“Engaging and Citing Brueggemann: Prophetic Ministry in Contemporary America, and the Problem of Mislabeling Things” (Day 5)

The excerpted text below is quite long, but I invite you to read every word with care, understanding, and with a critical eye. Given the clarify of Brueggemann’s writing and message, it is unnecessary tor me to write a reflection on the text below.

“It is of enormous importance that the prophets of the Old Testament characteristically spoke in poetic language. By that I do not mean they created rhymes. Rather they spoke in elusive, metaphorical ways as a rhetorical strategy for escaping and challenging the powerful ideologies that had reduced social reality to
control and social possibility to the capability of the dominant regime…

I do not believe there are easy, obvious, or direct
connections from the ancient world of the Bible to our own contemporary world. But I will dare nonetheless, in what follows, to suggest an analogue whereby we may think again about “prophetic ministry” among us. Not unlike the Jerusalem ideology of chosenness or the
imperial ideology of hegemony, pastors in U.S. churches live and work amid the American ideology of the National Security State. That ideology, massive in its influence but seldom lined out in a specific way, assumes U.S. exceptionalism, that is, that the United States is a special case in human history that is not subject to the ordinary conventions of life in the world. That exceptionalism assumes that we are, by right, an especially privileged, entitled people, blessed by God in peculiar ways. We are thereby given preeminence in the world and are entitled to more than our share of world’s goods in order to sustain an unparalleled and unsustainable standard of living. That exceptional privilege permits, requires, and legitimates unparalleled military strength, both in order to control markets and resources around the world, and to propagate the truth of
“democratic capitalism” all over the world, including parts of the world that are not amenable to that ideology.

The pastoral reality is that this ideology of privilege sustained by power is so pervasive that it is the air we breathe and the water in which we swim. It is beyond question or criticism; it renders us incapable of thinking or imagining outside of its definitions of reality…

When things are mislabeled, then one need not see them as they are. A prayer by “Reverend Billy” indicates how the denial of euphemism works among us:

Dear Lord,
We can’t believe that bombing is called security.
We can’t believe that monopoly is called democracy.
We can’t believe that gasoline prices are called
foreign policy…
We can’t believe that racism is called crime fighting!
We can’t believe that sweatshops are called efficiency!
We can’t believe that a mall is called the
neighborhood! ….
We can’t believe that advertising is called free speech!
We can’t believe that love is called for sale!
We can’t believe that you think there are two
political parties!
We can’t believe that you repeat the word
“democracy” like it’s a liturgical chant
from a lost religion.

There is no doubt that a society that traffics in violence and exploitation must disguise such policies and practices in order to protect the ideology that gives immunity….

It is surely the case that the U.S. church, largely
settled into the ideology of U.S. exceptionalism, colludes in denial. Thus we have complete confidence in the “American way of life” that is much confused with the promises of the Gospel. Across the entire political spectrum, we imagine that our way in the world is the right way and are largely incapable of noticing the trouble and suffering evoked in the world by U.S. practices and policies. More than that, we try not to take with seriousness the unraveling of the human fabric in our society because of greed that very often eventuates in violence, even if covert violence. The undercurrents of our society, like those of ancient Jerusalem, might suggest
we are very close to an emergency situation, given the failure of our institutions. But even the recent economic distress has not evoked any deep review of our policies and our practices that put our society at risk. Clearly, we
are like ancient Jerusalem in our immense capacity for denial.

I suspect that in our time and place the capacity to penetrate the denial, and so to exhibit the failure and the pain generated by a self-sufficient system, is voiced not in anger or indignation. It is rather in sadness and loss. The
sadness and loss need not be voiced in confrontational ways. The expression can be quiet and sober and unflinching in its resolve. The point is not to establish blame. The point, rather, is to make available the reality of hurt and loss, and to trace back the ways in which such hurt and loss are not an accident but are products of an ideological system. In this tradition, moreover, such an articulation that flies in the face of dominant ideology is not simply another opinion. It is rather a sounding of a deep holiness that cuts below our usual management of truth and speaks from a holiness that stands outside of our management. Our predecessors in prophetic office could do no better than to take their deep utterance as the word of God. And we do no better than that, as long as we remember the God who offers such a word is a God who notices and cares, and who knows that more
denial will only bring more trouble.”

—-Walter Brueggemann, “Prophetic Leadership: Engagement in Counter-Imagination,” pp. 4-5, 9-10, 13