Walter Brueggemann: The right place and how to inhabit it

“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’” Luke 15:31-32

“Mature materiality, like that of the son in the parable, knows that a faithful life requires participation in, attentiveness to, and loyalty to a place. The son came to know this; upon his return he finds his rightful place defined by adequate food, festive welcome, and a gracious safe-making father. Embrace of such a life-giving place presents us with two generative questions about place.

First, where am I supposed to be? To ask this question is already to acknowledge that there is a “right place” to be that should not be confused with the bright lights of a “far country” of utopia (“no-place!”) that is anti-human. A vacation in utopia may be in order but, as the son discovered, it cannot become one’s “continuing city” (Hebrews 11:14; NRSV “homeland”).

For good reason it is high praise to say of someone, “He never forgot where he came from.” Everyone comes from somewhere. Everyone comes from a particular place with its particular hope and particular resources and particular social protocols and particular foods. These particulars may be amended and critiqued, but they cannot be safely scuttled in a wholesale
way for the sake of rootless imagination.

Thus the “right place” to be is a place that is infused with particulars that impose costs, give gifts, and offer rootage. We are not meant to be and finally cannot be rootless, placeless occupants of “nowhere”; finally we must be obligated, contributing partners in a time and place.

The vow of “stability” taken by some monks is instructive. That vow means to spend one’s life invested “on location” without the illusion that elsewhere, any elsewhere, would be preferable. Thus a “place” is an actual human venue in which one puts down one’s buckets in durable ways. For many persons the liturgy of a particular religious community lends staying power to a place. This is true in Christian liturgy, and no less true in other traditions as well.

Second, we may ask about our right place, how is it that I should inhabit that particular place of home? Well, NOT as user, consumer, possessor, exploiter, or predator. These are models of occupation that are appropriate for a commoditized society in which those with “homeless minds” are unable to care about those with “homeless bodies.”

Mature materiality rejects and refuses all such convenient modes of habitation that are marked by indifference, apathy, fatigue, or selfishness. The intention of mature materiality is to identify and enact more appropriate forms of habitation.”

Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 70-71.

Some people reading this may find themselves out of place or not where they need to be. Generosity generally does not flow from our lives when we are out of place.

Others reading this may find themselves in the right place but not inhabiting it rightly. I would argue most people would find themselves in this category as we always have room for improvement.

Let me explain. We tend toward locating the right place, but occupying it as a “user, consumer, possessor, exploiter, or predator,” instead of one who practices mature materiality.

Such people move from “indifference, apathy, fatigue, or selfishness” to compassionate care, attention to impact of living on others, and living unselfishly.

Sit with the Lord today. Ask the Holy Spirit to guide you home if you are not in the right place. And ask for guidance on inhabiting that place in a manner that will optimize your generosity with mature materiality.

And keep praying for me and the team of indigenous workers and GTP staff as we continue the design lab to build a contextualized curriculum to grow generous stewards and activate the Palmful of Coffee vision.

We are asking God to help us evangelize the Coffee Triangle through this effort and engage them to participate in Christian mission in the whole world.

“Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ So he got up and went to his father. Luke 15:13-20

“The son found a resolution to his abandonment. He went back home to his rightful place. He resubmitted to the reality of that place, to its requirements, to its expectations, to the expectations of his father, to the irksome presence of his brother, to a place infused with abundance and rootage, the very abundance and rootage from which he had fled. In order to start that return journey, however, he had to acknowledge his hunger; he had to abandon his utopian (“no-place!”) fantasy of being unfettered by his rootage. He had to recognize that his anticipation for a far country was in fact a lethal illusion. Until he came to that “consciousness,” he could not make a move back to a place of human viability. The wonder for him, of course, is that when he got home, he was welcomed. That was not what he had expected, because he had become inured to the callous indifference of the far country that never welcomed anyone and that made every relationship transactional. It turned out that his home and his homecoming radically contradicted his experience in the far country of homelessness of mind and body.”

Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 68-69.

