From Classroom to Pulpit: Interviews with Fred Craddock & Walter Brueggemann
Preaching: So in what way would the text of Jeremiah help preachers today as they preach to people whose guarantees or assurances have just been cut out from under them?
Brueggemann: I think that Jeremiah had to live in a culture of denial that kept saying it can't happen here. I think that we live in a culture of denial, and this really can't be very serious, and we're going to come out of it alright and all that stuff. And I think that there are, in Jeremiah, rhetorical strategies for how you try to undermine and cut through that kind of denial to get people to see the world the way it really is. It's a world that is well beyond our control and management — we are not going to manage it. And every time we try to manage it, we're simply going to produce another wave of terrorists that are going to undermine us further. So we need a whole different way of thinking about that, as they did in Jerusalem.
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Preaching: Shifting subjects for a little bit, you just had a book of prayers published. (Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth, published by Augsburg Fortress) Tell me a little bit what led to that.
Brueggemann: It's the custom in many seminaries, and in ours, that class every day is opened by prayer. So I've been doing that for a long time, and what I try to do, as an Old Testament teacher, is relate the prayer to the text we're going to talk about that day. So it's sort of praying by the scripture. As I began to work more carefully on these, and write them out, rather than just extemporaneous prayer, I began to accumulate them. A number of students over time said to me it would be helpful if you would publish those prayers so we would all have permanent access to them. So about a year ago I thought to do that and found a pastor in Vancouver who was willing to take on the job of putting them together and editing them and so on. So they grew out of my own classroom. My wife thinks it's the best thing that I've done!
Preaching: Do you see a teaching role in prayer?
Brueggemann: Yes I do, though one obviously has to be very careful that a prayer does not become didactic and you are only talking to God in order to instruct the listener. I think that you model how to practice faith in a prayer so that other people may then learn to pray out of that in a certain kind of way. So I do think it has that modeling effect, and to that extent it is instructional. But obviously that's not it's main point; it's main point is an authentic transaction with God. The trick of public prayer is to try to say the prayer so that people who are praying with you silently could say "yes, those are my words too." That's not very easy to do, and we don't always get that done.
Preaching: What changes do you see in preaching over the next 10 to 20 years?