Let me Remind You Who You Really Are

Paul writes - “You are not who you say you are; let me remind you who you really are…” A statement attributed to Pope John Paul II during his 1979 visit to Poland. Poland was in the grip of communism, and the Polish Pope felt compelled to remind them who they really were (as Poles) apart from the ideology etc of the communist state.

This papal statement has strong resonances with what we’re trying to do within our church congregations; what Walter Brueggemann refers to as funding – providing the pieces, the materials, and resources out of which a new world [a new way of being human, of being community etc] can be imagined.

[The local church community] is “a place where people come to receive new materials, or old materials freshly voiced, which will fund, feed, nurture, nourish, legitimate and authorise a counterimagination of the world.” A gospel imagination. An already-but-not-yet imagination and ways of seeing and relating to the world in which we live.

We do the same thing in evangelising where on the one hand we’re saying, you are not who you say you are; let me remind you who you really are…” We’re hinting that there’s always more…

And so as church, whether gathered or dispersed, we are invited to communally and individually engage with the biblical txt (it’s drama, narrative, stories, poetry, wisdom, and gospel) while also bringing our whole being: our memories, our feelings, our intuition, our imagination, our thinking, our actions, our courage, and our critical and creative capacities to the task.

The biblical text is not a text we have read, rather it is a “text we are reading, writing, enacting, producing, and transforming.” It is a text that is reading us!

This reading (and allowing ourselves to be read) is a core activity of the community – “…reflecting, acting, imagining – interpreting the primary questions, issues and concerns of their socio-cultural situation in conversation with the primary narratives, symbols, relationships, ideologies, propaganda, lies, actions, visions, and more generally the raw materials (‘prima materia’) of our lives and living.  In engaging with this biblical text we enter into the vital task of counter-imagining and counter-acting.

Comments

[Johnny Brooks]

Great article. I really loved the part about how we have not read the Biblical text but rather are reading it, and in fact it is reading us. Thanks for a great entry.