Resistance to Anxiety

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

A sermon for Sunday 8^th October

 

Deuteronomy 5.1-21; 6.4-9

Just before Liz and I went away on holiday last month,
            I preached the concluding sermon of our short summer series on the Sabbath,
and I spoke about the principle of Sabbath as resistance to coercion,
            drawing on Walter Brueggemann’s excellent book ‘Sabbath as Resistance’.
 
Well, now I’m back we find ourselves in the lectionary readings for the autumn,
            as they take us through the revelation of God in the Hebrew Bible,
            and once again we’re in Deuteronomy 5, and at the ten commandments.
 
So today’s sermon is a kind-of follow on from the one four weeks ago,
            and I want us to return to our exploration of the principle of Sabbath.
But this time, and again drawing on Walter Brueggemann,
            I want us to think about Sabbath as resistance to anxiety.
 
In many ways, I think anxiety might be the defining feature
            of Christianity in our time.
 
It’s out there in society beyond the church, of course:
            the number people seeking help through medicine and therapy
            for anxiety-related illness continues to grow and grow.
And if you’re part of that number, as many of us are,
            I can speak from my own experience that help is available,
            and it is worth seeking sooner rather than later.
 
But today I want us to think about anxiety as a communal,
            rather than individual, response to stress;
and particularly to the way church communities,
            including our own here at Bloomsbury, experience anxiety.
 
There is, after all, much to be anxious about.
 
The decline in church attendance is widespread
            across all the historic denominations,
making it harder to be the churches that we once were,
            harder to fill the rotas, harder to raise the money,
            harder to do the good that we long to do.
 
I remember having a conversation with my former colleague Ruth a few years ago,
            and we were discussing what personality Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church had,
                        imagining the congregation as a person
                        and thinking about what they would be like to be with, to talk to…
            and Ruth’s diagnosis stayed with me:
                        she said that Bloomsbury personified
                        would be a person living with chronic anxiety.
 
This is not to say that this is true of every person sat here today,
            although it will be true for some of us.
 
But rather, it’s to say that collectively,
            the pressures on us as a congregation in central London are such
            that anxiety is an entirely natural and appropriate response.
 
And so we come to Sabbath-keeping as resistance to anxiety. [1]
 
Now, you may not naturally think of Sabbath-keeping as an antidote to anxiety,
            because in many parts of the Christian world,
            it is precisely the opposite!
 
Largely out of a misunderstood Puritan heritage,
            Sabbath-keeping has often become enmeshed in legalism and moralism,
                        and life-denying practices that contradict
                        the freedom-bestowing intention of Sabbath.
 
Such distortions, moreover, have led to endlessly wearying quarrels
            about “Sunday activities”
such as the ‘Keep Sunday Special’ campaign (remember that?),
            or debates about whether you can go to the cinema or pub on a Sunday…
 
I knew one family which decreed that no cooking should be done on a Sunday,
            and so the wife (of course) had to do all the cooking on the Saturday night,
            leaving it in the oven on a low setting overnight,
            so they had food to eat when they got home from church the next day.
 
This is not freedom from anxiety!
            Rather, it amounts to a pitiful misrepresentation of Sabbath-keeping.
 
But when taken seriously in faith by Jews—and derivatively by Christians—
            Sabbath-keeping can be a way of maintaining and enacting
                        a counter-identity that refuses to be entirely subsumed
                        by the “mainstream” identity.
 
Too often society enacts what are essentially anti-human practices,
            encouraging the worship of anti-human gods.
And understood properly, Sabbath is a bodily act of testimony
            to an alternative way of being human;
it can be enacted resistance to the pervading values and the assumptions
            that build up on people in anxiety-inducing ways.
 
And so, understood properly,
            Sabbath can be resistance to anxiety.
 
The ten commandments, of which the Sabbath command is the fourth,
            appear twice in the story of Israel’s journey from Egypt to the promised land.
 
They are there in Exodus 20,
            when Moses first receives them from God on Mount Sinai,
and they are repeated in Deuteronomy 5, our reading for today,
            as Israel stands at the gates of the promised land.
 
The context for these commands is Israel’s miraculous release
            from the exploitative environment of Pharaoh’s Egypt.
 
These commandments are the new rule of life for the people of God,
            replacing the absolutist demands of the Pharaoh,
and they stand in stark contrast to what came before them.
 
Pharaoh’s commands were oppressive,
            but God’s commandments are liberating.
 
Pharaoh’s commands were based on hatred of the other,
            but God’s commands are based
            on the love of God and the love of neighbour.
 
