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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Bruggemann reminded us that the powers that be, the empires around us, whoever holds power now wants us to remain numb. That's because he thought that if we could learn to lament, if we could practice naming what was wrong, then in that, we could also acknowledge what could be better, and maybe we could begin to imagine what might be different. We are also continuing a series called Reads a Classic. This will be the final week in that series, but this one has been a lot of fun, I think. Bobby introduced us to Hildegard of Bingen.
Jeremy Duncan:Scott reminded us of brother Lawrence. Last week, I got to talk about Dallas Willard. And today, I'm gonna look at a significant loss that the church has recently experienced. That was the loss of Walter Bruggemann who passed away just a few short weeks ago. However, let me say this.
Jeremy Duncan:Not only has this series been a lot of fun, also maybe a little bit frustrating. There has simply been not enough time to cover all of the writers that we would have loved to. We're definitely gonna have to come back to this concept again in the future. I would have loved to introduce you to doctor Wilda Gaffney, who forever opened my eyes in new ways to the stories of women throughout scripture with her book, Womanist Midrash, to Stanley Howerwosse who shaped my commitments to nonviolence with his book The Peaceable Kingdom, to the scholars Elizabeth Schuessler Frierenza and Adela Yarborough Collins, two women who did a lot of the work in grounding my studies in Revelation. Of course, Reni Gerard, who I have had a chance to talk about a couple times here at Commons and on our YouTube channel.
Jeremy Duncan:But there are so many classic reads that all of us would have loved to talk about. And by the way, because of that, we would love to hear your classics as well. Anyone who has influenced your spiritual journey, by all means, send your recommendations by email. Stop us and talk. We would love to hear what you're reading to add it to our list.
Jeremy Duncan:There's a lot we can learn from each other. That said, because of his recent passing, I decided to change gears a little bit and talk today about Walter Bruggemann's work. And let me acknowledge, there are very few writers that have influenced my thinking as deeply as Bruggemann. When he passed away, I actually posted a quick video to our YouTube channel, to say thanks to him and to point our community to some of his work. You can check that out as well.
Jeremy Duncan:Today, though, we're gonna focus on what is probably his most famous work, a book called The Prophetic Imagination. So first, a little biographical background, and then we'll turn our attention to a scripture, I think, we can read through the themes of Bruggemann's work. Walter Bruggemann was born in a little Nebraska town in 1933. He was a pastor's son, which by the way gives me a little hope for my kids. My childhood, not particularly religious.
Jeremy Duncan:And so I'm gonna be honest here. I've always been a little bit about nervous about my kids growing up around like this much church. That said, I will say, you guys have been so gracious and kind to my kids for more than a decade now. You are as old as my son, by the way. But all of you have been so generous to our family.
Jeremy Duncan:You make common. It's actually a pretty good place to grow up as a kid. So from all the parents on staff, a big thank you. But as a pastor's son, Bruggemann found himself shaped by the life of a small rural church. And so after his initial BA, he turned his attention to theology, completing a bachelor of theology, then a doctorate of theology, and then finally a PhD in education.
Jeremy Duncan:And I think it was really that combination of a theologian's mind and an educator's heart that made his voice so unique. His writing was deep and researched and footnoted to the heavens and yet also widely accessible and actually just pretty engaging to read. I've done a lot of writing in my life. I've done academic writing. I've written books.
Jeremy Duncan:I write sermons pretty regularly, of course. But finding the way to weave together everything you learn in those disparate disciplines, that's a very rare skill and one that Bruggemann did incredibly well. One of the things I've always admired about his writing was that you would learn something and actually enjoy getting there. And I think that's reflected in the fact that the dude published more than a 100 books in his career, and that was all before AI was even a thing. That blows my mind, especially considering the fact that he was also teaching at Columbia Theological Seminary across three decades in his life.
Jeremy Duncan:Now Brigham Young was primarily an Old Testament scholar, but there are some very important themes from across his writing that I think define his contributions and probably will help us to get our feet under us when we turn our attention back to the scriptures today. And the first was that lament is an act of faith, especially in a world where we don't like to be, where we probably even actively try to avoid being sad. Bruggemann reminded us that the powers that be, the empires around us, whoever holds power now wants us to remain numb. That's because he thought that if we could learn to lament, if we could practice naming what was wrong, then in that, we could also acknowledge what could be better, and maybe we could begin to imagine what might be different. So think about that next time you are sad.
