Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Amazing Reads: Sabbath as Resistance


Sabbath as Resistance
By Walter Brueggemann

Originally, I wasn't going to read this book. Mike Chen recommended that I read this book though (along with several other books), so I thought I would go for it. Walter Brueggemann writes that the Sabbath is not simply about keeping rules but rather about becoming a whole person and restoring a whole society. We are constantly going in order to be more, get more, etc., but we never really take any time to rest. Keeping the Sabbath allows us to break this restless cycle and focus on what is truly important: God, other people, all life. 

Favorite 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 becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest.” -Walter Brueggemann
-“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
-“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
-“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

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