Pharaoh’s commands were a source of constant anxiety
            as his own insecurity led him to make impossible demands of Israel;
but the ten commandments are an invitation to a new way of living
            which is non-anxious, based on a trusting relationship with God,
            and drawing out gentle faithfulness in response.
 
If you read through the list of the ten commandments,
            you find that the first three commands of God
            are to do with God’s exclusive claim over Israel.
 
Never again shall they give their allegiance to any other ruler
            whether human or divine.
And so they are told to have no other gods before the Lord,
            to not make any idols,
            and to not make wrongful use of God’s name.
 
And then the final six commands are to do with relating to your neighbour:
            honouring your parents, not murdering, or committing adultery,
            not stealing, or bearing false witness, or coveting.
 
And the bridge between the first three and the final six is the fourth command
            – the keeping of the Sabbath.
 
There is something about the intentional reverence for time,
            the setting aside of potentially productive hours,
that is key to allowing Israel to shift
            from a world where every moment is demanded from them by the Pharaoh,
to a new world where life is a gift to be treasured before God.
 
There had been no Sabbath in Egypt:
            no work stoppage for Pharaoh who worked day and night
                        to stay atop the social pyramid of Egypt’s elite;
            and no work stoppage for the Israelite slaves
                        who had to gather straw for bricks during their time off;
            in fact no work stoppage for anybody in the Egyptian world,
                        because frantic productivity drove the entire system.
 
Does that sound familiar to you?
            I fear that we drive ourselves back to Egypt,
                        as a society and sometimes also as Christian communities.
            The push to productivity, to more and more effort:
                        to achieve, to stay afloat, to keep going…
 
And yet in the ten commandments,
            the Lord God nullifies all such systems of anxious production.
There is a better way to be human.
 
So God places limits on how much work it is right for a human to do,
            God commands times of rest, of recovery, or relaxation,
            and those who obey this command break the anxiety cycle.
 
We, like ancient Israel,
            are invited to an awareness that life does not consist
                        in a whirlwind of frantic production and consumption,
                        that reduces everyone else to threat and competitor.
 
Many of you will know that I enjoy swimming,
            and I’m a regular visitor to the Oasis pool, just round the corner from the church.
 
Some days, I look at my to-do list for the day,
            and the pile of emails that has come in overnight,
            and I think to myself I just need to power through without a break.
 
Does that sound familiar to some of you?
 
What I have discovered, and I need to constantly remind myself of this,
            is that if I take an hour out,
            go to the pool and swim for half and hour,
I end up reviewing the day far more positively than if I had stayed sat at my desk.
 
As I often say to myself,
            the hardest part about swimming a mile is picking up your kit bag.
 
My point is that sometimes it takes effort to stop,
            it takes a decision to break the cycle of productivity,
but taking that decision also breaks the spiral of anxiety, stress, and pressure,
            and creates a place in our lives for a more balanced existence.
 
The divine insight behind the Sabbath command
            is that work stoppage permits a waning of anxiety,
            and allows energy to redeployed to elsewhere:
                        in acts of neighbourliness, in caring for the other.
 
The Sabbath command is designed to counter anxious productivity
            with committed neighbourliness.
 
And whilst neighbourliness doesn’t produce so much;
            it creates an environment of security and respect and dignity
            that redefines what it means to be human.
 
The world envisaged by the Sabbath-command
            is an anxiety-free world of well-being,
            based on the fact that God is anxiety-free.
 
God is not a workaholic. God is not a micromanager.
            God is not a Pharaoh.
God does not keep hiking up the production schedules.
            The Protestant work-ethic is not a divine command.
The ten commandments do not contain the advice,
            that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.
 
To the contrary, God rests, confident, serene, and at peace.
            And God’s rest, moreover, bestows on humanity
            a restfulness that contradicts the “drivenness” of the system of Pharaoh.
 
And so humans are commanded to rest,
            and while they rest, to be sure that their neighbours rest alongside them.
 
This means creating a system of rest,
            that contradicts the world’s systems of anxiety.
 
We are no longer subject to Pharaoh!
            We are instead called to creative restfulness,
                        which finds its basis in God,
            which is politically viable, and economically significant.
 
Rest is not just for the privileged few,
            Sabbath is rather for all – for sons and daughters,
                        for slaves and cattle, for immigrants and asylum seekers.
 
The Sabbath command calls us to do more than just take one day off per week,
            it calls us to work to build a society
            where all are released from the anxious burden of productivity,
                        where enough is enough, and where life is more than commodity.
 
