God's Gift of Jubilee Judy Fagalde Bennett
Editor's Note: This excellent study of Jubilee themes is written for five brief sessions. It contains suggested Scriptures and reflection questions. Groups and leaders should feel free to adjust the number of sessions to fit their local situations. There is a lot that is broken in the world today. It is not that the world is a bad place, as such. It is still the world God created. It is still the world that God so loved that God was willing to put on human flesh and come to live in the midst of its brokenness. We even dare to pinpoint the moment in history when that happened as two millennia ago. But now we enter a new millennium. Moments like this seem to bring out our introspective, analytical nature. We assess this and we measure that; we compare these things and rank those. We debate the relative merits of one "mover and shaker" over another, the glories of one era over another. When we're really feeling contemplative, we may even ask ourselves what has changed. Did God's intervention really make a difference? What, as a species, have we learned in these two millennia? Surely, we have learned about brokenness. We know it when we see it, most of the time. No matter how good a day we're having, in our hearts we know that we ourselves are broken and that we are surrounded by brokenness. We also know, as Christians, that we are called to do something about both — our personal brokenness and the broken world. A new millennium is a good time to begin. After all, it provides an occasion that does not come along often. Introducing Jubilee The beginning of each new millennium, says Maria Harris in her compelling book Proclaim Jubilee: A Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century (Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), is marked by its own unique constellation of forces. Harris names five forces that characterize the beginning of this third millennium. This new millennium is our end time/beginning time, our kairos moment. The ancient teaching of Jubilee is there for us — a vehicle for the work of repair that weaves together our yearning for liberation, our realization of connectedness with one another and the earth, our grief in the face of suffering, and our faith in the power of the artist's vision that will call us forth into new life. These interrelated themes of Jubilee have much to offer twenty-first century Christians. Paraphrased from Leviticus 25, the teachings are: Be sabbath-keepers, for the sake of the land, for the sake of your life. Surely, here are teachings that address the brokenness of our world, offering both a model for mission and themes to enrich and enliven worship design and preaching. Keeping Sabbath Jubilee is about sabbath; more accurately, it is about clusters of sabbaths. To understand Jubilee is to understand sabbath, which is to understand "not doing"; and that is difficult for most of us. To cease our endless busyness, even for a day, means — what? For some of us, it would mean that suddenly we would wonder who we are because our busy preoccupations give us our identity. For some of us, it would mean feelings of enormous guilt. In our "not doing," we feel certain that we are letting someone down; not being a good co-worker, good parent, or child; not meeting our responsibility to church and community. On the other hand, for some of us "not doing" would be sheer joy, the beginning of freedom, liberation from oppressions of multiple kinds. And that is only on a personal level. What would "not doing" do to institutions? Where does sabbath keeping fit into the economic picture? the business world? What about government, or education, or the media? What of religion? What of the church itself? Where are the moments of "not doing" in our program-driven congregations or, for that matter, even in our worship (except, perhaps, for the Quakers who at least know how to sit still and be quiet for longer than a minute or so)? What would happen in this country if our churches kept sabbath? What if we were serious sabbath keepers? What would that look like? Would sabbath be on Sunday, or has that day become so laden with doing that we would not know how to call a halt to the activity? What about some part of Sunday? Surely corporate worship is a form of sabbath keeping, for some of us, some of the time. Or could our "not doing" happen on another day or part of a day — perhaps on a week night? Would it be kept in our homes or together somewhere else? What happens when we engage in "not-doing" is that we find ourselves being. We find suddenly that we are present to ourselves, our fatigue and our pain, our frustrations and our lost hopes. But we are also aware of our new insights and our deepest joys. We turn and discover that God is there, that we are free to be present to God in a way that cannot happen in our busyness. We make room for God in our lives; and God moves in, sizes us up in our warts-and-all inadequacy and stays anyhow. Gradually, the pieces of the puzzle that is our lives begin to shift. What had loomed so large seems grossly out of proportion; what had remained gently, persistently on the periphery of our consciousness now comes into focus. As we recapture our capacity for presence, we begin to be present to others, first those closest to us, then beyond. Perhaps Maria Harris is right when she suggests that, because we were made for one another, one of the surest outcomes of sabbath keeping is our re-creation in community, which then leads to the re-creation of community. For our spiritual ancestors, Jubilee's roots were in seventh-year observances. The children of earth were to plan and plant diligently for six years, then let the land lie fallow so that Mother Earth could rest and renew herself. Then, as they trusted God to sustain them in the seventh year, their own rest and renewal became possible.
