Service Of Eight Lessons And Carols - The Last Section of Walter Brueggemann's Lecture Slow Wisdom

Eighth, finally.

It is written in Psalm 19, about God's commandments, "More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold, sweeter than honey and the drippings of honeycombs."  We might take this statement of an epitome of the two pairs I have tried to exposit.  The Psalm speaks in many wisdoms, in many synonyms of Torah, decrees, precepts, commandments, ordinances and it speaks of many ways to signify the transcendent purpose of God that orders life toward well-being.

This offer is better, better than gold, better than much fine gold, better than honey, better than the drippings from a honeycomb.  Imagine, thick guidance to covenantal existence is preferable to gold or honey.

Typically, this saying does not say how much better or in what way better just more desired, more coveted, more treasured, more to be pursued.  The Torah is a Psalm of steadfast love, justice and righteousness as gold is the quick summary of might, wisdom and wealth.

The task of nuture and socialization and education is to invite sustained critical reflection on choosing amid a tradition of folk who have been making that choice forever, sometimes toward death and sometimes toward life.

So I finish with three conclusions.

First, I am in agreement with that great U. S. theologian, Donald Rumsfeld [laughter] only this time.  The Secretary of Defense famously quipped  that, "there are knowns and there are unknowns and among the unknowns there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns." that's what he said.

The comment sounds wiser than it is [laughter] and one may wish that Rumsfeld had taken the unknown unknowns more seriously, like Iraq is divided into three sects.  He didn't know that.

So I have been expositing two kinds of wisdom, the fast known wisdom of might, wisdom and wealth that ends in control and the slow unknown unknown of the mystery of God that opens beyond our control that requires a relational integrity that appears as steadfast love, justice and righteousness.  And education is the disputatious reflection on those wisdoms.

Second, I have offered a list of contrasts and complements that exegete slow and fast wisdom

body - abstraction
neighborhood - club
tradition - memo
pain - numbness
dream - possession
vocation - career
imagination - explanation
Torah - gold

So the argument keeps coming back to the same point.

It occurs to me that these several word pairs boil down to the possibility of committed relationships of integrity in the neighborhood that make for the common good vis-a-vis a mode of life that is hostile to the common good.  It occurred to me that the relational covenantal narrative is exactly what we best learn in kindergarten. I will not pursue that but you can factor it out.  So I thought it was mind-boggling to entertain a thought that what properly belongs to kindergarten continues to properly belong to the work of the university, namely to sustain and evoke relational identity for the sake of the common good.

Third, the poetry of Jeremiah strikes me as profoundly contemporary among us. As in our time as in that ancient city, time is very short. We, like that ancient city, are now an anxious society in which everyone is greedy for unjust gain.  We, like that ancient city, are now a society against which comes an enduring nation whose language we do not know. We, like that ancient city, are now a society deeply at risk. The poetic response to that risky circumstance seems to me to be completely pertinent now as then.  

"Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, the wealthy in their wealth.  But let those who boast boast in this that they understand and know me that I am the Lord, I act with steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the Earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord."

What in our socieities, our cultures and our governments that stand in the way of achieving "relational identity for the sake of the common good," what is it that is effective in creating "hostility to the common good" what is it about our institutions, cultures and law that oppose "the transcendent purpose of God that orders life toward well-being"?

As anyone who has read what I write would expect I have identified the ubiqitious materialism of modernism, scientistic atheistic materialism, which is certainly a big part of it.  I think that is, in fact, in both its more arrogant, ideological form but probably even more effective, in its vulgar material form of selling out for money and security, capital grants and donations for building projects and endowments and everything else.

But that isn't a total explanation, though it lies hidden behind just about all of it.  I have long considered that the most granitic and glacially changing of political-legal forces, secular law, created over centuries by and on behalf of those with wealth, wisdom and power to enhance their ability to grasp and keep all of those for themselves.  The romantically cited "English common law" that is asserted to be the basis of law in many of the English speaking countries certainly had the provenance, the romantic bull shit about Magna Carta as flowed out of the imaginary mouth of Horace Rumpole was law created by the titled aristocracy of that benighted country, it did nothing to prevent the Tudor atrocity of the Poor Law, the war against the poor and impoverished who were driven off of the land and into rural and urban destitution, petty crime and controlled by a holocaust against the poor by the gallows and enslavement that went on for centuries.  Nor did it, in the period of the rise of "liberal democracy" prevent the scientifically informed reform, by the British elite from turning that Tudor atrocity into the even worse Victorian New Poor Law with its rehearsal for the death camps and gulags of the 20th century in the system of poor houses where the inmates were subject to a regime of gradual or more rapid starvation which led to the ones set to breaking apart bones to eat the rotting marrow from them and fighting over it.  

The U. S. legal system is not a revolutionary change from that, its forms and habits are based in it including many though, perhaps, not always all of its most appalling atrocities embedded into its statutes, literature and practices.  Though its most significant ones certainly were kept, especially in regard to slave laws, wage-slave laws and laws that allowed the genocide of the native People of North America to be murdered, robbed and, many of our founders explicitly hoped, eliminated from the future as certainly as the Nazis planned for Jews, Romas and Slavs (a controlled and numbered population of the later kept as a class of Helot, slaves). 

So, even when Democrats are a nominal majority in the Congress and have the White House the Courts, the judges and, especially, "justices" can be counted on to not let that tendency for the common good over the uncommon privilege rule for no better reason than the culture, literature, traditions and practices of the class of crooks, liars and cheats (both for hire and on their own behalf) who are the large majority of the profession of the law.   The judges and "justices" have no armies to enforce their dictates, they only have the bad habits - which is what such traditions and practices are - of letting them get away with their worst.

I give that only as an example of just how radical even Jeremiah's conception of God's will is, entirely more radical than the secular regime of radicalism, of secular socialism, even, can be.  And if there is one thing I have become convinced of in the past two decades in which almost all of my previous radicalism has been shaken and much of it overturned, it is that no regime of secular political or economic theory will be adequate to fight against those for whom the triad of control works.  Nothing else but this kind of faith that that is how the divinely ordered progress of Creation is meant to be, any impediment in it will lead to terrible pain, to which the typical secular answer is that numbness, through drugs, alcohol, cynical indifference, "mindfulness"  that comprises one of Brueggemann's contrasts on the side of "control".   

I will remind you that early in this lecture Walter Brueggemann points out that the radicalism of Jeremiah is not as radical as a very significant  extension of the earlier Prophets  taught by Jesus, (the real Reason for the season) which is the basis of any genuine Christianity, more radical in its goals and more radical in the non-controlling triadic nature of its means. 

He is the embodiment of poverty with nowhere to lay his head or even healthcare.  The remembered Jesus sits amid our posturing, it reminds us that the great imperial triad of might, wisdom and wealth never delivers the security or the happiness that it promises.

But I will not linger over that counter-triad of weakness, foolishness and poverty that waits silently for us, because that triad is too outrageous and too remote from our business at hand.

He proposed Jeremiah's triad of fidelity as a perhaps attainable goal because he was afraid that getting to that of Jesus is going to remain a work in progress, if we're that lucky.

I may go through one or more of the answers to audience questions but had originally planned on ending where the lecture did.  I may post an index to these postings I've done of Walter Brueggemann's lecture Slow Wisdom As A Subversion Of Reality beginning back on December 6.