Reading With ...

Most of my seminary studies have involved reading scripture or theology or philosophy (alone). Last week I read culture (in a group). In my class “Congregation as Learning Community,” we complied a list of cultural events occurring over the last century. Our list included a wide variety of happenings: the Great Depression, the lunar landing, the birth of TV, the internet, Ipods, the New Deal, McDonalds, Barrack Obama, and even blockbuster movies like The Lord of the Rings. Once our list was compiled, we talked about the challenges imposed upon and opportunities offered to the church by such cultural events. While our conclusions themselves were interesting, the process itself most captured my imagination.

The list we created, one of richness and depth, was the product of our group. No individual in our class could have created that list alone. Each member brought with them their unique way of remembering and interpreting history, cultural, and the church. As a group engaged in such reflection, we experienced the ideological, and perhaps even the epistemological, equivalent of ‘safety in numbers.’

This experience continued to solidify a theme I have been learning the past few years. Put simply: whom you ‘read with’ matters. Gerald West’s The Academy of the Poor: Towards a Dialogical Reading of the Bible speaks to this point. West proposes a reading methodology that seeks to move past dominant readings of biblical texts. It does so by involving both ‘educated’ and ‘ordinary’ readers into reading communities. Such a method uses dialogue and diversity to create a thicker interpretation of a text. By engaging West’s method, ‘educated’ readers distance themselves from reading ‘for’ a group and move closer to reading ‘with’ a group.

Both my reading of West and our group reflection underscore the need to create diverse reading communities in our churches. For West, the typical missing ingredient in a reading community is the voice of the poor. Our missing ingredient might be different, but I would venture to say that most of us have neglected part of West’s reading group recipe. What would it look like to diversify our bible studies? Who could we invite to widen our perspective? Perhaps our challenge lies even further upstream: do we have friends who are different from ourselves, whose different perspective would invariably help us see the fuller meaning of scripture? So the pertinent question for a contemporary church may not simply be, “Are we reading scripture?” Rather, we should ask our churches and ourselves, “Whom are we reading with?”

The Strange Intimacy of Exile

In a chapter entitled “Disciplines of Readiness” found within his Cadences of Home, Walter Brueggemann articulates an understanding of all God’s people as “a people [always] on the way”(110, italics mine). This journey-bound existence comprehensively characterizes the experience of those following God on earth. For Brueggemann, this journey includes three divinely directed phases: God’s sovereign promise, God’s sovereign demand, and God’s sovereign absence. At first glance, God’s sovereign absence seems to lie at the nadir. In God’s sovereign promise, the very “voice of God initiates the journey” away from “bondage, barrenness, oppression, and marginality” and leads them, albeit circuitously, toward the Promised Land (110). God’s sovereign demand draws Israel away from their idolatrous self-sufficiency and leads them back to intimacy with God. In both of these phases, God seems highly engaged, actively involved in leading and forming a people. Conversely, God’s sovereign absence seems to denote a literal distance from God.

So … what is the purpose of God’s sovereign absence? Is it to punish, shame, humble, or ignore the people of God? Is it to thrust the people of God back into a state of being “bereft, barren, powerless, without hope in the world” (112)? Punitive aims certainly are possibilities, but Brueggemann argues in favor of a surprising mission made possible by God’s sovereign absence. Brueggemann claims that exile, or God’s sovereign absence, teems with the potential for God’s sovereign newness to burst forth. The people of God within God-given exile are uniquely primed to engage in “fresh, imaginative theological work” (116). Brueggemann’s surprising, yet thoroughly biblical, claim about exile is that God is still with his people: “There is for Israel no journey without this God, but this God insists that the journey be one of a very specific kind, a journey of risk, trust, and obedience” (112, italics mine). So for the church of old and new, may we remember the God who is always present:

Psalm 139:7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. 9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. 11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me," 12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.”

What Do We Really Want?

Michael Budde, in his The (Magic) Kingdom of God, claims that “global culture industries” invest heavily in stimulating “consumers’ desire to consume” (49). So … what’s so bad about that? The heart of Budde’s critique of this activity is not directed at the production of consumable goods, but the creation of the desire for things. Global culture industries bank on their audiences “learning to want things” (49). This acquired aptitude for consumption is hidden behind “a false deference paid to consumer rationality” and perpetuated by a manufactured “asymmetry of information” (39, 42). Yet, this asymmetry is used to covertly seduce their prey, not assault them (42). We, as consumers, are not forced into wanting. Rather, culture industries massage their message into our skin through slick and ubiquitous advertising, always getting us in the mood to want things.

Budde, a catholic educator, is not alone in his assessment of these temptresses. Douglas Rushkoff (www.rushkoff.com), a media and culture critic, has produced several persuasive pieces investigating such sirens: “The Merchants of Cool” and “The Persuaders” (see below for links to these documentaries). His most chilling conclusion in “The Merchants of Cool” is a description of a positive feedback loop of created desires. Put briefly, youth watch TV and learn to want things. Marketers watch youth to find out want they are buying. Then, like a distorting mirror at a haunted house, marketers create and film shows and events where youth are consuming their products at artificially inflated levels. Yet, they make this heightened level of consumption look authentic and normative by plastering these images everywhere a kid might look. Youth feel inadequate as they watch artificially enhanced versions of themselves consume more stuff than they themselves consume in reality. This cycle constantly undermines the contentment of youth and proffers buying things as the panacea. What we need, in Budde’s words, is a healthy dose of “media literacy,” illumined by the light of the gospel, to demystify media and reawaken true and good desires informed by God.

“The Merchants of Cool”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/

“The Persuaders”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/