A Wilderness Zone

By Walter Brueggemann

In these several pieces I have worked to trace out possible interfaces between specific scripture references and matters at the forefront of our common social life. It is my hunch that, almost without fail, such an interface creates a very different angle of vision for any element of our common social life, because it situates such a topic in the context of the biblical narrative that is occupied by the holy agency of God. Such an alternative angle of vision helps to defamiliarize us from our usual discernment according to the master narrative of democratic capitalism that is most widely shared across the spectrum of conservatives and progressives. Because our common angle of vision shared by progressives and conservatives has a very low ceiling of human ultimacy, we (all of us!) easily come to think that our particular reading of social reality is absolute and beyond question, even if dominated by a tacit ideology. It is my bet that an interface with biblical testimony can and will deabsolutize our excessive certitude and permit us to look again at the social "facts" that are in front of us. I do not think and do not suggest that such interfaces with scripture are inevitable; they are rather suggestive, impressionistic, and fleeting, the kind of linkage that is available in the matrix of faith that is not fixed on certitude.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666701258

Walter Brueggemann

Walter Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. An ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of dozens of books, including Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out, and Truth and Hope: Essays for a Perilous Age.

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Preface

I am pleased to dedicate this book of sermons to Will Willimon, a foremost preacher among us. I am glad to salute him for his long-term passion for critical thinking about the shape and practice of the church. Beyond that, I am glad for our long-term comradeship that has been one of mutual reliability, support, and appreciation. Will and I have outlasted almost all of our generation of those who have been on the circuit of church teachers. And now, alas, he has outlasted me! I have no doubt that when we write the record of recent church history, Will will be featured as a durably important player as critic, leader, and bold practitioner in that history.

The several pieces in this volume have been written in response to the generous invitation of Mary Brown to contribute to her blog platform, church.anew. I promptly seized upon her invitation and have spent an intense year of making regular contributions to her blog. I am grateful to Mary for her suggestive, visionary leadership. Her blog of course continues, now that I have completed my contributions to it.

The chance to write brief ad hoc scripture expositions for a blog platform is a most welcome opportunity for an old, weary interpreter who no longer has the stamina to do extended work. In these several pieces I have worked to trace out possible interfaces between specific scripture references and matters at the forefront of our common social life. It is my hunch that, almost without fail, such an interface creates a very different angle of vision for any element of our common social life, because it situates such a topic in the context of the biblical narrative that is occupied by the holy agency of God. Such an alternative angle of vision helps to defamiliarize us from our usual discernment according to the master narrative of democratic capitalism that is most widely shared across the spectrum of conservatives and progressives. Because our common angle of vision shared by progressives and conservatives has a very low ceiling of human ultimacy, we (all of us!) easily come to think that our particular reading of social reality is absolute and beyond question, even if dominated by a tacit ideology. It is my bet that an interface with biblical testimony can and will deabsolutize our excessive certitude and permit us to look again at the social facts that are in front of us. I do not think and do not suggest that such interfaces with scripture are inevitable; they are rather suggestive, impressionistic, and fleeting, the kind of linkage that is available in the matrix of faith that is not fixed on certitude.

It is my hope that readers of these brief pieces will find them suggestive in a way that helps us look again and see again. In any case, this writing has suited me well, as I no longer have the energy or interest to do the hard critical work upon which good serious faith depends. For that reason I am glad to acknowledge the host of critical scholars who have done the hard work on which I depend. I am also glad to acknowledge the hard sustained work of many practical scripture interpreters—teachers and pastors—who continue, along with me, to seek for the emancipatory connections between scripture and life.

I am glad, yet again, to express my continuing and abiding thanks to K.C. Hanson and Cascade Books for willingness to publish these pieces. I am grateful for K.C.’s careful, discerning, quick work that so frequently brings my work to fruition.

Walter Brueggemann

Columbia Theological Seminary

August 11, 2021

1

A Wilderness Zone

The narrative of faith is characteristically about a journey in and through the wilderness. That theme seems particularly pertinent among us now in our present social crisis. We are into the wilderness as so many of our old social certitudes are now in acute jeopardy. (I write this on the day of the funeral in Houston for George Floyd who was murdered by police in Minneapolis.)¹ That crisis is deep, thick, and complex, but it has three faces of presentation:

•the virus that for now has outflanked our scientific capacity;

•the economic meltdown in the wake of the virus; and

•a skewed criminal justice system for which police misconduct is the visible front.

These three dimensions of the crisis together have a huge impact on the body politic:

•the virus leaves us variously vulnerable in its not yet understood danger;

•the economic meltdown leaves many people in deep dislocation; and

•the crisis in criminal justice evokes anger and fear.

When I thought about these poignant social realities of vulnerability, dislocation, plus fear and anger, it occurred to me that in the Bible the context that presents a like lived experience is the wilderness sojourn of Israel after the slaves had departed Pharaoh’s Egypt. Thus, I suggest that in the face of our crisis we may do well to consider the wilderness tradition in the Bible as a context in which faith may be powerfully pertinent. We in our current circumstance have an opportunity to bring that tradition close to our own experience. That narrative, I suggest, is marked by three remembered realities.

