Rest is Radical Resistance
Are y’all tired? I know I am.
As an American, that’s hard to admit. All my life I was told this country was built by hard work, grit and determination. Our ancestors picked cotton, they told me. By hand! From sun up to sundown! Life ain’t changed — y’all just lazy!
But here’s the thing. In two years, we’ve lived through:
- A global pandemic that’s killed over 800,000 in the U.S. alone (and a new mutation even more contagious.)
- American education reimagined on the fly, with kids being bounced from virtual class to regular class and back home again and teachers forced to become digital content creators and IT pros all at the same time.
- Church experiences blown apart and reworked into virtual, online events robbing us of our sense of community and corporate worship.
And on top of all that:
- An attempted coup, concocted in secret at the highest levels of government, executed by politicians who use racial resentment to whip their followers into a violent frenzy and then sent them to attack the capitol building. If not for a few courageous policmen, this violent mob would have overturned a presidential election and reinstalled Donald Trump to the White House.
That’s a lot for anybody. But if we’re honest, we’ve been struggling.
Before the pandemic, we were bombarded by messaging that told us we were incomplete and ads promising to make us whole.
Before the pandemic, we were already working longer hours for less pay, just to get enough money to buy everything in those ads.
Our weekends had already become just two more work days — on Saturday, we ran errands all day and on Sunday, we got ready to go back to work and do it all over again.
American life before the pandemic was like:
Too Much Work +Too Much Stress + Too Much Sickness + Too Many Medical Bills = More Work to Pay for Those Medical Bills → Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Until You Die.
Did the pandemic wear us out? Or have we always been in this cycle of death?And if so, how do we escape?
The ancients have an answer, right near the front of the Bible. In the book of Exodus, we see a rag tag band of slaves who are overworked and abused by a wicked system until they finally escape. They leave exploitation and abuse behind, but they don’t know what comes next.
They just know they want to be free.
What happens next is a turning point in their entire history as a people. And it can help us understand how we get through this crucial time with grace, peace and clarity.
Without the book of Exodus, I would not be a Christian. It’s one thing to liberate my soul from spiritual oppression. But a God who liberates my mind and body from physical and mental oppression ? As a descendant of enslaved people in America, that’s the only God I can trust.
But according to theologian Walter Brueggeman, God has more in mind. In his book Sabbath as Resistance, Brueggeman says God is not simply concerned about what happens to us, but why it happens.
So in Exodus when we read…
“The Egyptians put slave bosses in charge of the people of Israel and tried to wear them down with hard work. Those bosses forced them to build the cities of Pithom and Rameses, where the king could store his supplies.”
“The Egyptians were cruel to the people of Israel and forced them to make bricks and to mix mortar and to work in the fields…the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites 13 and worked them ruthlessly. 14 They made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their harsh labor the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly.
We know God is watching. And with all the money and power flowing up to Pharoah, while nothing but coercion and constant work flow down to the workers at the bottom, God does not just see broken, sinful people. God sees a broken, sinful system, because it makes Pharoah into a god and lets him turn human beings into things who only exist for Pharoah’s pleasure.
But for the greedy, even that’s not enough. When Pharaoh looks at life, he sees scarcity, not abundance. When he looks at life, he sees a competition and the winner is the one who takes first. When they imagine their workers prospering and their families growing, they feel anxiety and paranoia, not happiness. That’s why Pharoahs never share.
Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. 10 Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies and fight against us…”
From Egypt to Rome to Great Britain and all the way across the ocean to America, the Pharoahs of the day copy this model and re-shape the world into an Empire of Scarcity. We citizens copy it, too, because we believe the only way to surive Pharoah is to become Pharoah.
“Fuck the world, don’t ask me for shit,” we say. “Everything you get you gotta work hard for it!”
When we walk down the street, do we see friends and neighbors or do we see competitors who wanna take what little we have? Do we think we have to outwork, out think, out earn everybody? No matter what it takes? Did we fall in love with the same grind crushing us to dust? While the real Pharoahs build rockets to explore space so they can expand the model again?
Wash? Rinse? Repeat?
When the free Hebrews meet God in the desert, they are done with that life. They want change and God is ready to use them. But to create a new thing, you must become a new thing and this group — traumatized and abused for generations — are not ready. Not yet. So God gives them ten new practices. To help them forget who Pharoah shaped them to be. So they can remember who God made them to be.
History knows them as the Ten Commandments.
The first three show them how to relate to God:
You shall have no other Gods before me
You shall not make for yourselves an idol
You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God
The last six on how to relate to each other.
Honor your father and your mother
You shall not murder
You shall not commit adultery
You shall not steal
You shall not give false testimony
You shall not covet
And the one in the middle, the fourth practice, to help them live out the rest.
Remember the Sabbath, it says. And keep it holy.
And what is the Sabbath? It’s the day God took, after creating all of existence, to simply rest. To be. To pause long enough to appreciate the work, in confidence and peace.
As Brueggeman goes on to write:
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.
If your whole identity has been defined by work that never ends, this is a radical idea. Pharoah — the man who claimed to be a God — never let them stop working. The Unseen God of Heaven is different.
Rest, this God says. Like me. So you can be like me. Live like me. Create like me. That is the way you build something new and make the world a better place for yourself, your family and your neighbor.
Together, that’s how we will destroy the Empire of Scarcity and create a Land of Promise.
Here in Charlotte, seeds of rest already bear fruit. One of my yoga teachers, Grace Millsap, intentionally brings rest and gentle postures to her classes, resisting the power yoga, workout culture in our city. I always come away feeling refreshed and clear.
Grace knows rest must expand beyond the studio, so she offers a retreat called Take a Pause, inviting her neighbors to experience rest as well.
Radical rest is more than a personal practice — it can be a business practice, too. At Khali Yoga Center, all staff get paid time off for the Christmas holidays. That’s normal in corporate America, but despite all the talk about self care and sustainability in yoga world, most teachers are like hired hands — if they don’t work, they don’t get paid. As far as I know, no other studio in Charlotte gives their staff PTO. Khali Yoga Center is showing what radical rest looks like when the people with power extend grace to the people under their care.
2021 was exhausting. 2022 will probably be harder. The pandemic is still going, conservatives still want to restrict who can vote and what we can learn, and the Pharoahs still don’t share.
I am not naive. Rest will not produce a new Voting Rights Act or Paid Maternity Leave or Student Debt Relief or Accessible, Inclusive yoga. But if those are the battles and we are the soldiers, we need to get ready for a fight. Because if you have a assignment — maybe to teach spiritual practices, or advocate for more inclusion or more care for the least of these — rest is crucial for your work. Not so you can ‘feel good.’ But so you can reconnect with the One who gave you the assignment in the first place. And remember the assignment is what you came to do, not who you came to be.
So in this holiday season — Rest. Restore. Refresh. And then come back in 2022 ready to go. We’re in for the fight of our lives.
Updated:
Charlotte Family Yoga, another studio here in Charlotte, has offered a week PTO in July and December for the last theee years. Shout out to Vicie Moran for the correction.
