Tag: Christianity

Sabbath as Resistance

“In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods. Such an act of resistance requires enormous intentionality and communal reinforcement amid the barrage of seductive pressures from the insatiable insistences of the market…” -Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance

Sabbath, or the spiritual discipline of resting one day every week, is practiced today by many orthodox Jews but virtually unheard of in most Christian circles. Yet in my own spiritual journey, it has been a healing antidote to the many idols of modern life. To set aside a 24-hour period every week where no work is to be performed helps me to reset, be rejuvenated, and detox from the toxic ideology that my worth is in what I can produce.

Below are a series of selections taken from Walter Brueggemann’s book, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now. Walter Brueggemann is a legendary professor of theology at Columbia, focused on the Old Testament, and I love his insights. I hope you enjoy the selections I posted below, and recommend you read his entire book if you want to learn more!

The lack of rest inherent in Egypt’s system

“In the [Bible], the gods of Egypt are stand-ins for all the gods of the several empires. What they all have in common is that they are confiscatory gods who demand endless produce and who authorize endless systems of production.

It is clear that in this [Egypt’s] system there can be no Sabbath rest. There is no rest for Pharaoh in his supervisory capacity, and he undoubtedly monitors daily production schedules. Consequently, there can be no rest for Pharaoh’s supervisors or taskmasters; and of course there can be no rest for the slaves…the “Egyptian gods” also never rested, because of their commitment to the aggrandizement of Pharaoh’s system, for the glory of Pharaoh, surely redounded to the glory of the Egyptian gods. The economy reflects the splendor of the gods who legitimate the entire system, for which cheap labor is an indispensable footnote.

All parties at [the giving of the 10 Commandments]–YHWH, Moses, Israel–could well remember what it had been like in the world of Pharaoh:

  • They could remember that Pharaoh was regarded, and regarded himself, as a god, an absolute authority who was thought to be immune to the vagaries of history, a force with insatiable demands.
  • They could remember that Egypt’s socioeconomic power was organized like a pyramid, with a workforce producing wealth, all of which flowed upward to the power elite and eventually to Pharaoh who sat atop that pyramid.
  • They could remember that Pharaoh, even though he was absolute in authority and he occupied the pinnacle of power, was an endlessly anxious presence who caused the entire social environments to be permeated with a restless anxiety that had no limit or termination…
  • They could remember how that nightmare of scarcity… led to rapacious state policies of monopoly that caused the crown to usurp the money, the cattle, the land, and, finally, the bodies of vulnerable peasants (Genesis 47:13-26).

Pharaoh was remembered at Sinai. But Pharaoh was not at Sinai. He was left helpless at the bottom of the waters. At Sinai, while Pharaoh was remembered, YHWH was front and center as the decisive force who enwrapped Israel in new promises and new social responsibilities…

God introduces Sabbath to His people

Thus the Sabbath command of Exodus 20:11 recalls that God rested on the seventh day of creation… [and moreover shows]

  • That YHWH is not a workaholic,
  • That YHWH is not anxious about the full functioning of creation, and that the well-being of creation does not depend on endless work…Such divine rest serves to delegitimate and dismantle the endless restlessness sanctioned by the other gods and enacted by their adherents.

Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest. The same either/or is evident, of course, in the teaching of Jesus. In his Sermon on the Mount, he declares to his disciples: “No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matt 6:24). The way of mammon (capital, wealth), is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath. Jesus taught his disciples that they could not have it both ways.

Sabbath as Resistance to the Anxiety and Violence of Unrestrained Capitalism

And of course, every facet of this restlessness is grounded in and produces anxiety that variously issues in aggression and finally manifests in violence:

  • violence expressed in military adventurism that enjoys huge “patriotic” support;
  • violence against the earth that is signaled by overuse;
  • violence in sports, now with evidence of “paid injuries”;
  • violence in the neighborhood, with guns now the icon of “violent security”;
  • violence against every vulnerable population, sexual aggression against the young, and the “war on the poor,” which are accomplished by law and by banking procedures.

It is impossible, is it not, to overestimate the level of anxiety that now characterizes social relationship in our society of acute restlessness? That violent restlessness makes neighborliness nearly impossible. None of this is new; all of it is much chronicled among us. All of it is as old as Pharaoh’s Egypt.

