Quotes from Walter Brueggemann

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.