My Excuse For The Interruptions - "It is an endless interpretive negotiation."

WHEN I GET THE TIME to type out parts of the lecture-sermon-Q&As of Walter Brueggemann's lessons on Jeremiah, into and out of the abyss, I'll go into those because there is more in them that would be better if you had the text to look at.  That's one of the problems of posting these things in videos instead of linking to or typing out a transcript, it's easier to listen to and I've got no illusions about it, people will be more likely to listen to a video than read my transcript of it.  But to really engage with what Brueggemann said the text is the most effective way to do it.  

The discussion in the third week between him and the Episcopal pastor who introduced the lectures on the tension between the Jeremiah (the Sinai theology) and Isaiah (the more establishment theology) and how we, depending on the occasion and what was said, choose between them is especially good.  Brueggemann's parallel between Jeremiah and The Reverend Jeremiah Wright's cherry picked, distorted and lied about "God damn America" prophesy is especially powerful.  He, as Jeremiah was saying what was not permitted to be said and, as Brueggemann notes, Obama on the spot "ran for cover."  I can certainly understand why he did that, democratic politics is often no more open to hard truth than the royal house in Jerusalem was - as he noted earlier in the lecture.   If Obama agreed with Wright - which I tend to doubt he would have wanted to - it's understandable that he would do that, it's not the role of a Sinai prophet to say what's popular but to tell the truth - as in the previous discussion of the trial of Jeremiah in which the earlier trial of Malachi is invoked. 

I will leave it to you to go on and hear what he said about how, in the great parable of Lazarus and the rich man, Jesus did what is so hard to do, reconcile those two lines of prophesy that are inherently in some tension with each other. 

In order to do that justice I will have to type out more of it than I have time to right now - unless I'm willing to do it badly which I'd rather not do.   I should have waited till November to do this series but that gets into the holiday season when I don't think this would play well.   People want Isiah around Christmas.   Isiah has good stuff in it, too.  For anyone who claims that this is the easy way out as compared to secularism, they don't know what they're talking about, its conflicts that have to be engaged are built into it and are inescapable.