A Gospel of Hope

Walter Brueggemann

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781473686076
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'Wise words... filled with a message of hope for humanity and the world' - Irish Catholic Walter Brueggemann is beloved and respected by scholars, preachers and laity alike for his penetrating insights on Scripture and prophetic diagnoses of our culture. Both are woven throughout this new collection of his writings, A Gospel of Hope, which encourages readers to abandon what is safe and routine and instead embrace the audacity required to live out one's faith. This must-have volume gathers Brueggemann's wisdom on topics ranging from anxiety and abundance to partisanship and the role of faith in public life.

Chapter One

Abundance and Generosity

I invite you to keep this question before you: What are you after? And what would it mean to eat the real food of covenantal faithfulness, to receive and accept it, to live it and give it, to be transformed and weaned away from the stuff that only makes you more hungry?

When we do not trust in guaranteed abundance, we must supply the deficiencies out of our own limited resources. We scramble to move from our sense of scarcity to an abundance that we imagine that we ourselves can supply, all the while frantically anxious that we won’t quite make it: It is necessary to erode the holy time of Sabbath for the sake of productivity, given our sense of scarcity grounded in distrust.

We baptized people are the ones who have signed on for the Jesus story of abundance. We are the ones who have decided that this story is true story, and the four great verbs—he took, he blessed, he broke, he gave—constitute the true story of our lives. As a result we recognize that scarcity is a lie, a story repeated endlessly, in order to justify injustice in the community.

We have in our baptism declared the old story of scarcity to be false. And we have become the people and the place in the city where abundance is practiced. We notice that we have more than we need. We notice that we do not need to keep so much for ourselves. We notice that as we share, more is given. We notice that every time we commit to the truth of abundance, new energy, new joy, and new well-being surge among us.

Commodity thinking says that you share with your neighbor stuff that you can afford. Covenantal thinking says that you share first with your neighbor, and then you and your neighbor live on what you’ve got together.

Jesus has come that we may have an abundant life. His feeding narratives attest that the generosity of God is assured wherever Jesus rules in the earth, and we count on that generosity. And that means that our common practices of greed, of the pursuit of consumer goods, of the frantic effort to acquire more, are both inappropriate and unnecessary. Our society hungers always for more: more body surgery, more cosmetics, more cars, more beer, more sex, more certitude, more security, more money, more power, more oil … whatever.

This hunger for more is a true sign that we do not trust the goodness of God to supply all of our needs; we do not trust that the generous rule of Jesus who has ascended to power is in effect. But we, we are Jesus people, and therefore we are pledged and empowered to act differently, differently in the neighborhood, differently in the economy, and as citizens of the last superpower, differently in the world.

Our exhaustion, I propose, is rooted in anxiety that mistrusts the abundance that God has ordained into creation and, as a result, we—like the creator on the sixth day—have our spirits completely depleted. But we, unlike the creator, take no seventh day for refreshment, because, unlike the creator, we are too anxious to rest. And he says, “Come to me, all you that are weary.” True creatureliness, like birds and lilies, trusts the abundance of the Father. But we imagine we know better in our wisdom and in our intelligence. We spend ourselves in the futility of trying to take the place of the life-guaranteeing God.

When you are full, do not forget. Being full causes amnesia. Being comfortable causes indifference. Being secure makes us unresponsive.

There are enough flocks and herds and fish, because this is the creator God, the one who keeps on giving gifts. Prophets are those who complain about their work, threaten to quit, and face God when God is pissed off. But the call is to vouch for enough in a world of fearful anxiety. The people around Moses were weary with what they had. They complained. They complained for a lack of fish and cucumbers and melons and leeks and garlic and onions. In their scarcity they became restless and contentious and romanticized the past, because scarcity does that. It produces greed and anxiety and often violence. It results in selfish budgets and privatization. It produces violence and meanness and parsimony and anti-neighborliness and road rage and class warfare against the poor.

And right in the middle of that, God revs up prophets who ask the right questions and know the faithful answer: enough!

Enough grace to include all!

Enough neighborliness to restore safety and dignity!

Enough resources to share with widows and orphans and immigrants!

Enough of pruning hooks and plowshares that we need not take up the arms of sword and spear.

Enough that we need not scandalize the poor with our selfishness.

Enough that we need not live with grudge and resentment and fear, as though we were under threat.

Enough bread broken and wine poured out to exhibit gifts and give thanks.

We exist because of God’s inscrutable generosity in our creation, a generosity so rich that we need not be greedy or self-sufficient, because gifts are always being given. That story has its hope and culmination in the promise that God will make all things right, and that our destiny is to be in peaceable communion with God and with our neighbors, in this age and in the age to come. And between our beginning in generosity and our culmination in communion, our lives are lived in glad, obedient response to God’s purpose in our lives.

Now I want you to think what happens when we forget, what happens when we give up the story and we think we are too sophisticated, when we practice amnesia. I will tell you what happens. We give up on the wonder of abundance. We neglect God’s miracle of generosity. And we start imagining that there is scarcity of food, of love, of life.

And driven by scarcity, we scramble to get ours and more and more, climbing over and through and upon our neighbors to get ours. It is the case that our Western economy is rooted in a claim of scarcity and so we scramble. The poor scramble with robbery and violence and threat. The powerful scramble with investments and tax advantages and credit and exploitation. And together the rich and the poor create a jungle of anxiety, brutality, and violence. That is what forgetting will surely produce. And what is true in our culture is also true more closely in the family that operates on zero-sum love.

But we remember. And so we know that a life and an economy driven by scarcity is a fraud. And we remember to break ourselves away from the fraud of scarcity. We remember the gospel that there is enough, food is given, God is generous. The task of remembering is to break away from the grip of scarcity that holds us in bondage.

It is odd to talk about self-discipline in a therapeutic, self-indulgent culture of limitless consumerism that is on an endless binge of self-satisfaction. The news is that there is an alternative to all of that; it is rooted in the gospel. Christian people who are serious about Jesus have always been invited to a more excellent way of deliberately saying “yes” and deliberately saying “no” about time and about money, about speech, about neighbor, about sexuality, about charity, about hospitality, about all those things that make us human. [Imagine] a church that is so clear on its holy calling, so sure of its identity in the world that it is not indulgent and flabby and slovenly about its identity or its mandate.

Imagine a group of people who no longer meet to sing and dance and remember fidelity. In that world, memory is lost and amnesia is the order of the day, forgetfulness that assumes that we are the ones and only ones, none before us, none to come after us, only us, free to use up all of creation … and its oil!—in our own extravagant way. Moses, of course, knows all about this; he knows that affluence breeds amnesia and the loss of a grounding memory:

When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. … Do not say to yourself, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, so ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Also by Walter Brueggemann
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Abundance and Generosity
• 2. Alternative Worlds
• 3. Anxiety and Freedom
• 4. God’s Fidelity and Ours
• 5. Jesus
• 6. Justice
• 7. Evangelical Identity
• 8. Neighbor Love
• 9. Newness and Hope
• 10. Public Witness and Responsibility
• 11. Relinquishment
• 12. Faithful Practices