God invites the people of God
            to a new life of neighbourly freedom
            in which Sabbath is the cornerstone of faithful resistance to anxiety.
 
Sabbath declares in bodily ways
            that we will not participate in the anxiety system
            that pervades our social environment.
 
We will not be defined by busyness and by acquisitiveness,
            and by the relentless pursuit of more,
in either our economics or our personal relations,
            or anywhere in our lives.
 
Because our life does not consist in commodity.
 
It is no wonder that Jesus invited his disciples
            out of the anxiety system:
 
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life,
            what you will eat or what you will drink,
            or about your body, what you will wear.
Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?
 
Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns,
            and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not of more value than they?
 
And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?
 
And why do you worry about clothing?
            Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow;
                        they neither toil nor spin,
            yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory
                        was not clothed like one of these.
 
But if God so clothes the grass of the field,
            which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven,
            will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?
 
Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?”
            or “What will be drink?”
            or “What will we wear?” (Matt. 6:25–31)
 
Behind the sermon away from anxiety by Jesus is the good word of Moses:
 
Six days you shall labour and do all your work.
            But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God;
you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter,
            or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey,
            or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns,
so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. (Deut.5.13-14)
 
The “other gods” that the first three commandments call us to resist,
            are, it turns out, the agents and occasions of anxiety.
 
But we, by discipline, by resolve,
            by baptism, by Eucharist, and by passion,
resist such seductions.
 
And in so doing we stand alongside the creator
            in whose image we are made.
 
Sabbath, you see, is a school for our desires;
            taking a break is an exposé and critique of those false desires
            that focus on idolatry and greed.
 
When we do not pause for Sabbath,
            these false desires take power over us.
 
But Sabbath is our chance to embrace of our true identity,
            and find our rest in the God of love.
 
To conclude, a poem by Wendell Berry,
            quoted by Nicola Slee in her book ‘Sabbath’
 
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
 
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
 
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
 
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
 
            Wendell Berry

---

[1] The sermon that follows draws extensively from Brueggemann, ‘Sabbath as Resistance’

Time to press pause

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

10^th September 2023

 

Deuteronomy 5.12-15
 
In last week’s sermon,
            we looked at the ancient Hebrew economic principles of Sabbatical and Jubilee,
and saw how these offer a persistent challenge
            to unregulated systems of capital acquisition,
with their call to forgiveness of debts
            and a less exploitative relationship with the land.
 
We also saw how this theme of economic and ecological ‘forgiveness’
            is rooted deep within the Christian tradition,
with the Lord’s prayer itself calling us to forgive the debts of others,
            even as our own debts are forgiven by God.
 
And we learned how these two principles, of Sabbatical and Jubilee,
            are themselves the logical extensions of an underlying principle,
                        that of Sabbath;
            which the Hebrew Bible tells us
                        is written into the fundamental relationship
                        between God, humans, and creation.
 
It’s written into the creation account of Genesis,
            and codified as a divine law in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy.
 
And despite whatever else it might come to mean for us,
            the Sabbath command is also an economic command.
It is a demand that people should not work on the seventh day,
            that they should not earn money, for one day per week.
 
In preparing this week’s sermon, I’ve been greatly influenced
            by reading Walter Brueggemann’s wonderful book ‘Sabbath as Resistance’,
and I commend it to you
            if you want to take what we’re talking about this morning a bit further.
 
He describes a variety of ‘resistances’
            that he identifies as emerging from the Sabbath command
            to desist from work one day in each week,
including ‘Resistance to Anxiety’,
            ‘Resistance to Exclusivism’,
‘Resistance to Multitasking’,
            and the one that is relevant for our reading this morning,
            ‘Resistance to Coercion’. [1]
 
In Deuteronomy 5, we find ourselves in the world of the Ten Commandments,
            the laws originally given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai,
            as the Israelites made their way from slavery to freedom,
                        from Egypt to the promised land.
 
The forty years of wilderness wandering
            depict an Israel that is trying to work out what it is going to be,
                        what path it will follow,
                        how it will live as God’s chosen and holy nation.
 
In the time following their initial act of great faithful obedience,
            following Moses through the waters of the Red Sea
            into the wilderness of Sinai,
the people of Israel then find themselves
            having a crisis of confidence in the desert.
 
You know the story well:
            Moses leaves the people to go up the mountain,
                        and all the anxieties of Israel come to the surface.
            Their God seems distant and their prophet is absent,
                        and in their acute anxiety they gather their gold,
                        their precious earrings, their most treasured possessions,
            and they make their own god.
 
