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Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.

Walter Brueggemann

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Walter Brueggemann
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 11
Biblical Scholar
Theologian
University Teacher
Tilden
Nebraska
Life
Private
Consumption
Worship
Production
System
Productions
Wells
Instance
Pharaoh
Firsts
Pursuit
Pharaohs
Well
Defined
Withdrawal
First
Endless
Sabbath
Work
Anxiety
Refusal

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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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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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The power of the future lies not in the hands of those who believe in scarcity but of those who trust God's abundance.
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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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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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Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.
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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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God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.
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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 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.
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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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Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available.
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Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.
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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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Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.
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We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.
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