Quotes about Community

I imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious antineighborliness of our economy, a great departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, a great departure from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And then an arrival in a new neighborhood, because it is a gift to be simple, it is a gift to be free; it is a gift to come down where we ought to be.

To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God's imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ.

Worship that does not lead to neighborly compassion and justice cannot be faithful worship of YHWH. The offer is a phony Sabbath!

Gathering God, draw us out beyond our cramped circles of care. Draw us toward the neighbor, the other, the outsider, the hurting one. May we practice compassion. Amen.

Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology. Abraham

As a result, legitimate indignation is regularly siphoned away from speech with God to be acted out in other, perhaps more destructive ways. Such speech of rage addressed to YHWH is credible only when the worshiping community has confidence that the covenant God addressed is both willing and able to intervene in contexts of unbearable suffering.

Even in the wilderness with scarce resources, God mandates a pause for Sabbath for the community:

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.

As every vibrant subcommunity knows, the defining prerequisite for such a subcommunity is a conviction that it can and will be different because of the purposes of God that will not relent.

It is my hope that the Christian community in the United States will cease to appeal to the Bible as a direct support for the state of Israel and will have the courage to deal with the political realities without being cowed by accusations of anti-Semitism.

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.

Thus, Sabbath is a mighty antidote to an economy of depletion and diminishment, because it entails participation in a community that does not believe that human well-being and worth are established by endless productivity.