20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brueggemann is as fine as they come ..., August 23, 1998
This review is from: Threat of Life: Sermons on Pain, Power, and Weakness (Paperback)
Anyone who reads this review is probably saying, "FOUR STARS ?? .... Why only FOUR stars??" Well, this material is excellent, but is not CLASSIC material (unlike "Cadences of Home" or "A Social Reading of the Old Testament").
Brueggemann as a scholar deserves FIVE STARS, unquestionably ... but this book, compared to his others, is "merely" excellence in motion ...
This is a collection of SERMONS Brueggemann has preached (and true to the Brueggemannian way, there is a short note telling the reader of the OCCASION and social setting of each sermon).
These sermons could easily be read for a Sunday School class series, or a spriritual formation exercise curriculum (yeah, they're THAT good).
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5.0 out of 5 stars
pure proclamation and holy demands, March 18, 2010
This review is from: Threat of Life: Sermons on Pain, Power, and Weakness (Paperback)
In this book Walter Brueggemann brings many ideas that could become teaching and preaching resources, many ideas for anyone to ponder, possibly even more so during the season of Lent.
On pages 59-60, the author describes preparations for the two hundred who typically attended a long-time annual Church Strawberry Festival Social in days of yore along with the two dozen present-day attendees. Like in those days of [the exilic] Isaiah 43:18-20, the Church Strawberry Folks were so completely enamored of the past they neglected and "have completely misunderstood the present tense." What are my own excessive preparations and concomitant misunderstandings these days?
On page 113 WB talks about "the long wait of Saturday" and observes that most of life is Sabbatarian, but how can Saturday be so persistently lonely and void of community? And are we not supposed to wait together for Resurrection Sunday's Easter dawn?! Throughout The Threat of Life WB reminds us we are baptized, and that baptismal pronoun always is we, us, our, ours and never ever an isolated, atomized autonomous "I, me, my, mine."
Evoking days of cultural anthro classes and later-on conversations in divinity school, when WB insists "You get a whole world with each food, because each food is a social reality in a social context" / "They are big, far-ranging public choices concerning foreign policy and budget and land reform and dreams..." (page 120) I respond with, "indeed, in so many ways." You are what you eat, meaning we actually become in some sense those rapacious grabbers of land, polluters of rivers and exploiters of the innocent. But maybe even more tangible and touchable, during the current economic recession and long before then, although all during my adult life I've eaten low on the food chain though not vegetarian (a little meat, chicken or fish once or twice a week), how clearly economic circumstances and anxieties about future income constrain and restrain the edibles we purchase and prepare and literally prevent us from much eating out in real sit-down restaurants with actual flatware and live wait-staff. You could say circumstances even re-train our palettes and our habits!
I love how in chapter 12, preaching on Psalm 23 for Lent 4, "Trusting in the Water - Food - Oil Supply", WB observes "The journey, with the power and purpose of God, changes the circumstances in which we live. Wilderness becomes home, isolation becomes companionship, scarcity becomes generosity. That is how the life of faith is. It is, to be sure, very different from the life where Yahweh is not at its core." (pages 94-95)
Jerusalem had "...long since forgotten the counter-tradition of Moses..." And Yahweh's word from Mount Sinai included a heavy "If"... if you keep my commandments, if you keep covenant, if you have no other gods beside me... As Martin Luther observed, all sin violates the first commandment so that we actually need only a single commandment, the first. We can consider ways various disciplines and practice may help achieve the possibility of new life as we abstain from all our idolatries, indulgences and distractions in favor of trusting and encountering the God who tames chaos, ordered creation, enacts resurrection, demands our allegiance and promises life "
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Brueggemann at his best, September 1, 2008
This review is from: Threat of Life: Sermons on Pain, Power, and Weakness (Paperback)
Informative, powerful, displaying knowledge of God's mercy; reaching the depths of one's soul. I thoroughly recommend this masterpiece.
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