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

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

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

Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.

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

While the Passover narrative [in Exodus] energizes Israel's imagination toward justice, Israel's hard work of implementation of that imaginative scenario was done at Mt. Sinai. . . . Moses' difficult work at Sinai is to transform the narrative vision of the Exodus into a sustainable social practice that has institutional staying-power, credibility, and authority.

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