Counterscript: living with the elusive God

Christian Century, Nov 29, 2005 by Walter Brueggemann

17. The good news is that our ambivalence as we stand between scripts is precisely the primal venue for the work of God's Spirit. God's Spirit will work where it will and accomplish its purposes (John 3:8). But humanly speaking, it is in our ambivalence that the Spirit in us can be stirred and we can be opened to new possibilities. When we cover over and deny our ambivalence, our faith grows hard and we find ourselves committed with ideological passion and without the grace to rethink.

Surely one of the crucial tasks of ministry is to name the deep ambiguity that besets us, and to create a venue for waiting for God's newness among us. This work is not to put people in crisis. The work is to name the crisis that people are already in, the crisis that evokes resistance and hostility when it is brought to the surface and named.

* God may yet lead us anew where liberals and conservatives can disrupt the shrillness long enough to admit that variously we are frightened by alternative patterns of sexuality. We do not want to kill all gays as the book of Leviticus teaches, but we are in fact uneasy about changes that seem so large.

* God may yet lead us anew when conservatives and liberals can interrupt our passion for consumer goods and lower taxes long enough to admit that we believe neighbors should be cared for, even with taxes. We have a passion for social programs but are nonetheless aware of being taxed excessively, and it causes us alarm.

* God may yet lead us so that liberals and conservatives can stop the loudness to know that the divestment that costs us nothing is too easy, whether directed at Israel or the Palestinians; the core divestment to which we are first called comes closer to our own entitlements. The Spirit has always been, for the church and beyond the church, "a way out of no way."

The church and its pastors await the gift of newness from the Spirit. One of the ways in which the church and its pastors do that is that they consistently give voice and visibility to our common ambivalence whereby we are given a chance for rechoosing. The Spirit is wind and not wall. It is possibility and not coercion. It is opportunity and not threat. Ministry is for truth telling about the shape we are in. And that truth telling makes us free.

18. Ministry and mission entail managing that in escapable ambivalence that is the human predicament in faithful, generative ways. Managing ambivalence is not manipulating it toward preferred ends. It is management for truth telling, waiting and receiving newness. The work is the slow, steady work of ministry so that we, personally and communally, are able to renounce old scripts of death and enter new scripts of life. The hallmark of the church is not certitude; it is openness to the Spirit. In the book of Acts, after the apostles preached the gospel of Jesus Christ with all the certitude they could muster, there was still a waiting and a big leap beyond themselves.

Moving beyond ourselves is made possible only by the Spirit. We do not go beyond ourselves when we adhere to the dominant script. And the movement beyond ourselves in the church is not possible if the church's script only imitates the dominant script.