Mercy, Not Sacrifice: Brueggemann Comes to Rochester College

When I was just beginning in ministry, I received the book, The Land, by Walter Brueggemann as a Christmas present. I had a big chair in the corner of my office that was my reading spot. I got comfortable, opened the book, and didn't move until I was finished.

Now, that's quite a statement coming from a guy like me given my tendencies toward attention deficit. But I read the book through in one sitting. I was deeply moved. At various points, tears came to my eyes. I was moved by several things. I was moved by this vision of God and his relationship with Israel. I was moved by the way Brueggemann allowed the biblical text to speak directly to our world. I was moved by the prose, by his writing, by the passion that moved through the ink on the page into my heart and mind.

After reading the land, I quickly bought David's Truth, the Prophetic Imagination, and Hopeful Imagination (my favorite). I probably have over twenty Brueggemann titles on my bookshelves. No biblical scholar has impacted me more. When I was preaching in Oregon, I had a member approach me after a sermon. He asked, "Is this Brueggemann guy available so that we could just cut out the middle man?" Yeah, I'm that guy when it come to Brueggemann.

So, I'm thrilled that I received an email from Walter Brueggemann yesterday accepting an invitation to be our featured speaker at Streaming: Biblical Conversations from the Missional Frontier, June 18-20, 2012, at Rochester College. Our theme for the conference will be "I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice."

The following sentences were part of the invitation I extended. I hope they will entice you to attend as well.

This coming year’s theme will be “I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice.” We can think of no one better to address this theme than you. In your work you have emphasized the tensions between justice and purity traditions in Israel’s response to Yahweh. You not only demonstrate the priority of the justice or mercy strand, but you do so without jettisoning the purity dimension as an ordering response to “an unsettled residue of ache.”

This work has been picked up by many in fruitful ways beyond the areas of biblical interpretation. One recent work is Richard Beck’s fascinating study, Unclean. Beck is an experimental psychologist who is particularly interested in the psychological dimensions of disgust, contagion and their relation to mortality. He proposes a radical notion of hospitality as a response to our tendencies toward socio-moral disgust. Along the way, he dialogues with theologians including Volf, Heim, and yourself.

This large conversation related to justice and purity is very important to the emerging missional church conversation. This literature encourages a new engagement for congregations within Western cultures—an engagement not beholden to the powers that sponsor a life defined primarily by economic interests related to consumption. Churches that serve the broader society as “vendors of religious goods and services” do so at the cost of a reduced significance. The missional impulse, in contrast, invites the church to consider its life once again from the margins, as a people sent, or as an outpost for the reign of God. This move to the margins is impossible apart from a searching and probing conversation on the tensions between justice and purity—a conversation that has not yet appeared prominently in the missional church literature.

I'm Religious, Not Spiritual, and I Like it That Way

I know, it's usually said the other way. It's pretty fashionable these days to claim spirituality, not religion. Spiritual is deep. Religion is mechanical and superficial. Spiritual is authentic. Religion is foppery. Spiritual is of God. Religion is a human creation. I get it.

There certainly is a critique to be made concerning religion. There is such a thing as bad religion and plenty of examples to go around. I would even say that there are few things more dangerous than bad religion. The fact that most acts of terror are done under the shade of some religious tree is nearly enough for me to quit the whole thing.

But there's also such a thing as bad spirituality. And the examples are plentiful here as well. When someone tells me that they are spiritual, but not religious, I usually suspect some sort of idiosyncratic and wildly syncretistic view of what that means, and I'm often not disappointed. My experience in congregational ministry has been that the most difficult people are often the ones who present themselves just a little ahead of everyone else on the spirituality scale.

Let me be quick to say that there are good spiritualities. This is less a complaint about spirituality and more a way of commending religion. Religion can be good as well. And given its power, evident in the easy targets of our scorn, it seems to me that it is particularly important not to give up on religion.

Jesus didn't. True, he attacked bad religion. But he also encouraged the saying of a set prayer, taught his followers to fast and give alms appropriately, and to keep the law as an expression of God's good ordering of life. We could probably find this kind of understanding of religion throughout the New Testament. I will simply add that James had a definition of good religion--to care for widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world. Too often, I find this definition of pure and undefiled religion missing from the lives of self-styled spiritualists.

