Walter Brueggemann

We have a new associate pastor at our church. Fresh out of seminary, she’s young, enthusiastic, intelligent and an excellent speaker. In her first sermon she read a prayer from one of her favorite authors, Walter Brueggemann. Although he is an Old Testament scholar, she spoke of him as an author and poet. Hearing the prayer, I understood why. His prayers read like poetry!!

The prayer she read was from Brueggemann’s book “Prayers for a Privileged People”. I was so taken with it that I got a copy for myself along with another of his books of prayer entitled “Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth”.

The following is from “Prayers for a Privileged People”.
Listen to the beauty.
Feel the words.
Poetry!


Blown by the Spirit…
We Know Not Where

We hear the story of the wind at Pentecost,
Holy wind that dismantles what was,
Holy wind that evokes what is to be,
Holy wind that overrides barriers and causes communication,
Holy wind that signals your rule even among us.

We are dazzled, but then – reverting to type -
we wonder how to harness the wind,
how to manage the wind by our technology,
how to turn the wind to our usefulness,
how to make ourselves managers of the wind.

Partly we do not believe such an odd tale
because we are not religious freaks;
Partly we resist such a story,
because it surges beyond our categories;
Partly we had imagined you to be more ordered
and reliable than that.

So we listen, depart, and return to our ordered existence:
we depart with only a little curiosity
but not yielding;
we return to how it was before,
unconvinced but wistful, slightly praying for wind,
craving for newness,
wishing to have it all available to us.

We pray toward the wind and wait, unconvinced but wistful.