Quotes About God

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.

The church has a huge stake in breaking the silence, because the God of the Bible characteristically appears at the margins of established power arrangements, whether theological or socioeconomic and political.

Our public life is largely premised on an exploitation of our common anxiety. The advertising of consumerism and the drives of the acquisitive society, like he serpent, seduce into believing there are securities apart from the reality of God.

Relationship with God is not immune to the surprises and costs of our daily life.

It is no obvious or "natural" matter to resituate our lives with reference to the holy power and purpose of God. But that is what we do in prayer.

As a result, legitimate indignation is regularly siphoned away from speech with God to be acted out in other, perhaps more destructive ways. Such speech of rage addressed to YHWH is credible only when the worshiping community has confidence that the covenant God addressed is both willing and able to intervene in contexts of unbearable suffering.

Lent is rather seeing how to take steps into God's future so that we are no longer defined by what is past and no longer distracted by what we have treasured or feared about the present. Lent is for embracing the baby given to old people; resurrection to new life in Easter; and the offer of a new world made by God from nothing.

Even in the wilderness with scarce resources, God mandates a pause for Sabbath for the community:

The emancipatory gift of YHWH to Israel is contrasted with all the seductions of images. The memory of the exodus concerns the God of freedom who frees.

requires both the outrageousness of God and the daily work of decreasing so that Jesus and God's vision of peace may increase.

As every vibrant subcommunity knows, the defining prerequisite for such a subcommunity is a conviction that it can and will be different because of the purposes of God that will not relent.

It is the work of the poet to imagine YHWH out beyond old stereotypes and to show us that the God of Israel, at the very moment of risk, is a God of healing, transformative, covenantal fidelity.

doing economic justice for the vulnerable in generous, intentional ways, is communion with God.

The point that prophetic imagination must ponder is that there is no freedom of God without the politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion without a religion of the freedom of God.

God is a magnet who draws pain to God's own self.

The withdrawal of the king from the narrative exposes the king as an irrelevance. The one with all the power can do nothing to save. Because it is only "my God who saves.

In the prophetic tradition the continual insistence is that trusting relationships and not tradable commodities are the proper category for communion with God.

This exceptionalism is deeply present in American public rhetoric and every political leader must subscribe to it. Moreover, appeal to this exceptionalism as God's chosen people can cover a multitude of sins, for example, economic injustice and political oligarchy, all in the name of chosenness.

Thus the teaching of Jesus attests to the possibility of God that the world has long since taken to be impossible. That is what is wonderful about his teaching.

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.

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

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