A Way other than Our Own: Devotions for Lent

by Walter Brueggemann

For I believe the crisis in the U.S. church has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative; it has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian baptism and settling for a common, generic U.S. identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence.

The hard news is that the Lenten prerequisite for mercy and pardon is to ponder again the initial identity of baptism . . . “child of the promise,” . . . “to live a life worthy of our calling,” worthy of our calling in the face of false patriotism; overheated consumerism; easy, conventional violence; and limitless acquisitiveness.

Lent is a time to consider again our easy, conventional compromises and see again about discipline, obedience, and glad identity.

But women and men of faith are always on the road again, departing safe places, running risks, and hoping for well-being on the journey.

And if we ponder our destination, perhaps it is to be to the neighborhood of shalom, the neighborhood of shared resources, of inclusive politics, of random acts of hospitality and intentional acts of justice, of fearless neighborliness that is not propelled by greed or anxiety or excessive self-preoccupation.

imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious antineighborliness of our economy, a great departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, a great departure from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation.

The invitation is to get so involved in the emergence of humanness, human persons in all their delicacy, human institutions in all their effectiveness, human relationships in all their mystery, humanness, wholeness, that we don’t have to be defending how it was, worried about what will happen to the things to which we have given our lives.

Lent is a time for learning how to listen to the voices of promise and seduction and decide how to adjudicate them, to hear better the true voice of assurance and to notice quickly the seductive voice of unfaith, and to distinguish the same psalm when it speaks faith and when it serves unfaith.

May we hear better your voice of assurance and recognize its counterfeit, that we may walk faithfully before you. Amen.

may we stop our strivings marked by greed and anxiety, may we start again the work of compassion and generosity. Amen.

that we may pursue your priorities, that which makes you happy: steadfast love, justice, and righteousness. Amen.

the future beyond failure depends completely on God and not us; God’s way is a way of graciousness and mercy; but it is grace and mercy on God’s terms, not ours.

We people of faith do not have life on our terms. And we, like Moses, have to decide that we will walk into the future on terms other than our own.

we are flooded with the gifts of neighborliness—the economy of the rich devouring the poor is now inappropriate; we are now flooded with peaceable possibility—the old lust for war and violence is now out of sync; we are flooded with fruitfulness—the technological destruction that seeks to sustain our unsustainable standard of living is now passé.

But the pull of God’s largeness summons all of us, often through the words and presence of “the other.”

Moaning and grieving and weeping have to do with relinquishment, about which we are always reluctant.

What if the church is the place in town that refuses to participate in the “laugh now” movement of buoyancy, prosperity, and sureness? What if the church becomes the venue for processing loss and acknowledging grief for a world that is gone? It is precisely such processing of grief that permits hope.

The anthropologists call this “liminality,” an unsettling feeling at the threshold of something new, when life is gathered into a wholly new configuration.

Open our hearts to bewilderment, that we may be open to your wisdom. Amen.

Rather, he is talking about coming to see that God—the generous creator who gives good gifts—is the center of your life and that the self-taken-alone does not have the resources or capacity to make a good life.

The alternative to self-focus is to move one’s attention away from self to know that our life is safely and well held by God, who loves us more than we love ourselves, to relish the generosity of God and so to be free of the anxieties and needs and hungers of those who are driven by a mistaken, inadequate sense of self.

Desire one thing: God’s presence. And you will be less driven by all those phony desires that matter not at all.

Start over in vulnerability, in innocence, and in dependence, for the way you are living now keeps you cut off—in your arrogant security—from all the gifts of life for which you so much yearn.”

Lent is a time to think about another diet, another nourishment, another loyalty. In various ways, we are all seduced, domesticated, and bought off—economically, religiously, intellectually, politically, morally. It is the story of our life. Bought-off people never have power for life.

Life is promised to the ones who eat thin and pray hard. Life is given by God. Power is granted to do what the king can never do.

The church is always at its most daring and risking and dangerous and free when it sings a new song. Because then it sings that the power of the gospel will not let the world finally stay as it is.

There is no exceptional tenure or entitlement, no riding in the back of the bus, no exclusion of Gentiles—women, or conservatives, or progressives, or gays, or whomever we fear and want to exclude.

God is bringing the world to a new inclusiveness on the basis of God’s own generosity. And God is now calling the church to engage that inclusiveness, because all of our preferred distinctions are vetoed at Easter.

Lent is rather seeing how to take steps into God’s future so that we are no longer defined by what is past and no longer distracted by what we have treasured or feared about the present. Lent is for embracing the baby given to old people; resurrection to new life in Easter; and the offer of a new world made by God from nothing.

Woe—trouble—to those who have settled in on the present tense as though this were the end and culmination of everything, who are satisfied, comfortable, at ease, accommodating, without the alertness and the critique of the suffering of Jesus.

The story we tell about scarcity is a fantasy. It is not a true story. It is a story invented by those who have too much to justify getting more. It is a story accepted by those who have nothing in order to explain why they have nothing.

All of us are invited to be children and practitioners of this other story. We act it out in ways that disrupt our society, even as Jesus continues to disrupt our world of scarcity with his abundance.

May we bask in your shalom and then perform your story of generosity over and over again. Amen.

The disclosure is that God runs through alienation, into the silence of pain, and on to healing newness.

What is shown here to us is that there is a season of loss not to be avoided, a hope beyond, and a deep time of brooding between.

We are not called to aid and abet the pharaohs that loom in our lives. We are called, rather, to depart, to trust the new life, and to find space and energy for a life of full shalom, to live apart from the system of pharaoh.

Not: can you implement it, can you plan it, can you achieve it?—only: can you entrust possibilities to God that go beyond your own capacity for control and fabrication?

What counts finally is that the incursion of God’s holiness touches our lives and our life together, or it does not matter at all.

In Jesus Christ, your holiness has touched down in human life, remaking and reordering our values and expectations. Keep us restless and hope-filled and alive in the world, for the world. Amen.

It did not matter anymore to this son that his older brother got the farm as his “portion,” because the father is the son’s “portion” and the only thing he wants in heaven or on earth.

Indeed, Jesus’ engagement in ministry is, among other things, that we should be weaned from the seductions of commodity for the gift of communion, a presence that leaves us in joy and well-being.

Strengthen us to leave behind all the distortions of life we indulge and to embrace the gift of wholeness and joy you have offered us in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Notice well, the new chance is demanding. It takes a broken heart, an end to self-sufficiency, abandoning a pretense of being right.

So think of temple as the symbolic center of your life, as the place where you are met by the goodness and holiness of God, where you draw fresh on the core purpose of your life, where you get some clarity about who you are and what your life amounts to and how you will be remembered.

Our work in Lent is to move from these fake temples to the true temple who is Jesus.

The clue to the new mind of Christ is emptying of our need to control and our anxious passion for security. And as our minds change, we come to new freedom. It is Easter freedom, unburdened and fearless, freed for the interest of the neighbor.

Here is the news. Out beyond the world of exclusion and rejection and hostility, there is on offer a world of welcome that sees the other not as threat or competitor but as cohort on the pilgrimage of humanity. That alternative world of welcome is signed by bread and by wine; but it is known by lives that reach out and touch in order to heal and transform.

Imagine that a small community set down in the midst of the empire and all its aggressive militarism is a small community that refuses to participate in the anxiety of the world, because it imitates birds and lilies in the sure confidence that God in heaven knows our needs and supplies them.

Jesus has become for us the lens through which we reread power, social relations, and formal policies.