Dear Members, Friends, Siblings, All,

We learned yesterday that Walter Brueggemann has died. Thomas was kind enough to alert me to the news, he knowing in what high esteem I hold the man. I have loved Walter Brueggemann and been thrilled out of my shoes by his mind, his imagination, his friendship, and his prolific writing. My children named him “the WB,” so often did they hear his name. Many of you knew and loved him, too, as a member of Central Church, as a colleague, as a prophetic voice and teacher. We must say farewell, even as we celebrate his life and witness to the Christian faith in its most alternative form.

In fact, it is Brueggemann who gave me the exact words to articulate my own call to ministry. In an article on 2 Kings 5, he notes: “Belated readers, if they noticed her at all, might have recognized in her a model for how to initiate a new narrative of well-being in a circumstance palpably marked by suffering and despair.” This he says about “the little maid” (unnamed) in the narrative we most often refer to as “the healing of Naaman.”

To initiate new narratives of well-being is my work. This is what I am called to do and to offer in congregations and everywhere. This young woman speaks up in her moment of possibility out of her hard-headed faith and God’s generosity while the circumstances she finds herself in would suggest otherwise. I am trying to be like her. You should tell me if I’m not.

While we knew this day of sadness would surely come, we go on celebrating the gifts, the blessings Walter Brueggeman leaves with us. May he rest in God’s peace, even as his words still “stir us from placidness” for eternity.

Many of you know that Pentecost is my favorite season of the Christian calendar, and not just because it’s the only Sunday we get to wear all the red we want to wear. Pentecost begins that half of the Christian year where we retell and relive the story of the followers of Jesus, the People of God. This is our story, the story of the lived faith of Jesus Christ with all its pain, struggles, challenges, and “summons” (as Walter might say) in the current moment and toward the future of God’s own dreams.

 And, speaking of Hope (as we have been recently)…

Hope is a human act of commitment to and investment in the future. Hope is an act of human courage that refuses to cherish the present too much or be reduced to despair by present circumstance. Hope is the capacity to relinquish the present for the sake of what is imagined to be a reachable future…Sureness about God’s large resolve…is a summons…Now is the time for yielding justice, for foolish forgiveness, for outrageous generosity, for elaborate hospitality. None of these acts can come from fear, anxiety, or despair. But they are all acts that evoke new futures that the fearful think are impossible. Hope in the end is a contradiction of the dominant version of reality…it is at the root of human well-being, for ourselves as for all our would-be neighbors.

Walter Brueggemann on Hope

Come worship with us. We need that face-to-faceness with you, streaming faces and gathered faces. And I need the hugs, and not ashamed to say it.

Rev. Liz