Forming Christian virtues through Sabbath practices

Abstract

In the March 2020 issue of International Journal of Christianity and Education, Ken Badley wrote a prescient editorial titled “Green Spaces and Sabbath,” which argues “both we and our students need to breathe” and calls for “robust warrants” that encourage teachers to incorporate the biblical practices of Sabbath into educational spaces (2020: 3, 5). In his reflection on the concept of the Jubilee, Badley draws attention to the implication that “we should even let the economy rest from time to time,” and in what is now an ironic statement, he adds that economic rest is “unthinkable in our own day” (2020: 2). Although not articulated in terms of “rest,” the ensuing stay-at-home orders and economic shutdowns that were implemented around the time Badley’s editorial was published effectively provided opportunity for teachers and students (and others) to get a taste of a world not driven by economic interest and instead the health and safety of people living under the threat of a new virus. Regardless as to whether the economic shutdowns were the best response to COVID19, the very concept introduced to our world the possibility that life need not be ordered by money and production. As a Christian teacher who has long incorporated the principles of Sabbath both into my life and my teaching, I hoped amid the quarantines in 2020 that my students would experientially discover that something other than money might drive their choices, priorities, and daily rhythms. In effect, I hoped that peoples’ widespread choice to prioritize physical health over the production of commodities would attune students to the biblical practice of Sabbath, a practice I believe will equip them to resist the vices of our time and to develop Christian virtues. As Walter Brueggemann asserts, Sabbath-keeping “is an act of both resistance and alternative ... because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods” (2014: xiii-xiv). Or, as Abraham Joshua Heschel states, Sabbath is “a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization” (1951: 28). Given the extent to which greed and consumerism are normalized in academic ritual and rhetoric— specifically to motivate students both to enroll and take their studies seriously—the practice and concept of the Sabbath is a powerful alternative to the status quo that Christian teachers should share with their students. “Those who remember and keep