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Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural, but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.

Walter Brueggemann

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Walter Brueggemann
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 11
Biblical Scholar
Theologian
University Teacher
Tilden
Nebraska
Conditions
Constitutes
Hurt
Radical
Taken
Condition
Natural
Seriously
Form
Accepted
Announces
Criticism
Humanness
Compassion
Unacceptable
Normal
Abnormal

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Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist.
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Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.
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Buechner uses words with such transformative power that any comment on them is like the moon palely reflecting the sun.
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The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.
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Those who participate in [sabbath] break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competition.
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And when we take ourselves too seriously, we are grim about the brothers and sisters, especially the dissenting ones, and there will be no health in us and no healing humor.
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The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.
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We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised.
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On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.
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Imagination is a danger thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination to keep on conjouring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
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If the church is to be faithful it must be formed andordered from the inside of its experience and confession and not by borrowing from sources extenal to its own life.
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When serious people of good faith disagree, they've got to go back into the narratives and come at it again. One of the problems in the church is that people are not willing to do that. People have arrived at a place where they think they have got the answer.
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The deep places in our lives - places of resistance and embrace - are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.
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The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.
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Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.
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People notice peacemakers because they dress funny. We know how the people who make war dress - in uniforms and medals, or in computers and clipboards, or in absoluteness, severity, greed, and cynicism. But the peacemaker is dressed in righteousness, justice, and faithfulness - dressed for the work that is to be done.
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The Gospel is a very dangerous idea. We have to see how much of that dangerous idea we can perform in our own lives. There is nothing innocuous or safe about the Gospel. Jesus did not get crucified because he was a nice man.
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Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.
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God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.
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The Eucharist has been preempted and redefined in dualistic thinking that leaves the status quo of the world untouched, so congregations can take the meal without raising questions of violence the outcome is a colonized imagination that is drained of dangerous hope.
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