The Word Militant - Preaching a Decentering Word

This post is a strong recommendation of another book by Walter Brueggemann. While other books provide examples of good preaching and others address the issue preaching this is by far the best and most challenging I have read so far. I have copied the first section of the Introduction. I will add more material to this post and provide other posts besides under the Label.

Walter Brueggemann : The Word Militant – Preaching a Decentering Word.

Introduction : At Risk with the Text

Preaching is an audacious act. It always has been.

It is audacious because the preacher stands up to make a claim that she has something new to say that the gathered listeners want to hear. That audaciousness is now acute, because it is no longer the case, as in the days of clergy monopoly, that the preacher might be the most learned person in town. Now, almost anywhere, the congregation teems with people who, in every dimension of our common life, know things well beyond the learning of the preacher. On all counts the act of preaching is:

• foolish – because in the congregation some know more and because in every congregation there are those ideologically committed in ways that preclude serious listening. As a result the preacher’s utterance is already determined to be disputatious even before it is heard.

• dangerous – if it is faithful, because the powers of retrenchment are everywhere among us, a passion to keep things as they were before the utterance. Ideological resistancenis readily evoked in most congregations. And if not in the congregation itself, the rulers of this age keep a close eye on every proclamation that may disturb present arrangements. We have all read of the dangers of preaching in a police state where the preacher on any occasion is at risk and may be called to account. But even in our more-or-less benign democratic society such surveillance is not difficult to evoke, as witness All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, which has had its “tax status” called into question because of a preacher’s critique of the Iraq war policy.
• A risky self exposure of the preacher , who at best is vulnerable in the precariousness of the utterance. Every preacher knows with some regularity that what is said and what must be said inescapably expose the preacher to something of a fraud, for good preaching must speak truth to which the preacher’s own life does not always attest. The preacher, with any self-awareness, knows of such incongruity, and of course every knowing congregation can spot the slippage between utterance and utterer. But such discrepancy is inevitable unless preaching is confined to the small truths verified in the preacher’s own life.

Preaching is foolish, dangerous and exposing, because what must be said in proclamation constitutes a daring alternative to the ideological passions that may be present in the congregation, to the powers that conduct surveillance, either inside or outside the congregation, and to the preacher’s own sense of self.
The occasion of preaching is risky on all counts, inherently risky because something other happens in the preaching besides the echo of our preferred ideologies, our studied interests, or our personal inadequacies.