Study Scriptures Where in our common life together in our communities can we engage in "not doing?" Where in our churches? Where in our lives and in the lives of our children? How might we let this piece of earth called America rest? What would that Jubilee for the land look like on our shores and in our valleys? on our mountaintops and in our cities? How do we begin? Forgiving As the years add up to seven and move relentlessly toward the seven sevens of Jubilee, the biblical teachings point us toward making things right in the world. We are taught that we are to forgive many things in the effort to restore what has gone wrong. God forgives us; that is where it begins. In our sabbath keeping, in our being present to God, we discover the strength and the power to forgive. These two things together — God's forgiveness of us and the power God gives us to forgive others — are what make life possible. Without them, we cannot forgive ourselves; we cannot undo wrongs; we cannot experience restoration. We may doubt that our baby steps into the cleansing stream of forgiveness, our unwillingness to let go even of petty grudges, much less our old wounds that have festered for years, matters at all to the greater human community. Yet our faith teaches us that we are to forgive. If we take evil seriously, then it is not difficult to imagine that, like the pebble dropped in a quiet pond, the consequences of every sin ripple outward to affect us all. Why can we not also assume that our acts of forgiveness echo throughout the universe, adding to the reserves of good will and shalom, of greenness and new life? Forgiveness frees us from our fears and creates the possibility of an end to violence and a new beginning. What difference would it make in our world if forgiveness were a way of life? Where would it begin? Whom and what do we forgive? Maria Harris suggests that we forgive everything we can — debts, the sorts of things we think of as sins or trespasses, and the things we have left undone. Moreover, we are to forgive everyone we can, including those closest to us, who are often the hardest to forgive. We are to forgive all who have harmed us and the descendants of those who were harmed by our ancestors, who — not surprisingly — may bear us ill will. We are even to forgive what is impossible to forgive. Now there's something for friends and foes of the death penalty to sit down together and discuss! Finally, we are to forgive ourselves. This can be difficult, since it first requires our letting go of any illusion of our own blamelessness, and it takes away from us the sheltering role of victim. Forgiveness comes only when we are ready, so we must give it time. However, the calendar and the mirror whisper to us gently, day by day, that we don't have forever. Letting forgiveness into our lives is hard work. We do well to make it the task of each new day, as long as God grants us life. Study Scriptures What has forgiveness to do with us in our communities? in our nation? What has the role of forgiveness — or the effect of its absence — to do with criminal justice? with poverty and welfare reform? with issues of race and ethnicity? To live in some parts of the South is to be reminded that the memory of old wounds does not soon fade. As a pickup truck raced past me on the highway recently, I was jolted by a bumper sticker: "I'd rather be out shooting Yankees!" How long, I wondered? How long, America? How long, Northern Ireland? How long, Kosovo? How long, Middle East? How many centuries does it take to forgive? Freeing Captives The biblical Jubilee begins when people are free to go home. It begins in Leviticus with the proclamation of liberty for all the land's inhabitants. That proclamation is built into our own historical beginnings, carried in our national DNA from one generation to the next, read and re-read by all who make the pilgrimage to Independence Hall in Philadelphia to see the inscription on the Liberty Bell. What did going home mean thousands of years ago? What does going home mean now? The implications of going home can be highly political, deeply personal, or a combination of the two. Was it not both political and personal when Nelson Mandela went home to Johannesburg or, for that matter, when Jesus went home to Nazareth? In the runaway individualism of Western civilization, however, we have paid far more attention to journey or quest metaphors, to launching out into the unknown and, of course, to conquering the unknown. Going home must then be accomplished in the glory and honor of triumph. Will Willimon, in reflecting on Homer's The Odyssey in his book, Reading with Deeper Eyes (The Upper Room, 1998), points out that our cultural image of maturation requires leaving home. Our country, he says, was built by people who left home and family, sometimes by force, sometimes by choice, to seek their fortune in what came to be called the New World. The opening of the western frontier, subsequent waves of immigration, followed by other large population shifts and the needs of the new