Gift and Task

My favorite gift last year was the latest offering from the laptop of one of my favorite public speakers and Christian writers, Walter Brueggemann, Professor Emeritus, Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary.

In Gift and Task (Westminster John Knox Press, 2017) he shares fresh biblical insights for each day of the liturgical year without painting himself or his readers into denominational corners. After all, he says, no faith tradition has a monopoly on serious attention to Scripture. And he suggests that with some agility, readers should be able to apply his observations to their own lives and make adjustments to fit subsequent years of Bible reading.

Brueggemann says his reflections are intended for serious church members who are willing to consider in critical ways the cost and joy of discipleship without being excessively accommodating to “popular itches.”

It’s his conviction—and hope—that serious Scripture reading is and can be a source of missional renewal in churches everywhere. And, he asks,  could here be a better time to get started than Christmas itself?

Gift giving done rightly is an imitation of the self-giving of God, says Brueggemann, in which there can be no distortion. We may stand in amazement at God’s giving, he continues.  But there is also a mandate. God’s love summons and evokes our love.  We are summoned to “love one another, ” and our neighbors as ourselves. Eventually we are summoned to love our enemies.  And such responding love, Brueggemann adds, is the way we act out our amazement.

Brueggemann suggests that the wonder of Christmas (which many of us try to preserve all year long), is the way in which God keeps the great promises he made to ancient Israel, and the ways in which the earliest testimony in the New Testimony finds these promises indispensable for understanding what it is that God has done in the coming of Jesus.

The great gift of Christmas, says Brueggemann, is peace in our families, churches, and communities, and among nations. He continues: “[This] is a time to consider that the world is in God’s good hands. In the life of Jesus, newness is ‘at hand.’” And we are invited to dwell in that new alternative reality.

Brueggeman doesn't hesitate to name some of the deceivers that challenge us—the voice of consumerism, or the urging of individualism that regards the self as the goal and culmination of all well-being. He warns us against “phony piety” and gifts for the needy that are less than serious engagement. The message of Christmas, he insists, is about change of heart and and change of life which are rooted in trust in the promises of God.

Obedience is our true freedom. God’s spirit blows away all our certitudes; and in familiar places such as Psalm 23, we find even more than comfort and assurance. We are summoned to find freedom and hope beyond the closed world given us by conventional reasoning. 

In the life of the church, Brueggemann adds, there are indeed many restorations of life that happen beyond explanation. He unlocks Bible solutions to our age of anxiety, addictions, distorting fear, and inadequacy. He suggests that it’s a great illusion in our society that we have enough money, enough technology, enough pharmaceuticals, or enough weapons that we can secure our own future.

But the texts Brueggemann illuminates, invite a move beyond illusion to trust in the gracious God who, in love, acts on our behalf. He weaves together his insights from the Prophets and the Epistles, the Torah and the Gospels, effortlessly engaging readers of various faiths. He sees the story of the tower of Babel as an early account of globalization (with its tweets and smartphones), and the feeding of the five thousand in John chapter six as a text that makes a clear, firm declaration that “scarcity is not true!”

The purpose and message of Christmas (and all the days that follow) spill through every chapter of Brueggemann’s book, reminding us that it’s never too late to re-examine the role the Christ plays in our lives.