
23
II. THE FUTURE OF SARAHS HOPE
B
ut this text has a future. The metaphor in that poem serves the church well. Paul is driven to
the edge of his considerable intellectual gifts to express the wonder of the gospel. In his letter
to the Galatians he wants to characterize the stultifying life of knuckling under to the rulers of
this age (read law, read numbness, read docility, read fascination with technical reason, read
despair). That Paul is able to do. But when he comes to characterize the evangelical alternative, his
reasonable words fail. As elsewhere at his moment of payoff, Paul must break back into poetry. How
remarkable that this new situation with this fresh first-century crisis point is drawn to the same sixth
century poem, reiterated in Galatians 4:27:
Rejoice, O barren one that dost not bear;
break forth and shout, thou who art not in travail;
for the desolate hath more children
than she who hath a husband.
Again the issue is not Sarah and Hagar. But it is also not Babylon and exile as in Isaiah 54. Now it is the
scribal consciousness which cannot receive the newness of the gospel. Paul is of course fascinated with
the birth metaphor, because it is a way to speak of an unutterable, inexplicable gift. So in Galatians
4:19, he can write: My little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!
That text suggests a growth of the embryo of Christ in the body of believers. And in Romans 8:22 Paul
characterizes the whole world in painful labor for the redemption of our bodies.
Our theological tradition, revolutionary as it is, does not absolutize the Babylonian order, nor the rule
of positive law. Our theological tradition, radical as it is, does not absolutize the present contrived
economic arrangement, because there is a groaning and a time to come when our bodies will be
redeemed and an end to alienated work. Our theological tradition, radical as it is, does not absolutize
any intellectual scheme, any closed system of signs that imagines all the truth is given and all the
judgments already rendered. We treasure this free mother Sarah who is bound in freedom only for the
fruits of the spirit (Galatians 5:22). Mother Sarah stands as a metaphor for the possibilities given to us
that lie beyond our contriving and conjuring, the only source of new children.
III. RACHELS GRIEVING SONG OF LOSS
B
ut talk about newness is easy, easier than reality. And our talk must not be easy or glib. Israel
knows that as well. We do remember former things (cf. Psalm 137:4-6). We remember them
partly because we covet the wrong things and do not want to relinquish. But we also remember
them because we cherish the right things and properly linger. Isaiah 54:1-3 and Galatians 4:27 are an
invitation to move beyond and let life be shattered for Gods new act of life (above all see Isaiah 43:18-
19). But Israel engages in no self-deception. Any such newness is likely to be romantic and not
enduring.
24
So the main point I wish to argue about evangelical faith is this: Second Isaiah could not announce the
new birth until there had been two generations of Jeremiah to grieve the loss. The other side of
evangelical faith, the first side of the dialectic which claims us, is the pathos-filled speech of Jeremiah
31:15:
Thus says the Lord:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are not.4
Will our faith have children indeed! It has already had themand lost them. The rhetoric of Jeremiah
takes us to the ash-heap of burnt Jerusalem. The prophet saw the burnt temple, the charred city walls.
He observed the absence of the royal court. He named the names of those carried away to Babylon. He
took note of the brutality of the Babylonian armies, the damage done even to civilians, to unvalued
women and innocent children. The sweep of imperial death takes all. The Deuteronomists might have
explained it all as warranted punishment given a cynical calculus. But it is the task of poets to cut
underneath such conventional certitudes and discern the human cost and the human hurt. Those killed
in 587, as in any such holocaust, were not numbers in a simple calculus nor statistics in the nightly
news in Babylon. They were named, loved children. They had mothers and fathers who cared for them
and who called them for supper (and they did not answer). And Second Isaiah may delight in the labor
room of new possibility. But we must not delight to go there too soon. We linger at the morgue over
the charred bodies which can hardly be identified. And we grieve them because they are the treasured
children, the only future we shall ever have, now brutally become past, irreversible past. And we know
