Lenten Journey to Return to Our Calling: Dangerous Blessings (Week 4)

Reflection by David Lai

Education Team Leader

A few weeks ago, I came across a sidewalk chalk quote of Martin Luther King, saying: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” However, that’s actually a paraphrase: as far as I know, King never said that directly. Rather, King’s phrasing is more sacrificial: “if you haven’t discovered something that you will die for, you aren’t fit to live.” In one specific version told to his home church, King further tied this missional concept to Christian witness: “we must believe that there is something so dear, something so precious, something so eternal, that we’ll die for it.” 

This week’s readings had me thinking back on this quote, as the broad theme involves pursuing a new future regardless of the cost. Brueggemann outlined this in the Thursday reading, calling us to reimagine Lent not as a period of self-denial but rather to consider God’s promise and hope amidst a despairing world. Specifically, he calls us toward community, generosity, and peace against passively accepting violence and exploitation. The Friday reading furthers this along, observing that Jesus’ blessings are given toward those who are poor, hungry, weeping, or hated: exactly those that are struggling in the present. According to Brueggemann, that means the church “is to be odd in the world,” and that we should be wary if we are “satisfied, comfortable, at ease, accommodating, without the alertness and the critique of the suffering of Jesus.” Saturday’s reading then challenged cultural stories of “scarcity” that help justify why many go without food or shelter, calling it a “fantasy” that helps justify why the rich stay rich and the poor are without: but also one that flies in the face of God as the “creator of the abundant life.” God, after all, is one that promises salvation and life without strings attached, “generous to all who call upon him.” 

And like in the Beatitudes, God does provide comfort for those who are hurting. In Sunday’s reading, Brueggemann reminds that while love may not always win out in the world, it does in God’s story: “there is a season of loss not to be avoided, a hope beyond, and a deep time of brooding between.” For Monday’s reading, Brueggemann calls us to hold onto hope: noting that in times of crisis (and it certainly seems like these days are one crisis after another), the tendency is toward scarcity, “to look only after ourselves and our kind, only selfishly, only ideologically, only ‘realistically.’” Rather, we are to hope, to imagine a world that is “not shaved down to fit our realism, to conform to our interest, or to accommodate our conventional reality.” We are called, instead, to stand with those that challenge empire, “to find space and energy for a life of full shalom.” 

That’s a very grand vision when it comes to us: after all, we don’t have billionaires nor congressional leaders in our congregation. It often is a struggle just to survive and get to next week without the added burden of overhauling late-stage capitalism. Most every politician that emerges promising revolutionary change, in turn, struggles against the system, leading at best to incremental reforms and very often continued consolidation of power among the very top. It makes sense in such a system to just make the best for ourselves, to apply our talents and studies toward building a good living that enables us to try to pitch in when we can.

However, faith reminds us that true power comes not from the state but from God. In many ways, the most surprising inspiration from the civil rights movement is that it didn’t require the singular genius of someone such as Dr. King, but its true strength lay in the tens of thousands of foot soldiers and everyday Americans, most of whom lacked college degrees or significant status, that joined the march for freedom. They confronted police officers, joined boycotts against companies, demanded service at lunch counters, and insisted that the nation’s vaults of justice hold sufficient funds to ensure that all are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We are indeed called not to merely win at the game of Life, but to be salt and light and God’s witnesses in a world that is itself in transition toward something better. 

Reflection Questions:

• What are you currently living for? Where do you feel encouraged? Where do you feel discontent? 

  
  

• What is it that we so believe in to the point that we would be willing to die for it?