Today, 10/30/14 @ 6:00 - Room 1904 (Inside of the library) School of Social Work - Catalyst for Compassion Book Club Excerpts for Book Club discussion - Sabbath as Resistance ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Brueggemann, Walter. 2014. Sabbath as Resistance. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. “ . . . we may consider the Sabbath as an alternative to the endless demands of economic reality, more specifically the demands of market ideology that depend, as Adam Smith had already seen, on the generation of needs and desires that will leave us endlessly ‘rest-less,’ inadequate, unfulfilled, and in pursuit of that which may satiate desire. Those requirements concern endless predation so that we are a society of 24/7 multitasking in order to achieve, accomplish, perform, and possess. But the demands of market ideology pertain as much to consumption as they do to production. The system of commodity requires that we want more, have more, own more, use more, eat and drink more.”—xii “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 . . . 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.” xiv Sabbath and the First Commandment--“Thus the Sabbath commandment is drawn into the exodus narrative, for the God who rests is the God who emancipates from slavery and consequently from the work system of Egypt and from the gods of Egypt who require and legitimate that work system.” 2 “The Sabbath rest of God is the acknowledgment that God and God’s people in the world are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production and so dispatched, as we used to say, as ‘hands’ in the service of a command economy . . . That divine rest on the seventh day of creation has made clear (a) that YHWH is not a workaholic, (b) that YHWH is not anxious about the full functioning of creation, and (c) that the well-being of creation does not depend on endless work.” 6 “With reference to imperial imposition or over-coded religion, Jesus offers an alternative: come to me and rest! He becomes the embodiment of Sabbath rest for those who are no longer defined by and committed to the system of productiveness.” 12 Resistance to Anxiety—“The odd insistence of the God of Sinai is to counter anxious productivity with committed neighborliness.” 28 Resistance to Coercion—“In a society defined by production and consumption, there are huge gradations of performance and, therefore, of worth and significance. In such a social system everyone is coerced to perform better—produce more, consume more—be a good shopper!” 40 Resistance to Exclusivism—“How astonishing that of all the conditions for entry into the community the party of inclusiveness might have selected, they opted for Sabbath! They made Sabbath the single specific requirement for membership. That is because Sabbath represents a radical disengagement from the producer-consumer rat race of the empire. The community welcomes members of any race or nation, any gender or social condition, so long as that person is defined by justice, mercy, and compassion, and not competition, achievement, production, or acquisition. There is no mention of purity, only work stoppage with a neighborly pause for humanness.” 54-55 Resistance to Multi-Tasking--Isaiah 1, Hosea 2—“There is a recital of worship festivals, including new moons and Sabbaths. The indictment is that Israel had celebrated Sabbath, all the while multitasking, going through the motions of YHWH worship but in fact trusting in and honoring Baal, the Canaanite god of generativity, who had no interest in covenantal obligations or covenantal possibilities.” 63 Sabbath and the Tenth Commandment--“We are left, I suggest, with the question of how to break the lethal cycle of acquisitiveness. And so, in the context of our more general discussion, I wish to situate the tenth commandment in the context of the fourth commandment on Sabbath. Sabbath is the practical ground for breaking the power of acquisitiveness and for creating a public will for an accent on restraint. Sabbath is cessation of widely shared practices of acquisitiveness. It provides time, space, energy, and imagination for coming to the ultimate recognition that more commodities, which may be acquired in the rough and ready of daily economics, finally do not satisfy.” 84-85
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 14:48:30 +0000
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