You are the God of all things new.
You lurk on Saturday night in silence
just as you lurked
at the edge of that old deportation.
And then you leapt up on Easter morning with new life,
just as you enunciated homecoming for our ancient people.
You refuse the power of death
and have broken open our displacement with new possibility.
We give thanks for your promises you have kept among us,
and for your promises still under way,
promises of a new heaven,
a new earth,
a new Jerusalem, and
a new covenant.
We watch with eager longing
for your newness
that will outrun all our losses.
Emancipate us from our anxiety to watch for your gifts of newness
and to receive the strange forms
that your new beginnings may take among us.
At the far edge of our exile,
just as the new day breaks,
we will shout with glad elation,
"He is risen indeed."
W
alter Brueggemann, Cincinnati, 2011
[reproduced from Embracing the Prophets in Contemporary Culture]