Jeremy Duncan:Your grief is an acknowledgment of what could be. It is the first step in moving beyond what is toward that. Second man, Bruggemann had this conviction that God was interested in creating what he called an alternative community. So not church for the sake of more church. That's boring.
Jeremy Duncan:But maybe church for the sake of demonstrating a new way to live together. And that might mean resisting consumerism or pushing back on individualism, rejecting all of these fear based systems around us. But, really it was about allowing church, everything we do together to become a microcosm of what's possible in the world. So we evangelize or we good news our neighborhoods, not with placards and soap boxes and threats of hell, but actually by coming together across lines that feel entrenched, whether that's socioeconomic or political or ethnic and cultural. But we come together to care for each other, to learn from each other, to find common purpose, and ultimately, to accomplish things together that none of us could do on our own.
Jeremy Duncan:And specifically for Bruggemann, those things we can't get done on our own, that was largely about justice for the poor. See, I mentioned this already, but Bruggemann was primarily an Old Testament scholar. And one of the key features of his work was taking those ethical frameworks of ancient Israel and at least trying to apply them to contemporary society. All those verses about caring for orphans and widows and the stranger, All of those rules about debt forgiveness and jubilee. Those guidelines about leaving enough on the table for those who need it.
Jeremy Duncan:His question was, how can we get serious about that together? Because as a final theme, Brueggemann articulated what he called the prophetic imagination. And that had nothing to do with predicting the future. It was all about this insistence that the Bible is all of it, poetry. You see propositions get necessarily fixed in a time and place.
Jeremy Duncan:But for the Bible to be alive and active today, for us to really make sense of the words that were spoken on behalf of God, what we need is actually to learn to read more creatively. Said another way, read as prose, the bible can tell us about things that happened. But read as poetry or a story, the bible can begin to speak to us about what is happening all around us all the time. And so as a very small example here, Bruggemann wrote a lot about Sabbath in his career, that practice of resting weekly. But he saw that not primarily as a rule to be followed or a law to be enacted, but as a conscious act of resistance.
Jeremy Duncan:He saw the practice of rest as a chosen confrontation with the perpetual narrative that human beings are worth what we produce. And so as a scholar, you can read Sabbath as a set of arcane laws from an ancient desert people based on their creation mythologies. But as a poet, Bruggemann argued, you can read Sabbath as a reminder that human beings need to consciously, consistently push back against the idea that we are what we contribute to the economies around us. We're more than that. And that's the kind of prophetic imagination, the creativity that's woven all throughout the Bible if we slow down long enough to notice.
Jeremy Duncan:So with that in mind today, we want to turn our attention to what Bruggemann might name as the central prophetic narrative of the Hebrew scriptures that is the Exodus. First, let's pray. Loving God, you're the one who pulls back the veil and helps us to see the world as it truly is. You remind us that our fears, our despair, none of that has the final word because Christ has shown us the full extent of your love, what is possible when we follow your way. Today, we ask your spirit to be near and to awaken our hearts where we've become comfortable with the way that things are and give us courage to imagine instead what could be.
Jeremy Duncan:And where our hope feels decidedly small today, would you remind us that your story is still unfolding, that there are possibilities we can scarcely dream of ahead? Because people who speak truth with humility to each other, who practice justice with compassion, but who cling to the hope that all things can and will be made new. If only we can find the courage and the creativity to see it. In the strong name, the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
Jeremy Duncan:Okay. Today it is the prophetic imagination in the Exodus. And we'll talk about empires and off ramps, self sabotage, and new ways forward. But what I wanna do today is take a few minutes to talk about how Bruggemann sees the characters of pharaoh and Egypt in the story. And then we'll pick just a small section.
Jeremy Duncan:We'll go right to the highlight of the story with the crossing of the Red Sea, and we'll look at how reading with that prophetic imagination can help a story even like this feel very relevant, even poetic for today. So first, Bruggemann on Pharaoh. One of the things that is interesting about Bruggemann's work is that even though he has a PhD and a doctorate in theology, even though he thought and taught Old Testament studies and could hang with the best of them, when it came to reading a story like the Exodus, you would often find him largely sidestepping questions of historicity. I remember way back in my first year of seminary, one of my professors arguing that, look, we can have all kinds of debates about the historical characters in the Bible. What was the Abraham of history like, and who was the Moses of the ancient Near East?