multinational corporation — all have worked together to create a different expectation. That expectation now is not about coming home, but that we all grow up and leave home, making the abandonment of parents and childhood home a mark of maturity. What does home mean in such a world? What is the meaning of family when parents have died or children have taken jobs a continent away? While home is where we first learn to be in community, one powerful sense of coming home is deeply personal. It can mean coming home to oneself, returning to our roots, to wholeness. At home, we may just find that it is God who awaits us. In Leviticus, the freedom to go home meant going home to family and traditions, and it meant reclaiming ancestral history. For us, going home may carry similar meanings, but it also offers a dimension characteristic of our time. It can give us the opportunity to address the unfinished business many of us have with our parents. Whether we actually go home, or simply enact a homecoming in our imagination, Maria Harris suggests that it can allow us to complete our mourning or let go of rejections that may be real or imagined. In Leviticus the people were freed to go home, but they were also charged to remember their captivity and how they came to be released from it. Jubilee also calls us to remember. Remembering can be a highly charged, danger-laden activity. Dangerous memory, such as memory of oppression, must be dealt with before we can move on, individually or collectively. Remembering can take various forms. One form is aesthetic commemoration, the poem or painting or dance that recalls the suffering and injustice of the past, bringing it into the present for reexamination and resolution. Another form of remembering is liturgical, as in the celebration of Passover or the Last Supper, when we remember and are nourished by the memory of triumph over past suffering. Like our spiritual ancestors, we are called to remember, to testify to what God has done in our personal and collective lives, and to tell stories about it. Storytelling is a means of creating identity and molding a people. It is done for the sake of generations who will come after us. How we tell our collective stories has powerful political implications; indeed, which stories are told and which are left untold is a justice issue. Harris challenges the church to remember and to tell the stories of two particular groups: prisoners and children. Most of us want only the best for our children; or we say we do, but our actions support our words best when the emphasis is on our children. But are they not all our children? Do they not all represent our collective future? And we do well to remember that the two groups, children and prisoners, are not unconnected, given that this country's soaring prison population includes more women that ever before, eighty percent of whom are mothers. It is disturbing to ask if, just as the biblical call to Jubilee liberation did not include slaves from other nations, our treatment of offenders today represents a comparable blind spot. We say that our prisons exist for three reasons: deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution. Yet our resources are overwhelming directed toward retribution. The last of the developed nations to retain the death penalty, the United States also tolerates the inequities of our criminal justice system and the dehumanization of those we incarcerate. Jubilee teachings suggest that we have responsibility to help the incarcerated go home, if not literally, at least by making retribution where possible and coming home to themselves. As for the children of the world, their suffering due to poverty and war and their exploitation through child labor, prostitution and pornography, demands rectification. Even in America, children cry out for release from bondage. Too many are born so small that they risk lifelong disabilities, or they do not live to see their first birthday. Too many are victims of abuse. Too many commit violent crimes or are the victims of violent crimes. Our Council of Bishops was at its prophetic best when it launched the Initiative on Children and Poverty. What happens to our children affects the children they will one day bear and their ability to one day return home as whole people. Study Scriptures To what extent are the policies of our state and federal correctional systems driven by fear and by our own desire to be freed from the threat of violence? Is this an either/or issue — our freedom or their freedom? Is there a connection between our national history of slavery and the disproportionate number of African American males in our jails and prisons? How much "correcting" happens in our correctional system? Is there any way in which those who are incarcerated can experience Jubilee as coming home to themselves, to forgiveness, to interior freedom? What sort of change would be required? How might it begin? What needs to change to make this country safer and healthier for our children? Who is responsible for initiating