In that moment of anxiety,
            they imagined that they could somehow purchase security in the world,
                        and to this day ‘God-making’ amid anxiety
                        remains a standard human response.
            We think we can buy and build security,
                        and we make our own idols of gold
                        that we devote ourselves to in the hope they will not let us down.
 
But Moses, returning from the mountain after his conversation with God,
            broke the tablets of stone
            on which God had written the words of the covenant,
and had to go back up the mountain to try again,
            receiving a new list of commands
                        to help the people learn to live in trust and relationship with God
                        in the midst of an anxious world.
 
And one of those commands is the Sabbath command.
 
The years and decades pass in the wilderness wandering of Israel,
            and eventually the people came to the Jordan river,
            ready to enter, at long last, into the promised land.
 
But it was a long time since Sinai,
            and a new generation had grown up who didn’t remember the golden calf,
and so an aging Moses gives Israel renewed instruction
            for what it will mean for them to live in their new land.
 
This long sermon is found in the book of Deuteronomy,
            and lasts for thirty chapters.
 
Moses clearly regards the move to the new land as a high-risk venture,
            and he wants to be sure that Israel understands
that the old, desert covenant still pertains
            to the new agricultural territory, they are about to enter.
 
So Moses stands on the bank of the Jordan looking over at Canaan,
            this fertile land flowing with milk and honey,
and he regards it as an enormous temptation
            and a huge seduction to his people Israel.
 
He knows that the affluence of the land
            is sure to create a crisis in covenant faith.
 
The problem before Israel is that the new land will work so well,
            that they will come to think that they can manage on their own.
 
They will be tempted to autonomy,
            without due reference to the Lord their God.
And whilst they might not make another golden calf,
            they will still build their idols of gold and trust them for security.
 
The wilderness less of manna and quail,
            of food that is given each day, enough for that day alone,
                        and which will not keep for tomorrow,
            is about to be forgotten in the glories of fields and farming,
                        of barns and storehouses.
 
The reason Israel will be tempted to autonomy
            is that this new land will make them inordinately prosperous.
 
The lowlands of the Israel between the river and the sea
            are wonderfully fertile, for growing wheat and grazing crops.
 
And Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia.
            So he warns Israel about amnesia:
 
[T]ake care that you do not forget the LORD,
            who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
            out of the house of slavery. (6:12)
 
[T]hen do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God,
            who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
            out of the house of slavery. (8:14)
 
Moses is worried that the Israelites might forget where they came from,
            forget the circumstances they had left behind in Egypt.
They might forget that they had lived under a system of unbearable coercion
            where they had to meet impossible production schedules
            of more and more bricks at the hands of the Egyptian slave-masters.
 
Moses anticipates that if they do not remain alert to the God of emancipation,
            they will just end up right back in another system of coercion.
 
The problem is that because the land is fertile,
            its produce will make Israel safe and happy.
 
And the inescapable logic of production
            is that if Israel can increase its produce,
            it will be even safer and even happier.
 
In time Israel will discover that the sky is the limit!
            The fertility of the land,
                        and the domestication of the wheat that grows there,
                        and the productivity of the systems of agriculture they will invent,
            will make Israel acquisitive;
 
Ancient Israel will come to think that the goal of its life as a nation
            is to acquire, and acquire, and acquire.
 
And in order to keep on acquiring,
            Israelites will inevitably end up in competition with their neighbours,
and the system of ever-increasing acquisition
            will turn a neighbour into a competitor,
            and a competitor into a threat and a challenge.
 
And so Moses warns Israel to ‘Watch out!’
            or the land in its productivity will transform Israelites
                        into producers and consumers,
            and will destroy the fabric of covenantal neighbourliness
                        to which they have been called.
 
Moses understands, as do the prophets after him,
            that being ‘in the land’ poses for Israel
                        a conflict between two economic systems,
            each of which views the land differently.
 
On the one hand, the land is regarded as property and possession,
            to be bought and sold and traded and used.
On the other hand, in a context of covenant,
            the land is a birthright and an inheritance,
                        one’s own land as a subset
                        of the larger inheritance of the whole people of God.
 
If the land is possession,
            then the proper way of life is to acquire more.
But if the land is inheritance,
            then the proper way of life is to enhance the neighbourhood
                        and the extended family,
            so that all members may enjoy the good produce of the land.
 