that we shall never have any others, only these, so we flinch from the question too easily put, Will our
faith have children?
Rachel is weeping for her children,
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are not.
Evangelical faith is not escape to a naive, never-never land. There are pseudo-forms of evangelical faith
which move easily to the next triumph and the next wave of the future.5 But serious evangelical faith is
of another kind. It is as concrete as today, as specific as Rachel, as vulnerable as these little bodies. It is
indignant with rage over the inhumanity. And that is why the mothers and fathers of many of us were
evangelical long before the name got coopted and trivialized for triumphalist American imperialism.
The true evangelicals are those whose eye notices the hurt and whose nose smells the grief. It is the
4
On this text, I am especially helped and moved by the comments of Emil Fackenheim, New Hearts and Old Covenant: On
Some Possibilities of a Fraternal Jewish-Christian Reading of the Jewish Bible Today, The Divine Helmsman, James L.
Crenshaw and Samuel Sandmel, eds. (New York: KTAV, 1980) 191-205. See also Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962) chapters 6, 12, 14, and K. Kitamori, Theology of the Pain of God (Atlanta: John Knox, 1965).
5
Such pseudo-forms of evangelical faith may appear in secular fascinations with passages that know too much about the
outcome, and in religious certitudes that promise too much too soon and without real risk or pain.
25
poet of faith who has himself battled God but now is free enough of his own agenda to look beyond
self to notice those in his world crushed by the rapacious system, destroyed by self-seeking and
stunned by the very cut of steel against baby fat. And the crying he imagines is for the children,
incidentally for the governors of such a deathly system and the religious ones who pray over it (Luke
19:41-44).
And no word of comfort must be spoken now. It is a mockery to comfort. And nobody is as irrelevant in
such a moment of reality as is Second Isaiah with his buoyant, hopeful poem. Not wrong, just grossly
inappropriate.
IV. THE RESILIENCE OF RACHELS GRIEF
J
eremiah of course stands deep in tradition in this moment of pathos. Rachel learned how to cry this
way, because she had been wife to this husband Jacob, whose life is one of pathos. We are not in
the grand symmetrical tranquility of Abraham who never seemed to be bothered and who, with
Sarah, laughed (cf. Genesis 17:17; 18:12; 21:6). We are in the rage-filled, incongruous world of Jacob
and Rachel, who know conflict and cunning, who value life in its raw gift and are not given to grand
speculation or noble faith. This generation always lives at the eleventh hour of precariousness-and now
they are not.
Now with father Jacob, Rachel is dead. There will be no more children. Jacob treasures the ones he has.
And then in Genesis 37 (after Rachel is dead, 35:19-20, and the faith will have no more children), enter
the older brothers who are as filled with rage as was Jacob with Esau. And for good reason they
despise the beloved Joseph. They must needs lie to their father. And so they bring the beloved sons
robe, blood covered. And Jacob believes them, to deep grief. And then the narrative catches the mood
of death and grief (37:35):
All his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him;
but he refused to be comforted, and said, No, I shall go
down to Sheol to my son, mourning.
He refused to be comforted. He was not comforted until he held his grown, precious son in his arms
(46:29-30). The one who was lost is found, was dead and is alive (cf. Luke 15:24). But until that
inexplicable moment, Jacob refused to be comforted. No spiritual assurance, no neighborly acts, no
piety, no religious or mythic continuities would matter. The father pushed that all away and embraced
the dark rawness where Gods promises seem not to carry. And Rachel in 587, so long afterwards but
with poignant, painful memory, now echoes Jacob, with the important difference that as yet, there is
no restoration. The children are gone. Rachel also asks, Will our faith have children? And she knows the
heavy answer. It is No. The grief is for loss, for hopelessness, for a future that is closed. Only the glib
can say yes in the face of Babylonian brutality.
Rachel in her grief looks both ways. She looks back to Jacob who will not be comforted for beloved
Joseph. But Rachel also looks forward and nothing is changed. So Matthew can write of the brutality of
Herod who tries to eliminate the gospel by killing the boy babies: Then was fulfilled what was spoken
by the prophet Jeremiah:
26
A voice was heard in Ramah,

wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled,
because they were no more. (Matthew 2:18)
Herod wants to make sure that the faith has no children, because the only sure way to keep the old
order intact is to be sure this faith yields no children. And the deathly truth is that Herod and Rachel
are united in this moment in believing that there will be no children for the faith. That Herod draws
that conclusion is one more act of self-serving brutality. Rachel reaches the same conclusion in deep
chagrin and grief.
V. FAITH POISED BETWEEN SARAHS HOPE AND RACHELS GRIEF
N
ow I propose an evangelical structuring of biblical faith around the metaphor of children, a
statement about openness to Gods surprise. I have tried to suggest two shapings of the motif.
One motif is the ecstasy of surprising birth, deriving from Sarah, used by Paul, but focusing on
the exile-ending lyrics of Isaiah 54:1-3. The other motif is grieving for lost children, looking back to
father Jacob in Genesis, looking toward Herod and the slaughter of precious, not just innocent, but
precious children, and focusing on the exile-embracing lament of Jeremiah 31:15.
Pursuant to our question, will our faith have children, these two texts and their related clusters of
texts, provide ways for giving an answer. Isaiah 54 answers vigorously, joyously, unambiguously, yes.
The poet evokes the faith of exiles with freedom enough to go home (52:11-12), to relinquish imperial
connection, to celebrate the rule of the liberating God in the face of Babylonian claims (46:1-4), to eat
free bread in the face of coercive bread (55:1-3). The faith of those exiles will have children, abundant
generations of heirs freely given, unimagined, uncontrived, given by the generosity of God, far more
abundantly than we ask or think (cf. Ephesians 3:20).
But on the other hand, the pathos-filled word of Jeremiah also faces the question, Will our faith have
children? Jeremiah, I suspect (and Rachel with him), would have been appalled not at the answer of
Second Isaiah, but at the senselessness of the question. How dare anyone ask for new children or hope
for them, for dont you know about the loss of children, the precious children, the only children (cf.
Genesis 22:2)? And we do not hope and dare not hope for new ones or different ones, because these
are the ones. For these we must refuse to be comforted. And so the question about such a new future
is rather irrelevant and evokes no interest in the generation that knows the loss.
Emil Fackenheim has noticed a shrewd thing about Job.6 In the first chapter (1:2-3) and in the last
chapter (42:12-13) of Job, what he had at the beginning is nicely contrasted with what he had at the
end. And in all things but one, everything is precisely doubled at the restoration: from 7,000 sheep to
14,000 sheep; from 3,000 camels to 6,000 camels; from 500 yoke of oxen to 1,000 yoke of oxen; and
from 500 she-asses to 1,000 she-asses. In all things save one, Job has been doubly blessed. At the
6
The connections between Jeremiah and Job on critical grounds are sufficient warrant to draw an imaginative link between
the two literatures.
27
beginning he has seven sons and three daughters. At the end he has precisely seven sons and three
daughters. They have not been multiplied or doubled. The number of the children is the only number
taken seriously, for children, the wave of our future, are precious, non-clonable, unrepeatable,
concrete and irreversible. So concrete are they, that at the end, the daughters are named, which sets
them even beyond the sons.
Evangelical faith is not only buoyant about new gifts surprisingly given. Evangelical faith is candid and
unflinching about hurt, loss, grief, endings in human history which are real and painful and not covered
over. The concrete embrace of deep death is as evangelical as is the lyrical celebration of new gift. And
so the answer to our question must not be made lightly, easily, unambiguously, or with excessive
buoyance.
It is the key problem of our faith about how to relate continuity and discontinuity7 and we trouble
about it in theological education. We ask whether the buoyant continuities cancel out and nullify the
grief. And how strange that when we engage in such affirmations, we are at the same time deep into
the hurt and rage that is not nullified. That is the problem of faith, and that is the discernment now
made about our Enlightenment self-deception, that our ways of transcending trouble may suppress but
do not nullify. The critical problem that belongs to our question is how to relate the pathos of Jeremiah
to the buoyancy of Second Isaiah.
It is clear enough, I judge, that Second Isaiah knew of the poetry of Jeremiah. When he uttered this
triumphant note of 54:1-3, he surely had not forgotten the pathos of Jeremiah 31:15. The linkage
between the two texts is of course evident in the general theme. But the connection is not only
thematic, but is evident in a common verbal usage.8 Thus Jeremiah 31:19 has:
I was ashamed (bot)
and I was confounded (niklamt)
because I bore the disgrace (h!arpat) of my youth (ner).
And Isaiah 54:4 has:
You will not be ashamed (teb)
be not confounded (tikkalm)
...you will forget the shame (boet) of your youth (alumayik)
and the reproach (h!erpat) of your widowhood.
The Isaiah passage appears to be a quite deliberate and intentional response to and nullification of the
Jeremiah text (perhaps Ezekiel 36:32 which also uses bo and kalam is a middle term between the
Jeremiah and Isaiah passages). Perhaps the key issue of evangelical faith, i.e., good news to exiles, is
7