Some may wonder what the prodigal son story has to do with generosity. Everything. We all succumb to illusions. This story teaches us how to get back on track. And if we want to pass on this way of living to our children, then it means everything.

The world bombards them with a “lethal illusion” to abandon the abundance and rootage of home. If the word rootage sounds odd to you, join the crowd. It did to me too. It just means system of roots.

And interestingly, Brueggemann draws out that a utopian fantasy literally takes a lost person to no place. We could call it homelessness. That said, notice the unexpected welcome that also comes when he returns to the abundantly generous and deeply rooted home.

The lessons for us today are many. For each of us with homes, we want to create a welcoming environment of abundance and roots. Simultaneously, we must all ignore the lies that advance lethal illusions.

And we want our homes to appear as places that radically contradict the craziness out there. So our children and anyone who enter, find it as a place of generosity and vitality.

We do this not by hoarding wealth, but by living obediently and generously in a world filled with scarcity thinking and lies. We show the veracity of our faith through our generous living.

And that’s really what creating a contextualized generosity curriculum for indigenous workers in the Coffee Triangle is all about. Everyone, everywhere needs to put this thinking to practice.

The LORD hears the cries of the needy; He does not despise his imprisoned people. Psalm 69:33

“This linkage may lead mature materiality to wonder how it is that we not only live in an economy that is occupied by homeless persons; we live in an economy that is busy producing homeless persons. The capacity to produce homeless persons is deeply enmeshed in a privatized, greedy economy of low wages, predatory loan arrangements, and regressive tax policy. It is easy enough, moreover, to imagine that much of our current homelessness is a residue of slavery in which a population of laborers ended a lifetime of work with no resources.

So it is with us now with many workers who are not officially slaves but who end a lifetime of work without resources. That systemic production of homeless persons is a direct result of “technological homelessness” whereby the successful in the technological enterprise to some great extent have no interest in, capacity to notice, or willingness to support and pay for a viable social network for those in need of housing. The current inability to deal with student indebtedness is only a recent example of the indifference of the predatory economy to the requirements of the less privileged for a viable life support.

Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 68.

I flew all night. I have arrived safely in Panama City, Panama, connecting this morning to Bogotá, Colombia. I have meetings today so pray with me that I can check in early, get a nap, and function well.

Brueggemann’s focus on mature materiality shifts to the fifth and final area. He calls it place. Here he helps us see that the systems in which we operate aim to displace and, as a result, actually produce homeless people.

Whether we like it our not, the economy of this world uses people and discards them. Our participation in this economy has adverse impact. We do well to recognize it. I see this with the people that serve me around the world.

I try to  learn the servers names at the hotels where I stay. I give generous tips and befriend them in the week I stay at a hotel. And I connect them with national workers and a local church. This is how I try to address the materiality of place as a traveler.

I honor my brother today. It’s his birthday. Happy Birthday David. At 62, he serves as president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. That’s the umbrella entity for the Christian colleges and universities across USA.

Part of the reason today’s post seems fitting on my brother’s birthday links to the comment about student indebtedness. Such systems enslave. I pray through his service he can address that problem, among other issues, with Christian schools.

But we all have work to do, not just David. We either create systems that produce homeless persons or the opposite. I think generosity takes shape and determining how we can do the opposite through the footprint we make and the service we offer.

While it is daytime, we must do the works of Him who sent Me. Night is coming, when no one can work. John 9:4

“All our times are in God’s hand. Growth in mature materiality is alertness to the timefulness of every time in our life, in order that we may live it in faithful response to the Giver of all our times. Such alert responsiveness to the right moment means to yield our life back to our Creator in gratitude. In such a life there will be no automatic pilot!”

Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 61.

Jesus teaches us the pathway to alertness in timefulness. During daytime, which implies during our lives, we make the most of every opportunity to do God’s works. We do this because a time will come when we can no longer work.

I love that Brueggemann urges us to “yield our life back to our Creator in gratitude.” That’s the best kind of giving. “Jesus, we surrender ourselves to you. Take care of everything.”

