Sabbath as Resistance Quotes

“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.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“Thus I have come to think that the fourth commandment on sabbath is the most difficult and most urgent of the commandments in our society, because it summons us to intent and conduct that defies the most elemental requirements of a commodity-propelled society that specializes in control and entertainment, bread and circuses … along with anxiety and violence.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“The first commandment is a declaration that the God of the exodus is unlike all the gods the slaves have known heretofore. This God is not to be confused with or thought parallel to the insatiable gods of imperial productivity. This God is subsequently revealed as a God of mercy, steadfast love, and faithfulness who is committed to covenantal relationships of fidelity (see Exod. 34:6–7).”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“We used to sing the hymn “Take Time to Be Holy.” But perhaps we should be singing, “Take time to be human.” Or finally, “Take time.” Sabbath is taking time … time to be holy … time to be human.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“The way of mammon (capital, wealth) is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath. Jesus taught his disciples that they could not have it both ways.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“That divine rest on the seventh day of creation has made clear (a) that YHWH is not a workaholic, (b) that YHWH is not anxious about the full functioning of creation, and (c) that the well-being of creation does not depend on endless work.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“The Sabbath rest of God is the acknowledgment 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. All of that is implicit in the reality and exhibit of divine rest.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“Worship that does not lead to neighborly compassion and justice cannot be faithful worship of YHWH. The offer is a phony Sabbath!”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“The conclusion affirmed by the narrative is that wherever YHWH governs as an alternative to Pharaoh, there the restfulness of YHWH effectively counters the restless anxiety of Pharaoh.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“In this interpretive tradition, Sabbath is not simply a pause. It is an occasion for reimagining all social life away from coercion and competition to compassionate solidarity. Such solidarity is imaginable and capable of performance only when the drivenness of acquisitiveness is broken. Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. Whereas Israelites are always tempted to acquisitiveness, Sabbath is an invitation to receptivity, and acknowledgement that what is needed is given and need not be seized.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“In his Sermon on the Mount, [Jesus] declares to his disciples:

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. (Matt. 6: 24)

The way of mammon (capital, wealth) is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath. Jesus taught his disciples that they could not have it both ways.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“Isaiah 5:8–10. The oracle in Micah has a close parallel in the poetic oracle of Isaiah 5:8–10. This poetic segment also begins with “Ah” (“woe”), anticipating big trouble to come because of destructive social behavior. The indictment is against those who “join house to house” and “field to field,” exactly the language of the commandment and of the Micah oracle. The process consists of buying up the land of small peasant farmers in order to develop large estates. The vulnerable peasants are then removed from their land and denied a livelihood, and now coveters can bask in their newly secured isolated self-indulgence. The prophetic judgment pertains to such rural displacement; in our time, the same crisis might refer to urban gentrification that dislocates the poor and the vulnerable. The poetry traces the destruction, by acquisitiveness, of a viable neighborly infrastructure.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“I have come to think that the moment of giving the bread of Eucharist as gift is the quintessential center of the notion of Sabbath rest in Christian tradition. It is gift! We receive in gratitude. Imagine having a sacrament named “thanks”! We are on the receiving end, without accomplishment, achievement, or qualification. It is a gift, and we are grateful! That moment of gift is a peaceable alternative that many who are “weary and heavy-laden, cumbered with a load of care” receive gladly. The offer of free gift, faithful to Judaism, might let us learn enough to halt the dramatic anti-neighborliness to which our society is madly and uncritically committed.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“But Sabbath is not only resistance. It is alternative. It is an alternative to the demanding, chattering, pervasive presence of advertising and its great liturgical claim of professional sports that devour all our “rest time.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“The first commandments concern God, God’s aniconic character, and God’s name (Exod. 20:3–7). But when we consider the identity of this God, we are made immediately aware that the God who will brook no rival and who eventually will rest is a God who is embedded in a narrative; this God is not known or available apart from that narrative. The narrative matrix of YHWH, the God of Israel, is the exodus narrative. This is the God “who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (v. 2).”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. Whereas Israelites are always tempted to acquisitiveness, Sabbath is an invitation to receptivity, an acknowledgment that what is needed is given and need not be seized.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“When a god is fashioned into a golden commodity (or even lesser material); divine subject becomes divine object, and agent becomes commodity.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“I have come to think that the fourth commandment on sabbath is the most difficult and most urgent of the commandments in our society, because it summons us to intent and conduct that defies the most elemental requirements of a commodity-propelled society that specializes in control and entertainment, bread and circuses … along with anxiety and violence.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“The conclusion affirmed by the narrative is that wherever YHWH governs as an alternative to Pharaoh, there the restfulness of YHWH effectively counters the restless anxiety of Pharaoh. 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.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“Even in the wilderness with scarce resources, God mandates a pause for Sabbath for the community:”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“we may consider the sabbath as an alternative to the endless demands of economic reality, more specifically the demands of market ideology that depend, as Adam Smith had already seen, on the generation of needs and desires that will leave us endlessly “rest-less,” inadequate, unfulfilled, and in pursuit of that which may satiate desire.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“The Sabbath, along with the other practices he exposits, concerns the maintenance of a distinct faith identity in the midst of a culture that is inhospitable to all distinct identities in its impatient reduction of all human life to the requirements of the market.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“The rat race of such predation and usurpation is a restlessness that issues inescapably in anxiety that is often at the edge of being unmanageable; when pursued vigorously enough, moreover, one is propelled to violence against the neighbor in eagerness for what properly belongs to the neighbor.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“The emancipatory gift of YHWH to Israel is contrasted with all the seductions of images. The memory of the exodus concerns the God of freedom who frees.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“Sabbath is a big no for both; it is no to the worship of commodity; it is no to the pursuit of commodity. But it is more than no. Sabbath is the regular, disciplined, visible, concrete yes to the neighborly reality of the community beloved by God.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“commandment on sabbath is the most difficult and most urgent of the commandments in our society, because it summons us to intent and conduct that defies the most elemental requirements of a commodity-propelled society that specializes in control and entertainment, bread and circuses . . . along with anxiety and violence.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance, New Edition with Study Guide: Saying No to the Culture of Now

“Adam Smith had already seen, on the generation of needs and desires that will leave us endlessly “rest-less,” inadequate, unfulfilled, and in pursuit of that which may satiate desire. Those requirements concern endless predation so that we are a society of 24/7 multitasking in order to achieve, accomplish, perform, and possess.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance, New Edition with Study Guide: Saying No to the Culture of Now