Jubilee

Sermon manuscript for Green Lake Church

Sabbath, July 11, 2015

Texts:

Leviticus 25:8-17

Luke 13:10-17

Last week was 4^th of July, our national day. We celebrated our freedom. Liberty. Freedom. Independence. These are important words for us as a people. We like to think of ourselves as the people in the world who are most free. We celebrate our freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press.

On the other hand, we are also a violent people. We have often imagined that freedom meant holding the gun instead of having the gun pointed at us. We have been infatuated with a vision of cowboy justice in which the wrongdoer is summarily executed. Our love of vengeance and punishment has led us as a nation to incarcerate more people than any other nation on earth. The United States has more people in prison than either China or Russia—nations we have rightly criticized for their human rights record.

This contrast between our love of “my freedom” and our willingness to take away “their freedom” stands in stark contrast to the vision of freedom articulated by the ancient prophets and modeled by Jesus.

Let's consider two pictures of freedom in the Bible.

The Book of Leviticus in the Bible is a potpourri of all kinds of ancient rules and procedures. It is a bit notorious for its mix of strangeness and wisdom. For the modern person, reading through this book can be a difficult exercise. Then you come to the end of the book. And there you come across the passage we read for our Old Testament scripture this morning: the Sabbath rules.

It is an astonishing vision of a perpetual renewal of freedom.

Jewish life was ordered in cycles of Sabbaths.

Every week, the seventh day was a park in time, a social/spiritual space protected from the demands of ordinary life. Every Sabbath people were set free from the tyranny of employers, even the tyranny of existence. For one day, the people were to quit working, quit striving, quit chasing an adequate retirement, quit chasing an advancement, quit chasing wealth. Every week, for one day, every person was to live perfectly free. On Sabbath there were no slaves, no employees. Astonishingly, there were not even any beasts of burden. There were no bosses, no employers, no kings, no tyrants. Every week the nation luxuriated in this experience of freedom.

Every seventh year came a sabbatical year. Israel was an agrarian society. Everything was based on agriculture. Against this background, the entire community was commanded to interrupt the cycles of planting, cultivating and harvesting. For a year, the fields were to be allowed to go fallow. It was an agrarian sabbatical.

Then there was the super Sabbath, the Jubilee. At the end of the seventh cycle of seven years there was a grand Jubilee. In this year the land was redistributed. Since land was the basis for wealth, this was a grand wealth redistribution project.

The Books of Moses tell of the distribution of the land after the conquest of Palestine. It was like the Homesteader Act in the United States offering free land to anyone who would go and work it. The entire nation started off with an a golden opportunity. Land was the source of wealth and everyone one was given property.

In the natural course of life, if you give everyone equal opportunity, some are going to thrive and prosper. Some are going to struggle. Over time, the natural trend is for the sources of wealth to become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. This is not an evil process. It is the fruit of hard work, luck, and family culture. The people at the bottom have less and less. The same amount of effort on their part will produce less and less economic benefit. While for those at the top, the same amount of effort will produce greater and greater wealth.

When one becomes wealthy enough, passive income will completely supply one's needs. You don't have to work, unless you want to. Nice!!!

This disparity in wealth ends up creating a profound disparity in freedom. Those at the bottom are free to work. And work and work some more. Or starve. They have no margin. A single bit of bad luck will throw them into the tender clutches of payday loan providers and ruthless creditors. While those at the top are increasingly free to spend their time studying philosophy and music, climbing mountains and pursuing education.

Then comes the Jubilee. The poor are made free again. They or their children or grandchildren are given another shot at acquiring wealth through hard work. The playing field is somewhat leveled. Hope comes alive again.

In the practice of Jubilee, the entire society participates in creating Sabbath freedom. The entire community is transformed and renewed. Freedom touches every person, every family, every household.

This vision of glorious freedom, this vision of a society in which freedom for the lowly is renewed over and over—this vision was picked up by the prophets and used as a metaphor for Grand Goal of all history. This persistent renewal of freedom provided a concrete example of the overarching purpose of God.

People struggling at the bottom, people born in poor families, people born without connections, without a family history of hard work, people born without keen intellects or without healthy bodies were promised a new birth of freedom. There would be a better world where their efforts or their children's efforts would produce good success. A world where they, too, could make music and voice ideas and ideals and hopes.

This was the pattern of history mapped out by the Sabbath cycles of Israel. This was the pattern of life God dreamed of for his people.

Let's leap forward hundreds of years. Let's go from the primitive world of Leviticus, a time when the people of Israel were nomads living in tents or an agrarian people scattered in tiny hamlets in a wild and dangerous country. Let's come to the time of Jesus. The Jewish people were now a civilization. They had a deep, rich theological and religious heritage.

By the time of Jesus, the notion of Jubilee had become deeply embedded in Jewish theology (though it had disappeared from their civil society). The weekly Sabbath so thoroughly permeated Jewish society it had become a central definition of who they were as a people. They were Sabbath keepers.