Jeremy Duncan:Those questions are fun, even important to ask, but the answers are always largely going to be speculative. That's because all we can really talk about with certainty is the Abraham of the text or the character of Moses that's preserved in the story. Now there might be some significant overlap between the person Moses and the character Moses, But all we have available to us in biblical studies is the person on the page. Now archaeologists, that's a different thing. They get to play in a different sandbox, so they have a different set of questions.
Jeremy Duncan:But when it comes to biblical studies, these are literary characters that we are dealing with. And for this reason, Brueggemann prefers to see Egypt not just as a historical empire, which it certainly was. But he would say more importantly, Egypt is a character. They're a symbol of every system that resists God's justice in the world. Likewise, the pharaoh of the Bible.
Jeremy Duncan:That's not just a man who sits atop a particular empire. He is a an amalgamation of all those who presume to sit at the apex of human history. A Brueggemann would argue that's not just a way to make the bible relevant. It's actually inherent in the way it's written. So for example, particular, historical, identifying characteristics about any particular pharaoh who presided over an exodus event, those are largely, actually, conspicuously absent in the Bible.
Jeremy Duncan:And Brueggemann would say that's not an oversight. That's by design. Because the storytellers were acutely aware that this wasn't just a story about a particular pharaoh and a unique Moses. This was a story of something that was unfolding over and over again throughout the human history. In other words, they were using the person pharaoh to write about the phenomenon of Pharaoh, the idea of power.
Jeremy Duncan:In fact, I used a lot of Bruggemann's work to argue that the book of Revelation, when it moves back and forth between Rome and Babylon and images of Egypt, that's not because the narrative is switching back and forth in different time periods. It's because it is explicitly following the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. It's intentionally dislocating the story from a particular time and place to speak to tendencies within the human condition. So the book of Revelation, the Hebrew prophets, the Exodus. The prophetic imagination is not about predicting the future or just narrating the past.
Jeremy Duncan:It's about telling us the mistakes we keep on making. And so in that sense, Egypt, Babylon, Rome, Britain, America, China, whatever empire you see on the horizon, the bible actually has something to say to all of it. And I'll read one of my favorite quotes here. Brigham and writes, the key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of our imagination so that we become too numb, too satiated, too co opted to do the serious imaginative work of reading the Bible. It's good stories read with prophetic creativity that wakes us up from what is now toward what is possible.
Jeremy Duncan:And so when we read a story like the Exodus, it's valuable, I would argue even fascinating to study where it fits in our history, but never at the expense of seeing how the story is still unfolding all around us today. And for that, we need to get poetic. Now Brighamen identifies three characteristics in what he calls the royal consciousness that is embedded in the character of Egypt. Calls them affluence, amnesia, and numbness. Affluence, this is Egypt's wealth built on the back of the oppressed.
Jeremy Duncan:It's Jewish slaves who make the bricks to keep their economy moving. Second is amnesia. Egypt is impervious to the lessons of the past. In fact, the story of our pharaoh begins in Exodus one eight where we read, then a new king whom Joseph meant nothing to came to power over Egypt. Empires only remember who's important to them today.
Jeremy Duncan:And then finally, this numbness. The Egypt of the Exodus suppresses grief and silences dissent, but it's not just from their slaves. It's actually from their own people when the story begins to turn against them. And that means it renders them unable to learn properly. So affluence, amnesia, numbness, these are problems we see in empires all around us today.
Jeremy Duncan:And with that as background, then we can use this as a lens to read what is in some ways the climax of the story. That is the flight to the Red Sea. So this is Exodus 13 starting in verse seven. When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them on the road to the Philistine country, though that was shorter. For God said if they face war, they might change their minds and return back to Egypt.
Jeremy Duncan:So God led the people around by the desert road toward the Red Sea, and the Israelites went up out of Egypt ready for battle. Now by way of recap, what's happened here is that Moses has been called by God to confront Pharaoh and ask for the freedom of his people. And Pharaoh has said, not a chance. And yet God, through Moses, has offered Pharaoh now a number of off ramps in the form of 10 plagues intended to demonstrate the folly of his obstinance. Sadly, every off ramp has been refused, except now the burden, carried in the death of his firstborn son has become too great, and Pharaoh relents.
Jeremy Duncan:Except there are poetic hints already here in the text. And the first is in this phrase, when Pharaoh let the people go. That's not a great translation. And it's because the verb here is not passive. In other words, Pharaoh didn't let anyone go.
Jeremy Duncan:He drove them out. Another scholar, John Durham, suggests we should read this more literally. Pharaoh hurled them out of his lands. Point being, Pharaoh doesn't think he's giving in and letting anyone go right now. He thinks he's still in control of this story.