I depart for Colombia later today to collaborate with indigenous workers create the contextualized curriculum to spread the Palmful of Coffee vision across the Coffee Triangle.

I changed the header photo back to Colombia to give you a glimpse of the country. Pray for our team, I will do this important work in surrender and service with 12 others. Click here for our prayer calendar.

“For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.” Ecclesiastes 3:1-4

“Mark C. Taylor has detailed the way in which the ideology of the market has made speed and efficiency primary virtues. The cost of such a rush is immense in terms of tradition, culture, memory, and our capacity for humanness and neighborliness. Speed goes with commoditization.

On the other hand, Carl Honoré has considered the quality of slowness that “challenges the cult of speed.” It is worth noting that the regulation of time in worldwide terms was accomplished in the service of the British navy, that is, in the service of power and control. Honoré nicely observes: “The telling time went hand in hand with telling people what to do.” There is indeed a time to hurry and a time to wait.

The tilt of the matter in our society is obvious. The frantic pace of overanxious 24/7 attentiveness and endless electronic connection requires that our accent in this added word pair must be on the side of slowness. Whereas speed is all on the side of commoditization, slowness is all on the side of neighborliness.”

Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 59.

I am guilty of functioning along the lines of commoditization rather than neighborliness on many occasions. Productivity in that paradigm trumps people. God forgive me for living this way. This study is helping me.

I pray it helps you too. Materiality as resistance says that we will choose neighborliness over commoditization because we realize there is a time for everything and not everything needs to be in a rush.

The lesson for me today and anyone reading this. Generosity or neighborliness takes time. It’s not fast or demanding. It’s timely and deliberate. God help me grow in neighborliness.

Be careful, then, how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. Ephesians 5:15-16

“Now as then, keeping Sabbath is refusal to have one’s life defined by the production and consumption demands of a commoditized economy. In the keeping of Sabbath we, like ancient Israel, attest that our lives are not defined by or answerable to the insatiability of commodity.

In that ancient world, Sabbath broke the spell of production. In our world, Sabbath invites living in the new rule of God that contradicts the fatiguing world of things. Sabbath keeping is indeed acting as though Jesus is Lord of our time and
has decisively trumped the rigors of our schedule!

From that discernment of Sabbath, mature materiality has radically resituated all of our times with reference to the new rule of God. Thus the psalmist can aver: “My times are in your hands.” All my times! All our times! Not just Sabbath time but all our days.

Mature materiality consists in a willing readiness to recognize that every time is a gift from God; every time is an occasion for response to the holy time-giver; every time is an opportunity to act out our glad creatureliness in ways that befit the time-giving God.”

Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 54.

What a word picture: Sabbath breaks the spell of production. “Mature materiality has radically resituated all of our times with reference to the new rule of God.” We find freedom from domination and the necessity to produce!

In God’s economy and within the construct of sabbath, we receive time as a gift. Our response shows our love of the holy time-giver. And every time God grants use comes into view as an opportunity to glorify our time-giving God.

Interestingly, we cannot steward time. We can only make the most of it. Why? No one possesses time. We can only choose how to use the time given us. Generous people give God one day a week.

In so doing, they do not lose time but gain it. The reset makes everything better, richer, and fuller. By including sabbath – on Saturday, Sunday, or some other day – we follow God’s design for making the most of time.

It will be a sign between me and the Israelites forever, for in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day He rested and was refreshed.’” Exodus 31:17

“We may take it as a truism that Sabbath is the pivotal issue concerning time in the horizon of mature materiality. Sabbath is the defining moment in all time. All six previous days of the week move toward Sabbath time. It is so for the creation as it is for the Creator (Gen. 2:1–4a). Indeed in Exodus 31:17 we are told what happened to the Creator on the seventh day, when God rested. Our translations say that God was “refreshed.”

But the Hebrew word translated “refreshed” is the verbal form of the word for “self” (nephesh), that is, God was re-selfed after the depleting work of creation. So the human self is depleted or talked out of the self over six rigorous days amid the rat race of the predatory economy. The seventh day is for recovery, celebration, reordering, and affirmation of the human self. In Mark 2:23–28, Sabbath restoration occurs by eating. In Mark 3:1–6, it is by healing. Sabbath rest becomes elemental and indispensable for the well-being of the self.

Unreflective Americans want to abrogate Sabbath by endless busyness, by 24/7 electronic connection, by the practice of spectator sports, and by other preoccupations that numb the human heart and detract from the beauty of the human person. It was already like that in Pharaoh’s ancient Egypt.

In that regime there was no rest or relief from the incessant production requirements of Pharaoh. Then, dramatically, at Mount Sinai, Moses offers ten rules for resistance to Pharaoh’s ten commandments, ten guidelines for an alternative neighborly economy (Exod. 20:1–17). At the center of this new ten is Sabbath. Moses understood that resistance to and refusal of the insatiable demands of Pharaoh require attentive disciplines.”

Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 53.

What might it look like for God to refresh, or literally, re-self each of us on a weekly basis? This brings into view a renewal for living, giving, serving, and loving generously.

Brueggemann teaches us that this calls for “attentive disciplines” which stand in contrast to the unreflective pattern of filling the day with “preoccupations that numb the human heart and detract from the beauty of the human person.”

This relates to generosity, in part in this way. The life defined by production (think: Pharaoh in antiquity and endless busyness today) and “preoccupations that numb” paradoxically becomes more productive with this reset.

Ask God what might need to change in your life (what to stop doing) and what attentive disciplines to add (to move toward refreshment) to enhance the overall generosity of your living, giving, serving and loving.

Do whatever He says.

Then He said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Mark 2:27

“The adversaries of Jesus, the Pharisees, had gotten control of their schedule. It is no small matter to get control of one’s schedule, especially in a demanding rat-race economy like ours. But actually the Pharisees had not gotten control of their schedule. To the contrary, their schedule had gotten control of them. They had only to look at the calendar to know what the particular day required of them, and what the day prohibited.

This domination by the calendar is not unlike that of my mother and many other mother-housewives of her generation: “Monday is wash day, Tuesday is ironing,” and so on. It is then no surprise that the Pharisees are vigilant about Sabbath day, when they sharply disapprove of the conduct of Jesus’ disciples. They know that what his disciples have done on the Sabbath day violates the calendar of prohibitions.

They have “plucked heads of grain” to eat (Mark 2:23), and their “work” by definition violates the Sabbath. Jesus joins issue with the defenders of the Sabbath. He defends and justifies the “violation” by the disciples. He does not say that Sabbath rules are bad or that His friends are free to do whatever they want on Sabbath.

Rather He asserts that His purpose (as “Son of Man”) trumps Sabbath rules. The disciples are to act as though the kingdom of God is present. And that means they are free to act and compelled to act for the sake of human welfare, in this case to deal with their own bodily hunger. On the one hand, against his adversaries Jesus radically redefines Sabbath. On the other hand, He reiterates the deepest impulse of the Sabbath command of Moses, namely, the emancipated well-being of the covenanted community.

That vigorous insistence is sharply reinforced in the next textual unit, Mark 3:1–6, in which Jesus, in terse fashion, heals on the Sabbath. He restores the withered hand of the man in front of Him. In the new rule of God embodied by Jesus, all times, including Sabbath time, are for the sake of human restoration.”

Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 49-50.

Does your calendar have control over you? Do you live your Sabbath like everyone else?

Consider again this profound truth: “The disciples are to act as though the kingdom of God is present.” Notice what Jesus did on the Sabbath. He restored the strength of the disciples and He restored the withered hand of the man.

In Christ Jesus, the Sabbath comes into view not as day with restrictions but a day for restoration.

What might restorative work might you choose to do? How might your Sabbath living, giving, serving, and loving change from a day with restrictions to making it a day for the work of restoration?

I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. Philippians 1:20

“Mature materiality lives in the awareness that we will die; our bodies (selves) are transient. The illusion of immortality in our culture is sustained (and required!) by the expectation that the next product will make us healthy, keep us young, and refuse our diminishment.