that change? Restoring Justice Jubilee is not just a collection of ancient teachings, it is a spirituality, a way of being in the world that recognizes the reality of that mystery we call God. But this spirituality is not an airy, disconnected thing. It assumes a deep immersion in the world as it is: holy, because created by God, but in need of repair. This is where we come in, for Jubilee spirituality requires the work of justice making, of restoring right relationships. Sometimes it means giving back what has been taken — possessions, freedom, heritage, opportunity. All may be things taken generations earlier. How does God call us to address this cry for restoration? Justice always begins in the religious realm, it and refers us once again to the role of forgiveness in human life. Justice begins when we truly understand ourselves as forgiven by God. Then we take the next step: We apply that understanding to the economic and social spheres. Jubilee justice is a critique of the massive private accumulation of land and related wealth that destroys any meaningful sense of personal or family ownership and raises questions about future sustainability. Mother Earth cries out for justice, too. The agenda of the twenty-first century must include agreements around setting limits on what we have chosen to call progress. What happens in the economic realm shapes the social realm, especially its smallest and most vulnerable form, the family. Economic collapse in one generation has doomed future generations to lives of poverty. Giving back so that resources are more equitably distributed may mean, for some of us, giving up some of what we have. Letting go can be empowering; it is also daunting. It is, however, what life requires of us with some regularity. Parents must give up some of their freedom for their children; children may one day be required to do the same for their parents. Parents must ultimately give their children over to God, giving to their children accountability for their own lives, just as the children must one day give their parents back to God. Aging itself offers us many opportunities to understand letting go and giving back in new and deeper ways. Study Scriptures Where have you seen the setting of limits industrial growth of development in your community? Where have you seen healthy and unhealthy growth? Where do you see unjust economic disparity in your community? Do you agree that inherited wealth is unearned? Can unearned wealth be used to relieve economic disparity? How? Do you agree that there are certain benefits to which all people are entitled? What are those benefits? What examples of restoring justice by giving back have you experienced or heard about? Celebrating The process by which we arrive at the Great Feast of Jubilee, the time of jubilation, has its own rhythm, says Maria Harris. It begins when the community decides that it is indeed time and then makes the declaration that it is so, and is for all people. Then follows a time when history is reexamined, and we move toward repentance. Between the reexamination and the repentance, which is to be publicly expressed, deep inward searching and the giving and receiving of forgiveness must take place. Frederick Buechner suggests that we ought to ask God to forgive us for every face we cannot look upon with joy. We must begin to be at ease with one another, able to look upon one another's faces with joy. Then, we wait for the Spirit to lead us. We light the sabbath candles and wait patiently, together. We wait to learn what God will do next in us as individuals and as community. When God comes — and God always comes — we will celebrate God's presence among us; and we will know what it is that we are to do. We will glimpse the particular tasks in repairing the world to which God is calling each of us. Those tasks will be what we United Methodists call mission. For some of us, this calling will take us into new and uncharted waters, demanding of us strengths we never knew we had. For others, it will be an affirmation that we are to keep on keeping on, perhaps in familiar ways, but perhaps eliciting from some wellspring within us us a new creativity. Some of us will indeed be artists, offering our community the new insights and new images sought for our moment in history. And our community will commission us for our work and bless us on our way. Wherever it is that Jubilee leads us, whatever it is that we are called to do because of it, we must put our selves on the line, embodying Jubilee, making real what Jubilee has challenged us to imagine by putting flesh on it. Then we will join in jubilation, the Great Feast. The African American churches have kept alive an understanding of the biblical Jubilee. What a gift it would be if they would share their gift of Jubilee awareness with white churches. What sweet victory it would be if white churches were ready to receive that gift. To look upon one another's faces with joy — faces of all the colors of God's wondrous palette — would that not be Jubilee? Would