My day off this week found me in front of the television. I meant to do projects, clean the house, sort laundry, feed the cats, all the things. There is ductwork that needs to be wrapped, floors that ought to be mopped, squirrels and birds that need to be fed, touch-up painting, always touch-up painting.
Instead, I watched 11 episodes of a show I’ve been binging. Eleven episodes. I was a little reluctant to tell you that, fearing judgment for not being productive. “A whole day wasted” I could hear in my head. Maybe it wasn’t your voice, but it was someone’s.
Then, the next morning, I sat with a cup of tea to read this week’s Brueggemann assignment. The chapter is on Sabbath. “Sabbath as Alternative.” And we wonder “alternative to what?”
When I was a kid, Sabbath meant worship as an alternative to sleeping in or hanging out with my friends. Worship wasn’t the end of it, though. Sabbath also meant visiting my grandmother, which meant keeping on my church clothes through the afternoon. Not restful. Not restful at all.
In college, Sabbath meant time-and-a-half at the grocery store where I worked, and an afternoon spent sorting through customers’ carts to remove items forbidden for purchase under South Carolina “blue laws.”
(Once, my manager was arrested and our store was shut down when someone accidentally sold a screwdriver — the hand tool — which was forbidden on Sundays, I suppose because it might make you want to work. We were only allowed to sell necessities. Paper towels, not cloth ones; disposable diapers, not cloth ones; paper cups and plates, not ceramic ones; film, but no camera; batteries, but no flashlights. I suppose it might have meant ammo but no guns, but that wasn’t in our inventory. It was an odd time.)
Sabbath was always Sunday, even for the Jewish merchant who requested an exemption so he could close on Saturday and open on Sunday. Nope. Sunday it was.
In seminary and since, Sabbath-as-Sunday has meant work. Worship for pastors is lovely, but it isn’t rest. It isn’t always even worship, though we try. And when we look beyond sabbath as work, we (I?) only ever seem to come up with sabbath as forced meditation, or in my case, (since meditation has never been my spiritual gift), pious sitting and staring.
In all of these, Sabbath was something to check off the weekly to-do list. Which is perpetually unsatisfying.
So, I’m learning to observe Sabbath in other-than-worship, other-than-Sunday ways, fully aware that however I land, my understanding may clash with yours or even offend you.
Like 11 episodes of a TV drama.
Then, though, through the fog, comes Brueggemann.
"In ancient Israel, the Sabbath is a mighty practice that sustains a peculiar faith identity in political economy that seeks eagerly to overcome that peculiar identity that is seen as a hindrance to larger economic effectiveness."
In other words, Sabbath is resistance. First commanded in Exodus, in the time of Pharaoh’s enslavement of labor, to observe Sabbath was to extricate the community from the extract-and-exploit economy of the Pharaoh.
Sabbath is the bridge between the first few commandments, the ones about love of God, and the latter commandments, the ones that describe love of neighbor. It reminds, says Brueggemann, “don’t crowd, don’t demand, don’t coerce.”
And this, a powerful observation: Sabbath “entails participation in a community that does not believe that human well-being and worth are established by endless productivity…. (Sabbath) is a life-choice to belong to a different humanity” and “a day of social equalization for those who on all other days are quite unequal.”
I read this as I was also reading the day’s news, including a story in the Washington Post of a teaching assistant in a Florida public school who works four jobs — 80 hours a week — and lives in his car. He said he and his teaching assistant co-workers were constantly exhausted. Small wonder. I was a teaching assistant for four years while I was a half-time pastor in Texas. It was exhausting, and I was 30 years younger then. I had choices; most folks in this situation do not.
But this is the world we live in. Aside from the federal poverty guidelines, woefully inadequate to describe the reality of America’s workers, there is another measure, described in the WaPo article: ALICE, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. In 2020, the story reports, 13 percent of American households were below the federal poverty line, but 29 percent more were below the ALICE threshold. That’s 51 million households altogether — more than 40 percent of Americans who cannot live securely.
Adding insult to injury locally, a federal judge ruled against local objections to the Flint water settlement (surely insufficient), stating among other things that New York and Indiana are not too far and $500 is not too much to pay for the bone lead testing that would support residents’ claim of harm. Forty percent poverty in Flint, and 27 percent unemployment before COVID, and folks are supposed to afford such a thing.
We live in a Pharaoh economy of extraction and exploitation.
Sabbath, continues Brueggemann, “is in fact a tap root for a political economy that is imagined and practiced differently, (where) economic concerns are subordinated to and governed by neighborly relationships.”
Like so many others, I decorated my home for Christmas last weekend. It feels like capitulation, I know, especially since I’m the one harping on letting Advent be Advent. But among my Christmas “ornaments,” next to the Christmas tree, is an old, wooden, rough-hewn child-size crutch, gruesome perhaps and odd to some, but a reminder to me in a Tiny Tim sort of way of so many people ground up by our system, without our assistance.
We’ve been sold a bill of goods, but Sabbath is still an act of resistance, still a commitment to an alternative.
Maybe this season, we can ponder a world imagined by Jesus that doesn’t grind people up. There is a movement afoot to trim the work week to 30 hours, to just 4 days, which sounds pretty righteous to me, paired with a living wage. Imagine if our paid labor was just 20 percent of our week instead of 50 percent as is so often true for ALICE. Imagine if our neighbors had enough, had dignity, humanity, rest.
Imagine all we could do to transform the world if we had time, if we were well-rested. Of course, that’s the reason Sabbath was so threatening to Pharaoh and still is. That’s also why they killed Jesus and still do.
But Jesus is still the one we follow.
Blessings of Advent.