Quotes from Walter Brueggemann

The store-house cities are an ancient parallel to the great banks and insurance houses where surplus wealth is kept among us. That surplus wealth, produced by the cheap labor of peasants, must now be protected from the peasants by law and by military force.

Because if you cling excessively to the past, you will miss the newness being enacted before your very eyes.

Sabbath is a big no for both; it is no to the worship of commodity; it is no to the pursuit of commodity. But it is more than no. Sabbath is the regular, disciplined, visible, concrete yes to the neighborly reality of the community beloved by God.

Where there is no speech we must live in despair. And exile is first of all where our speech has been silenced and God's speech has been banished. But the prophetic poet asserts hope precisely in exile.

Lament is the loss of true kingship, whereas doxology is the faithful embrace of the true king and the rejection of all the phony ones.

First, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt; second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land; and third, that "the way to the land is through the wilderness." There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.

To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God's imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ. As human persons, body and soul, are incorporated into the performance of Christ's corpus verum, they resist the state's ability to define what is real through the mechanism of torture.22

Clearly, human transformative activity depends upon a transformed imagination. Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a quite parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity.

In practice, I suggest that it is the liturgy that is to enact the settled coherence of church faith, and the sermon that provides the "alien" witness of the text, which rubs against the liturgic coherence.118 There can, in my judgment, be no final resolution of the tension between the systemizing task of theology and the disruptive work of biblical interpretation. It is the ongoing interaction between the two that is the work of interpretation.

wind is blowing. It may be a breeze that cools and comforts. It may be a gust

Sabbath is the visible acknowledgment that life is not defined by commoditization.

The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act.

Second, the elders of the city (Bethlehem) are trembling. They want to know why he comes. They do not even know yet whose side he is on. They presume he is still an agent of Saul. If so, the Judeans tremble because Saul is no friend of southerners. Or if he is not an agent of Saul, it is even more dangerous, because then he may come to include them in an act of betrayal, which is more risk than they want.

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.2

The claim is the very antithesis of Ezra, who is busy excluding, separating, and driving out those who are carriers of abomination. Ezra has given voice to an exclusivism that closely echoes the old practice of Pharaoh. The good news is that this posture did not contain all of emerging Judaism. The poet of Isaiah 56 asserts otherwise!

we will not have a politics of justice and compassion unless we have a religion of God's freedom.

From beginning to end the narrative shows, with no rush to conclude, how the religious claims of Egyptian gods are nullified by this Lord of freedom. The narrative shows, with delighted lingering, how the politics of oppression is overcome by the practice of justice and compassion.

We can recognize, moreover, that a move beyond our tribalism never happens in the ordinary. It takes a miracle, or a jolt, or a gift, or killing (as in Charleston) to awaken us from our tribal numbness, to see and act afresh.

Reading Jeremiah alone leaves faith in death where God finally will not stay. And reading Second Isaiah alone leads us to imagine that we may receive comfort without tears and tearing. Clearly, only those who anguish will sing new songs. Without anguish the new song is likely to be strident and just more royal fakery.

So in Psalm 73, when life is inequitable, the speaker is aware of a skewed relationship in which one is less than human: When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was stupid and ignorant; I was like a brute beast toward you. (Ps. 73:21-22; cf. 102:7-8)49

Observance of the freedom God has to change causes a terrible unsettling among the faithful.

It is rather the conviction that God will not quit until God has arrived at God's good intention.

what interests us more is that a parable is the chosen mode of communication. Indeed, it must be.33 One cannot address royal power directly, especially royal power so deeply guilty and shamed. It is permissible to talk about speaking truth to power; but if truth is to have a chance with power, it must be done with some subtlety.34

If one is linked to a flat, one-dimensional faith, then this verse is a bitter loss of faith . But if we think in terms of obedience on its way to risky imagination, then this verse is an opening for new faith beyond the conventions and routines that secure but do not reckon with God's awefulness .