It is clear which of these perspectives
            was appropriate to Sinai and the years in the wilderness.
But in its amnesia and wealth, Israel may forget its covenantal frame of reference,
            and generate an economy that is anti-neighbourly
            in order to have more, and ever more…
 
And so, in his great interpretive manoeuvre,
            Moses asserts that:
 
The Lord our God made a covenant with us at [Sinai].
            Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us,
            who are all of us here alive today (5.2-3)
 
Moses remembers the ancient covenant of Sinai,
            made to a previous generation in Israel,
but he asserts that this covenant is still immediately relevant
            for the new generation of Israel who are about to enter the land.
 
This is the core argument of the book of Deuteronomy,
            that the economy is not a rat-race
                        in which people remain exhausted from coercive goals,
                        as they were in Egypt,
            but rather the economy is an outworking of covenant
                        for the sake of the whole community.
 
Even in a new circumstance of agricultural possibility,
            the old desert covenant is defining.
 
And Moses expects Israel therefore
            to reject the acquisitive culture of its neighbours,
            for the sake of a more neighbourly covenantal alternative.
 
And so Moses repeats the Ten Commandments,
            a generation on from when they were first given at Sinai (recorded in Exodus 20),
            including the command to observe the Sabbath:
 
Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy,
            as the LORD your God commanded you.
Six days you shall labour and do all your work.
            But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God;
            you shall not do any work
                        —you, or your son or your daughter,
                        or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey,
                        or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns,
            so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. (Deut. 5:12–14)
 
Moses proclaims Sabbath as the great day of equality
            when all are equally at rest,
                        humans enslaved and free,
                        and animals and land alike.
 
Not all are equal in production,
            some perform more effectively than others.
 
Not all are equal in consumption,
            some have greater access to consumer goods.
 
Moses knows that in a society defined by production and consumption,
            there are going to be huge gradations of performance
                        and, therefore, of worth and significance.
 
And he knows that in such a social system,
            everyone is in danger of being coerced to perform better,
                        to produce more, to consume more,
            to be the perfect shopper and the perfect worker.
 
Such valuing, of course, creates ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’,
            the significant and the insignificant,
                        the rich and the poor,
            people with access and people denied access.
 
But, he says, all are equal in rest.
            Sabbath breaks the gradation caused by coercion.
 
On Sabbath:
 
– You do not have to do more.
– You do not have to sell more.
– You do not have to control more.
– You do not have to know more.
– You do not have to have your kids in ballet or soccer.
– You do not have to be younger or more beautiful.
– You do not have to score more.
 
Sabbath, the one day of rest, challenges the cycle of coercion,
            because in rest all are of equal worth,
            equal value, equal access.
 
And if you can construct a society where all get a chance to rest,
            that forces that society to construct an economics of neighbourliness.
 
In our own society, we have seen this with the rise of the trades union movement,
            and the push over the last two centuries for greater workers rights,
            for universal healthcare, and the welfare state.
 
These are the contemporary outworking of the Sabbath principle,
            as all receive the benefits regardless of their circumstances.
 
But back to scripture.
            There is a significant difference
                        in the way the Sabbath command is framed in Deuteronomy
                        compared to its earlier version at Sinai.
 
In Exodus 20, when Moses received the tablets of stone on the mountain,
            the command to rest was based on God’s act of creation:
 
‘For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth,
            the sea, and all that is in them,
            but rested the seventh day;
therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.’ (Exod 20.11)
 
Intriguingly, this creation ordinance for Sabbath
            doesn’t get a mention in Deuteronomy
as Moses stands on the shores of the Jordan
            at the gates of the promised land.
 
Rather, what we find in Deuteronomy
            is that the motivation for Sabbath is not creation.
 
Rather, Moses says that they are to rest on the seventh day,
            because they must remember that [they] were … slave[s] in the land of Egypt,
                        [that] the LORD [their] God brought you out from there
                        with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm;
            therefore [says Moses],
                        ‘the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.’ (5:15)
 
The reason for Sabbath is exodus!
 
They are to remember
            that the coercive system of Pharaoh was disrupted.
They are to remember
                        that the brick quota was declared null and void.
 
Moses is here warning the Israelites that if they forge this,
            they will give their lives, both personally and corporately,
            over to coercive competition.
 
But if they remember Egypt, and the Exodus wanderings in the wilderness,
            they will know that Pharaoh,
                        and all similar agents of coercion, have been defeated.
 
You do not need to meet the expectations
            of your mother, or your father,
                        or your work, or your boss,
                        or your broker, or anybody else.
You are free from the quota, if you remember,
            if you situate yourself within the covenant memory.
 
