Today I found myself searching for a writer who could help make it possible for me to speak what is on my heart – and with deep gratitude to Walter Brueggemann I offer these words from his book, Journey to the Common Good*.

The great crisis among us is the crisis of “the common good,” the sense of community solidarity that binds all in a common destiny – haves and have-nots, the rich and the poor.  We face a crisis about the common good because there are powerful forces at work among us to resist the common good, to violate community solidarity, and to deny a common destiny.  Mature people, at their best, are people who are committed to the common good that reaches beyond their private interest, transcends sectarian commitments, and offers human solidarity. (1)

So I begin this way:

— The journey to the common good in this text is a memory of the way in which ancient Israel moved from Pharaoh’s slave labor arrangements to the holy mountain of covenanting at Sinai.

— That journey, deeply remembered in ancient Israel, became the script and the itinerary that Jews, over many generations, have made, always again from Egyptian exploitation to the holy mountain.  The Jews make that journey, in liturgical imagination, over and over again, most visibly in the imaginative enterprise of Passover.

— Christians, in a derivative way, make that journey alongside the Jews, rooted in the same ancient memory.  Christians do so in the company of Jews, though of course we Christians are frequently tempted to imagine that the script belongs to us and not to Jews.

—  Jews, and along with them Christians, make an offer and issue an invitation to wider humanity to join the journey, because that hard trek is required not only by the particular passions of Jewishness or of Christian sensibility.  Rather, the journey to the common good is a trek that all serious human beings must make, a growth out beyond private interest and sectarian passion. (2)

*Brueggemann, Walter.  Journey to the Common Good.    Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.