Sabbath as Neighborliness

Last year I read a book with a group of colleagues, written by Walter Brueggemann, entitled Sabbath as Resistance. Now, I won’t pretend like I can still remember all the facets of Brueggemann’s argument; but the overarching theme is the idea that Christians’ observation of the sabbath – a day for rest – is a form of resistance to the non-stop pressure to produce that our society places on us. As a society, we tend to let these pressures drive us and drive out our sabbath time because we judge and are judged based on our productivity.

In the opening chapter, Brueggemann says this: 

The Sabbath rest of God is the acknowledgement 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. Rather they are subjects situated in an economy of neighborliness…Sabbath is a practical divestment so that neighborly engagement, rather than production and consumption, defines our lives.  

Well folks, we find ourselves in a forced sabbath, yes, but a sabbath nonetheless. Though many of us are still being expected to produce (hello blog posts J), even this productivity has taken on a different shape; it is happening at a different pace, often in a different setting than we’re used to. The flow of work, the flow of productivity, the flow of our lives has been dramatically altered, and it’s out of our control. What, then, are we to do?

We let our lives be defined by neighborly engagement rather than production and consumption. We recognize this change in flow as a true sabbath and let our thought at the end of each day be, “How did I care for my neighbor today?” and not, “What have I produced today?”. 

And here is the glorious thing about this particular sabbath time…caring for our neighbors may involve hands-on care like running errands or making a phone call, but it may very well simply look like staying at home. So, friends, I hope that we will receive this sabbath time (uncertain and anxious as it may be) as a gift – a gift to be shared with our neighbors.