Quote of the Week: Conducting a Text

"The sermon is not an act of reporting on an old text, but it is an act of making a new text visible and available. This new text in part is the old text, and in part is the imaginative construction of the preacher, which did not exist until the moment of utterance by the preacher. Like a conductor 'rendering' Beethoven so that that particular music exists only in that occasion, so the preacher renders a text so that it only exists in that particular form in that particular occasion of speaking."

- Walter Brueggemann, The Word Militant: Preaching a Decentering Word (Fortress, 2007), p. 85.

Quote of the week - the scandal of Friday, the rumor of Sunday

"In a culture that has learned well how to imagine - how to make sense - of the world without reference to the God of the Bible, it is the preacher's primal responsibility to invite and empower and equip the community to reimagine the world as though Yahweh were a key and a decisive player . . .

"We are forever reimagining and retelling and reliving our lives throuh the scandal of Friday and the rumor of Sunday"

- Walter Brueggemann, Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope, 2, 10.