Mature materiality is under no such illusion and prepares for the dying of a good death. Such preparation, however, is not resignation. It is rather an act of hope, for mature materiality lives in anticipation of the resurrection of the body after the manner of the Easter Christ.

Mistaken spirituality has led to the seduction of immortality, the idea that there is something about us that does not die. Buoyant faith trusts otherwise; it affirms that the giver of broken bread is the Lord of life and the Lord of our futures.”

Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 49-50.

The world presents an illusion of immortality. We must not succumb to this seduction. Or pour God’s money toward it. We must instead, prepare for a good death while living, and we do well to exhibit buoyant faith in the process.

Sure, we will someday die, so let’s live each day to the fullest and honoring God with our living, giving, serving, and loving. I am learning this from my parents as they age and face some health challenges.

I am praying for today’s Scripture to be true for them and every reader. For Christ to be exalted in our lives and in our death. The Charlie Kirk incident, of course, illustrates this. But I pray it be true of each of us.

Charlie prepared for death by how he lived his life. Each of us needs to prepare for a good death whenever it comes. A good death is not living long; a good death is a God-timed ending of a life lived generously with buoyant faith in God.

Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many. 1 Corinthians 12:12-14

“The image of body suggests that the community of believers is an active organism of complex parts, all of which are interconnected into a functioning living agency. On the one hand, Christ as the “head of the body” means that Jesus does the thinking for the body, that is, provides the guidance and assurances that define the body. On the other hand, the members of the body, enumerated as bodily parts, are interconnected and depend on each other for vitality and effectiveness.

Such imagery refuses the mistake that so besets much Protestant privatism, in which it is all about “me and Jesus,” as if other congregants as well as other neighbors had no significance for “my faith.” The imagery of “the body of Christ” at the same time refuses the institutional reductionism of the organized church that imagines that rules, protocols, and organizational charts constitute the character of the church. Such reductionism leads to struggles for authority and eventually to “guidelines” in the service of an imagined certitude.

Against such a temptation, the image of “body” means that all members, even “lesser members,” are essential to the full functioning of the body in response to its head. The claim is that we belong to each other, thus another dimension of the same fidelity that we have noted in our discussion of sexuality. This declaration concerning “the body” in the several epistles voices the character of the church as an assemblage of interrelated members who are connected to each other, who rely on each other, who have the capacity to “speak the truth in love” to each other (Eph. 4:15).

As the epistles develop, however, it is clear that this body does not exist for its own well-being. It exists to act out and perform the alternative world of the gospel in the practice of neighborliness that contradicts the anti-neighborliness of the old order. This body is fully committed to the work of Christ, relies on Christ, and is sustained by Christ.”

Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 46.

I am safely home. Some statements are worth repeating.

“Christ as the “head of the body” means that Jesus does the thinking for the body . . . this body does not exist for its own well-being. It exists to act out and perform the alternative world of the gospel in the practice of neighborliness that contradicts the anti-neighborliness of the old order.”

Consider the connection to generosity.

We only grasp life as Jesus intended for us to live it when we follow His explicit, otherworldly, and counterintuitive instructions. Only those who seek find this alternative reality. Sadly most people rationalize disobedience by choosing to do the thinking (acting like they know better than Jesus) and then doing something neighborly (thinking they have done their part). That’s privatism.

No wonder the church as a business or a building appears lifeless.

Only when we act out and perform the alternative world of the gospel do we find life. Or as I like to say, we do not figure it out until we live it out. And when we do this together, we appear as a body. As we grow we need order and oversight, but the ministry is not done by ministers. That’s institutional reductionism.

God’s servants equip the saints for works of service to show the “lesser members” matter too.

We exhibit generosity, which is a fruit of the Spirit, when we act out and perform the alternative world of the gospel. It’s not something we do but something God does through us, as He neither needs our support nor relies on our service. We need to give it and do it. Obedience comes into view as the pathway to sustainability.

Is it time for you to abandon the anti-neighborliness of the old order?