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Finally Comes the Poet QUOTES

Finally Comes the Poet QUOTES

1 " Sabbath is the practice of letting life rest safely in God's hand.41 "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

2 " So who is out there? The preacher addresses people with layers and layers of alienation that result from sin and that are experienced as guilt. The gathered congregation includes those who are profoundly burdened with guilt, whose lives are framed by deep wrong, by skewed relations beyond resolve, shareholders in the public drama of brutality and exploitation. There is a heaviness, and pious good humor is not an adequate response. The heaviness is poorly matched by yearning, but there is a yearning nonetheless. It is the resilience of the yearning that causes people to dress up in their heaviness and present themselves for the drama one more time. Sunday morning is, for some, a last, desperate hope that life need not be lived in alienation. We need not dwell on the sin that produces alienation. Suffice with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to say that sin characteristically is manifested in distorted relations to sex and money, in lust and in greed, in abuse of neighbor and in the squandering of creation. As the guilt
emerges, alienation lingers. And the desperation resulting from the alienation lingers even more powerfully. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

3 " Hans Walter Wolff has suggested that the Sabbath is the great equalizer, for that day is a foretaste of the kingdom when all-great and small-are reckoned to be exactly equal .2' All-masters and slaves-are to engage in this most godlike activity of being at peace. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

4 " A concrete embodiment of the jubilee commandment was evidenced in a rural church in Iowa during the "farm crisis." The banker in the town held mortgages on many farms. The banker and the farmers belonged to the same church. The banker could have foreclosed. He did not because, he said, "These are my neighbors and I want to live here a long time." He extended the loans and did not collect the interest that was rightly his. The pastor concluded, "He was practicing the law of the Jubilee year, and he did not even know it." The pastor might also have noted that the reason the banker could take such action is that his bank was a rare exception. It was locally and independently owned, not controlled by a larger Chicago banking system. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

5 " There are many pressures to quiet the text, to silence this deposit of dangerous speech, to halt this outrageous practice of speaking alternative possibility. The poems, however, refuse such silence. They will sound. They sound through preachers who risk beyond prose. In the act of such risk, power is released, newness is evoked, God is praised. People are "speeched" to begin again. Such new possibility is offered in daring speech. Each time that happens, "finally comes the poet"-finally. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

6 " 2. After God notices the truth about us (voiced by the poet), God responds to that truth. The poem of Jeremiah 5 continues with a presentation of God's response. The taxonomy of guilt and healing includes two dimensions of God's response to the reality of sin and guilt. First there is God's wrath, indignation, and anger. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

7 " Along with anger, God makes a second response to our guilt. Anger at the throne is compounded by God's utter anguish at having hoped and been betrayed, at having yearned and failed. The "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

8 " The judge remembers to be a parent: a father in wistfulness, a mother in yearning, a God of grief flowing with tears beside the deathbed. The angry God remembers to be a God who cares about the beloved partner. God has noticed. God has noticed the mocking and the dying, the denial and the irrepressible pain.
To "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

9 " The shock of such a partner destabilizes us too much. The risk too great, the discomfort so demanding. We much prefer to settle for a less demanding, less overwhelming meeting. Yet we are haunted by the awareness that only this overwhelming meeting gives life. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

10 " (paraphrasing 1 Cor. 1:25) that the fictions of God are truer than the facts of men.13 "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

11 " 1. The first partner in the meeting is the text. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

12 " Restitution costs: "He shall restore it in full, and shall add a fifth to it." Restitution costs twenty percent according to Leviticus. Guilt requires not simply equity and an even balance, but gift beyond affront. It requires surplus compensation. Such a rule is both economically shrewd and psychologically sound. Israel is required to move beyond grudging restoration, until it is "pressed down and running over. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

13 " 2. The second partner in the meeting is the baptized. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

14 " 2. According to our Leviticus text, there are two things to be done about guilt. The first is reparation, done by the offender. This is the move from the human side. The second is more difficult, because we cannot do it ourselves. It must be done for us. There is a weiihty residue of ache that one cannot dispel by one's own actions. a The affront and its resolution are more troublesome and more profound than we ourselves can settle. What remains unresolved is underneath guilt; it is more like taintedness, uncleanness. The priests noticed that even after adequate reparations are done, one is not yet finished. The problem of alienation lingers. The priests did not shrink from the recognition that this unfinished business requires them to act as priests. There is an authority they will have to exercise, costly as it is. Priests, even those who think of themselves primarily as preachers, are entrusted with this "residue of ache" that is dealt with only through mystery that reaches from the other side, out where we cannot act reasonably or effectively. Finally, guilt requires God's action. That action of God, in order to be reliably available, must be given by the regularized channels of priestly action. The work of priests is to make available the God who is required for reconciliation. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

15 " 3. There is a text in its boldness. There is a congregation, perhaps reduced and diminished by fatigue. Third, there is this specific occasion for speech. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

16 " 4. There is a text that looms in resilient power. There is a waiting congregation, perhaps not tired out, but too sure of self, pretending buoyancy where there might have been transformation. There is the voice that takes the old script and renders it to evoke a new world we had not yet witnessed (cf. Isa. 43:19). The fourth and final partner is this better world given as fresh revelation. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

17 " I had come for certitude, but the poetic speech does not give certitude. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet