“Prosperity breeds amnesia.”

You don’t need enough money to be ‘rich’ in order to be prosperous – just enough to pay the bills and then some.  Just enough to insulate you from the reality of life for the most.

‘Having enough’ as we think of it means you can pay to cover the miles between you and government housing.  When you have bought the boundaries that separate you from your neighbors, you don’t have to see the rent-to-own trucks that show up weekly at their door.

When you are prosperous, you don’t have to remember, or even learn how and why the city, the state, the country, is divided the way it is.  It doesn’t affect your life one way or the other.  When you have more than enough, it is easy to ignore the topics of race and privilege because your more than enough papers over the uncomfortable.

“We are so fearful that we want to fence the world in order to keep all the others out.”

If I were God, I would have made our tendency to fear a little weaker and our willingness to love a little stronger.  It’s so easy to be afraid of each other, of what we don’t know, and it feels so much easier to retreat to our own lines and hide.  I mean, we pay taxes and we like our comfort, and besides, we’ve worked hard for what we have, and come on, we’re not really our brother’s keeper.

“Such neighborliness is eroded and eventually destroyed when the unchecked acquisitiveness of the powerful preys on the vulnerable.”

We have inherited such a mess of division and fear, and what makes pleasant boundaries for one is condemnation for another.  Acquisition and willful ignorance for one leads to financial ruin for another, and the rental trucks just keep showing up.  When you can measure the divisions of a town by the locations of pawn shops, rent-to-owns, and cash advances, you can see the lines of privilege and empire.  It would be so much easier to deny being a brother’s keeper.

But Sabbath says we are.  It says yes to giving up our anxiety at having enough, consuming at the expense of others, and more, more, more, so that we can treat each other as equal humans.  Sabbath says that we were designed to take care of each other.  It was built into creation, built into the structure of the commandments, and built into the return from exile.  No wonder Jesus was so easily able to distill everything to Love God, Love Others.  Sabbath is essential to who we were created to be.

But a Sabbath way of life forces us to ask hard questions of ourselves.  Where are my physical boundaries?  Why are they the way they are?  How is what and where I am acquiring my goods affecting my local and global neighbors?

So, I need to get my hair cut (hello, Virginia humidity).  But most of the salons in our part of town are not for white people’s hair.  From what I’ve gathered, I can either drive 30 minutes to the rich part of town, have an in-home stylist come, or go to the one salon in our part of town, where I will have to take what I get – no comparison shopping!  (I love comparison shopping.)

This seems like a small, silly issue, but,

“Sabbath is a practical divestment so that neighborly engagement, rather than production and consumption, defines our lives.”

Practicing Sabbath and resisting the demands of empire is not one large decision that you just make one day.  It’s made up of our daily decisions and interactions with people.  Sabbath makes us pause, evaluate and look for the path of love.  Am I my brother’s keeper?

There is tension in the evaluation.  Discussing race and privilege and our complicated history is really not fun.  Boundaries were drawn out of conflict and fear, but what about when the fear is valid?

What about when your husband rides his bike around town, even the ‘bad’ part, because it’s sidewalk and well-lit and on the main drag, and 24 hours later someone else gets held up in the same spot he was?  Do you retreat to the boundaries of your car and drive around in fear?

Resisting the ways our culture pulls us apart from each other means we have to look at ourselves over and over again.  We have to look at our histories and our tendencies towards self-preservation.  Resisting a lifestyle shrouded in fear means we have to tear down the walls so we can see ourselves and our neighbors for who they really are.