Peter Ackroyd, Continuity and Discontinuity: Rehabilitation and Authentication, Tradition and Theology in the Old
Testament, Douglas A. Knight, ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977) 215-234, has pointed to the resilient ways in which the
community of faith struggles for continuity in the face of the painful and real discontinuities of experience.
8
I am indebted to my student, Kevin Andrews, for having called my attention to these precise parallels.
28
caught in how one can speak such a promise with full recognition of and respect for the loss and hurt
already on the table. I could think of several ways that Isaiah 54:1-3 can follow Jeremiah 31:15.
First, it is possible to take the point chronologically, a possibility not without merit. The grief of
Jeremiah and of Rachel had been full, had spent itself, for time does indeed heal. It had been two long
generations. Grief finally does reach its bottom.9 When it has reached that point, a new, good word is
permissible, even if not too soon. And possibly this bottoming in exilic Israel is aided by the reality of
the poetry of Lamentations which is undoubtedly lodged between these two poets. 10 The way to move
from Jeremiah to Second Isaiah is by way of Lamentations which gives full range to the loss. It is there
that Israel goes the full way to the bottom, and then begins to move out. The links between
Lamentations and Second Isaiah are still to be traced. But I have no doubt that the theme of Comfort,
Comfort (Isaiah 40:1) is an intentional response of None to Comfort (Lamentations 1:2, 9, 17, 21).
And the newness of Isaiah 43:18-19 maybe triggered by the anticipated newness of Lamentations 3:22-
23. Moreover, the historical changes in the period, from Babylon to Persia, specifically Cyrus, permit a
new word of hope. And that also can be traced chronologically.
Second, it is possible that we should not take these texts chronologically but dialectically, i.e., read
them as theological statements informing and correcting each other, rather than as historical
statements following in a single sequence. And to an evangelical Christian reading from the dialectic of
Good Friday and Easter, such away has considerable merit.11 Thus Israel knows too much to answer our
question only with the lyric of Isaiah 54, but must always answer with both grief and surprise, and
neither must supersede or nullify the other.
Third, taking into account the first two possibilities, chronological and dialectical, one may say it this
way: It is the unmitigated grief of Rachel that is the parlance of hope. The grief of Israel is the only
arena in which Gods newness appears. So the grief is not to be chronologically superseded, not
dialectically corrected, but rather is the experiential matrix wherein newness must be born, if it is to be
birthed at all. It is in the moment of such grief that deep groans are uttered wherein the revealing of
the children of God can happen, there and nowhere else (Romans 8:19). It has been so since the
beginning of our people in Exodus 2:23-25. So Paul who knows so much about these two evangelical
poets learns with them that it is precisely sufferingembraced and practiced and articulatedthat
produces hope (Romans 5:3-4). Suffering peculiarly produces hope like nothing else, but it must be
suffering brought to speech in faithful ways.
9
See George A. Benson, Then Joy Breaks Through (New York: Seabury, 1972). Of course Benson does not suggest that the
mere passage of time will resolve matters, for suppressed hurt endures with power. But Benson does reflect on the reality
of a bottoming that is reached on occasions of unflinching candor.
10
On the distinctive theological contribution of Lamentations, see Norman Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations
(Chicago: Allenson, 1954). As Gottwald sees, the bottoming is reached in Lamentations in a way consonant with Bensons
suggestions, i.e., through genuine candor and pain.
11
The dialectic of Jeremiah and Second Isaiah is in decisive ways an anticipation of the dialectic of crucifixion/resurrection,
which has been most clearly articulated by Jrgen Moltmann, especially in his two books on the two points of the dialectic,
Theology of Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1967) and The Crucified God (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
29
Of course Second Isaiah knows that. So the barren Sarahit could have been barren, bereaved
Rachelis addressed in the same chapter 54: O afflicted, storm-tossed and not comforted (54:11).
Sarah, exiled Israel, is also not comforted, as is Rachel in Jeremiah 31:15. It is precisely the one not
comforted, the one refusing to be comforted who has the chance of comfort. It is Rachel who has
been all through the book of Lamentations who finally is reached by this poet, Comfort, comfort,
people. These poets and this people know that in the person of Sarah, Rachel is also present.
So exegetically we come to the answer: Yes, our faith will have children. But our faith will not have
children if it imagines it can hold on to the old ones. And our faith will not have children if we glibly
rush to newness. And our faith will not have children if we imagine we can just move from strength to
strength, from children to children, and in matters of human pathos simply balance things off. It is
indelibly written in our tradition that our children, i.e., our future from God, are given only when we
linger long over the loss. Lingering long and honestly over the loss is foundational for newness. Elie
Wiesel has observed how strange it is that it is the survivors of the Holocaust who can yet believe in
