(Message given at Wayside Friends Church on January 5, 2025)
Something I love to do, but don’t get the chance to do very often in this stage of life, is to fly fish.
I grew up fishing quite a lot with my dad, but my dad was not a fly fisher. He called himself a “plunker.” He would find a likely looking spot, put on some big bait, and plunk a cast right out in the deepest part. Then he’d pull up a folding chair, open a nice beverage and sit there all day.
My uncle was the one who introduced me to fly fishing and to reading water, finding the little pockets and spots in a river or creek that surprisingly hold fish. It completely changed the game for what fishing was. Instead of sitting around all day, fishing became exploring, wandering, finding all kinds of beautiful places where fish might be found.
And in the course of that exploring, finding the spots, and figuring out how to deliver a cast to where the fish are, you end up crossing the stream many times.
Crossing the stream can be an adventure.
Unless it’s the heat of summer, you’re wearing chest waders, which makes you not quite as mobile and agile as you normally might be. You’re wearing boots, which sometimes are covered with a kind of felt. Why? Well, because those rocks on the bottom of streams tend to grow moss and are slippery.
On top of that, when the stream is rushing at a pretty good clip, those rocks on the bottom are always ready to start rolling down the stream at the slightest touch.
It’s an adrenaline-pumping experience to start crossing, feel your foot slip on the moss, try to catch yourself, and then find the rock you try to catch yourself on start to roll, then another, then another…
It can feel like there is nothing solid to stand on.
There’s a great feeling of relief when you finally feel a rock hold underneath your feet, and you get to the other side of a swift channel. You can take a breath, and instead of flailing about, start planning how to get to the next fish.
In general, the last decade or so for me personally has felt a bit like the flailing that comes when the stones seem to keep moving under your feet. In particular, the time since the election has felt even more that way. When it seems to me that the majority of the country has voted for things that I see as detrimental to people I care about and to people on the margins, how should I live and be in this world?
So it’s a little strange to be the one trying to speak words that send us into 2025 with a strong, confident direction, when for a lot of the last couple of months I feel like I’ve just been trying to get my feet under me.
When I’m out fishing and crossing a stream and find myself losing footing, sometimes the best thing to do is to take a literal step back to find a rock that has held my feet solidly before.
I tried to live that metaphor this past week while preparing to speak, by returning to a book that has provided clarity and solid ground to me several times before: Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination. And I feel like it’s helping me get my feet under me, and starting to help me return to a place where I can plan for where I should go, rather than just survive the rushing current.
Here’s one solid rock that Bruggemann offers, one that won’t slip:
When people of faith hitch their wagon to empires and nations and political power, it never, ever goes well. The influence that institutional power has over people of faith is FAR greater than the influence people of faith have over institutional power.
Living, breathing, vibrant faith isn’t found in what Brueggemann calls the “royal consciousness” of governmental order. Living, breathing, vibrant faith thrives in what he calls the prophetic imagination.
In America, a close synonym for “royal consciousness” is the desire for “law and order.” There’s something like a trade that takes place in people’s minds. I give up some of my independence and freedom, in order to have a government that will keep order, particularly a kind of order that helps people like me.
In the bible, in the book of Judges, we hear the people of Israel ask for a king “like all the other nations.” The desire is for a strong leader to keep them safe and help them thrive.
And, for awhile, it looks like faith and this new strong leader can walk hand in hand. King David is known as “a man after God’s own heart.” King Solomon builds a temple for God to be at home in the center of royal power. Wealth increases, with gifts of gold and the cedars of Lebanon flowing to the king.
But looks are deceiving in this partnership of faith and power.
The God who once led the people through the wilderness by fire and cloud is now forced and domesticated into being used as a weapon of the king. With increasing wealth and affluence comes oppression and slavery.
Soon it is faith and the priesthood that change, because they must fall in line with the power of law and order, the dominance of the royal consciousness. The priests and the religious institution must speak things that are in line with the king, because critique of the system is not allowed. Don’t question, don’t raise the alarm; don’t notice the cost being paid for this rise of affluence at the center of power.
Whether we talk about the ancient kingdom of Israel, or Constantine’s “Christianizing” of the Roman Empire, or the “Princely Popes” of the middle ages; whether we fast forward to the rise of Hitler, who came to power by promising a more moral nation, or to some Christians in America today, using political power to try to bring moral goodness…in all of these examples and more, the marriage of faith and institutional power does bring affluence (for some), but also oppression, and a faith that is captive to a strong leader who will not allow critique.
And as this institutional power grows (or “law and order”, or “royal consciousness”, whatever you want to call it)…as this system of empire grows, a sense of inevitability and despair grows as well.
