The Prophetic Imagination
This is also the title of a book by Walter Brueggemann to which this article refers.
Reflection Roundup reports from conversations couched in relationships. Here, readers will find boots-on-the-ground and “live from the field” items important to Christian leaders. As always, listening broadly draws together differing perspectives from which we can learn but with which we may not concur.. This month’s post draws from multiple streams of ministry, at the levels of both local and missional congregations, each in a direction toward which the prophetic message flows contemporarily.
Have you ever been around someone who makes you tired? They control the narrative, even the people around them, to the point that no one else can have a thought, much less get a word in. You may know the type. I wonder if this may not personify the tyranny present in the world just now. Christians have an enemy aimed at wearing folk out, those whose ruler resides above this world’s frame. Ministers are exhausted. Members’ resilience has diminished. Leadership systems may find themselves infused with the question, “How much can we tolerate?”
This is not a new story. God’s people have partners of old. Walter Brueggemann compares our modern systems to those of the ancient kings, even the wisest, who “replaced covenanting with consuming,” removing the mystery from the promises of God. These systems work in “tradable commodities,” says Brueggemann. We might compare our modern metrics and data points, those on which we rely to gauge growth and progress both in personal spiritual growth and in our churches. Brueggemann suggests that this trade makes real, Spirit-infused energy—the kind driven by imagination—to be less likely. He suggests that a “management mentality” diminishes the capacity for the anticipation and experience of mystery, of leaning toward the possibility of what God might do. This sets people up for a “cost-accounting” type of faith where there are “only problems to be solved.”[1]
A minister does not have to listen long to hear the voice of pain in people’s lives. So much happens, and people want to know that God sees. Even greater is the desire that God would act, that God would offer some assurance that God sees what people are enduring. According to Walter Brueggemann, the job of the prophet is two-fold: first, to exercise an open spiritual imagination, and second, to serve as a reminder to all of God’s identity, nature, and character. This imagination and discernment meet in poignant ways “at the breaking points” in human community and history.[2]
The people of God might think they should be exempt from such challenges.
According to history, they are not. YHWH’s chosen were carried away into exile by the Babylonians. Jerusalem was conquered in 586 B.C.E. The prophet Habakkuk complained from within their midst, begging that God would see, that the Lord would remember them and act. YHWH promises to use the very empire that conquered Judah to bring answers to their prayers. It’s a disorienting prophecy, both to the modern reader and to the one to whom it originally came.
Since 2019, Come Before Winter, a group dedicated to women in ministry around the world, has been working on preparing a renewal centered on the message of the prophecy of Habakkuk. The development of this initiative has weathered several disruptions and pauses, one being a worldwide pandemic, an apt disruption when considering the disorientation of not alone his message but also the prophet himself.
A growing familiarity with the prophet’s questions gave counsel to those preparing a renewal that would begin with disorientation: that they should wait for the right time. It’s a fair question: is there ever a “right time” for bafflement, daze, and discombobulation, especially on spiritual terms? None would willingly choose it, but life tends to hand it to all of us at one time or another. Now seems an apt time in which people are ready to take some questions before the Lord.
While studying and drawing together teachings for the renewal, the team utilized several rich resources, including the Walter Brueggemann book from which I’ve been quoting. Reflecting personally, what was once an ancient prophecy began to speak to my own context, my church family, my physical family, and then my very own self. Brueggemann speaks of the role of the prophet in a way that is salient to the contemporary Christian community. When prophetic scripture is opened by individuals and churches, this connection expands, further demonstrating the nature of the living, active word of God.
Speaking with a different literary voice, the prophets seek to infuse their systems with freedom. It’s often a lyrical style. Some call it “weird,” but the prophetic message has to ring differently than the norm. Brueggemann emphasizes how prophets model imagination and articulate “historical newness.” He suggests a compelling question: whether “our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.”[3] The prophets evoke, with a different kind of language, a context for imagining what God might have in store for a people and a place whose speech has been overcome by fear and pain. The prophets cast the people’s view back to possibilities for justice, compassion, and a hope only imaginable in a world ruled by divine mystery.
It can be difficult to know exactly what to do with a prophecy—or a prophet, for that matter. In an interview with On Being podcast host Krista Tippett, Brueggemann said, “Prophecy, you either give up on it or get taken in by it; this stuff sounds like it was written yesterday, the contemporaneity of it.”[4] The ancient messages draw closer and don’t sound so distant in time and place after all.
Does this sound like something communities of faith might wish to see in their churches? I believe it does, but enacting a prophetic imagination is not something people can “do” as an action item on a list. According to Brueggemann, “The task of prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings we have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there.” Further, Brueggemann suggests that an exilic community lacks the tools of hope. If people can be so honest, hope can be embarrassing to have. What if it goes unfulfilled? Amazement goes by the wayside because it is too risky, too vulnerable to engage.[5]
But folk can watch for these things—for hope—and recognize it when it arrives. Like Habakkuk, stand at the guardpost and watch! Pray for divine vision to see what God reveals; pray for the courage to act on it when it comes. Brueggemann reminds us that a prophet stands as a lookout “until the community receives a newness it cannot generate for itself, a hope that is never generated among us but always given to us.”[6]
Habakkuk had an experience with God that turned his heart toward trust. He spoke his own pain to God, as well as bearing before the Lord the pain of his community, and he was not admonished by God for doing so. Instead, he is directed to look and see what YHWH is doing as the earth fills with the “knowledge of YHWH’s glory as the waters fill the sea” (Hab 2:14).
Hope arises as a gift when we least expect it. It comes when people break the cycle of preoccupation with self, notice the presence of others, and embrace our connectedness as we pray and watch.
God, please show us what we’re not seeing. Give us your imagination, vision, and way of seeing. We humbly ask for the courage to consider your ideas above our own.
Even “when the fig tree has no buds, the vines bear no harvest, the sheep vanish from the fold, and there are no cattle in the stalls,” then we rejoice in YHWH, exulting in God our Savior, the one who “makes my feel as agile as a deer’s, and teaches me to walk on my high places.” (Hab 3:17-19)
The Come Before Winter ministry desires your prayers as they lead a renewal next month in Croatia, centered on the prophecy of Habakkuk.
1. The quotations in this paragraph come from Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Fortress Press, 2001), 33, 37.
2. Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 16.
3. Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 39.
4. “Walter Brueggemann — The Prophetic Imagination,” The On Being Project, accessed June 24, 2024, https://onbeing.org/programs/walter-brueggemann-the-prophetic-imagination-dec2018/.
5. Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 65.
6. Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 79.