Escape to the wilderness from Egypt meant that Israel had moved beyond the reach and governance of Pharaoh. His control did not extend to that untamed territory. This meant for the newly emancipated slaves that they freed, at last, from the coercive demands of Pharaoh that served his hunger for a monopoly grain.² Pharaoh’s requirements were unending and insatiable (see Exod 5), and now the slaves no longer had to answer for unreasonable brick quotas, a harbinger first of unreasonable quotas for chopping cotton and now unreasonable requirements for meat-packing workers! It is no wonder that just as the slaves crossed the waters into the wilderness away from the reach of Pharaoh’s demand economy that Miriam and the other women took tambourines, danced, and sang:

Sing to the L

ord

, for he has triumphed gloriously;

horse and rider he has thrown into the sea. (Exod

15

:

21

)

Their action was the performance of bodily freedom, for their bodies had long ached with unbearable work. As I pondered their song and dance of freedom, I noted the contemporary parallel as the protestors danced in the streets in DC where the huge yellow letters spelled out, Black Lives Matter. It was as though the protestors sensed that they had, at least for now, escaped and moved beyond the coercive fear and greed of the predatory economy of US patriarchal capitalism. That dance, like that of the earlier dance of Miriam, gave bodily articulation for bodies now permitted their full joyous freedom, even if under the all-seeing eye of Pharaoh’s surveillance.

At the same time, however, a move beyond the reach and governance of Pharaoh meant that the erstwhile slaves could no longer count on the certitudes and predictabilities of Pharaoh; as a result the wilderness felt like a free-fall into risk. Without Pharaoh’s jobs, how will we pay the rent? It is for that reason that as soon as the slaves crossed out of Exodus 15 and Egypt into Exodus 16 and the wilderness, in that moment they wished for a prompt return to Pharaoh, ready to trade-off their newly found freedom for the certitude of Pharaoh’s bread supply:

If only we had died by the hand of the L

ord

in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. (Exod

16

:

3

)

Our circumstance is like that now as the loss of Pharaoh’s jobs generates great risk. Wilderness evokes great soberness and a wish for return to the way it was back there. The wilderness marked by great joy can readily enough turn to anxiety and nostalgia for the old security:

If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but his manna to look at. (Num

11

:

4

–

5

)

Some soon wearied of their new circumstance and wished for the regularities of the old system of coercion. I suppose the contemporary appeal to law and order is designed to call attention to the fact that emancipation for some feels like anarchy to others.

The wilderness is a new liminal environment that requires fresh constructive thinking and action. So now in the moment of emancipated bodies, the wilderness requires hard thinking and bold action for the sake of an alternative social apparatus. It is one thing to cross the water into freedom. It is quite another thing to morph from the dance of freedom to a viable shared life there. In the memory of ancient Israel that is the burden of the wilderness-like moment of exile when Israel a new world now void of city, king, and temple:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may have sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. (Jer

29

:

5

–

6

)

The prophetic tradition of Israel exhibits poetic-prophetic efforts at such imagination outside the sphere of the coercive regime of Jerusalem and beyond the reach of imperial Babylon, a stand-in for Pharaoh. Thus Isaiah can imagine a new alternative city (Isa 65:17–25). Jeremiah can evoke a new grace-laden covenant (Jer 31:31–34). And Ezekiel can sketch out a new symmetrical city with abiding holiness at its center (Ezek 48:1–35). Actual social reality may take the form of none of these poetic offers, but the wilderness inhabitants cannot short-cut the imaginative efforts that run beyond anything thinkable or imaginable amid the coercion of Pharaoh. (It is for the same reason that Jesus told parables, acts of imagination beyond administered reality in the Roman Empire). It is the work to be done after the first flush of dancing in order to be sure that there is no reembrace of Pharaoh, because Pharaoh, despite all hopes, has not and will not change. Pharaoh will continue to be coercive and predatory. Wilderness is the hard work of alternative!

Pharaoh’s monopoly of grain assured that there as in Egypt a steady supply of food. In contrast to Pharaoh’s Egypt, the wilderness is a place without visible life-supports. While the Israelites were eager to escape Egypt, they inescapably found the wilderness to be a place bereft of life’s sustenance—bread, meat, water. It did not take long to discover that they faced in the wilderness a most precarious existence. Some promptly yearned for a return to Egypt. Even though they had known harsh oppression there, what they remembered about Egypt, rather than oppression, was a reliable food supply:

Why is the L

ord

bringing us into this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become booty; would it not b better for us to go back to Egypt? So they said to one another, Let us choose a captain and go back to Egypt." (Num

14

:

3

–

4

)

There was a sustained complaint against the leadership of Moses, for he was not able to guarantee a food supply in the way that Pharaoh had. The wilderness left the freed slaves with an option, so it seemed to them, of death or resubmissions to Pharaoh’s Egypt. Of course it is like that amid the virus in which we face an awareness that an income necessary for life can be had only with the participation in the capitalist economic system. Thus the reopening of the economy in some ways is not unlike a return to Egypt, a readiness to risk the virus for the sake of livability.

In the wilderness material of the Bible we are offered two narratives that attest that the wilderness, presided over by the generous creator God, does indeed contain viable life supports, even though they are not easily visible, and even though they do not take conventional form. In the more familiar account of Exodus 16, the complaint is against the leadership of Moses. Moses, however, deflects the complaint away from himself and on to YHWH (v.\ 7). In response to the complaint of Israel, it is remembered that YHWH heard the complaint and responded with great gifts of food. First there came quail to supply meat (v. 13). And then there was bread; it was a fine flakey substance as fine as frost on the ground (v. 14). That gift of bread was not something they recognized. They asked about its identity: "What is