Moses, in Deuteronomy,
            imagines that Sabbath is not only a festival day
                        but also a new social reality,
            that is carried back from the Sabbath day
                        into days one through six.
 
People who keep Sabbath live all seven days differently.
            So the task, according to Moses, is to “seven” our lives.
 
There are two key aspects of new life that are made possible
            when patterns of coercion are broken
            by the faithful observance of Sabbath as a day of deep freedom.
 
First, we saw last week in our sermon on Deuteronomy 15,
            that Moses lays out
            the most radical extrapolation of Sabbath in the entire Bible.
Every seven years, in an enactment of “the Sabbatical principle,”
            Israel is required to cancel debts on poor people,
And every seven Sabbaticals, at the Jubilee year,
            they are to redistribute the land
            and release those who have become economically enslaved.
 
The intention in this radical act of “seven”
            is that there should be no permanent underclass in Israel (v. 4).
 
Moses, in this instruction, anticipates resistance
            to this radical extrapolation of Sabbath,
he knows that Israelites may become “hard hearted” and “tight fisted” (v. 7).
 
But, he says, that is because they have fallen into coercive patterns
            whereby the poor are targeted as objects of economic abuse
            rather than seen as Sabbath neighbours.
 
Moses counters such resistance, however,
            by appeal to the exodus memory (v. 15).
 
On the basis of their own experience as slaves in a coercive system in Egypt,
            Israel is invited to “give liberally” (v. 10) and “provide liberally” (v. 14),
                        and so to avoid the temptations
                        of consumptive excess and economic abuse in their own land.
 
But second, the book of Deuteronomy identifies the great “triad of vulnerability”
            of widows, orphans, and immigrants,
            as needy members of society who are without protected rights.
 
The tradition of Deuteronomy is particularly attentive to their needs:
            with numerous commands to protect the needs
            of these vulnerable, exposed neighbours.
 
In this interpretive tradition, Sabbath is not simply a pause.
            It is an occasion for reimagining all social life
            away from coercion and competition,
            towards compassionate solidarity.
 
Such solidarity is imaginable and achievable
            only when the drivenness of acquisitiveness is broken.
 
Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes.
            It is the pause that transforms.
 
Whenever ancient Israel was tempted to acquisitiveness,
            Sabbath was an invitation to receptivity,
an acknowledgment that what is needed
            is given, and need not be seized.
 
And so what does this look like in our world,
            how does this ancient economic and theological model
            take shape in our world, an in our lives?
 
We, too, know about the vulnerabilities
            of those whose circumstances in life make them particularly fragile,
and the next decades of global life
            are going to see ongoing waves of people displacement
and a persistent need for a compassionate and generous response
            to those who find themselves refugees in the world.
 
This is why we, as God’s people, need to be active in welcoming refugees,
            and reaching out across ethnic and religious divides.
 
We, too, know about the hurt caused by bereavement or relationship breakdown,
            as people have to battle not only with grief,
            but often changed financial circumstances also,
and there is a need for communities such as this congregation,
            to offer a place of belonging and deep support
            for those whose lives are in turmoil.
 
We too, know how our drive for security in life
            can cause us to put our faith in glittering idols of gold,
            as we trust in our possessions to the detriment of our reliance on God.
 
And the pattern of giving money and resources to God
            through the community of faith that we are part of,
so that together we can re-balance the economy of faith,
            is a vital part of our discipleship.
 
We too, know about the damage to the earth caused by excessive consumption,
            as the climate crisis continues to become ever more tangible,
and there is a need for people such as us
            to be willing to see beyond their own circumstances,
to answer the wider call for carbon reduction, pollution control,
            and compassionate consumption through ethical trading and finance.
 
The principle of Sabbath, you see,
            not only highlights the darkness of the human soul,
            but also offers a way of breaking the cycle.
 
Friends, we need Sabbath.
            as we are called to rest from the ever-spiralling demands of production,
                        to resist the call to ever greater acquisition and productivity,
            to learn that sometimes enough is enough,
                        and to discover that this might mean
                        that another person can also have enough.
 
And so we find ourselves once again at the words of Jesus,
            challenging us to a new and better way of being human.
We are his disciples, sent to the world with a message of good news,
            as we learn to forgive the debts of others,
            even as our own indebtedness is forgiven by God.
 

---

[1] The sermon that follows is based extensively on the chapter ‘Resistance to Coercion’ from: Brueggemann, Walter. Sabbath as Resistance, New Edition with Study Guide: Saying No to the Culture of Now. Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.