Such faithful practice of work stoppage is an act of resistance. It declares in bodily ways that we will not participate in the anxiety system that pervades our social environment. We will not be defined by busyness and by acquisitiveness and by pursuit of more, in either our economics or our personal relations or anywhere in our lives…

And as the work stoppage permits a waning of anxiety, so energy is redeployed to the neighborhood. The odd insistence of the God of Sinai is to counter anxious productivity with committed neighborliness. The latter does not produce so much, but it creates an environment of security and respect and dignity that redefines the human project…

The Seduction of Prosperity

Moses regards the land of Canaan, it being so fertile, as an enormous temptation and a huge seduction to Israel…Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia…Moses understands, as do the prophets after him, that being in the land poses for Israel a conflict between two economic systems, each of which views the land differently…if the land is a possession, then the proper way of life is to acquire more. If the land is inheritance, then the proper way of life is to enhance the neighborhood and the extended family so that all members may enjoy the good produce of the land…

“All are to rest: ‘sons and daughters, slaves, oxen, donkeys, livestock, immigrants….Sabbath is a great day of equality when all are equally at rest…

In Deuteronomy 15:1-18, Moses enunciates the most radical extrapolation of Sabbath in the entire Bible. Every seven years, in an enactment of the sabbatic principle, Israel is enjoined to cancel debts on poor people. The intention in this radical act of “seven” is that there should be no permanent underclass in Israel. Moses, in this instruction, anticipates resistance to the radical extrapolation of Sabbath, that Israelites may be “hard hearted” and “tight fisted”. But that is because they have fallen into coercive patterns whereby the poor are targeted as objects of economic abuse rather than seen as Sabbath neighbors…

Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend out power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing…

[In Isaiah 5:8-10] the indictment is against those who “join house to house” and field to field”, exactly the language of the commandment and of the Micah oracle. The process consists of buying up the land of small peasant farmers in order to develop large estates. The vulnerable peasants are then removed from their land and denied a livelihood, and now coveters can bask in their newly secured isolated self-indulgence…in our time, the same crisis might refer to urban gentrification that dislocates the poor and the vulnerable…

Sabbath is an antidote to anxiety that both derives from our craving and in turn feeds those cravings for more. Sabbath is an arena in which we recognize that we live by gift and not by possession, that we are satisfied by relationships of attentive fidelity and not by amassing commodities. We know in the gospel tradition that we may indeed ‘gain the whole world’ and lose our souls (Mark 8:34-37). [Sabbath fights against that temptation.]”

Communal/Generational Sin

Many white evangelical Americans have a very individualistic view of sin, wherein we cannot understand how we could carry any responsibility for something that our ancestors/relatives/friends/police/leaders did or continue to do. [I’m sure that’s also true for some other types of Christians too, but I see this view being especially prevalent among fellow white evangelicals]. Yet that is not a fully biblical view of sin: God calls his people to enact justice and righteousness for the entire community, not just in their own personal lives. Hence the prophets’ warnings to the entire nation of Israel, or Jesus’ warning to entire groups of people like the priests and Pharisees. It is tough to shed our solely individualistic view of sin and adopt the Bible’s more balanced view, but understanding communal guilt is absolutely essential if we are able to ever tackle massive, widespread sins in our society like racism. 

In 2017 Tim Keller, a white pastor from NYC, gave a short talk explaining the biblical view of communal guilt. It is more of an overview than a deep-dive, but it’s a good overview of the concept. However, I will say that the absolute best way to adopt a biblical view of sin is to just soak A LOT in the Bible and learn more about the ancient Middle Eastern culture(s) in which the Bible was written. As a start, check out these Bible passages below that address the idea of systemic/communal/generational sin and evil. It took me barely about an hour to find all these passages, and I know there are many, many more!

As you read them, ask yourself: What would it look like for white American Christians to adopt a similar mindset in our day? What would it look like to actually confess, repent, and make amends for the systemic sins that are present in our culture? And what are the costs if we continually reject the Bible’s complex and multi-faceted view of sin in favor of a purely self-centered one?

