Walter Brueggemann and Matthew Johnson

It was a great privilege to hear and meet Walter Brueggemann this week.  Dr. Brueggemann spoke at a seminar presented by the Center for Clergy Care & Education whose director Dr. Don Winslett has done much to help improve the “life-health” of clergy in my community.

If you are unfamiliar with the work of Dr. Brueggemann you can go here for audio samples of his work including lectures and interviews. In short, Walter has made enormous contributions to our understanding of the prophetic and psalmist voices in the Old Testament.  He has authored almost 60 books, including his 2013 new release Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture.

Here are some highlights from Dr. Brueggemann’s talk on the Psalms.

Q: Why do the psalms have such a grip on us?

A1: They have transportable particularity. They are so particular to the situation and the Psalms are transportable to our particularity.

A2: They are articulations of our emotional extremities (praise, wonder, lament, protest, etc) before God, done in stylistic idealized ways.  Local congregations should be places to express these articulations.  Unfortunately, we typically only site 6 or 7 psalms that we know, but this is denying people access to the emotional extremity of our lives.

[pullquote]Psalms are safe sacred spaces to bring self to speech.[/pullquote]

Psalms are for speaking out loud. Bringing self to speech is transformative. Psalms are safe sacred spaces to bring self to speech.  Speech breaks denial. Breaks autonomy. Bringing self to speech creates energy. Silence saps us of energy.

The flow of the psalms is Orientation-Disorientation-New orientation.

Psalms of Orientation

• When we perform psalms of orientation we are affirming God’s fullness. They are an invitation to help make this life with God work.
• These Psalms are designed to maintain moral control. The message is “Don’t mess this up!” These types of psalms are on the lips of Jobs friends.

For example: Psalm 1 is a construction of equilibrium.  It comes right out of Deuteronomy as the template for all Psalms. It pushes for genuine coerciveness – you can be genuine and still be coercive, that’s not automatically bad.

Don Winslett and Matthew Johnson

Psalms of Orientation bear witness to a reliable God, a reliable world and our place in that world. Reciting these psalms helps use construct that world in a morally reliable way.

Ps. 15 & 24:  Who gets to come in? Those of cleans hands and pure hearts.[pullquote]I say the Psalmist lived a sheltered life if he never saw the righteous forsaken.[/pullquote]

At one place the Psalmist says, “I’ve never seen the righteous forsaken.” I say the Psalmist lived a sheltered life if he never saw the righteous forsaken. Unless he is speaking of maintaining current power structures and not statistical data on the welfare of all righteous people.

These psalms stay close to the practice of common good and disapprove of those who do not live their lives this way.  Psalm 1 starts in obedience and Psalm 150 ends in self abandoning praise. The argument is you cannot get from 1 to 150 without Torah, so keep Torah.

The psalms of disorientation show this doesn’t always work!

Psalms of Disorientation

People like discussing these psalms the most because our lives are like these psalms and because the church withholds them.

• What we know is God is not faithful.  We are besieged by the power of death that wants to talk us out of ourselves.

[pullquote]The move in disorientation is from the all-powerful being of God to a dramatic dialogue with God.  Faith becomes a performance in which God and us are players at risk.[/pullquote]

The move in disorientation is from the all-powerful being of God to a dramatic dialogue with God.  Faith becomes a performance in which God and us are players at risk.  The performance is around the settledness of fidelity and the threat of infidelity.

Many of us want to fall back to those orientation psalms because of our upbringing.  We are torn.

“I went to sessions with a counselor.  I went because I desperately needed him to know, while I was simultaneously terrified he would find out.”

We don’t want to go there. We resist, we deny and turn everything into guilt.

There are 50 lament psalms but we only focus on 2 and 51. You will not find confessions of guilt in one of the lament psalms.  Let that thought cross our lips.  That’s what we are saying when we say, “Why me?”

Walter Brueggemann, Ben Smith & Randy Jackson

The lament psalms assume the covenant but instead of it being about me keeping it, it’s about God’s promises to me. Psalms of disorientation are regressive speech. They are the kinds of speech that people with orientation cannot tolerate. It sounds blasphemous.

