In this reading from A Way Other Than Our Own, Walter Brueggemann reflects on Isaiah 54:7-9. He says,
"Ours is a time like the flood, like the exile, when the certitudes abandon us, the old reliabilities have become unsure, and 'things fall apart.' The falling apart is happening...all around us and to all of us.
"In such a context of enormous fearfulness, our propensity is to enormous destruction. We grow more strident, more fearful, more anxious, more greedy for our own way, more despairing, and consequently, more brutal...On many days we succumb to the need to look only after ourselves and our kind...
"The alternative is an act of imagination, seeded by memory, uttered by a poet that draws the health-giving memory into the present so that the present is radically reconstituted. We do not need poetry or artistry or imagination, if we only want to wallow in our status quo. The poet stakes a claim against such present reality. This act of imagination subverts our status quo and invites us to an alternative.
"The world comes at us in destructive, pathological ways. From out of the chaos, however,...comes the text shaping our future, not in hostility but in compassion, not in abandonment but in solidarity, not in isolation but in covenant, not in estrangement but in well-being."
"In the midst of troubled times, be with us, God of well-being. May faithful remembering lead to compassionate reimagining. Amen."
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