Words with Power

Why bother with the interpretive categories of biblical faith when in fact our energy and interest are focused on more immediate matters? The answer is simple and obvious. We linger because, in the midst of our immediate preoccupation with our felt jeopardy and our hope for relief, our imagination does indeed range beyond the immediate to larger, deeper wonderments. Our free-ranging imagination is not finally or fully contained in the immediacy of our stress, anxiety, and jeopardy. Beyond these demanding immediacies, we have a deep sense that our life is not fully contained in the cause-and-effect reasoning of the Enlightenment that seeks to explain and control. There is more than that and other than that to our life in God's world.

"Virus as a Summons to Faith: Biblical Reflections in a Time of Loss, Grief, and Uncertainty" by Walter Brueggemann

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Dear Kate,

I wasn't thinking about writing today.  In fact I was quite determined to not write in the next little while: too many books beckoning me.

Then came a rock-n-roller by the name of Walter Brueggemann, who could churn out books like he's eating grape and sure enough serves this hungry man a sweet little helping before the airborne commotion is grounded.  Above is the description of his new book on the pandemic while we are still pandemicking.

Here, the old man speaks in a paragraph ten times as richly what I was stuttering about in the past month.  While I was biting my tongue for appetizer this hero of mine came up with a feast of a book already!  

"Why bother with the interpretive categories of biblical faith when in fact our energy and interest are focused on more immediate matters?"  That's his question.

In fact, for most "believers," the honest question is, why bother, ever, at all, since we are always focused on stuffs more immediate, necessary, pleasurable, profitable and, frankly, enriching, than reading some ancient words that we don't understand half of the time and can't get ourselves to care most of the time?

Science speaks, money talks, good food in the stomach soothes.  Even arguing with our kids and spouse does a better job at distracting us from our troubles.  But...words?  Why?  What's the power in these jots and tittles?  What's the use of mere words?  Let the preachers expound on them, the scholars toy with them, but as for us, we want reliable test kits, effective vaccines, timely handouts, and most of all, a clean conscience, the kind of prior normalcy we deserve to recover.

God speaks the world into existence, so we say.  But that was then, story in an old book, and this, the cloud over our head, is now.

Faithlessness.  We don't really trust in the tall tales after all.

Yours, Alex