Week #5: Subversive Games for Ruthlessly Eliminating Hurry
Subversive Games for Week of October 31-November 6
For more details about Games, visit our Communal Practices page . Or visit our Sermons page to access last week’s conversation about Ruthlessly Eliminating Hurry and Games for Un-hurrying our lives.
Jesus invited apprentices to Consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field (Matthew 6) as an antidote to anxiety. Below are practices or Games that we sense may help us to slow down and PAY ATTENTION to the Christ, to our neighbors, to our own selves, and to the Creation.
Game: Play “Hide & Seek” with the Christ aka Sabbath
Consider setting aside one chunk of time this week to “Hide” aka STOP (SHABBAT) production and consuming.
During the timeframe of stopping also consider playing “Seek” with Christ and yourself. Consider practicing DELIGHT or Recreation.
As followers of Christ, the invitation is not to create a new LAW of Sabbath but a new Game to Play with Christ. And so we are encouraged as families and individuals and smaller groups to define what PRODUCTION means for us.
One such definition of production is: “Labor enforced by political or economic means, by the carrot or the stick.” - Economist / work theorist, Bob Black
So how about YOU, what is Production for you? What is consumption?
What timeframe might you STOP producing and consuming?
OK. So now that you have defined production and when said production will cease, what takes its place? What is the Alternative to production and consumption?
DELIGHT! The Hebrew phrase for Shabbat - Sabbath - Yes it means TO STOP but it also means TO DELIGHT!!!
Dan Allender, in his book Sabbath, had this to say: The Sabbath is an invitation to enter delight. The Sabbath, when experienced as God intended, is the best day of our lives. Without question or thought, it is the best day of the week. It is the day we anticipate on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday—and the day we remember on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Sabbath is the holy time where we feast, play, dance, have sex, sing, pray, laugh, tell stories, read, paint, walk, and watch creation in its fullness. Few people are willing to enter the Sabbath and sanctify it, to make it holy, because a full day of delight and joy is more than most people can bear in a lifetime, let alone a week.16 And all this is rooted in God. He rested. He stopped. He set aside an entire day just to delight in his world. But notice what else God did: he “blessed the seventh day and made it holy.” Two things worth noting here.
First, the Sabbath is “blessed.” In the Genesis story, three things are blessed by God. To start with, God blessed the animal kingdom with an invocation: “Be fruitful and multiply.”17 Then he blessed humanity the same way: “Be fruitful and multiply.”18 And then God blessed the Sabbath. Wait, so God blessed animals, humans, and then…a day? Mmm. What does that mean?
It means that the Sabbath—just like an animal or a human being—has the life-giving capacity to procreate. To fill the world up with more life. Life is tiring. (Case in point, most likely you read that line and sighed…) You get to the end of the week, and even if you love your job, still you’re worn down on every level—emotionally, even spiritually.
The Sabbath is how we unplug from production and consumption AND fill our souls back up with life. Its also how we practice JUSTICE / RESTORATION . Its how we PLAY hide and seek.
So first, the Sabbath is “blessed.” Secondly, it’s “holy.”
Have you ever thought about that? How a day could be called “holy”? This would have been jarring to the original audience. In the ancient Near East, the gods were found in the world of space, not of time. They were found in a holy temple or on a holy mountain or at a holy shrine. But this God—the one, true Creator God—is found not in a place but in a day. If you want to go and meet with this God, you don’t have to make pilgrimage to Mecca or Varanasi or Stonehenge. You just have to set aside a day of the week to Shabbat, stop long enough to experience him.
So there is a day that is blessed and holy. A rhythm in creation. Six and one. And when we tap into this rhythm, we experience health and life. But when we fight this rhythm—ignore it, suppress it, push past it, bully it, make excuses, look for a way to get out of it—we reap the consequences. - Comer, John Mark. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry (p. 158). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Resources for Sabbath: