Quotes from Walter Brueggemann

the father God is attentive to the vulnerable and unproductive, a theological claim that is reflected in the Torah provision for widows, orphans, and immigrants. Ancient Israel is to care for and protect precisely those God is attentive to.

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, "Your God reigns." Isa. 52:7

Idolatry consists in harnessing God for our purposes, regarding Yahweh as a reliable ally in our interests, so that God finally becomes useful to us.11 That usefulness is a temptation of all zealous religion, conservative or liberal.

It is evident that immunity to any transcendent voice and disregard of neighbor leads finally to the disappearance of passion. And where passion disappears there will not be any serious humanizing energy.

The political agency of YHWH comes, in Israelite tradition, to be a stable, orderly cultic presence, but without surrendering any of the force of agency known in the exodus narrative itself. Thus "glory" becomes a cover term that holds together forceful agency and abiding presence

A student of Old Testament theology must be alert to the problem of conventional thinking about ontology, thinking that is essentially alien to Old Testament testimony.

Peace requires the capacity to forgive. Peace requires a readiness to share generously. Peace requires the violation of strict class stratification in society. Peace requires attentiveness to the vulnerable and the unproductive. Peace requires humility in the face of exaltation, being last among those who insist on being first and denying self in the interest of the neighbor. These are all practices that mark his presence in his society.

The rat race of such predation and usurpation is a restlessness that issues inescapably in anxiety that is often at the edge of being unmanageable; when pursued vigorously enough, moreover, one is propelled to violence against the neighbor in eagerness for what properly belongs to the neighbor.

But these matters of life and faith cannot be expressed in the tongues of modernity, for it is this very epistemology that has consigned us to death and despair.

Thus the Sabbath of the fourth commandment is an act of trust in the subversive, exodus-causing God of the first commandment, an act of submission to the restful God of commandments one, two, and three. Sabbath is a practical divestment so that neighborly engagement, rather than production and consumption, defines our lives.

Along with anger, God makes a second response to our guilt. Anger at the throne is compounded by God's utter anguish at having hoped and been betrayed, at having yearned and failed. The

The judge remembers to be a parent: a father in wistfulness, a mother in yearning, a God of grief flowing with tears beside the deathbed. The angry God remembers to be a God who cares about the beloved partner. God has noticed. God has noticed the mocking and the dying, the denial and the irrepressible pain. To

The burden of what Jesus says is this: give it away. Give it away gladly. Make friends by your generosity. The door to a gospel future is by generosity, outrageous, intentional giving away in the present to create a viable future. That seems to me such an urgent word, because we are so deeply caught in cycles of greed and affluence and self-indulgence and acquisitiveness of a fearful kind that will yield no human future.

Prophecy in this context may be understood as a redescription of the public processes of history through which the purposes of Yahweh are given in human utterance.

Following the lead of Moses, Israel seizes upon this revelation as the clue to its future. Israel celebrates that Yahweh is this peculiar God of covenantal relatedness, even as Israel insists that Yahweh must be the God who is self-announced in this way. Israel "prays back" to Yahweh in an imperative, Yahweh's own words of self-announcement.

The shock of such a partner destabilizes us too much. The risk too great, the discomfort so demanding. We much prefer to settle for a less demanding, less overwhelming meeting. Yet we are haunted by the awareness that only this overwhelming meeting gives life.

paraphrasing 1 Cor. 1:25) that the fictions of God are truer than the facts of men.13

1. The first partner in the meeting is the text.

Restitution costs: "He shall restore it in full, and shall add a fifth to it." Restitution costs twenty percent according to Leviticus. Guilt requires not simply equity and an even balance, but gift beyond affront. It requires surplus compensation. Such a rule is both economically shrewd and psychologically sound. Israel is required to move beyond grudging restoration, until it is "pressed down and running over.

Yahweh is not unfettered but is constrained by a hard, relentless commitment made to Israel. The very character of Yahweh, as Yahweh has articulated that identity, gives Moses and Israel a toehold against God and a space from which to speak imperatives that Yahweh must heed.

3. There is a text in its boldness. There is a congregation, perhaps reduced and diminished by fatigue. Third, there is this specific occasion for speech.

4. There is a text that looms in resilient power. There is a waiting congregation, perhaps not tired out, but too sure of self, pretending buoyancy where there might have been transformation. There is the voice that takes the old script and renders it to evoke a new world we had not yet witnessed (cf. Isa. 43:19). The fourth and final partner is this better world given as fresh revelation.

The creedal disclosure of Exod. 34:6-7 and the initial "pray-back" of Moses in Numbers 14 form a tap root for Israel's recurring prayer to this You who does wonders of costly solidarity.

The two commandments go beneath social performance and social appearance to the deep, elemental, defining issue of "God versus the gods.