Rector’s Note: Sabbath as Resistance-7.23.26

My retreat time the other week gave me time to really sink into some practices that I find little time for in my regular schedule. Last week I wrote about the gift of sitting with birds and allowing them to serve as my spiritual directors. I also made some time to start reading a book I’ve been trying to get to: Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, by Walter Brueggemann.

Brueggemann died last year after a storied career as a New Testament scholar and an interpreter of biblical justice. In Sabbath as Resistance, he makes the case that God’s insistence on rest and Sabbath for Godself and for God’s people made the God of Israel distinctly different from the other gods and kings of the antiquity. In fact, the idea of rest for people, land, laborers and Godself aimed to undermine from the start the human drive to acquire, exploit, overwork, dominate.

The call to keep holy the Sabbath day launches the 10 Commandments. Brueggemann saw sabbath rest as a direct affront to the Pharaoh who had so subjected the enslaved people who would become God’s people, Israel. Pharaoh could not rest from his desire for more storehouses for his vast wealth. But God, the king of all, could.

I am so envious of my Jewish friends and colleagues who practice sabbath rest in a way that shuts out the urge to labor, and purchase and travel. Instead, the Sabbath is dedicated to shared meals, and stories and prayer.  That in itself is an act of resistance that I find admirable and almost impossible to imagine for myself.

For Christians, keeping holy the Sabbath day has pretty much meant going to church on Sunday---every week if you’re really devout. But the call to Sabbath is not meant to be a guilt trip about how you worship or whom you worship. It’s meant to be a practice that helps humanity resist some of its most damaging instincts, which ultimately harm all of God’s creation.

 And that is done through rest. Genius.

In these fraught times, people are asking over and over again what can be done to resist the mess we are currently in. Perhaps we also need to ask how to undo the long-held practices that have brought us to this point. Sabbath may be our way out.

I will be the first to admit that this is both easy and hard for me. Managing Sunday Sabbath is my job after all. And it’s not too hard to get home and fall into a multi-hour nap afterward. But that might not be the rest that God has in mind.

 Many of my colleagues choose a different day for their Sabbath rest. And some are pretty good about keeping other activities and ministry demands off that day.

While my week of retreat felt a lot like five days of Sabbath, Brueggemann’s treatment of the day challenges that as well. I’m still thinking about it and frankly haven’t managed to finish the book yet either.

But I share it with you as a concept that we might all try to work at together – make our time of communal prayer and worship and fellowship as the body of Christ a time of rest, and perhaps an opportunity to strengthen our muscles that resist the push of other gods the other days of the week.

“…Sabbath is not only resistance,” Brueggemann writes. “It is alternative. It is an alternative to the demanding, chattering, pervasive presence of advertising and its great liturgical claim of professional sports that devour all our ‘rest time.’ The alternative on offer is the awareness and practice of the claim that we are situated on the receiving end of the gifts of God.”

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how keeping the Sabbath helps you resist the pull of our current culture. Check out Brueggemann’s book and let me know what you think.