Wednesday 4 July 2007

Walter Brueggeman notes four necessary components for the practice of hope shared by Jews and Christians. Today we look at #4.

...hope requires a community of interpretation that is emancipated, emancipatory, generative, and daring in its interpretation.... These communities (Jewish and Christian) at the same time, however, have found ways to resist the generative force of interpretation, whether by fundamentalist reductionism or by critical explanation, for both reductionism and explanation inescapably curb the dangerous subversive force of a text that witnesses to hidden holy mystery.

So...both sides of these two faiths can be forces of resistance to new and strange ways of hearing the text and finding in them life that carries us beyond ourselves and into that holy space of God's Reign. We must be able to keep listening to voices of interpretation within our community. It is within the dialogue of these voices that we begin to hear how daring the life of faith is for all of us who call ourselves God's Children - beloved. In some ways, I think we are all a bit frightened by the notion of a holy mystery in life. It is as though we think it will be a slippery slope down which we will slip and tumble into a place and life that is quite unlike the life we presently try to hold. Well, there is some truth to that possible movement and pull into a new life. And yet, isn't that what we are presented in Scripture. Time and time again, the community of God's people slip into this holy mystery of God's Reign and it has little to do with what the people did. It is all about the God who takes hold of us and pulls us into God's mysterious Reign of grace.

Connection: Don't limit what you read in the texts that come from our faith traditions. Rather, re-view them and question and dream and imagine. In that process and with a willingness to share those notions in a safe community of inquiry and learning and prayer, we might become something new even as we step off into this day.

Enlighten us, O God, so that as we come together as your people, we will be bold in how we share the way your Word transforms us and allows us to question even when there are no answers to the questions we ask. Grand us peace in your living Word. Amen.