Sojourners are odd in a society where everything is settled. Sojourners are threatening where everyone imagines that they are "at home." Sojourners are a source of unwelcome reminder in a context of agreed-upon forgetfulness, endlessly recalling what we thought had been safely jettisoned.
It is difficult to imagine the convulsive context in which Sojourners first emerged 20 years ago. Our society was in the thick of "war protest" and "civil rights," and violence, fear, brutality, and heavy estrangement. There were, to be sure, a lot of long-haired "weirdos" around who responded to the social emergency too easily and thoughtlessly, and without much staying power. Sojourners Community, along with other weirdos, was birthed in that defining upheaval and made common cause with the larger, mostly undisciplined restlessness.
From the outset, however, Sojourners Community assumed a peculiar role and performed a quite distinctive function. It was not embarrassed by the protesting/hoping company it kept, but it could never be mistaken for an unthought orgy of protest.
Sojourners Community has been an urgent voice in a society that in large part was shut down by a numbing agreement to uncritical silence. The silence about public policy and its production of hurt became a calculated defense of economic-political privilege. In the face of that dominant pattern of social power, there was shrill silence about civil injustice, shrieking silence about the Vietnam War and its killing, deafening silence as "the powers" worked their advantaged will at home and abroad. Twenty years ago, there was a visible unraveling of our social fabric, but the silence kept that unraveling almost completely unnoticed.
Sojourners Community dared to give voice, to refuse settled definitions of reality. It knew that war and peace were too urgent to leave to the "war planners," and that civil justice was too pressing to leave to the kept judiciary. Sojourners Community broke the silence in a quite distinctive way, and now we celebrate and give thanks for that voicing.
These 20 years, Sojourners has been a bodied voice. Sojourners is not just a magazine, but a community under discipline, refusing to be seduced by the rewarding silences of domination. Much of the credibility of Sojourners comes in the shared awareness that this community speaks through prayer and fasting, a voice kept free of much of the seduction and encumbrance of a "housed" project.
These 20 years, Sojourners has been an informed voice. Sojourners Community is one with a mind as disciplined as is its body. Though its members might describe it otherwise, I should say its interpretive voice is informed by a capacity for class analysis, by utilizing serious dependency theories that expose the ways in which crude monopolies of power produce killing powerlessness. To live at an intentional distance from establishment presuppositions requires critical thought rooted in counterpromises. Sojourners is clear on those promises and on the costly extrapolations of life from those promises. The dominant religious community, by contrast, is paralyzed because of its inability to look this riddle of power and control in the face.
These 20 years, this bodied, informed voice has been heard among us as a holy voice. I would not want to be excessively pious in such a claim, but clearly Sojourners Community speaks with the voice of the God who liberates. It is heard with prophetic freedom, summoning us to the dangerous things of God. In the biblical tradition, the speech of God is regularly on the lips of those who attend most acutely to the broken reality of human community. In the witness of this community, we are brought face to face before the saving God who decrees the rise and fall of many, before the commanding God whose "more excellent way" is costly.
Sojourners appears to us to be so odd because we are unaccustomed to a voice so daring in its rescue or so urgent in its requirement. The utterance of this voice shatters our prepackaged discernment of the world, and requires us to sojourn from oasis to oasis, without a continuing city or a settled home.
THIS MOMENT of stock-taking for Sojourners is an important moment. Not only is it an anniversary for the community; we are at a turning point in our society. While "civil rights" is now dismissed and declared as dead as "quotas," we grow increasingly indifferent to the unentitled. While "war protest" is less and less tolerated among us, we are more unrestrained as an international bully, as the only tough kid left on the block. While the exuberant, cynical greed of the '80s modestly subsides, we are now into a more polite, pragmatic, technologically driven "decency" that only covers over the hurt and need with clever sound bites. While we grow more and more affluent, nothing important or human can be paid for in government or in the private sector.
Decent silence covers over the deathliness of our society, and we are left partly bewildered, partly terrified, and partly too comfortable. We have traded a crudeness for a benignness, but the urgent human questions, rooted in God's resilient holiness, are less and less addressed.
In a way very different from 20 years ago, the question persists: Is utterance possible? Can a voice be found which is at the same time concretely human and demandingly holy? Such a voice is a terrible assignment, but just such an assignment belongs to Sojourners for time to come. This same community still lives at the margin to voice what the center will not tolerate. This utterance from the margin, moreover, continues to make a claim that is holy, resonating with the purpose and power of God.
I imagine that the voice of Sojourners -- still bodied in discipline, still informed about social analysis, still holy in rescue and demand -- must be intentionally bilingual. On the one hand, there is need in our ideology-driven society for a voice that is unapologetically sectarian about the claims of the gospel. This evangelical voice must be epistemologically unembarrassed and uncompromised, paying no heed to the "realism" that bewitches our established power. Such a sectarian voice insists that, by the mercy of God, human possibilities persist that our wearied denial thinks impossible.
On the other hand, Sojourners cannot afford to be slotted as sectarian, and so its voice must be cunningly public, speaking the human agenda in a way that honors our social pluralism, in a way that touches our shared human requirements of love, mercy, justice, peace, and freedom. These are the property of no confessional truth and the monopoly of no sectarian community.
After the best efforts of self-indulgent existentialism, technological positivism, revolutionary Marxism, and free-market ideology, we may yet discern that the covenantal discourse of the Bible, preserved as it is by this confessing community, is as close as we can come to a genuinely public language. That discernment can happen, however, only when it is unambiguously clear that the speakers and advocates of such covenantal discourse are not proselytizing or serving parochial ends -- and that requires the discipline of self-emptying compassion.
Thus I imagine that Sojourners is uniquely positioned to practice a voice wherein sectarian passion and resolve can converge with the public urging for a social fabric of care that is more than surface decency. I imagine Sojourners is faced with the twin temptations, either in militancy to forfeit public credibility into strident kookiness, or to lust for acceptance and so to tone down the radicalness of the claim.
No doubt the controlling center will continue to be controlled by a massive denying silence which pretends that "all is well." This means that the human, holy voice of pain and possibility need not be expected or sought for at the center.
This holy, human voice is always heard from the margin. From the margin comes Rachel's weeping (Jeremiah 31:15). From the margin comes the dancing of Miriam (Exodus 15:21). From the margin comes the cry of the sojourning God who is endlessly restless (Exodus 5:1). It is my hope, expectation, and insistence that Sojourners should be that voice of marginality, holy as well as human, human as well as holy.
That voice is our chance for a recovered humanness. Without that voice, we shall pass another 20 summers ... and not be saved!
Walter Brueggemann, a Sojourners contributing editor, was a professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia and the author of Abiding Astonishment: Psalms, Modernity, and the Making of History (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991) when this article appeared.
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