A meditation to begin the week:
Our Beloved Friend
Outside the Domination System
May your Holy Name be honored
By the way we live our lives.
Your Beloved Community comes.
Guide us to:
Walk your Walk
Talk your Talk
Sit your Silence
Inside the courtroom, on the streets, in the jailhouses
As they are on the margins of resistance.
Give us this day everything we need.
Forgive us our wrongs
As we forgive those who have wronged us.
Do not bring us to hard testing,
But keep us safe from the Evil One.
For thine is:
The Beloved Community,
the power and
the glory
forever and ever. Amen.
- Open Door Community Jesus Prayer
A quote to begin the Sabbath:
Sabbath-keeping practiced can unhook us from appetite-driven and production-driven machine of our culture. It helps us discover the liberty of saying no in order to say yes. Identification with God’s rest on a weekly basis can foster some of the spiritual and emotional resources we need to see and feel beyond ourselves. What a priority-calibrating gift it is to take a full day every week to rest and realign your life with the passions of God! No to busyness. No to unnecessary consumption. No to 24-7 productivity. No to media. Yes to God. Yes to worship. Yes to community. Yes to justice.
- Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Worship:
Living God’s Call to Justice, p. 171
A meditation to begin the week:
They heard me singing and they told me to stop
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
These days my life, I feel it has no purpose
But late at night the feelings swim to the surface
‘Cause on the surface the city lights shine
They’re calling at me, come and find your kind
Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small
That we can never get away from the sprawl
Living in the sprawl
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there’s no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights
We rode our bikes to the nearest park
Sat under the swings and kissed in the dark
We shield our eyes from the police lights
We run away, but we don’t know why
Black mirror, your city lights shine
They’re screaming at us, “We don’t need your kind”
Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small
That we can never get away from the sprawl
Living in the sprawl
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there’s no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights
They heard me singing and they told me to stop
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small
Can we ever get away from the sprawl?
Living in the sprawl
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there’s no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights
- “Sprawl II (Mountains beyond Mountains)” by Arcade Fire
A quote to begin the Sabbath:
If we ask what the sabbath is there for, we are asking about two different things. It is one thing to ask about its function, and another to ask what is meant by its ‘blessing’. (It is only in this sense that we can ask about a commandment.) What does it mean for us when God ‘blessed’ the seventh day? In the way the story of creation is told, it may first of all strike us that the human being celebrates the first sabbath before he himself has performed any work. So he shares God’s rest, not like God, by ‘celebrating from his (own human) works’, but by celebrating with God ‘from his (divine) works’. For the human being himself has as yet no works which he could contemplate. This relativity and relatedness remain the secret of the sabbath even after the human being has gone to work himself. The sabbath does not acquire its meaning from the act of working. It does not just belong to the people who have work. It belongs to all human beings. On the sabbath, human beings do not look at their own work, at least not primarily. Every sabbath is supposed to be like the human being’s first sabbath, when he had as yet no work of his own at which he could have looked back. The rest which is meant for human beings is to be found in the contemplation of God’s works, from which they live. If a person looks at these, his gaze becomes free. It is neither drawn downwards, because it is fixed on the part-work of his own hands, nor upwards at the success of his work, which elevates him above other people. It is not the fragments of what he does that he sees, and not the question of how he could perfect them; what he has before him are the perfect works of God.
- Prof. Bernd Wannenwetsch, University of Aberdeen
Political Worship : Ethics for Christian Citizens, p. 347
A quote to begin the Sabbath:
And what we are thankful for provides us with a subversive imagination. While the cybernetic revolution will tell us that the world is in the hands of those with the powerful computers and widest Net access, and while the forces of globalization arrogantly proclaim that those who control capital have a proprietary right to the resources of creation, we confess that this world is the inheritance of those who live in the light—not the din light of the Enlightenment, not the glittering lights of computer screens , televisions and gambling terminals, but the light that liberates us from the darkness. You see, friends, because we are not subservient to the empire but subjects of the kingdom of God’s beloved Son, we have the audacity to say to the darkness, “We beg to differ!” We will not be a pawn to the Prince of Darkness any longer, because we owe him no allegiance, and by God’s grace through our redemption and forgiveness, our imaginations have been set free.
- From a targum for Colossians 1:1-14
Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat
Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire, p. 40-41
Colossians, Empire, Enlightenment, Globalization, Quotes, Sabbath
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Colossians, Empire, Enlightenment, Globalization, Quotes, Sabbath
A quote to begin the Sabbath:
Frederick Buechner, in his recent book Longing for Home, writes: “We carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home that beckons us.” But, he adds, “woe to us if we forget the homeless ones who have no vote, no power, nobody to lobby for them, who might as well have no faces. Woe to us if we forget our own homelessness. To be homeless the way people like you and me are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not really to be home in any of them. To be really at home is to be really at peace, and our lives are so intrinsically interwoven that there can be no peace for any of us until there is real peace for all of us.”
- Walter Brueggemann, Conversations Among Exiles
A quote to begin the Sabbath:
In contrast to the arrogance, lack of relationships, and abstraction embodied in the global meltdown, we find material concreteness, relationship, and humility affirmed in the Christmas story. The story celebrates a person with a face who entered into time; it celebrates a relational, family community; and it celebrates a humble baby Jesus. Christmas is the church’s re-enacting this major chapter of the fullness of the Christian story: the story that the Word of God became flesh in the womb of a Virgin only to suffer and die an unjust death, before being raised to new life and ascending to heaven. This true story schools us in concreteness: we recall the baby in the manger in Bethlehem. It schools us in community and relationships: Jesus was born of a woman, born into an extended family, born into a neighborhood, born into a village, and born into friendships. And it schools us in humility: the birth of our Lord was a modest birth, in the humble circumstances of a migrant family. Hence, the story of Christ’s birth offers contrasting ways of imagining globalization that can lead to constructive improvisation and concrete action that is re-framed by the Christmas story. Re-enacting the Christmas drama helps us re-imagine alternative practices to the current system of global money and global capital circulation.
- From The Fullness of Time in a Flat World by Scott Waalkes, p. 69-70
A quote to begin the Sabbath:
Christmas is the promise that the God who came in history and comes daily in mystery will one day come in glory. God is saying in Jesus that in the end everything will be all right. Nothing can harm you permanently, no suffering is irrevocable, no loss is lasting, no defeat is more than transitory, no disappointment is conclusive. Jesus did not deny the reality of suffering, discouragement, disappointment, frustration, and death; he simply stated that the Kingdom of God would conquer all of these horrors, that the Father’s love is so prodigal that no evil could possibly resist it.
- From Reflections for Ragamuffins by Brennan Manning
Used in A Guide for Prayer for All Who Seek God, p. 27
A quote to begin the Sabbath:
In this light the Sabbath prescription is a loving reminder to take full advantage of a condition that already exists. At rest, our souls are restored. This is the only commandment that begins with the word “remember,” as if it refers to something we already know, but have forgotten. It is good. It is whole. It is beautiful. In our hurry and worry and acquiring and working, we forget. Rest, take delight in the goodness of creation, and remember how good it is.
- Wayne Muller, Sabbath, p. 44
A quote to begin the Sabbath:
The ancient rabbis teach that on the seventh day, God created menuha—tranquility, peace, and repose—rest, in the deeper possible sense of fertile, healing stillness. Until the Sabbath, creation was unfinished. Only after the birth of menuha, only with tranquility and rest, was the circle of creation made full and complete.
- Wayne Muller, Sabbath. p. 37
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