Daniel 9:4-5 And I prayed to the Lord my God, and made confession, and said, “O Lord, great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and mercy with those who love Him, and with those who keep His commandments, we have sinned and committed iniquity, we have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from Your precepts and Your judgments.”

Isaiah 6:5: “5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

Ezra 9:5-7 “5 Then, at the evening sacrifice, I rose from my self-abasement, with my tunic and cloak torn, and fell on my knees with my hands spread out to the Lord my God 6 and prayed: “I am too ashamed and disgraced, my God, to lift up my face to you, because our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached to the heavens. 7 From the days of our ancestors until now, our guilt has been great. Because of our sins, we and our kings and our priests have been subjected to the sword and captivity, to pillage and humiliation at the hand of foreign kings, as it is today…”

Leviticus 26:40-42: “40But if they will confess their sins AND the sins of their ancestors—their unfaithfulness and their hostility toward me, 41 which made me hostile toward them so that I sent them into the land of their enemies—then when their uncircumcised hearts are humbled and they pay for their sin, 42 I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.”

Judges 9:56-57: “56 Thus God repaid the wickedness that Abimelek had done to his father by murdering his seventy brothers. 57 God also made the people of Shechem pay for all their wickedness. The curse of Jotham son of Jerub-Baal came on them.”

Matthew 23:31-36 “31 So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started! 33 “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? 34 Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. 35 And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. 36 Truly I tell you, all this will come on this generation.“

Deuteronomy 24:7: “If someone is caught kidnapping a fellow Israelite and treating or selling them as a slave, the kidnapper must die. You must purge the evil from among you.”

1 Corinthians 12:25-26: “25 so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 26 If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”

Matthew 25:31-33: “31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left….”

2 Chronicles 7:14: “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Matthew 12:41-45 “41 The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here. 42 The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, and now something greater than Solomon is here. 43 “When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. 44 Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. 45 Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.”

Isaiah 24:5-6: “The earth is defiled by its people;
    they have disobeyed the laws,
violated the statutes
    and broken the everlasting covenant.
6 Therefore a curse consumes the earth;
    its people must bear their guilt.
Therefore earth’s inhabitants are burned up,
    and very few are left.“

Malachi 3:8-9: 8 “Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me. “But you ask, ‘How are we robbing you?’ “In tithes and offerings.9 You are under a curse—your whole nation—because you are robbing me.“

Revelation 18:1-5: “After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority, and the earth was illuminated by his splendor. 2 With a mighty voice he shouted:
“‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!’[a]
    She has become a dwelling for demons
and a haunt for every impure spirit,
    a haunt for every unclean bird,
    a haunt for every unclean and detestable animal.
3 For all the nations have drunk
    the maddening wine of her adulteries.
The kings of the earth committed adultery with her,
    and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.”
4 Then I heard another voice from heaven say:
“‘Come out of her, my people,’
    so that you will not share in her sins,
    so that you will not receive any of her plagues;
5 for her sins are piled up to heaven,
    and God has remembered her crimes.“

A Dialogue in Heaven

[NOTE: The dialogue that follows below is an example of “satire.” Satire often utilizes exaggeration and silly images, and is certainly NOT meant to be taken literally. Rather, satire uses hyperbole and shock to illustrate a point.]

“The Temptation of Christ” by Ary Scheffer, 1854

Setting: Heaven’s Throne Room. God is seated on the throne. Satan enters.

Satan: Hey God, it’s me.

God: Oh really, you again, what have you been up to?

Satan: Prowling around, looking for who I can devour. You know, the usual. But today I wanted to run something by you.

God: Oh really? What’s that?

Satan: I’d like to bring forth another anti-Christ, designed to deceive your people, particularly in the United States.

God: You know my true Church always stands strong in the end; I don’t know why you try all these pointless schemes. But sure, what do you have planned this time?

Satan: Well, I have a person in mind, and I’d like them to run for President. They’ll claim to be the most pro-Christian candidate ever elected. In so doing they’ll lead a majority of American Christians to become utterly confused about right and wrong.

God: Righhht [skeptical]…tell me more about this person.

Satan: Well, without getting too specific, this person is known to be very greedy and proud, and has a tendency to have lots of affairs and touch people inappropriately—despite being married! They’re also known to twist the truth and lie, even over very tiny facts-in other words, they’ll be fluent in speaking my native tongue. Not to mention, this person has a habit of cheating employees out of wages owed to them.

