The Word Militant: Preaching a Decentering Word
Walter Brueggemann, Fortress Press

“The task of the preacher is to show how and in what ways life will be reimagined, redescribed and relived ... Preaching is both foolish and urgent ... The preaching moment is a moment of great complexity, great danger and great possibility ... Preaching as interpretation is always a daring, dangerous act, in which the interpreter, together with the receivers of the interpretation, is consuming a text and producing a world.”

When you buy this book (if you’re serious about preaching, you will), sit down and take off the cover so you can really grab hold of it.

Another tip: take your time. It’s classic Brueggemann; poetic, rich, dense, challenging and at times utterly incomprehensible.

Here’s an example of the latter: “On the other hand, the availability of a counter metaphor that opens us to a plurality of metaphors helps us notice that our usual ‘taken-for-granted’ world is also a metaphorical construct, even if an unrecognised or unacknowledged one.”

Or is it just me? If you can untangle that one, please email me with a translation.

This text is a panacea for the ills of safe and complacent preaching that any of us who undertake the task week in and week out find ourselves falling prey to.

It’s easy to read over the North American context and feel it speaking right into wherever you are, and often it’s an uncomfortable, unsettling and yet inspiring voice — that’s Walter’s way.

There’s a particularly powerful chapter about the necessity of the move from preaching as proclamation, which assumes or appeals, to a broadly-based consensus that dominates our culture (which no longer exists) to preaching as testimony; fragile, local, persuasive, contested and fragmented; the sermon depositioned from the judge’s bench to the witness box.

Brueggemann had me in the first two lines (emphasis is mine): “Preaching is an audacious act. It is audacious because the preacher stands up to make a claim that she has something new to say that the gathered listeners want to hear.”

Delving into the treasure of scripture with his awesome knowledge and insight, and balancing it with concise commentary on the world in which we live, there are plenty of “ah-ha” moments that force you to read a particular sentence or paragraph again, and again and again.

This is a book to keep on a shelf close to your work area; to reach for when it all feels like wilderness and to rediscover that you’re there, in the middle of the narrative; all you need is the imagination to see it and the courage to proclaim it.

Get this book; read it and reread it and let it challenge and change the way you approach and undertake this strange and countercultural, albeit urgent, imperative to preach.

Jennie Gordon