Walter Brueggemann Quotes

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.

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.

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.

The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.

The power of the future lies not in the hands of those who believe in scarcity but of those who trust God's abundance.

The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.

The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.

Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.

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.

Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.

We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised.

Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.

Buechner uses words with such transformative power that any comment on them is like the moon palely reflecting the sun.

God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.

Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.

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.

Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available.

Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist.

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.

There are buoyant powers of healing at work in the world that do not depend on us, that we need not finance or keep functioning and that are not at our disposal.

Give us courage for your easy burden, so to live untaxed lives.

Cynicism always comes clothed in "realism". The alternatives to begin with an act of imagination. Can we imagine another way?