Exodus 20:12-17; Matthew 6:25-31
Sabbath Hangovers and the Neighborly Community
Sabbath as Resistance to Anxiety
James Sledge July
6, 2014
When
I was a young boy in Spartanburg, SC, America’s cultural version of Sabbath was
still quite prominent. There was no Sunday Little League baseball, and, as we
had not yet discovered soccer, no Sunday youth leagues. At my house and most others
there was no cutting the grass. And people might cast a judgmental glance at
the odd person who did.
Most
stores didn’t open on Sunday. Those that did waited till afternoon. Indoor
shopping malls were a new thing. We didn’t have one in Spartanburg, but there
was one in Charlotte where my grandparents lived, dutifully closed on Sundays.
But things were changing.
In
their book Resident Aliens, Stanley
Hauerwas and Will Willimon write about the day the Fox Theater in Greenville,
SC defied blue laws and opened on Sunday. Willimon, then a youth at Buncombe Street Methodist, joined a
few others in his youth group who snuck out of the youth meeting to see John
Wayne at the Fox Theater. They write,
That evening has
come to represent a watershed in the history of Christendom, South Carolina
style. On that night, Greenville, South Carolina—the last pocket of resistance
to secularity in the Western world—served notice it would no longer be a prop
for the church. There would be no more free rides. The Fox Theater went head to
head with the church over who would provide the world view for the young. That
night in 1963, the Fox Theater won the opening skirmish.[1]
For
many of you, it’s hard to envision the Christendom that began to fade in the
1960s, a world where legal statutes and longstanding custom worked together to
maintain a Christian hegemony. This particular form of Sabbath had little to do
with the one commanded at Sinai. It was more about guarding churches’ special
place in our culture, a culture where it was hard to grown up without being Christian, at least one day a week.
It
is vastly different today. Sabbath, at least as I knew it as a child, has
almost entirely disappeared. But we still live with a Sabbath hangover, the
residue of a potent mix of Puritan severity and blue laws against movies,
dancing, drinking, or anything suspected of being too enjoyable. And this
hangover affects people who never actually drank a Sabbath brew. Even folk who
grew up play soccer on Sunday mornings may reflexively recoil at the mere mention
of Sabbath.
But
this hangover is from a bad imitation of Sabbath. True Sabbath is not about
keeping people from having fun or weighing them down with lists of prohibitions.
It is about rest and refreshment. Most of all, it is about creating a community
of genuine neighborliness.
If
you want to experience the opposite of such neighborliness, simply drive around
metro DC. I’ve shared with many of you a Facebook post by Diana Butler Bass, author
of Christianity for the Rest of Us, that
captures this well. She’d just returned from conferences in Hawaii and the US
Southwest and experienced the drive from National Airport to her home in
Alexandria, prompting this. “Have just returned from the land of Aloha and
‘Thank you ma’am’ to the land of ‘Get out of my way, I’m more important than
you.’ ”
DC
traffic is enough to make anyone frustrated and anxious. So many people in
competition for too little space. “Get out of my way! I’m late, and I have
somewhere really important to go, more important than you do.”
DC
traffic makes a good metaphor for many of our lives. We’re in competition for
so many things: to get ahead, stand out, be beautiful, make the team, get into the
right college, get the job we want, get that big promotion. All those other
people are in our way, and if we’re not careful, they’ll get what we’re after.
No wonder we’re so anxious and stressed. No wonder so many of us cannot imagine
a Sabbath where we truly stop, where we actually rest, not worrying about who
might pass us or get there ahead of us.
What
are the things that worry you and make you anxious? An article a few years ago
in Psychology Today said, “The average high school kid today has
the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950's.” Our world is
growing increasingly anxious, increasingly stressful. But God at Sinai and Jesus
in the Sermon on the Mount speak of an alternative, a different sort of
existence.
A
lot of people misunderstand the Ten Commandments, imagining them an ancient version
of civil law. But primarily, they are God’s plan to form Israel into a
peculiar, neighborly community, one distinct from the societies around them,
one that does not participate in the restless anxieties of Pharaoh’s oppressive
economic system, or ours. This alternative community is formed by trust in the
non-anxious Yahweh who rests and commands rest, and by concern for the
well-being of the neighbor. Members of such a community naturally refuse to
steal from or kill their neighbor, but they also honor family and marital
relationships. They refuse to subvert justice to get ahead of their neighbor.
That’s what the command against “false witness” is about. It’s not a general
command about lying but a court room command that justice not be perverted so
that some can get ahead of others. And the pinnacle of this alternative,
neighborly community is found in the command on coveting. Others in the
community are not competitors who must be outdone, surpassed, or pushed out of the
way. God has promised enough for all.
But
all of this falls apart without Sabbath. Or perhaps better, the inability to
keep Sabbath reveals an inability to create the neighborly community God envisions.
That is because true Sabbath is an act of faith. It is trust in God’s promise
of abundance. It is embrace of Jesus’ call to a life of discipleship that sees
the other – all those people on the highway, at work, in school, in the job
market – not as competitors but as neighbors to whom I am bound by love.
By
and large, our culture says that God’s promises and Jesus’ call are lies, that life
is a competition for scarce resources, and you had better secure yours before
someone else does. You’d best keep a wary eye on neighbors and do everything
you can to secure an advantage over them. In a recent Supreme Court decision, one
justice aptly described this non-neighborly community, writing in a dissent, "It
is not the role of this court to identify and plug loopholes. It is the role of
good lawyers to identify and exploit them...” In other words, to secure an
advantage over one’s neighbor.
That
is why true Sabbath – resting and ceasing all activities that are about helping
us get ahead, stand out, be beautiful, make the team, get into the right
college, get that job we want, get that big promotion – is a monumental act of
resistance to the anxious, non-neighborly world we live in. True Sabbath allows
us, momentarily, to enter into the alternative world God imagines at Sinai and
that Jesus proclaims to those who would follow him. True Sabbath begins to
shape and form us for new lives, lives freed from the anxious striving that so
often defines us, lives freed for joyful, grace filled living as new creations
in Jesus Christ.
This is the second in a 6-part sermon series based in Walter Brueggemann’s book, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now. Each sermon is inspired by one of the six chapters in that book. The second chapter is “Sabbath as Resistance to Anxiety.”
[1]
Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon
Press, 1989), 15-16.
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