this God of pathos.12 But the other Jews who have not been into such hurt doubt more easily. It is not
different with us Christians who must be suspicious of those who easily promise new children without
grief.
VI. ON IMITATING SARAH AND DENYING RACHEL
T
hus far exegetically. Let me say why I think this could matter to us. The glib hope of new
children without grief I take to be a primary issue for our culture, an issue for those of us who
are accustomed to having our way promptly about everything. And I take that temptation to be
a primary task of pastoral responsibility. The task is to nurture people into the embrace of loss while at
the same time our culture seeks to deny with phony promises and Ersatz continuities. In this
connection I refer to two studies that ought to concern us mightily. Alexander and Margarete
Mitscherlich,13 following Freuds study of melancholy, have considered the National Socialist
movement in Germany, and have found important roots in the German response to the losses of 1918
and Versailles. They suggest that the movement of Hitler is in part rooted in the inability to mourn. And
because of that inability, society engaged in an enormous act of denial with all the religion needed to
make it legitimate.
Closer home, Robert Jay Lifton14 has studied American responses to the nuclear threat. He suggests our
cultural situation is one in which there is an inability to believe in larger connections by pervasive
expressions of psychic numbing. These states can be directly manifested in various kinds of apathy,
12
Elie Wiesel, Talking and Writing and Keeping Silent, The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust, Franklin H. Littell
and Hobert G. Locke, eds. (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1974) 271-274. I am grateful to Robert McAfee Brown for this
reference.
13
Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn (New York: Grove, 1975). I was led to this analysis by
Robert Liftons work, but see also the use made of their work by Jrgen Moltmann, The Experiment Hope (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1975), 158.
14
Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).
30
unrelatedness and general absence of trust or faith; or more indirectly in social, artistic and political
struggles to break out of that numbing.15
He goes on to argue that the inability to mourn is part of a general breakdown in the symbolizing
process, a form of dislocation so that experience can have no form. And the response to such an
inability is deadening self-indulgenceof rank, individualism, or authoritarianism.
So I have settled on this theme of new children and loss of children, because I believe it concerns the
ministry of the church in overriding ways. It concerns our common ministry, first because I believe this
is a fair assessment of what is happening in our culture, a refusal to face these issues and a loss of
political discourse about them.
Second, it concerns the ministry of the church because there is so much fraudulent religion that denies
and does not face up. And that religious temptation may come either in fake evangelicalism which tells
what we want to hear with shameless certitude, or it may come as rational mysticism which screens
out the historical, public issues. And we are tempted in both ways in our theological tradition.
It concerns the ministry of the church, third, because those of us who purport to be genuinely
evangelical are entrusted precisely with the resources and discernments which could matter. So it is
my judgment that what our culture now urgently needs is indeed what is entrusted to us. But an
evangelical ministry must fly in the face of most of the ideology of our time, secular and religious, for
this tradition knows that Second Isaiah could rejoice only after Jeremiah, with Rachel, has refused to be
comforted.
VII. SEASONS OF SUFFERINGCOMMUNITIES OF HOPE
F
inally permit me to hazard some constructive statement growing out of these exegetical
comments. In doing so, I am trying to proceed along the lines of Walker Percy16 who
distinguishes between knowledge and news, and news available on the island and news from
across the sea, i.e., disclosure that intrudes from outside our system but which is urgent for us. To
answer this question, Will our faith have children? requires not just knowledge which is everywhere
true, not just news from the island of our habitation, but news from across the sea.
First, if I have rightly articulated an evangelical discernment of reality, we ask what of this evangelical
faith in American society. I read and experience the American dream (call it Enlightenment Project,
progress) as a rush too easily toward new children, bright tomorrows, more security, new energy
resources, all within reach. It is so in political terms, and it is true in much of establishment religion.
And such certitude is a seduction in seminary and church alike. One never knows about the signs of the
times. But there is reason to think that the metaphor of dismantling in 587, to which Jeremiah
addressed himself, is not alien to where we may be headed culturally. There is reason to think we face
15
Ibid., 293-294.
16
Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975), chapter 6.
31
now a great disappointment and a deep loss.17 One can surmise that the desperate move to put the
wagons in a circle reflects the sense of danger now common to us: that the American dream we have
lived is precarious, if not ending. And it helps very little to offer scientific or religious certitudes that
cushion the break. The churchs ministry is not only prophetic to note the ending, but also pastoral to