Reading Revelation: A Literary and Theological Commentary - Review

A review of Jamie Davies, Reading Revelation: A Literary and Theological Commentary, Smith & Helwys, 2023. Presented to the British New Testament Society Conference 2023 Revelation Seminar as part of a panel review of this book.
https://www.helwys.com/sh-books/reading-revelation-2nd-series/

A commentary that is both ‘Literary’ and ‘Theological’? I’m reminded of the scene in the classic film The Blues Brothers, where the band rock up at the Good Ole Boys diner to play, and ask the manager what kind of music they usually like. She replies, ‘Oh, we got both kinds. We got Country and Western.’
 
Nearly two decades ago, when I was being interviewed for my job as Tutor in Biblical Studies at Cardiff University and Cardiff Baptist College, the interview panel comprised some from the academy and some from the seminary.
 
I was aware that the questions I was receiving from these two groups were quite different to each other: the academics quite properly wanted to know about my credentials and my ability to teach and research, whilst the theologians wanted to know about my faith and my ability to impart that faith to others.
 
These two sat uneasily alongside each other both in the interview, and in the happy years of teaching and training that followed.
 
When I was Acting Principal of the College for a while, a review process called on me to defend and justify the close historic partnership between the Russell Group University and the Theological Colleges in Cardiff, and one of the inspectors commented that it was entirely inappropriate for Christian Clergy to be teaching the Bible to University undergraduates. My response was that if the idea of practitioners teaching their own subject ever caught on in medicine or dentistry, we’d all be in trouble!
 
But the tension remains, and it is one we feel here at the British New Testament Society. Do we go to morning prayer before breakfast? In my case – the answer is an emphatic no! But I could if I wanted to, and this is testimony to the ongoing tension in our own discipline between faith and academy.
 
The academy looks to the literary context, and the church looks to God. But can the two meet? This, it seems to me, is the premise behind Jamie’s excellent treatise on the Book of Revelation.
 
The designation of this commentary as both literary and theological allows it to pay attention not only to the historical critical context of the Apocalypse, but also to the way that the text speaks of God.
 
Those of us within the guild of biblical studies are probably here because we have come to love and value the historical critical approach, and many of us have come to distrust more theologically motivated hermeneutical approaches to the Bible.
 
But of course, the texts we study are theological documents – they bear testimony to their authors’ faith in God, and their history of interpretation bears witness to millennia of ‘faith-full’ reading.
 
And so to adequately account for the text as we have it, we do well to pay attention not only to its literary and historical origins, but also to the words about God that it offers.
 
Which brings me to my first question, that of the intended audience for this commentary.
 
Is this a commentary written primarily for those in the academy, or for those in the church; or does it aim for both? Or rather, does it aim at people who inhabit both?
 
An example of this comes in the discussion of the way the Book of Revelation might be considered prophecy.
 
Quite rightly, Jamie notes that the book is explicitly self-designated as prophecy in the benediction of 22.7, observing that, ‘in most prophecy, the primary audience is the contemporary inhabitants of the world of the prophet, and Revelation is no different’ (p.34).
 
However, then he continues, ‘But Revelation, also in line with the biblical prophetic tradition, has a meaning that spills over from that contemporary time and place to times and places beyond the prophet’s horizon’ (p.34).
 
This means, he asserts quite rightly, that ‘we can no longer read the ‘nearness’ of what is revealed in the book of Revelation in such a way as to plot its events on the linear schemes of earthly chronological time’ (p.35).
 
But then he goes on to say that, ‘Instead, we must become and remain sensitive to its claims concerning divine eschatological action and the fulfilment of God’s purposes for his world, as in Christ time’s fulfilment has come ‘near’ to the world of the first century and the twenty-first.’
 
And so back to my question: who is the ‘we’ that is in view here?
 
It must be people of faith, those who believe that John’s textual communication of what he believed God to be saying in his time, is also applicable to those who seek to hear God’s words in the present time.
 
Which takes me back to the question of whether biblical scholars of faith can both have their cake and eat it? Can one be faithfully attentive to both literary and theological concerns? Or is there always a compromise to be struck along the way?
 
This tension runs through the commentary, and I am impressed by the way in which Jamie negotiates the tightrope, but I want to draw attention to the difficulty of maintaining this methodology. For some, this will be the commentary’s greatest strength, for others it will represent a significant compromise.
 
And this brings me to my next question: that of the eschatology in play in this commentary’s interpretation.
 
