I’ve been reading Walter Brueggemann’s Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope. I love the way he looks at the “thickness of the text.” He argues that the preachers and teachers of the gospel are to “invite, empower and equip the community to reimagine the world as though Jesus was the key player.” Our role as Christ-followers is to “utter a sub-version of reality, an alternative version of reality that says another way of life in the world is not only possible but is peculiarly mandated and peculiarly valid.”
As we proclaim the king and kingdom, we challenge the dominant version of social reality which (for example) thinks:
* bread must be guarded, and not shared
* that it is each against all, with no ground for community
* silence can authenticate the status quo.
The preacher/teacher/leader of a reimagined vision of an alternative reality where:
–the community offers break even amidst their own material deprivations
–the community affirms a covenantal solidarity amidst social dissociation
–the community legitimates speech where the rest of the world uses enforced silence to protect its privileges.
Jesus was such a leader who announces from the beginning that a new reality, a new governance is at hand. This new goverance–of Jesus as King–brings all of life–public and personal, human and nonhuman–into a regime of wholeness.
(and my favorite line from Bruggemann)
Jesus came with a mandate to do for the world what the Creator had intended from the outset.