Jeremy Duncan:And that's important because way back at the start in Exodus three, when God first spoke to Moses, God said, I will stretch out my hand and strike the Egyptians with all the wonders that I will perform. And after that, pharaoh will let you go. And there, we see the passive form of the same verb. In other words, God was hoping that the wonders would move Pharaoh to change. I think they've translated this way to make the connection, but they've actually missed the point here.
Jeremy Duncan:Because God is hoping Pharaoh will come to understand the injustice of slavery. He'll participate in the emancipation of the Israelites willingly. But what we see here is that Pharaoh has actually not learned the lesson at all. He hurls them out instead of letting them go. I think that's really interesting because I think sometimes the line between surrender and control is far more delicate than we think it is.
Jeremy Duncan:Today, we might use terms like passive aggressive or gaslighting or narcissistic personality disorder. All of those probably apply to Farrell. But often, I think what appears to be giving in, even repenting, is actually really just our attempt to maintain control and manipulate people around us. And if we're not careful with that, if we don't name the difference for ourselves, I think what we might find is we are actually the ones that are being deceived. I mean, very clearly, God wants the liberation of the Israelites in the story.
Jeremy Duncan:That's the point. I get it. But I think God might also want Pharaoh to find some freedom as well, Except that would mean that he would need to open up to what his own grief might teach him about what he's done wrong, and he won't. And there's something poetic in that. Even then, it's not all that's buried here in this little verse because we also read that when given their freedom, when let go, God leads the Israelites the long way around toward what seems like a dead end at the Red Sea.
Jeremy Duncan:Now, sure, that sets up the big climax. I get it. That's important. But that's not actually the reason given in the text for that path. Instead, we read that God was concerned that if they faced war, they might change their minds and they might head back to where they came from.
Jeremy Duncan:So first of all, hardships can stop us from getting to where we need to go. That's true, undoubtedly. We need some courage. It's not the only thing I notice here, though, because we're also told that the Israelites went up out of Egypt ready for battle. And this whole section reads a little tongue in cheek to me as if the people think they're ready for a battle and God thinks, come on, guys.
Jeremy Duncan:Give me a break. And, again, I think we're supposed to pay attention to this tension here. Right? The whole point of the Exodus story is that Israelites cannot possibly fight back against Egypt. They are a tiny little group.
Jeremy Duncan:Egypt is this huge empire. They are, as we spoke about last week, meek, dispossessed of their freedom. No chance of fighting back, and yet here they are graciously granted that by God and at the same time, already ready to ascribe their victory to their own strength. It's like my kids. My daughter, loves the swings.
Jeremy Duncan:She'll spend hours on them if you let her. But this summer, we made a big breakthrough as she has learned how to get a little thrust going now. So you give her some momentum and she can maintain it, you know, push and pull and all that. If you've ever spent hours pushing just one more time, you know, that's a big deal. Autopilot, baby.
Jeremy Duncan:Except here's the thing. She's still too small to get herself up on the swing. And you still have to pull her back and get her going with a couple pushes to start. And don't get me wrong. It's a very big win in our house.
Jeremy Duncan:But every time she turns to me and says, daddy, look. I can do it all by myself. I'm kinda like, can you though? I mean, when you can get yourself to the park safely and onto the swing and through the ride and home again, then we can talk about all by yourself. Right now alright.
Jeremy Duncan:Well, here are the Israelites ready for battle, and I wonder how many times I have thanked God for goodness that I've stumbled into only to immediately rewrite the story to narrate my own courage back to myself. Remember, the Egypt of the story isn't just the Egypt of history. It's the way that empires dominate our imagination. And I'm worried that if we immediately, upon seizing any sort of grace and freedom for ourselves, decide that we earned it through our own power, then perhaps what we've actually done is set ourselves up to become the next source of suffering for someone else in the world. Sometimes the story isn't you're stronger than you think.
Jeremy Duncan:Sometimes the story is there's a different way for you to move through the world, and you don't need to compare yourself to what was. And that again has a certain poetry to it. Because even here as Israel is flirting with their own self congratulation, there's another parallel that's being set up in the text. Chapter 14, a couple of verses later, the Lord says to Moses, okay. Turn back and head toward the sea.
Jeremy Duncan:Pharaoh will think you're wandering around in the land confused and lost, hemmed in by the desert. But I will harden his heart and he will pursue you. And I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh and his army. And the Egyptians will finally know that I am the Lord. This one's fascinating to me because particularly having just come off what we saw happen in the hearts of the Israelites, how quick they were to ascribe their freedom to themselves.