that not be a celebration to end all celebrations! Study Scriptures What sort of repentance can you imagine being marked liturgically by your church or by churches together in your community? Might that repentance focus on racial issues? on historical/theological issues? How do communities of faith come to repentance? How might African American churches share their gift of Jubilee awareness with white churches? Have you ever experienced deep celebration that might be called "jubilation," or have you experienced some of the marks of the biblical Jubilee? Can you describe it? Why Jubilee? Why mark the close of this century and the opening of a new millennium as a Jubilee? We might as well ask, "Why not?" What better time could ever present itself? Endings have a way of turning into beginnings, and beginnings are filled with possibility. Jubilee offers a profoundly religious response to the problems left to us in the wake of the twentieth century. It also affirms, despite all testimony to the contrary, that this world belongs to God, and it provides an opportunity for thanksgiving for God's gifts to us. There are signs that Jubilee may be beginning even now — signs that some among us are already at work repairing our own small corners of the world. Tom Horton of The Baltimore Sun wrote an article recently in which he compared the landing of the Eagle on the moon in July of 1969 with the effort to help three trumpeter swans recover the forgotten migratory path of their ancestors. The swans were to make their way from a Chesapeake salt marsh to their winter home in Airlie, the first of their species to return in two hundred years. Unfortunately, they didn't make it across the Chesapeake Bay — at least, not these swans, not this time. But hopes are high for helping other swans learn another route, one that is longer but more natural. The moon launch, on the other hand, was a technological triumph. The hoped-for return of the trumpeter swans will one day be a triumph, but of a different sort. It will be the result of a decidedly low-tech process — imprinting the swans from hatching to follow their "mother," the same sort of ultralight craft seen guiding wild geese in the movie Fly Away Home. We have enormous technological power at our disposal, but perhaps we are learning that we cannot continue to walk away from the damage we do, nor can we always rely on technological solutions. Although we are a species that thrives on challenges and yearns for the stars, some among us are remembering that we are, in the end, children of Earth. There is much to be done, large and small, to repair this planet that is our home, this world that God created. We must do it together, women and men, young old, all races, people of all faiths and none — or it will not be done at all. We have, in our churches, much to give to the living out of Jubilee teachings. We share with our Jewish sisters and brothers the teachings themselves, and we have our own rich liturgical heritage, our artists and musicians and dancers. And we have the hope that is in us, the vision of God's reign. What will you be doing in the months remaining before this century runs out? Whom do you need to forgive? With whom do you need to reconcile? What can you do about giving back to people what has been taken from them? To what particular part of the repair of the world, large or small, is God calling you? Where and when do you keep sabbath, so that you can hear God's call? By the way, what will you be doing this New Year's Eve? Resources for Further Study of Jubilee The most useful exploration of Jubilee in our time is that of Maria Harris in Proclaim Jubilee: A Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century (Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). Of additional interest to women is her Jubilee Time: Celebrating Women, Spirit, and the Advent of Age (New York: Bantam Books, 1996). See also Jubilee Journal: A Workbook of Forgiving for the Millennium by Mary Cabrini Durkin OSU and Sheila Durkin Dierks (Boulder, Colorado: Woven Word Press, 1998). The Office of Peace and Justice Ministries of the Episcopal Church has produced an excellent guide for a congregational study of Jubilee, including session plans appropriate for children, youth, and adults in various settings. Most of it is entirely appropriate for United Methodist congregations. It is available from: Materials regarding the forgiveness of international debt, especially the video, Cancel the Debt, Now! The Jubilee 2000 Campaign, are available from Jubilee 2000/USA, 222 East Capitol St., NE, Washington, DC 20003; phone: 202/783-3566.
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| Introduction | Preface | Contents | Copyright | | Millennial Perspectives | Worship and Study Resources | | Seven Days of Praise and Prayer |Prayer and Worship for a Jubilee Week | The Last Letter: Revelation’s News | Repairing the World: God's Gift of Jubilee | Hymns | Additional Liturgical Resources | Appendix |
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