Lenten Journey to Return to Our Calling: Finding a New Story (Week 1)

Reflection by David Lai

Education Team Leader

Despite always being fond of history, it was only during graduate school that I really started considering historiography, which is, basically, the history of history. The classic example I learned was the historiography of American chattel slavery. To summarize, back in the post-Reconstruction days, scholars, drawing from slaveowners’ statements and texts, concluded that slavery was not so much economic but paternalistic, a way of exposing an unreached people group to Christianity and European values. Although Black scholars always realized this was hardly a fair argument, it was only after the civil rights movement that mainstream scholarship started discounting slaveowner texts and instead used social statistics to realize that mortality rates of enslaved persons were extremely high and slaveowners certainly profited from the system economically. Data, however, only tells so much of the story, and another generation of scholars focused more on trying to creatively read the extant slave narratives we have or reconsider other artifacts in order to construct a larger perspective of their overall lives or recover their agency and resistance.

I bring that up mostly to point out that the histories we are taught and the foundational stories that support our worldviews are in some ways dynamic. While new experiences can’t actually change the past, they can reshape how we view it. And this week’s devotionals have me thinking about how my worldview remains stuck and not suited for the journey that Brueggemann is inviting us to take. I still sometimes worry that I’ll be unable to provide for myself when work-related stress pops up, or compare my net worth to my friends that have made it in the tech world, or see the car that sharply cut in my lane as a threat to my personal safety. 

I believe, then, that Brueggemann is inviting us to reconsider our theographies (confession: I learned this word for this post), to find the stories that propel us toward seeking shalom, toward developing a single-minded focus on the Kingdom, toward hearing the “assuring voice of God,” and away from empire. In all that, the core invitation remains to rediscover our “original identity” as children of the promise. 

The Sunday panel provides one possible direction: how is it that we, today, can take inspiration from the stories of the issei and nisei generations? We can, on one hand, take inspiration from David’s life story to recognize the importance of persistence through trials, and that the future often holds potentials far beyond what we can imagine in current predicaments. On the other hand, Kit and Lyn both point out how American racial prejudices continue to persist, and government officials use language akin to Army general John DeWitt or then-California attorney general Earl Warren when discussing immigration enforcement today. If, as some say, “never again is now,” we should also make sure to reconsider how the past can speak to today. 

I’ll conclude with one final thought about what shalom looks like. When reading Sunday’s Scripture passage, Isaiah 55:1-2, I pictured a line of food insecure, similar to the ones at the Second Harvest distribution centers, being welcomed instead into a Whole Foods Market with open encouragement to take whatever they needed from the shelves. And while that world seems so unrealistic that it’s even absurd, it is not hard to see which one God would prefer.

Reflection Questions:

• Brueggemann asks three questions for us to consider for Lent in the Sunday devotional, so let’s just use his. They are:

  • What are we doing?

  • Are we working for that which does not satisfy?

  • Are we spending for that which is not bread? 

    
    

• In our journey toward shalom, what in our stories, our theographies, should we reevaluate? What is it that we need to learn, and what is it that we need to unlearn?