quotes from Walter Brueggemann

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The following excerpts are from the book "Peace" (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001), by Walter Brueggemann, UCC minister and retired professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta and Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis.

. . . So morality is sorting out the demands and claims that emerge out of the precious moments when life is whole and new.  Consider how we would act if we were to live according to the exodus:

•Exodus people honor the Sabbath, because it is a reminder of the contrast between oppressive work and healing, humane rest.

•Exodus people don't covet, because the tyranny of Pharaoh was in coveting after he had enough. 

•Exodus people don't steal, kill, or commit adultery, because now they know that life is too precious to be abused or perverted. The laws of Israel are informed by exodus. 

There are some things you can count on.  The world will not fall apart.  At the bottom of life are a confidence and buoyancy about the world.  The world will not collapse, and we need not be frantic about the prospect that it will.  This, I believe, is a dimension of reality lost in our time, impressed as we are with our capacity to make and unmake the world . . .  we cannot finally unmake the world because we have not made the world.

. . .God rested!  Think of the boldness of that statement.  God rested.  The One charged supremely with ordering the world was not in a tizzy about making it go.  And the commandment is very clear: We rest because God did (Exodus 20:8-11).  And God rested because the reliability of the world has been ordained by God and is not in doubt . . . The world is whole and faithful enough that we need not be consumed in efforts to secure our own existence.  It has been secured . . . The world is safe, and that calls for wonder, amazement, and gratitude.

People who lack that sense of astonishment are likely to take themselves too seriously, and for them the world may finally become too anxious.

What is it God has promised that the world does not know?  Simply that which separates the followers of Jesus from the slaves of this world – suffering love.  This little, seemingly powerless community (the Church) is ordered and identified by its practice of caring, transforming, empowering love of the towel-and-basin variety. 

. . .this little community consists of those who have gotten themselves untangled from the values of this world.  We are not like the others.  Our perception of the world is different, and because we see differently, we can both act and believe differently.   

The truth into which the church is led by the dying one is that the world is being dismantled, and a new world with a quite different code of operation is at hand.  It is this dismantling that the church knows about and that the world has not yet begun to suspect . . .   

Newness is about to burst into our lives and, indeed, into the world.  But the newness comes not without a price, and the price is death to all present arrangements, death to fear and to small hopes, death to old visions and memories.  And those who are ready for death to all that the world calls 'life' are the ones to whom life can come.  The world that will hate us does not know about joy; it knows about management and security and competence and stability, but none of that can yield joy.

. . . the movement from this world to the next is not made with full hands, but requires empty hands.