Lenten Journey to Return to Our Calling: Finding a New Story (Week 3)

Reflection by David Lai

Education Team Leader

Amidst all the other dramatic headlines of the past month, I ran across a local article detailing the Silicon Valley Index’s recently released report on income inequality here at home. There’s a lot of expected results: tech makes up a big share of our economy, the region remains generally diverse albeit racially segregated, health and education remain generally accessible. I was also not surprised to read that affordable housing remains a significant challenge, as does income inequality. 

Yet the scale of these challenges surprised me: according to the Index, 28% of households here need assistance to meet basic needs. While the average mean wage has gone up 45% since 2010, median household wages have lagged: illustrated most starkly in estimating the top 0.001% percent of residents here hold 18% of the wealth, and the top 10 percent hold 75% of the wealth. These disparities also show up in racial demographics: Latinos with graduate degrees, for example, make about the same as whites with bachelor degrees. The end result is that a vast amount of residents here struggle to make ends meet even as they’re surrounded by caravans of driverless cars and other futuristic inventions made everyday. 

This week’s devotional readings decry such a state of affairs. The devotional reading for today (Tuesday) outlines how the church has “bought in… on consumerism, aimed at self-indulgence, comfort, security, and safety. We live our lives out of our affluence, and we discover that all our self-indulgence makes us satiated but neither happy nor safe.” It further points out that these values are eerily similar to those of “the Babylonian empire, with its lush dreams of war and promises of prosperity.” Saturday’s reading similarly notes “we are all seduced, domesticated, and bought off – economically, religiously, intellectually, politically, morally,” and warns us that seeking solutions in the same system is a fruitless effort.

Rather, Brueggemann insists that Lent should lead us toward different paths. We are reminded that God’s “friendliness and kindness will run after me and chase me down” and that He is sufficient for our needs. We are encouraged that God indeed gives life, albeit “not given the way the world would dispense such power” but rather through loyalty and prayer. Our churches and communities, in turn, find life when they stand against oppression and sing “new songs, counter songs that refused to let the promise of the gospel sink into the landscape of the empire.” And new energy comes in being cheerfully generous, imagining a world where “old enemies are really needy neighbors, seeing that what looked like scarcity is enough when shared, enough to feed a crowd when there is gratitude.” 

And so often in discussions of equality, the immediate tendency is to raise practical solutions and end up bogged down in contrasting policies. But while those discussions have their place, more fundamentally we need to realize that achieving justice is not just addressing practical challenges but also fighting spiritual battles. Friday’s reading reimagined Nicodemus as an influential leader, flush with wealth and having a limo service, choosing to risk his status to meet up with Jesus under the cover of night. Brueggemann comments that the only motivation for him was that “a gnaw about reality” – one that states this wealth, influence, and success fails to fully satisfy. Cast in that light, Jesus’ challenge was especially severe – to devalue everything he has worked for and indeed be “born again” and “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.” Like Nicodemus, our first step toward imagining a new world is to accept that there is a way other than our own, other than what we know, one that casts aside security, certainty, and self-reliance for “an alternate way, the waters of baptism, the bread of the Eucharist, the wine of new covenant, the capacity to risk and trust and obey, and then to find ourselves safe and joyous, close to God, and enlisted for a very different life in the world.” 

Reflection Questions:

• What does it mean to practice generosity? How much does that clash with seeking comfort, security, and safety? 

  
  

• Does your faith lead us toward compassion and empathy to others? How so? In what ways might it go elsewhere?