We begin a three-week worship series this week on Sabbath as Resistance. We hope this worship series will help us to reclaim the significance of Sabbath. Each week will focus upon a particular expression of Sabbath from scripture. Our worship series is based on a book called Sabbath as Resistance: Saying NO to the CULTURE OF NOW by Walter Brueggemann who is a professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary.
Outline of Sabbath as Resistance
August 17 Genesis 2.1-3
August 24 Exodus 20.1-6
August 31 Matthew 11.28-30
What are some images, memories and words that you hold relating to Sabbath?
Walter Brueggemann writes, For the most part, contemporary Christians pay little attention to the Sabbath. We more or less know that the day came to reflect, in U.S. culture, the most stringent disciplinary faith of the Puritans which, in recent time, translated into a moralistic prescription for a day of quiet restraint and prohibition (Sabbath as Resistance: (Kindle Locations 48-51). Brueggemann continues, In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods. Such an act of resistance requires enormous intentionality and communal reinforcement amid the barrage of seductive pressures from the insatiable insistences of the market, with its intrusion into every part of our life from the family to the national budget (Sabbath as Resistance: (Kindle Locations 107-111).
Read Genesis 2.1-3. In this story of creation, God rests on the seventh day. Genesis 2.3 states: So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that God had done in creation. How would it feel for you to take an entire day this week for rest? What would you do? Where would you rest? How would this be for you?