Journey to the Common Good: Updated Edition

By Walter Brueggemann

A decade ago, Walter Brueggemann called the church to journey together for the good of our community through neighborliness, covenanting, and reconstruction. He distilled this challenge to its most basic issues: Where is the church going? What is its role in contemporary society? What lessons does it have to offer a world enmeshed in turbulent times?

Published originally in 2010, Journey to the Common Good spoke to an era defined in large part by America's efforts to rebuild from an age of terror as it navigated its way through an economic collapse. Today, the dual crises of the coronavirus and the disease of racial injustice present daunting new challenges for the church as it seeks the good of its neighbors. In a new introduction to this updated edition, Brueggemann links the wilderness tradition of Exodus to these current crises, as a framework to help the church navigate this time of risk and vulnerability and to pursue a genuine social alternative to the governance of Pharaoh. The answer to the question of the church’s role in society is the same answer God gave to the Israelites thousands of years ago: love your neighbor and work for the common good.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Jan 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646982011

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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JOURNEY TO THE COMMON GOOD A REINTRODUCTION

Within this book, I explore some ways in which Scripture—ancient text as authorizing word—may impinge on the faith and life and practice of the church as we journey together toward the common good that God wills for the world. The task of interpretation that gives contemporary access to the scriptural text is an ongoing one that is never finished. It requires, moreover, venturesome imagination that is always risky; those risks, however, are not as great as the risk of flat, one-dimensional reiteration that does not connect. I have returned to the theme of this book, journey, and the interpretive risks necessary to it, in the midst of our current social crisis. (I write this on the day of the funeral in Houston for George Floyd, who was murdered by police in Minneapolis.) This 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 anger and fear, it occurred to me that in the Bible the context that presents a similar 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. I allude to the wilderness narrative in the following chapters but give it little direct attention, and so wish to expand on it here. We in our current circumstance have an opportunity to bring that tradition close to our own experience, as we find ourselves on a particular journey of risk and responsibility. That narrative, I suggest, is marked by three remembered realities.

I.

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 were freed, at last, from the coercive demands of Pharaoh to serve his hunger for a monopoly of grain (see Gen 47:13–26 and James C. Scott, Against the Grain¹). 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 current 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 LORD, 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 U.S. patriarchal capitalism. That dance, like that 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 would they 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 their newly found freedom for the certitude of Pharaoh’s bread supply:

If only we had died by the hand of the LORD 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. Under the ravages of the pandemic, the failures of Pharaoh’s system have been revealed even more fully, and the people cry out for change. Yet wilderness can also evoke 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 11:4–6

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 the later Babylonian exile when Israel finds itself in 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 bear 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 (65:17–25). Jeremiah can evoke a new grace-laden covenant (31:31–34). And Ezekiel can sketch out a new symmetrical city with abiding holiness at its center (48:1–35). Actual social reality may take the form of none of these poetic offers, but the wilderness inhabitants cannot shortcut 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!

II.

Pharaoh’s monopoly of grain assured that there was 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 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 LORD bringing us into this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become booty; would it not be 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 resubmission to Pharaoh’s Egypt. Of course, it is like that amid the virus as we face an awareness that an income necessary for life can be had only with participation in the capitalist economic system. Thus the reopening of the economy can be seen, in some ways, as similar to a desire to return to Egypt, a readiness to risk the virus for the sake of livability. The capitalist system on which we are dependent seemingly leaves us with only this either/or choice.

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 onto 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 it? (man hu’) (v. 15). That question became the name of the new bread, so that man hu’ morphed to manna. The peculiar name for the peculiar bread of the wilderness was the consequence of an unanswered wonderment. What is it is gift bread that escapes all conventional expectations and that