A Message from Pastor Andrea Chaumont

February 26, 2026

Dear MBPPC

This year I dove into the winter Olympics with gusto. The Olympics was for me a way to lean into hope in the midst of the terrible news cycle of January/February; young people reaching across aisles, athletes supporting each other by showing encouragement and sportsmanship across nations, “winners” losing with grace and “losers” coming out on top with humility. Still, my eye caught a sign at the Olympics closing ceremony, a sign that said something like, “Faster, Stronger, Harder…”

This may make sense if you are an Olympic athlete, but in his Lenten devotional A Way Other Than Our Own, Walter Brueggemann offers Lent as an alternative to Empire. He sites Isaiah 55:1-2 Hear, everyone who thirsts; come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your earnings for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. 

Brueggemann continues, “this poem of Isaiah is a wake-up call for us when we have been nearly talked out of faith by the force of empire, when we have wanted to prevail instead of trust mercy, when we have decided to gut it out rather than let the pardon come…Lent is a question, a gift, a summons. The questions of Lent are: 

What are we doing?

Are we working for that which does not satisfy? 

Are we spending for that which is not bread?

The gifts of Lent are free, gifts that sustain life: free wine and milk, free water and bread, and all the markings of sacrament that refuse our thin attempts at empire. The summons of Lent is to bear new fruit. Do what is in sync with the God of the gospel, the God who has another intention for our lives, who wants us out of the rat-race of “big is better” and so has mercy…We are left with a new sense of ourselves as God’s people…This could be, for any one of us, a return to our true self after almost being talked out of it” (p. 11). 

I pray that in this Lenten season you are hearing the question, receiving the gift and responding to the summons of Lent. May we journey deeper into God’s love together during these days leading up to Easter.

Lenten blessings,

Pastor Andrea