I know this is not what most people have in mind when they critique religion. When they claim being spiritual over being religious, they are often being critical of the "formal" aspects of religion--liturgies, especially set liturgies, that suffer from lack of spontaneity or feeling. So, I want to say a good word for religion here as well.

Religion says my experience of God is mediated. It doesn't begin and end with me. Religion says that my relationship with God requires others. It requires words that aren't my own, and times and spaces that I don't designate. It involves a story that didn't originate with me, that is being passed down to me.

What passes for spirituality often says just the opposite. Spirituality says my relationship with God is direct and unmediated. Its just about me and God. This is why I don't need a religious community or times of worship or sacraments.  Or if I do, they are only necessary to the extent that they support my personal relationship with God. Spirituality, in this sense, deepens the very thing we need to overcome--the conviction that the world begins and ends with me.

Now, I think I could define religion and spirituality in ways so that they are seen as complimentary and not as things that could be divided into choices. But if you had to push me into a choice, am I religious or spiritual, I think I'd go for religious.

Baptism and Rene Descartes

This past Sunday marked my last sermon in a series on the "five-finger" exercise. That meant a sermon on baptism--the big enchilada where Churches of Christ are concerned. If you're interested in the entire sermon, you can find it (give it a few days) at http://lochurchofchrist.org/content.cfm?id=213. 


Here, I just want to talk about one point I made in the sermon. The idea that being a Christian without the experience of baptism is a fairly recent phenomenon. To my knowledge, it is only a recent development (within the last 150 years?) that baptism has been seen as optional or even unnecessary. Before that, people argued about the mode or proper subject of baptism, but not about its necessity. So, why this recent development.


As with all problems I experience in life, I blame Rene Descartes. I am kidding, mostly. It's not Descartes himself, but a legacy that exalts the interior of the individual as the place of ultimate reality. Decartes' dictum, "I think, therefore, I am," captures a prevalent impulse that locates what is most real within the individual conscience. The real action takes place, not external to me or even involving my body, but within me. So, we say things like "baptism is the outward sign of an inward reality." What's important here? The interior of the individual. And who am I as an individual? The sum of my thoughts and feelings. Baptism is only important as it relates to those, which means sometimes it is not important at all.


This exalting of the interior of the individual corresponds to understandings of language, symbols, and rituals that also characterize the Enlightenment and certain "modern" notions. Symbols only point to reality, they don't participate in it. Words only point to what is real. Rituals, like baptism, are "mere rituals" or "only symbolic" of greater realities. And because all the real action happens inside me, what's real doesn't need to be mediated to me through a sign or language or ritual, it comes to me directly.


It is not surprising, in light of this, that evangelicalism in North America, the reigning champion of this view of the individual, would diminish the importance of baptism. Lest we are too hard on evangelicals, however, it is important for those of us within Churches of Christ to recognize our own affinity with this view of life and the sideways way we attached it to baptism. The same impulse, for instance, that privileges the interior of the individual in relation to baptism also allows an individual to feel justified in switching congregations if they are personally dissatisfied. Or, this impulse is present in the primary ways we evaluate worship. "I enjoyed that today." Or, "That didn't connect with me at all." We spend an inordinate amount of time and energy thinking about how our worship will connect with the interiors of individuals.


Part of the Enlightenment impulse related to the individual also had to do with notions of progress and self-mastery. The appeal of baptism for many early Stone-Campbell leaders was precisely because it was something we could do to guarantee our salvation. Ironically, it was a way to guarantee our standing before God apart from tradition--a naked (no, not literally) encounter between the individual and God.


I want to put baptism in a different light. Like all things, if it is saving, baptism is something God does through the mediation of others--community, water, Spirit, death and resurrection of Jesus, etc. Second, symbols and rituals do not only mimic or point to realities, they help to create them. They are not simply substitutes for something more real. They accomplish something in ways that other, perhaps more straightforward, accounts of things can't. Baptism does something real that is greater than whatever it is going on inside of us. Finally, the measure of all things is not the interior life of the individual. We are persons and have identities not because we are self-conscious, but precisely because we are conscious of the other. As individuals, we are not the measure of the meaning of life. The saving work of God on our behalf comes through our bodily participation in a community called into the realities of the work of Jesus. Baptism enacts this very reality.