Jeremy Duncan:I mean, what do we do here with Pharaoh in his heart? What does it mean that God hardens it? That doesn't sound fair to me. But again, there's some breadcrumbs here because the Jewish rabbi, Nahum Sarnah, points out that Pharaoh's heart is actually hardened exactly 20 times in the narrative. 10 of those times, the hardening refers to an action that Pharaoh does to himself.
Jeremy Duncan:For example, eight fifteen says, Pharaoh hardened his heart and would not listen to God. And then another 10 times, the hardening is done by God. For example, the verse we just read, I will harden Pharaoh's heart. And there's actually three different words in Hebrew that are used across these various references. They they mean to dull, to strengthen, or to become obstinate.
Jeremy Duncan:For the record, all three are used on both sides of the god pharaoh divides. That doesn't really help us either. But for me, what this means is that it's far too convenient to have 20 references, 10 on each side to be anything but a very intentional structuring of the story. Someone has taken great pains here to say something. And what Sarna points out is that in the first five plagues, it is always pharaoh who's doing the hardening to himself.
Jeremy Duncan:And it's only after pharaoh chooses that path 10 times over, the hardening is then later attributed to divine causality. That's a story that we see repeated over over again in scripture. Right? Like, for example, Paul talks about God punishing us by giving us over to our worst desires. Or Jesus talks about those who refuse to forgive slowly becoming unable to be forgiven.
Jeremy Duncan:Exodus talks about those who harden their hearts, having their hearts hardened against them. But here, the callback is, I think, to Israel heading out toward the sea. If you come to believe that you have won your freedom and your wealth by being more powerful, stronger than anywhere else, more ruthless than them. If the Hebrews buy into the story that they left Egypt because they were ready for battle, then they will we will, all of us, find ourselves eventually trapped by the story God just helped us exit from. In other words this, if you constantly tell yourself a story about how hard you are and how everything you have has been earned by your grit and that your callousness to those around you is a virtue, then slowly, painfully, God just might give you that story.
Jeremy Duncan:And it might end up with you in places that you never wanted to be. And this is why we have to read imaginatively because the empires around us are giving us stories all the time, telling us this is what's important about you. This is the person that you want to be, and it's not always true. That's why Bruggemann is so set on the idea that we have to stop viewing scripture as singular stories, but instead as archetypes. Because when Pharaoh reaches the depths of his descent and abandons even that measly bit of grace that he extended to the Israelites when he hurled them out and he sends his army after the people to get them back and trapped against the dead end of the Red Sea, Moses stretches out his hand only for God to drive back the waters in front of them.
Jeremy Duncan:The point of the story isn't to believe that we can throw down with empires because we're just as strong as them. The point is to realize that the hardening of our hearts will have us ignoring the miraculous right in front of us and rushing headlong into the sea to our own demise. See, the prophetic imagination of what's possible was born not because Moses struck back with more force against his enemy, but because the possibility of a different way forward through the world was born in their consciousness. They are free because they are weak. They are free because that's who God's grace is lavished on.
Jeremy Duncan:They are free not because they became a bigger, better, stronger, meaner version of Egypt, but because God laid out a different path for them to follow. That they might trust that one day nation would no longer take up sword against nation, no longer would any of us train for war anymore because the ability for power to dominate our imagination can be drowned in the Red Sea if we're willing to allow it to happen. And all we need is a little creativity to notice that story in front of us over and over again in the world. There's a path that's offered to you by the empire that dominates your world, and God is offering an alternative. Let's pray.
Jeremy Duncan:God, for all those times when we have allowed power and strength and empire and dominance to close down and shut down our imagination, to make us to believe that the only thing we can aspire to be is more of that, whatever it was that dominated us, instead of realizing that it is in our softness and our weakness, in our willingness to follow the graph path of grace that we are opened up to a whole new world of what is possible not just for us, but for our neighbor, for our communities, and perhaps even in the scale of time to this entire world, this kingdom that you imagine possible being born, growing, taking root, and eventually overcoming the world. Not through the strength and the dominance and the power that has kept us down, but through self sacrifice and grace and the path of peace. May our imagination slowly be shaped by that prophetic word that your path forward is an alternative way to be human, and it is the way that we'll eventually overcome through self giving love. Might we follow it, and in that, might we find ourselves anew and renewed In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray, amen.
Jeremy Duncan:Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Jeremy Duncan:Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.