A Progressive Vision of the Benedict Option: Part 5, Sabbath as Resistance
“You’re right,” I said, “you have to make that commitment if you want your kids to be successful at soccer. But the question I keep thinking about is why we don’t care as much about our kids becoming successful Christians?”
.. The discussion about how youth sports affects church attendance is a perfect illustration of this dynamic. Wanting our kids to be successful and fearing that our kids will fall behind their peers, we push our families to a point of exhaustion where we no longer have the time or energy for Christian community and spiritual formation.
.. At the end of my last post I said it’s time for Christians to start opting out of the rat race of modern, capitalistic societies. And that’s what I think should be at the heart of a Ben Op “withdrawal.” By withdrawal we mean opting out.
.. Theologically, a better word might be renunciation. If Christianity is going to become a locus of resistance to Empire we have to be formed into people who renounce–opt out, psychologically withdraw from–the way Empire defines success and significance. In the empire I live in that means opting out of the American Dream.
.. In the sermon I gave at ACU’s Summit last year, I shared the story of a young man who left a prestigious educational institution to teach history at a poor, inner-city high school. That’s opting out of the American Dream. That’s resisting empire, pursuing a very different path toward success and significance.
.. And notice how the opting out in these two examples–youth sports and career choices–face the exact same challenge: social shaming and stigma, the fear of “falling behind,” the neurotic anxiety about not being successful. If we opt out of youth sports we fear that our kids will not be successful or will fall out of step with their peers, making them odd and weird. If we say no to a prestigious career opportunity to pursue more servant-oriented work we fear looking like a loser or a failure to our peers, neighbors, colleagues, families, and even, in our heart of hearts, to ourselves.
In short, to opt out of empire is to experience shame. Which means that we have to become shame-resilient if we want to resist empire, individually and collectively.
And that’s why we need the Ben Op. Shame-resiliency.
.. In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.