There is a growing numbness, a loss of hope, the feeling that nothing new or different can come, nothing can change the system that is.
Does that resonate with anyone else? Because it does with me.
When the institutions of faith do not critique; when they close their eyes to the oppression that is caused; when they are numb to the harm in pursuit of the good ends they desire…when this happens, institutions of faith contribute to the sense of inevitability, the sense that nothing will change.
This is where faith is corrupted, writes Brueggemann, when people of faith fail to question and therefore completely miss what they are participating in. They “care intensely about God,” Brueggemann writes, “but uncritically, so that the God of well-being and order is not understood to be precisely the source of social oppression.” (The Prophetic Imagination, p. 8, emphasis mine)
Here comes a second solid stone Brueggemann offers us: True faith survives by offering a prophetic imagination, a challenge to the power of empire—empire that tries to keep us numb and without hope for anything different than what is.
How do we break through the numbness? We let our grief over injustice be expressed. We critique what is and don’t be silent.
I spent a lot of my adult life within the religious systems of power. And a lot of my call from within the system was to critique, to notice and draw attention to oppression, to not turn a blind eye to how “good religious systems” can bring pain and suffering.
I hope there are others within the religious systems of power who are still doing that work today. I pray for it and hope for it.
But, here was my a-ha this week. It may be wrong, it probably is a little too neat and tidy for the messiness and complications of the world we live in. But my overly-simplified a-ha was that maybe our community here has a different circumstance and needs a different solution.
It seems as if Wayside and the circles of people I am in now are not characterized by numbness or blindness to the oppression.
For many of us, grief is our constant companion, as we can’t help but see the cost of what many in America today seem to see as a return to Christian values.
Our grief has fought off the numbing blindness of the “royal consciousness”—but what I think overwhelms us is the despair, the sense that nothing new or different can come. That the empire is inevitable.
At least, that is what overwhelms me.
Which brings us to the third solid stone to stand on: Our faith rests in a God who always and consistently brings a new beginning out of a system of emptiness and oppression.
Here’s how Brueggemann puts it: “Numb people do not discern or fear death. Conversely, despairing people do not anticipate or receive newness.” (The Prophetic Imagination, p. 60)
The prophetic imagination is not only critiquing. It is also energizing.
So how do we do it? If most of my adult life was in a religious system where I was trying to break through the numbness, what do we do now that we are a community that borders on despair, that struggles to anticipate or imagine or receive newness? How do we energize?
Brueggemann says, “…[we] engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God.” (The Prophetic Imagination, p. 60, emphasis mine)
THAT is what resonates with my soul! That is where I can find a direction for my own part in this journey toward prophetic imagination!
Living, breathing, vibrant faith is always rooted in the God who brings new things when they are least expected. Faith itself is receiving from outside of the current system of oppression a gift of something new and vibrant, something unimaginable when all we see is what is.
Faith that has simple answers and boundaries and rigid lines is less connected to the vibrant renewal of God and more connected to the numb and oppressive “law and order” empire.
What we are critiquing and rejecting and challenging and deconstructing is a faith that has been warped to support an oppressive system.
What we are striving to embrace is a faith tethered to the completely free and transcendent God, leading and calling us to new life! New life unimaginable by the systems of power in our world.
How do we combat the despair that nothing will ever change in this status quo of oppression? By remembering that true newness and hope comes from outside of our human endeavors.
Am I saying we should give up on striving for justice? Absolutely not. Am I calling us to believe in some kind of Santa Claus God, who just shows up unexpectedly and gives us good things? Absolutely not.
I guess what I am trying to say is this: for faith to be faith, there must be a fundamental sense that God’s activity, God’s character, God’s leading is more at the center than human actions—no matter how good our human intentions are.
If human good intentions could be pooled together to make a just world, we would have already done it.
If power didn’t corrupt, power would have already brought justice and an end to oppression. If systems of power didn’t begin their rise with supposedly good and moral intentions, they wouldn’t be able to gain the power to create the inequity, oppression, and injustice that characterize the history of humanity in the world.
We can “engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God.”
We can hold on to how God has a track record of bringing unimaginable newness right into the iron grip of empire oppression.
Imagining something new, finding the glimmers of hope in the midst of paralyzing despair, can begin by holding and remembering the history of living, vibrant faith in a living, vibrant God.
Who is our God?
The living God, who appeared to an old childless couple, promising descendants outnumbering the stars to Abram and Sarai, who by all the rules of the world were barren and bereft of hope.
The living God, who appeared in a burning bush to a washed up former prince hiding in the desert, forever afraid—to Moses, afraid to speak, afraid to dream of anything other than slavery under the power of Pharaoh.