God: Wow—and you think this person can deceive my Church? Well OK, go on.

Satan: They’ll use foul language a lot.

God: Uh-huh.

Satan: And they’ll generally just criticize, insult, and relentlessly harass anyone who doesn’t immediately bow down in support before them. That’s especially true against women, foreigners, and people who aren’t white, but the target can be anyone.

God: Surely they’ll repent and asked for forgiveness for all these sins?

Satan: That’s the thing—the person I have in mind is so stubborn that they will never publicly repent, and will even claim they’ve never even had to ask YOU for forgiveness either!

God: Haha foolish indeed…now tell me about this person’s political priorities.

Satan: Well, this person LOVES hanging out with dictators and cutting backroom deals with them. Particularly those from North Korea, Russia, China, and other places where your people are persecuted. Not only that, but they’ll dramatically limit the number of Christian immigrants and refugees that are allowed to come into the United States.

God: [Scoffs] Hah-no way my people will let that happen. They love their brothers and sisters around the globe! I really doubt your plan will work, but go on.

Satan: This person also will discourage people from stewarding your creation, and instead will reward people who pollute the air, water, and soil.

God: [Shaking head] I’m sure by now my people in America will know better than to let that happen, but sure. Go on.

Satan: The key to my plan is this–I will deceive your people into affiliating so strongly with this person, that many of them will refuse to hear even the smallest criticism. They’ll call true statements about wrongdoing “fake”, and believe any embellishment that makes this person look good. It’ll get to the point, that people will lie about the truth in legal proceedings, even after swearing an oath on a Bible!

God: Look, I’m really struggling to believe you’ll get my entire Church in the US to actually follow this person.

Satan: Well, no, it won’t be everyone. Some will denounce this person, and others will vote for them only reluctantly and half-heartedly. But I figure if I can get a high enough percentage of your people (especially if they’re prominent figures in the Church) to publicly worship, whole-heartedly support, and even lie for this person, it will make you look so bad, that you’ll see a whole generation flat-out rejecting your son Jesus and the Church.

God: Wow. That is ambitious. But OK–you gotta tell me who you have in mind for this plan. This feels too far-fetched, who are you thinking? And which political party?

Satan: I’ll tell you, but I’m keeping it a bit secret right now, so keep it under wraps for now: [Satan whispers the person’s name in a low voice].

God: Hahahahha—You’re kidding right? THAT person?! Running in THAT party?

Satan: It’ll work!

God: No way. But I’ll tell you what. You have my permission to go ahead and try your plan. If my people in the US actually are deceived by this person, then they deserve every last judgment that is coming to them. I’ll let you sift each of them as wheat, to see whether their faith will fail–and if it does, whether or not they will turn back to me.

Satan: Understood. I’ll see you around.

Master Yoda

[I find it fascinating that a significant portion of Jesus’ teachings are in the form of parables: simple narratives used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. More frequently than logical arguments, sermons, or speeches, Jesus utilizes the power of story to communicate truths to his followers. Despite that, modern Christians often prioritize logic over narrative. In order to push back against that a little bit, here is one of my past attempts to communicate a truth about God via a parable. I have titled it “Master Yoda.” ]

Master Yoda? Credit: British Library

A young Jedi Knight once sent a request for a meeting with Master Yoda. Master Yoda sent back a message– “Meditating, I am, in the Room of a Thousand Fountains.” Not wishing to disturb, the young Jedi waited. The next day, he sent the same request. This time, Yoda replied: “In the training room, I am.” The next day, the young Jedi sent his request a third time. This time, Yoda wrote: “Eating in the cafeteria, I am.” Annoyed at Master Yoda for dodging his request, the young Jedi Knight gave up.

Weeks later, the same young Jedi ran into Yoda in the Main Atrium. Yoda asked him why they had never had a meeting. Exasperated, the young man cried out, “Because you always had an excuse! You never made time for me.” Yoda slowly shook his head. “My child, sadly mistaken you are. My heart was to see you, and I told you where to find me. Wanted you to join me, I did. Sad was I, when you never showed.”

Whoever who has ears to hear, let them hear.