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.’ ”