Tuesday 7 August 2007

We're back into "Mandate to Difference" by Walter Brueggemann. This week I will try to lift up pieces that focus around this statement: I submit that in the context of the North American church, worship that is spirit-led imagination is powerfully over and against dominant reality. He turns to three texts to bring our what a "contrary" way may be.



The second text is Psalm 136, that highly stylized liturgy, offers a community of remembering that is able to recall in some grandeur and some close detail the wonders of creation and the dazzlement of exodus... from this acute remembering, our singing community has continued with what we take to be the long-term truth of God, that YHWH's fidelity is very, very long-term.

(Then he goes on to say) Imagine a group of people who no longer meet to sing and dance and remember fidelity. In that world:

• Memory is lost and amnesia is the order of the day...


• Fidelity disappears in a large binge of self-indulgence


• Where memory fails before amnesia and where fidelity gives way to self-indulgence, in that world there will be no thanks, no acknowledgement that life is a gift...

The dominant culture all around is one of self-indulgence without fidelity, manipulation without gratitude.

In some way, it is as though all I can do in the face of such an image is to stutter. And yet, we are called to sing! The life into which we are called is a dangerous and risky movement in the face of this type of culture. We are called to keep our eyes and our ears and our lives open to the grand history and story of God's fidelity to God's people - that's us. Even now when there are so many ways we are pulled to take part in the way the dominant culture is so quickly turned in upon its self with self praise and self-indulgence, we break that cycle by remembering whose we are. That status is the beginning of resistance. We are not the followers of the powers of the day that long for us to follow their lead and their interpretation of who we are to be. Even when the dominant culture uses the words of Scripture, they use it to limit our imagination...they use it in an attempt to bless their self-indulgent ways. If we want to help build a courageous church, we must be willing to remember whose we are and with that, invite our children into a life that is risky, transformational, and out of reach and control of the powers that long to win our allegiance.

Connection: It doesn't take much singing in our lives to break the power of the dominant culture. "This little light of mine..." Cannot be touched or extinguished once we sing it and remember what it brings to us and the way we are empowered to question and critique the god-makers of the day.

Your faithfulness, O God, is the power that turns this day into something new. Too often we would march off in the direction of any of the powers of the day as they attempt to win our lives. And yet, in noting your never-ending love we are given new legs on which to stand and sing of your glorious and liberating love. Amen.