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Regardless of our faith lineage, the liberating narrative of the Hebrew scriptures has much to teach us about deceptions that false authorities lord over communities. Imperial powers of scarcity, violence, and competition introduce a death

The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord… The deathliness among us is not the death of a long life well lived but the death… [of] wanting all knowledge and life delivered to our royal management.  The Prophet must

1. reactivate symbols “out of our historical past symbols that always have been vehicles for redemptive honesty”
2. Bring to public expression those fears and terrors that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we do not know they are there.
3. Speak metaphorically but concretely about the real deathliness that hovers over us and gnaws within us, and to speak neither in rage nor with cheap grace, but with the candor born of anguish and passion.^[1]

HIstorical numbness can keep us from live encounters with present pain. How does your community connect to history? Who are the ancestors for your community? What cultures hand you this moment (your own tradition, as well as the traditions of those who have lived before you in this particular place)?  How might the historically hidden stories of women, children, and minorities be lifted up to help reimagine this present moment?

How might you candidly call out deathliness in your community with anguish and passion using the imagery and memories of those who have gone before you?

^[1]Brueggemann, Walter. Prophetic Imagination: Revised Edition (pp. 45-46). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

…The real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right. Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right—either in the dean’s office or in our marriage or in the hospital room. And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism.^[1]

In the historic Women’s March in Washington DC, January 2017, Janelle Monáe led a chant with the mothers of men and women who had fallen at the hands of violence. As the band played, the mothers of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and others shouted their son’s name, and the crowds replied, “Say his name!” As they shouted the names of Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, the crowds continued, “Say her name,” “Say his name!” This practice made public by the #blacklivesmatter movement is a public act of grieving. There are tears. The pain and rage from a lack of control is publicly uttered, shouted from the rooftops, rather than left powerless as mumbles and whispers. To pretend that “things are all right” is disempowering for those who most feel unauthorized by empire. On the other hand, the courage to grieve in publicly vulnerable ways opens possibilities. To “say his name” is an energizing prophetic act.

Take time today to notice what isn’t right in your community, in your family, or in the national and international sphere. To “embrace the inscrutable darkness” is a leap of imagination. Dare to speak it, past the mumblings or hidden critiques. Have the courage to be vulnerable about your own implicit collusion. Invite others to join you as you move past the numbness of silence.

^[1]Brueggemann, Walter. Prophetic Imagination: Revised Edition (p. 11). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology is the ultimate challenge to the language of managed reality, and it alone is the universe of discourse in which energy is possible.^[1]

The alternative reality we’ve been discussing, and working to build, includes language. It is in our “utterance” that the new reality becomes imaginable. When we are afraid to say it, we drift into conversations of blame and excuses. Consider the three forms of energizing languagethat Brueggemann describes:

1. Energy comes from the embrace of the inscrutable darkness.
2. Energy comes in the statement of new reality (on the side of the oppressed)
3. Energizing language names a new freedom

What are ways you can name freedom in your community? How might you embrace the darkness as real, painful, and refuse to let it be explained away? How might you name a new framework, and abundant possibility and beauty in those places frequently exploited or diminished? Last, what does it mean to give voice to the glory (doxa) that you see?

How might we celebrate a freedom and energy that is available and at work in the very space and lives that we and others inhabit, rather than waiting for the external language of empire to “authorize” those experiences or for the market to validate them?

^[1]Brueggemann, Walter. Prophetic Imagination: Revised Edition (p. 14-18). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

Religion and theology that presumes static social order eventually erodes into justifying social oppression:

Our sociology is predictably derived from, legitimated by, and reflective of our theology [our vision of the ideal, or divine order]. And if we gather around a static god of order who only guards the interests of the “haves,” oppression cannot be far behind. Conversely, if a God is disclosed who is free to come and go, free from and even against the regime, free to hear and even answer slave cries, free from all proper godness as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion.

…The point that prophetic imagination must ponder is that there is no freedom of God without the politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion without a religion of the freedom of God. The program of Moses is not the freeing of a little band of slaves as an escape from the empire, though that is important enough, especially if you happen to be in that little band. Rather, his work is nothing less than an assault on the consciousness of the empire, aimed at nothing less than the dismantling of the empire both in its social practices and in its mythic pretensions. Note the significance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership in integrating a lunch counter or a local bus line!1

Consider your social beliefs and social behavior. Justice asks that we engage society with a the faith that society can transform, that our habits not only need changing, but canchange. This will require the courage to be vulnerable. To act with prophetic imagination is not simply to design escapes from empire through more public assistance, but must extend into the messy work of dismantling whatever props up a public that separates us as helpless- and – helpful.

Notice a local place where the line between “helpful and helpless” is made most apparent (such as the lunch counter and bus line in MLK’s days). Is there a way to stand in one of those places and notice an act of justice and compassion, to call it out? Might you find a way this week for your purchasing power, your transportation choices, or the impact of your family’s time and presence to be aimed toward an alternative way? Perhaps you could consider supporting a co-op, a CSA, community center, a credit union, a farmers market, a neighborhood barber shop, a library or purchasing from a local store? Perhaps it is to find a local organizing group with whom to march or writing letters to an elected official. Perhaps it is patronizing a local artist who brings beauty into your community.

All of our neighbors have a gift of some sort. To live prophetically requires faith, trust in a possibility that our actions of compassion, vulnerability, and shared responsibility can, in fact, participate in creating an alternative, a good that is common.

1Brueggemann, Walter. Prophetic Imagination: Revised Edition (pp. 8-9). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.