We continue our three-week worship series this week on Summer Sabbath. 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 20.1-8
August 31 Matthew 11.28-30
Walter Brueggemann writes, “SABBATH-KEEPING IS A DISTINCTIVELY JEWISH ART FORM. It is, however, a practice and a discipline that has long preoccupied Christians who have responded to a core requirement of the God of covenant. It is unfortunate that in U.S. society, largely out of a misunderstood Puritan heritage, Sabbath has gotten enmeshed in legalism and moralism and blue laws and life-denying practices that contradict the freedom-bestowing intention of Sabbath. Such distortions, moreover, have led to endlessly wearying quarrels about “Sunday activities” such as movies and card playing and, currently in my state, purchasing liquor on Sunday. All that common lore in U.S. society, of course, amounts to a pitiful misrepresentation of Sabbath-keeping as an art form. When taken seriously in faith by Jews— and derivatively by Christians— Sabbath-keeping is a way of making a statement of peculiar identity amid a larger public identity, of maintaining and enacting a counteridentity that refuses “mainstream” identity, which itself entails anti-human practice and the worship of antihuman gods. Understood in this way, Sabbath is a bodily act of testimony to alternative and resistance to pervading values and the assumptions behind those values” (Sabbath as Resistance, 20-21).