Excerpt: Brueggemann, "The Prophetic Imagination" and "Finally Comes the Poet" I was stunned when I read these words in "The Prophetic Imagination." I believe many of us who are called to walk in new directions, and reflect on life, kingdom and culture will identify with them. This is a call to grieve, and to believe, and to move forward... "As I reflect on ministry, and especially on my ministry, I know in the hidden places that the real restraints are not in my understanding or in the receptivity of other people. Rather, the restraints come from my own unsureness about this perception... I, like most of the others, am unsure that the alternative community inclusive of the poor, hungry and grieving is really the wave of God's future. We are indeed "like people, like priest" (Hosea 4:9). That is likely the situation of many of us in ministry, and there is no way out of it. It does make clear to us that our ministry will always be practiced through our own conflicted selves... "We ourselves shall move in and out [of certainty, of our convictions about the nature of the kingdom of God and His body, our awareness of what God is doing] precisely because of our poor capacity to grieve the death in our own lives and so be amazed at the new futures. We are not more skilled in that than all the other children of the compromised community, and therefore we must engage in the same painful practices of becoming who we are called to be. I have come to think that there is no more succinct summary of prophetic ministry than the statement of Jesus: "Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh" (Luke 6:21), or ""Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted" (Matt 5:4). " Jesus' concern was finally for the joy of the kingdom. That is what he promised, and to that he invited people. But he was clear that rejoicing in that future required a grieving about the present order. Jesus takes a quite dialectical two-age view of things. He will not be like one world liberals who view the present world as the only one, nor will he be like the unworldly who year for the future with an unconcern about the present. There is work to be done in the present. There is grief work to be done in the present that the future may come. There is mourning to be done for those who do not know of the deathliness of their situation. There is mourning to be done with those who know pain and suffering and lack the power or freedom to bring it to speech. The saying is a harsh one, for it sets their grief work as the precondition of joy. It announces that those who have not cared enough to grieve will not know joy. " The mourning is a precondition in another way also. It is not a formal, external requirement but rather the only door and route to joy. Seen in that context, Jesus' saying about weeping and laughing is not just a neat aphorism but a summary of the entire theology of the cross. Only that kind of anguished disengagement permits fruitful yearning, and only the public embrace of deathliness permits newness to come. We are at the edge of knowing this in our personal lives, for we understand a bit of the processes of grieving. But we have yet to learn and apply it to the realilty of society. And finally, we have yet to learn it about God, who grieves in ways hidden from us and who waits to rejoice until his promises are fully kept." * * * * * "The task of prophetic imagination is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there.." "Isaiah gives his people a remarkable gift. He gives them back their faith by rearticulating the old story. He gives them the linguistic capacity to confront despair rather than be surrounded by it. And he creates new standing ground outside the dominant consciousness upon which new humanness is possible." "The dominant consciousness must be radically criticized and the dominant community must be finally dismantled. The purpose of an alternative community with an alternative consciousness is for the sake of that criticism and dismantling." Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 1978 Walter Brueggemann in the second edition of "The Prophetic Imagination" In Finally Comes the Poet, Walter Brueggemann writes, "To address the issue of truth greatly reduced requires us to be poets who speak against the prose world. The terms of that phrase are readily misunderstood. By prose I refer to a world that is organized in simple formulae, so that even pastoral prayers and love letters sound like memos. By poetry, I do not mean rhyme, rhythm or meter, but language that moves like Bob Gibson's fast ball, that jumps at the right moment, that breaks open old worlds with surprise, abrasion and pace. Poetic speech is the only proclamation worth doing in a situation of reductionism. The only proclamation that is worthy of the name preaching is not moral instruction, or problem solving, or doctrinal clarification. It is not good advice, nor is it romantic caressing, not is it a soothing good humor... It is rather the ready, steady, surprising proposal that the real world in which God invites us to live is not the one made available by the rulers of this age. The preacher has an awesome opportunity to offer an evangelical world: an existence shaped by the news of the gospel. This offer requires special care for words, because the baptized community awaits speech in order to be a faithful people."

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