embrace the ending, for with our dominant historical position, we may have as much to grieve as does
Rachel. Surely songs are to be sung about new children, children to the barren one. But first the loss
and the grief and the barrenness must be faced full, and we may not be very skillful (cf. Amos 5:16) or
willing about that (Amos 6:6). Our propensity is to deny, cover up, supersede the loss.
Second, cautiously I suggest this mode of evangelical faith requires a new look at what we are about in
theological education. For as Robert Lynn has observed, we have become compatible with cultural
dreams which are not really or primally our own. And we shall, by choice or necessity, in the next years
get opportunity to rethink that compatibility. For seminaries may rightly grieve for times and children
treasured and now gone. For if exile comes to the faithful church, the seminary is no place in which to
be safe from it. And we may not order our life as an immunity from the loss. Perhaps the seminary also
has been a place of too much certitude, ready to sing before we grieve our own deep ambiguity;
perhaps the seminary too easily embraces the norms of the academy, because it is easier to follow the
right forms than to face the raw substance never fully caught in form; perhaps the seminary has come
to terms too fully with economic sufficiency, when members of the seminaryfaculty, students, and
board count too much on treasures that comfort the heart (and that also is a measure of our
enmeshment); and perhaps the seminary has become too nearly a collection of autonomous
believers, endlessly fascinated with ourselves, not very good at being the body of the one Lord. And
the voice of Rachel may be an imperative voice for our future.
Third, if culture must face the loss, if seminary might relinquish in order to receive, then what of the
church constituency we dare to call evangelical? The church may in time to come recall with relief and
gratitude that we are not summoned to be an echo of culture, either to admire its economics, to
embrace its psychology, or to certify its morality. But we are permitted an alternative way (cf. 1
Corinthians 12:31-13:13) that to some will feel subversive and to others a more excellent way, and to
some both subversive and excellent. The church will now and then affirm that we are about dangerous
things in its seminaries. We are not replicating dangerous things of another generation, but being led
to the danger peculiar to our time. None of us knows what that might mean. But what a difference to
have the church aware of the danger that comes with the loss of children and future, expectant that
the loss will be embraced, ready to accompany in places where we have not been, wanting finally to
sing of new children, new future, surely, but not too soon.
If we choose to be ultimately that evangelical, there are of course many ways in which penultimately
we continue the old ways. Penultimately, we shall be a culture that continues to seek order, security,
and prosperity. But we shall have an open edge toward the harder, more demanding human issues of
17
See the thoughtful theological analysis of this turn-point by Langdon Gilkey, Society and the Sacred: Toward a Theology of
Culture in Decline (New York: Crossroad, 1981). See also the shrewd argument of Carl A. Raschke, The Bursting of New
Wineskins (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1978).
32
justice and humanness. Penultimately, a seminary must continue to seek academic excellence and
financial well-being. But we shall have an open edge toward the harder, more demanding faith
questions of passion in a sea of apathy, of community in a torrent of individualism. Penultimately we
shall be a church that continues to seek growth and influence and respectability. But we shall have an
open edge toward the harder, more demanding evangelical questions of faithfulness, renewal, and
reformation. Penultimate continuities for our culture, for the seminary, for the church, are not to be
mocked or treated lightly. But ultimately our vocation calls us to notice the cost of these continuities,
costs in terms of repression, denial, self-deception, and exploitation; costs which finally we are not
called to pay. So we are called, I submit, with precious gifts and peculiar discernment, with odd power
and access to be present to the discontinuities where the new children are given in faith. Such birth is
in mighty and painful labor. The children given us new by faith are never an easy birth. But it is the
birth for which we wait in eager longing.
Now this may leave a rather burdensome and heavy impression. I do not mean it or sense it so. I do not
perceive it as despairing. I do affirm that the news of future children inexplicably given by the mercy of
God is indeed the gospel. I do celebrate that we may sing that song of doxological discontinuity in
which we are startled by gift. And I gratefully acknowledge that we are a community that believes our
faith has a future. But I yearn for it to be a future not filled with deception or cover-up, pretense or
denial, numbness or old habits, but a new future given precisely for us when we fully grieve that the
old is lost and gone. The future is given to us by the God known fully in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.
Of that One, Rachel weeps on Friday utterly bereft, and Sarah sings on Sunday, utterly stunned.
This article was published in Word & World (July 1983). Copyright 1983 by Word & World, Luther Seminary,
Saint Paul, Minn. All rights reserved.
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Working Preacher Presents

