Eating is a social act, and I don’t simply mean because we so often eat in family units, prefer to break bread with friends. Eating is a social act because in advanced cultures, technology allows a small percentage of the population to produce a surplus, so that others might take on others tasks, if we are lucky, the arts, if not, war. This was one of the key challenges for the ancient Hebrews, for they lived on marginal land, while the rich river valleys to their northeast, the Tigris-Euphrates, and to their southwest, the Nile, produced enough to support large armies, making the Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians a perennial threat despite the defensible terrain in Canaan.
In advanced cultures, like those in the ancient river valleys and like the one in which we live, food then becomes part of the system we call economic activity, the exchange of goods and services, and what you eat very much reflects the values and stratification of the social system, generals and admirals feasting while soldiers and sailors eat hard-tack and ship’s biscuit.
This is true in America today, where the urban poor often live in food deserts, areas where there are no grocery stores, no fresh produce, nothing but the highly processed foods – powdered donuts and sugary drinks – found in bodegas. For many, if you want fresh healthy foods, you have to take a long bus journey to the suburbs, where you can buy only as much food as you can carry, especially hard on the elderly and disabled.
I was reminded of this truth again this week reading the latest issue of the Economist. It reminds me of my privileged status, for while I might complain about the prices at Whole Foods, or Whole Paycheck as many of us know it, at least I have the option of buying organic, of buying fresh. When I moved here, I was delighted to see the wide selections available at Tradewinds and the Co-op, happy to land in a granola and micro-brew sort of town.
I like to cook, and I try to pay attention to what I eat, because I care about my health, because I understand eating as a social act, and because I understand eating as a spiritual act. There is no doubt that eating was a spiritual act in scripture, Peter and his vision of the unclean food that the Lord commanded him to eat. Two thousand years later, and we still see battles over what you are allowed to eat, with a recent surge in the murder of Muslims and lower caste individuals in India, accused, often falsely, by upper caste mobs of eating beef.
Wealthier Americans, which in our racist society mostly means educated white Americans, can opt for organic food, whole foods, can be locavores and avoid GMO foods, belong to CSAs and co-ops. And that isn’t a bad thing. Nor is the growing vegetarian and vegan movement. Livestock is incredibly inefficient, consuming massive amounts of water and producing massive amounts of greenhouse gases. Cutting back on your meat consumption is a guaranteed way to reduce your carbon-footprint.
In a perfect world I might even choose to be vegetarian, despite the hard work it requires, for I have a Buddhist take on the slaughter of animals and I do care about creation. But then there is bacon, and Carolina-style barbecue.
I can at least participate, and have at times participated, in the meat-free Monday movement. This is a growing segment of the population, again mostly white and educated, that chooses to avoid meat one day a week as an act of creation stewardship. It is, if you will, a sabbath from meat.
Others are choosing to block out a day a week when they don’t expose themselves to our systems of mass disinformation, a sabbath from media, and in this age of manufactured anxiety, I strongly recommend the practice. Those who workout regularly take days off to allow their bodies to recover, a workout sabbath.
In fact, I would argue that those who live lives that are mindful and intentional build many of these mini-sabbaths into their lives, while those caught up in the false consciousness of our age buy, buy, buy, push and push and push until they collapse in exhaustion.
Yet we have turned the religious notion of sabbath into something ugly, highly charged. In our country this started with the Puritans, a part of our own Congregational and United Church of Christ heritage, for while they were hippies of sorts, revolutionaries really, they were also a strict little cult. Initially they had complete control of the New England colonies, forcing out those that would challenge their hard line.
Even as the region became more diverse, as the nation itself embraced an idea of religious freedom modeled on William Penn’s successful experiment and influenced by the humanism of the age, still the Congregationalists maintained control of New England culture, promulgating strict “blue laws,†forcing everyone to comply with their religious calendar.
Happily the civic enforcement of religious belief has fallen away, at least in this one area of our lives, for while Christian jihadis want to control over our bedrooms and our bodies, especially dangerous women’s bodies, they are okay with going to Wal-Mart after church.
Yet within the Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox communities in Brooklyn, strict rules about shabbat lead to a high rate of fire deaths as gas stoves are left on for twenty-four hours at a time, longer during the High Holy Days. This happens again and again, but no one will change the rule.
It is exactly this sort of legalism that Jesus challenges with his sabbath violations, crazy things like healing people. Then there was that time when some of his disciples pulled off some heads of grain as they were walking, leading to accusations that they were “harvesting†on the sabbath. This sort of nit-picking legalism is one of the three areas Jesus works hardest to reform, right up there with greed and self-righteousness.
In another passage, in the 2nd chapter of Mark, Jesus is pretty clear, saying that the sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the sabbath.
A common sabbath might have worked when you were born and lived your entire life in one region where there might be one or two systems of belief at most, but technology has accelerated human migrations. I can get in an aluminum tube with hundreds of others and be hurled to the other side of the world where they believe very different things, operate on a different calendar. My neighbors celebrate different sabbaths, if they celebrate any sabbath at all, and social enforcement of any one system just leads to conflict and violence.
Certainly to be church to one another we must gather to maintain our covenant, to learn and to worship, and the flow of our communities means that Sunday morning is still the best time, but it does not have to be the only time. What about those who have to work on Sunday? The family where those few hours are the only time for rest, the only time to be together.
The Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann writes of sabbath as resistance, and that is exactly what it is, but like a meat-free sabbath or a media-free sabbath or even a workout sabbath, we don’t all have to do it at the exact same time. Sabbath is not about enforcing our belief on others, which would just be more of the same use of power that constantly gets us in trouble.
Sabbath is resistance, resistance to the frenzied false consciousness of our age. Two thousand years ago Jesus used the sabbath as an opportunity to resist the legalism and showy self-righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, the same sins so present today in Evangelicals. We can use sabbath, the religious sabbath and new forms of sabbath, as ways to upend systems of oppression, systems of destruction. Visionary Christian leader Brian McClaren calls our current social systems a suicidal system, and it is clear to most of us that the great machine of our society is not working.
Checking out, taking a sabbath, not participating… this is how we change the world. Refuse to play the game, and the game collapses. A generation of young people raised on dystopian literature understands better than any of us that the system only works as long as we participate, that the Hunger Games only work until contestants wake up and team up against the system.
Engage in the arms race for bigger and better children’s birthday parties, and everyone loses, and it works that way in every single part of our lives.
Sabbath, time off, centered and checked out of the frenzy, is good for our souls, but it is also good for our society, time for us to see how silly it all is, to resist Madison Avenue’s siren song promising that if you just buy enough stuff you will be happy, if you just take the right pills you will live forever. How’s that working out for you?
Mindful lives, intentional living, will include sabbath, though it might not look like the sabbath of the ancient Hebrews or of the Puritans. Engaged lives will include sabbath as small acts of resistance. Meat-free, media-free, family time, a week without shopping, staying at home on Black Friday, cutting the cord on the inflationary death spiral of a million expensive cable channels of absolutely nothing… These are all forms of sabbath.
And maybe, in that moment of resistance, in that moment of rest, like the woman in the synagogue, you will experience healing.
Amen.