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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
Well
Defined
Withdrawal
First
Endless
Sabbath
Work
Anxiety
Refusal
Life
Private
Consumption
Worship
Production
System
Productions
Wells
Instance
Pharaoh
Firsts
Pursuit
Pharaohs

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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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Buechner uses words with such transformative power that any comment on them is like the moon palely reflecting the sun.
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We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised.
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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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God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.
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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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Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.
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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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We pray because our life comes from God and we yield it back in prayer. Prayer is a great antidote to the illusion that we are self-made.
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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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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.
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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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Hope requires a very careful symbolization. It must not be expressed too fully in the present tense because hope one can touch and handle is not likely to retain its promissory call to a new future. Hope expressed only in the present tense will no doubt be coopted by the managers of this age
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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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The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.
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The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.
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Give us courage for your easy burden, so to live untaxed lives.
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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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