Sacred Strides: Sabbath as a Command, a Practice, and a GiftSample

DAY 4: Sabbath as an Act of Resistance

But now after you have known God, or rather are known by God, how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements, to which you desire again to be in bondage?
Galatians 4:9

Theologian and author Walter Brueggemann calls Sabbath rest an “act of resistance.” I like that a lot. It places Sabbath keeping in the same stream of thought, action, and urgency as the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. I think that’s an appropriate place for Sabbath keeping.

Dr. King and Malcolm X resisted a dominant ideology that dehumanized people God Loved. They taught others to resist the underpinning of industries and institutions that believed Black bodies were most valuable as instruments in an economy driven by various forms of slave labor. The civil rights movement was an act of resistance. That resistance was an act of love.

The Sabbath was commanded by God in the shadow of a very recent history of Jewish slave labor in Egypt. It, too, was an act of resistance. And that resistance was also an act of love.

Brueggemann published his book Sabbath as Resistance in 2014 for similar reasons. Because 113 years after the transatlantic slave trade ended, the same values and assumptions were still in play and wreaking havoc on human life.

In the book of Matthew, Jesus healed a man by sending unclean spirits into a herd of pigs. The villagers then chased Jesus out of town because they didn’t like what it cost them to make that man well. Part of what Brueggemann points to in his book is that when you push against the machinery, it will push back. A booking agency once dropped me for turning down one too many speaking engagements that fell on my designated Sabbaths. I never regretted it.

Pulling fifty-two days of work off your calendar is an act of resistance that is, at its heart, an act of love—love for the organization you care for, love for the people working within it, and love for those who benefit from what the organization is doing. A regular Sabbath helps counteract the relentless and ruthless drumbeat of the other narratives that seek to enslave us.

Respond

What enslaving habits or behaviors have you struggled to free yourself from? Ask God whether a Sabbath practice might help you find freedom.