The living God, who kindled enough courage and leadership life in that stuttering, fearful former prince to lead an entire people out of the only life they had known, one of cruelty and oppression.
The living God, who parted the Red Sea that seemed to block their escape from the pursuing army, and instead led them on dry land into a new freedom.
The living God, who when they couldn’t imagine anything but starvation and dehydration in the desert, provided water from a rock and food from the sky.
The living God, who when the exiles had lived a generation away from home under the greatest military power in the world, dared to speak through Isaiah of them returning home.
The living God, who when the Roman Empire reigned supreme, when it had snuffed out every rising rebellion of the Israelites for generations, took on human flesh in a barn through means that could not be imagined possible by Mary or Joseph, and announced the new goodness that was coming, announced it to the very ones oppressed and forgotten by the systems of power, those shepherds on a hillside.
Isn’t the Christmas story, so overly familiar to us, isn’t it nothing but the culmination of a long history of God breaking into the static power of empires with new life and hope for the oppressed?
Isn’t this the very essence of who God is, of what our faith is?
Maybe this hard time can bring about something good in us.
We can see that we cannot make a new world on our own. We cannot bring about just systems.
We are always on that journey toward justice and must always fight that fight. But we do it by rejecting what a static empire creates; we do it by embracing the unconstrained God who is ever for the oppressed.
The God who brings life to the barren, who precisely when no way out of oppression seems possible, births and creates and brings from outside of this human system something life-giving and new. This IS who God has always been! This IS who we serve.
Bruggemann writes,
“The newness from God is the only serious source of energy…I am aware that this runs dangerously close to passivity, as trust often does, and that it stands at the brink of cheap grace, as grace must always do. But that risk must be run because exiles must always learn that our hope is never generated among us but always given to us. And whenever it is given we are amazed.” (The Prophetic Imagination, p. 78-79)
What I found personally this week is a renewed sense of amazement in reading God’s words of hope in the Bible.
There is power and life in the story of God in the bible, that I’ll fully admit I sometimes lose sight of. Sometimes because it’s so familiar to me at this point in life. Sometimes because others misuse it. Sometimes because it seems too pasted on to the harsh reality of life.
But words like we find in Isaiah 40 are not meant for cross-stitches hung on walls, but for broken hearts that can no longer imagine anything changing, who can no longer conceive of new life and hope coming again.
God IS the God of new life! God can bring strength to us in our most despairing moments.
“O Jacob, how can you say the LORD does not see your troubles?
O Israel, how can you say God ignores your rights?
Have you never heard?
Have you never understood?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of all the earth.
God never grows weak or weary.
No one can measure the depths of Their understanding.
God gives power to the weak
and strength to the powerless.
Even youths will become weak and tired,
and young adults will fall in exhaustion.
But those who trust in our God will find new strength.
They will soar high on wings like eagles.
They will run and not grow weary.
They will walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:27-31, NLT)
It’s precisely WHEN we are at the end of our efforts, when we are exhausted, when we see no solutions or answers…it is in those moments that God shows up in ways we can tangibly rely upon.
Oh God, make good on this promise! Show your character as you have in the past!
From Isaiah 41:
“When the poor and needy search for water and there is none,
and their tongues are parched from thirst,
then I, the LORD, will answer them.
I, the God of Israel, will never abandon them.
I will open up rivers for them on the high plateaus.
I will give them fountains of water in the valleys.
I will fill the desert with pools of water.
Rivers fed by springs will flow across the parched ground.
I will plant trees in the barren desert—
cedar, acacia, myrtle, olive, cypress, fir, and pine.
I am doing this so all who see this miracle
will understand what it means—
that it is the LORD who has done this,
the Holy One of Israel who created it.” (Isaiah 41:17-20, NLT)
Our hope was never the kingdom, never the culture, never the empire, never politics.
We are not forever stuck and without the hope of new beginnings. Our God is always the God of new beginnings, and meets us right in these points of despair!
When God moves, it is we who will be at Ground Zero. The announcement and activity of God will not come to the White House. It will come to the poor, the thirsty, the outcasts, the forgotten ones. To those who mourn, to those who hunger and thirst for justice.
May we embrace who You have always been, God, in order to imagine the justice that has not yet fully come.
May we, as Brueggemann writes, “speak neither in rage nor with cheap grace, but with the candor born of anguish and passion.” (The Prophetic Imagination, p. 45)
May we deconstruct the god held captive by empire, and embrace the living, breathing, vibrant God who leads us on, completely unbound by human systems.
And may we be ready to receive the surprise of God’s new works of hope in and around us.