Wilderness Zone

Walter Brueggemann’s A Wilderness Zone is a great little collection of sermons, reflections, essays, seeking to offer Biblical, especially Old Testament, insights on current life and issues, not least the challenges of a world emerging from the pandemic. Brueggemann comments: “When I thought about these poignant social realities of vulnerability, dislocation, plus fear and anger, it occurred to me that in the Bible the context that presents a like lived experience is the wilderness sojourn of Israel after the slaves had departed Pharaoh’s Egypt.”

The collection is full of the kind of fascinating insight that Brueggemann so often offers. In a sense it is stating the obvious, but it is, equally, helpfully perceptive when he points out: “The virus has caused many people to feel abandoned. Beyond that the virus has caused many people in actuality to be abandoned. Consequently, I have thinking about biblical articulations of a season of abandonment.”

I particularly like his comments on the challenges around how we understand the interaction beyond possibility and reality, and the ways in which we try to limit God to what we can understand. What we see as possible is severely limited by the extent of the limits which we seek to impose on reality. When we struggle with the present reality, we find it so difficult to allow that God can completely break out of that. As he puts it: “Mother Sarah and Father Abraham knew that a son for them was impossible. Such newnesses are impossibilities made possible by drinking the cup of contradiction for the sake of the reality of God’s coming rule among us. Such impossibilities amount to a vigorous summons to the church away from anaemic prayer, anaemic preaching, and anaemic mission. The entire story depends upon the impossibility. It was so back in Genesis. It was so in the life of Jesus; it is so now. The future depends upon drinking “the cup” for the sake of God’s coming new world among us.”

Are we ready for/open to God’s bigger possibilities? Are we stuck in the wilderness zone or is there any chance of reaching the promised land?