Q: Are we going to let our pastoral life and strategy get real?  Too much of the liturgical life of the church is a practice of denial and when you deny long enough it’s going to break down somewhere.

Ps. 88:10-12 ask a series of rhetorical questions concerning what can a dead person do for God?  These questions point to the need for God to keep me alive so there can be praise from me to lift him up. These psalms claim something is at stake for God and not just for me.

Ps. 35 praise is withheld until God does something.  The language is hyperbolic. It’s like the child with a scratch who acts like their dying unless mommy does something.

[pullquote]The church is all tooled up to deal with sin but not chaos.  The psalmist claims that evil has intruded because God has been inattentive.[/pullquote]

The problem in the lament psalms is not sin, it’s chaos caused by the power of death.  The church is all tooled up to deal with sin but not chaos.  The psalmist claims that evil has intruded because God has been inattentive.

They psalms enunciate provisional role reversal.  Orientation psalms say GOD is big and I am the junior partner.  In disorientation psalms I am BIG and I expect to be taken seriously.  There is a lot of first person pronouns. i.e. Ps. 77

Orientation psalms call people to cede their life over to God, but disorientation psalms call people to claim the self.

Prayer is both ceding myself over to God and claiming myself before God.

[pullquote]If you can bring yourself to act out this dramatic performance, you can put your problems on God’s desk and say, “Deal with that”.[/pullquote]

Disorientation psalms call us to a dramatic performance, an expression of ourselves to God.  If you can bring yourself to act out this dramatic performance, you can put your problems on God’s desk and say, “Deal with that”.

i.e. Vengeance.  Three things to do with a thirst for vengeance 1. Act it out  2.Deny it. 3. Voice it to God and leave it with God.

This is serious dialogical engagement in which I am a very present participant with certain rights.  Unfortunately, the church is often the last place in town with honest speech.

All disorientation psalms end in good resolve except Ps. 39 & 88. Ps. 88 has no resolution.  It voices a theology of the cross. It’s for Friday. Sometimes we live Friday just like the followers of Jesus who didn’t know Sunday was coming.

Two prayers of Jesus play out disorientation:  Gethsemane and the Cross (My God, my God…).

Psalms of New Orientation

Experientially nobody knows how newness comes.  We perform new orientation and people grab onto it when they can. Because the mercy of God cannot be scheduled.

Isaiah said, “For a brief moment (super quick) I abandon you but with great compassion I will bring you back” (Isa. 54:7)

Isaiah is the first to use the word gospel Isa 40:9 “herald of good tidings”

Isa. 41:8 … 10 do not fear because I am with you

This hypothesis of do not fear on behalf of God is world changing. Most people long for a trustworthy person to say don’t worry I am with you.  When a child has a nightmare and a parent comes in they say, “Don’t worry I am here.”  The declaration of your presence in the midst of the terror is world changing.

[pullquote]The complaint evokes the presence of God, so if you don’t complain, you don’t get the assurance.  Nobody believes it. Yet everybody does it.[/pullquote]

New orientation psalms shows God offering new assurances due to a complaint. The complaint evokes the presence of God, so if you don’t complain, you don’t get the assurance.  Nobody believes it. Yet everybody does it.

Ps. 29 sounds like a campaign speech for God. The word “voice” occurs seven times for dramatic emphasis.  Then he sits upon his throne on the chaotic waters.  Jesus is showing his kingship when he stills the waters.

Notice the song starts with King and ends with Peace.  The other time this happens is when the angels declare good news to the shepherds (Luke 2:10-14).  What if Christmas and Easter become enthronement celebrations of the King ruling over the chaos?

God is able to be summoned by Israel into the chaos to order it.  This takes away from the spiritualization of privatism:  the idea that this only has to do with Jesus and me. No, it has to do with the renewal of all things.

Ps. 107 testimony is the particular account of how God brought me out of disorientation.

Join the Conversation:  Are you uncomfortable talking to God the way the psalmist does in the psalms of disorientation? If so, why? Leave a comment.