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A Fourth-generation Sellout. Text of sermon delivered July 2000, Columbia

Working Preacher Presents:

Walter Brueggemann on Preaching

Getting Smashed for Jesus

Woebig trouble coming

And then, just to add a more daring figure, Isaiah adds,

We have this treasure in clay jars.

from afflicted to crushed,

afflicted but not crushed,

To be sure that we do not confuse the treasure with the vessels,

Extraordinary power concerns self-giving forgiveness, hospitality, and generosity. Transcendent

And then in the very next verse he says to the church,

Death has been swallowed up in victory.

And then he says to the church:

Consider your call.

Here is the Sunday mandate:

Be steadfastabounding in the work of the Lord.

What a menu: grace, thanksgiving, glory! So Paul to us:

Consider your call for the sake of the cross.

Sermon on Genesis 41:11-32, 46-49; 47:13-26; Acts 26:1-3, 12-21

a trade-off of promise for nightmare

Sermon notes on Jeremiah 18:1-11; Deuteronomy 30:15-20; and Luke 14:25-33

Lecture delivered September 2014 at Luther Seminary

Preaching the Old Testament

Lecture delivered February 1983 at Eden Theological Seminary

Will Our Faith Have Children?

II. THE FUTURE OF SARAHS HOPE

A voice was heard in Ramah,

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