Do you remember back during the season of Lent we made our way through Aaron Miller’s book “Weird in the World?” Like Jesus, Aaron is critical of the values of “the world as it is” and suggesting that the gospel calls us not to fit in but to stick out because we live by a whole different set of values that may well look weird in “the world.”
Growing up, I was idealistic. I was dissatisfied with “the world as it is.” I wanted to change the world into something more peaceful, loving, respectful, just. In the message of Jesus I heard a call to turn “the world as it is” upside down. Most of us at some point in our lives look at the poverty, injustice, prejudice, suffering, environmental crisis and think, this is not the way it should be. This is not the way it was meant to be. And for followers of Jesus, this is not the way God wants it to be.
It’s not just that there are rich and powerful individuals exercising bad behavior (although there is plenty of that). It is systemic.
For example, everyone will say that the wild fires this summer are a terrible thing. The destruction and suffering is palpable. However, if you pay close attention to the economic effects as measured by Gross Domestic Product, these fires, with all the employment they generate in fighting them, the insurance claims and work involved in re-building after disaster will give a measurable “boost to the economy.” If that sounds sick to you, you are hearing it correctly. The measures of health in “the world as it is,” largely economic measures like GDP, economic growth, unemployment rate, inflation rate all make other measures like love, happiness, justice, dignity look unrealistically idealistic.
The call to take sabbath, to stop producing and rest, to step off the economic treadmill in order to connect with God, the creation and our deepest self runs counter to “the world as it is.” Sabbath makes no economic sense in “the world as it is.” In fact, sabbath is a practice of resistance to “the world as it is,” sand in the works to a profit-obsessed system. Learning sabbath means learning to resist, to not fit well into “the world as it is,” and to say no.
See you this sabbath.
Blessings, Will