I detect a tension between the commentary’s reading of the text of Revelation as having a predominantly realised eschatology, and the broader theological theme of future hope.
 
Jamie quite properly anchors the eschatological language of the text within its original context, with the ‘eschatological soon’ creating a ‘time of expectation’ within which John’s church can faithfully and actively bear witness, rather than waiting quietistically for divine intervention (p.28-9).
 
The commentary then relates this eschatological scheme to the thrice repeated threefold ‘time-signature’, of the one ‘who is, who was, and who is the coming one’ (1.4, 8; 4.8). These are described as ‘not three separate events but three interrelated forms of the one ‘coming’ of God’ (p.30).
 
Jamie elaborates: ‘God’s past coming in the incarnation of Christ, his present coming by the Spirit, and his future coming in consummation are all united as the one and the same apocalyptic event.’ (p.30)
 
He concludes that ‘Seen from this perspective, it is clear that the threefold divine life cannot simply be plotted straightforwardly with the three tenses of creaturely history. Rather, God simply is ‘the coming one’ who comes to history and assumes it.’
 
And so the theme of witnessing through suffering unto death is thus seen as central to the book’s call to discipleship, and the eschatology described is correspondingly focussed on creating a context within which such witnessing can occur.
 
The calls to patient endurance through persecution, and to resistance against empire, are seen as an outworking of what it means to live faithfully in the time-between-times.
 
But against this there is also a desire to relate the future aspect of the time-signature, the description of Christ as ‘the coming one’, to a hope for future eschatological transformation. Jamie says, ‘Though Revelation is clear that God is sovereign, the cosmic battles against the powers challenging his rule are very real, and so the promise of a divinely ruled world remains, at least from an earthly perspective, in the future.’ (p.26)
 
I would be interested to hear more from Jamie on his view of Revelation’s eschatological theology, and how he relates this to those in his intended audience who read from a perspective of faith themselves, and how it relates to that other strand of the audience for this commentary, the academy.
 
The commentary proceeds through the text of Revelation in a way that is clear, helpful, and accessible. I think the decision to treat the 7 letters together as 7 ‘Oracles’ makes good sense of the way they relate to the wider visionary material in the text, helping anchor them as a key part of the overall prophecy rather than as an early diversion from it.
 
The journey Jamie describes around the churches brought back to mind my own travels in the region a few years ago, as I spent a week in 40-degree heat visiting each of the 7 churches. Jamie peppers his commentary with nuggets of insight, which serve to bring the text to life for modern readers, and in this he draws on his extensive research in both the Jewish and Graeco-Roman context and literature.
 
The ascent into heaven at the beginning of chapter 4 takes us into more familiar apocalyptic territory as John begins his tour of the heavens. But Jamie helpfully cautions that, ‘If we restrict our attention to that we will miss something profoundly important about this book, for it is also a renewed vision of earth, seen from a heavenly perspective.’ (p.84)
 
This introduces the theme of ‘apocalyptic reversal’ where all is not as it seems (p.85). This demands a double response of those encountering the vision: they are invited to ponder the ‘deeper theological significance’ of their existence in the world, and to then act on that reflection.
 
Readers are called, as Jamie puts it, to ‘hold those first-century historical insights together, simultaneously, with the theological ‘surplus of meaning’ that is expressed through the imagery, and transcends the specific first-century context.’ (p.85)
 
If we can manage this, Jamie suggests, ‘we will approach a reading that attends faithfully to the redoubled nature of the book’s literary form and theological meaning.’ (p.85)
 
The journey of the commentary through the visions pays frequent attention to the characterisation within the text, elaborating on the variety of characters a reader encounters to show how their description and actions speak to the world of the reader.
 
I found this approach to speak helpfully to my own character-driven analysis of the text, in which I suggested that Revelation is a bit like a Shakespearian play, where the number of characters is greater than the actors available to play them, and so actors play more than one role within the drama, often nipping into the wings for a quick costume change.
 
I think I probably fall more firmly on the side of realised eschatology that Jamie does, and we’ve had interesting debates on this one in the past. For example, I prefer to read the New Jerusalem as an image of the church militant, whereas for Jamie it is part of the eschatological hope (p.238). But this is to quibble, and such quibbles are best done over a pint in the bar.
 
So to conclude, I think this is a truly worthwhile addition to the commentary canon, and will be of particular use to those in more ecclesial settings who want to access the fruits of the latest literary studies on the apocalypse. It is, as it sets out to be, both literary and theological.
 
Simon Woodman, August 2023.