Which brings us to our New Testament reading.

One Sabbath, Jesus went to synagogue, as usual. And as usual, he preached. At some point in the service, he noticed a woman with severe scoliosis. The way I imagine it, she was bent over so far she walked with two sticks to hold up her torso as she shuffled about the village.

If you watched her for more than a few minutes, you would feel in your own gut the compression, the pressure on your stomach and lungs. You would begin to hurt.

Jesus was preaching, saying beautiful and inspiring things. People loved it, like they usually did. But he interrupted the sermon. He noticed this woman and stopped talking. He invited her to the front of the synagogue. I imagine she came with great timidity. She felt her deformity, her ugliness. She was used to lurking at the edge of social events, hiding in the shadows at weddings and funerals. She was weird. She was cursed. Still, the preacher, the famous preacher, had summoned her. So she planted her sticks and heaved herself to her feet and shuffled forward.

There, in front of the congregation, Jesus placed his hands on her and announced, “Lady, you are released from your bondage. You are free.” Immediately, she was healed. She straightened her back. She turned her head back and forth. Then she turned her torso back and forth. Then she dropped her sticks. She stepped in a circle to the right, then to the left.

The crowd gasped. “Glory be!” the woman exclaimed. “Hallelujah!” She started laughing, then covered her mouth in embarrassment. This was church, after all.

She walked gingerly back to her place in the synagogue, wondering every second if it was real, if it would last.

The synagogue became a bee hive of murmuring and whispering. Who had ever seen such a thing?

The synagogue ruler stood and demanded people come to order. This was church not a clinic.

“Look,” he said. “God gave us six days to do our work, six days to do the ordinary stuff of life, to take care of ordinary business. Come on those days for healing. Sabbath is for worship and for study. Let's keep Sabbath special.”

Jesus spoke up. “Come on. Don't be hypocritical. Every person here unties his ox or donkey twice or three times every Sabbath and leads it to the watering trough. Four times, if it's hot. If you would do that for a donkey or a cow, surely it is right that I should untie this woman, this daughter of God who has been bound by Satan these eighteen years.”

All the people were delighted, the Gospel says. And all dignitaries who were opposed to Jesus adversaries were confounded.

God wants us to be free. The point of religion is to be a mechanism for setting people free. But sometimes it gets turned into an instrument of bondage.

Like many of the older members in this congregation, I grew up in constant fear of condemnation. I imagined God was constantly watching to see if I screwed up, to see if I, at every moment, was putting out one hundred percent effort in the pursuit of holiness. I lived in perpetual dread of the judgment. Then I received a new vision of the compassion and affection of God. I knew that God was pleased with me.

I was set free. The inner change was so profound that all my friends noticed. My behavior didn't change, but I changed.

People asked, “John what happened to you?” They rejoiced with me.

But a few people were like the synagogue ruler. They were terrified. They could see I was no longer leashed and bound and they were afraid for me because I as no longer afraid. I guess they feared that if I wasn't afraid, if I was happy, I would race off into a wild and stupidly wicked life.

They, too, asked, “John, what has happened to you?” But asked in worried tones.

I had been in bondage for over eighteen years and now I was free.

Some of you have experienced that kind of bondage. You have been told by parents or teachers or preachers or siblings or someone else that you are defective, unworthy, hopelessly broken. You are ugly, wicked, lazy, stubborn, hopeless. Those words have defined your existence. They have formed a cage. You have been trapped.

Jesus says to you this Sabbath and every Sabbath: You are free. Those words of bondage are false. They come from the enemy. God's word is you are free.

This story also addresses directly the issue currently being debated in the Adventist Church. This past Wednesday, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists voted not to approve the ordination of women. Those who opposed women's ordination are committed to keeping women “in their place.” They imagine that exercising this kind of domination is doing the work of God. They imagine that God's goal for his people is subjugation and subordination. They join the synagogue synagogue ruler in urging people to leave freedom for the secular world. Women can be doctors and judges and presidents and professors, but inside the church women must remain cloistered, subservient, second. Religiously women must not be free.

They are wrong. They are violating the spirit of Sabbath. They are contradicting the message of the prophets and the mission of Jesus.

I stand with Jesus in proclaiming freedom. I invite us as a congregation to stand with Jesus.

We are a Sabbath keeping church, a Sabbath keeping congregation. The essence of Sabbath is the proclamation of freedom. On Sabbath, we are set free from the ordinary human patterns of subordination. According to the commandment, even the ranking of humans above animals is set aside. On Sabbath, we may not even order our animals to work. They are free to luxuriate in divinely-appointed freedom. How much more our daughters and wives and mothers and aunts and lovers and friends.

As a Sabbath keeping church, we are committed to the radical message of freedom. We oppose systems of control and subordination. On Sabbath all of us together savor the freedom which is ours as members of the family of God. And on Sabbath we pledge ourselves to doing all we can to shape our world in the direction of Jubilee—the world of perpetual liberation, the dream of God.