Jubilee - The work of releasing others from sin and debt

Here's the sermon that I shared this morning at St Catherine’s Wickford:

When we have a General or Local Election, I wonder whether you read the manifestos of the candidates that you are able to vote for. I guess that most of us don’t. Often, they are quite wordy and many people don’t believe a word that is written in them.

The political parties know this, as is demonstrated by this quote from a post entitled Why manifestos still matter (even if nobody reads them) from Labour List:

“Given the amount of time and effort that goes into producing election manifestos, the number of people who actually read them is frighteningly small. Every campaign, parties make determined efforts to get them onto shelves but their sales hardly threaten JK Rowling or even the authors of well-known political diaries (still available in all good book shops) ….

But for the millions of voters who decide the election outcome … well for the overwhelming majority, life’s too short.” (http://labourlist.org/2013/02/why-manifestos-still-matter-even-if-nobody-reads-them/)

The passage that Jesus read in the synagogue at Nazareth the morning we have just heard about (Luke 4: 16 - 24) was the manifesto for his ministry and for the kingdom of God. We would do well not to ignore this manifesto because what Jesus spoke about here, he actually did in the course of his ministry. He did exactly what it says on the tin, as the advert goes.

Jesus’ manifesto is taken from Isaiah 61 and is all about release. Release from poverty, imprisonment, blindness and oppression. What Jesus is proclaiming would have been recognised by his hearers as the announcement of the Year of Jubilee – “the time when the Lord shall come to save his people.”

The word ‘jubilee’ stems from the Hebrew word ‘Yobel’, which refers to the ram or ram’s horn with which jubilee years were proclaimed. In Leviticus it states that such a horn or trumpet is to be blown on the tenth day of the seventh month after the lapse of ‘seven Sabbaths of years’ (49 years) as a proclamation of liberty throughout the land of the tribes of Israel. The year of jubilee was a consecrated year of ‘Sabbath-rest’ and liberty. During this year all debts were cancelled, lands were restored to their original owners and family members were restored to one another.

The people listening to Jesus knew about Jubilee but had never heard anything like his statement before. What Jesus was saying and how he was saying it was astonishing. They had heard teachers talk of the law before but this was something so amazing that they were in awe. Jesus was in another league because he claimed to be the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy in Isaiah 61:1–2.

Jesus stated that he had come to ‘proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4:18–19). That is the year of jubilee and so Jesus proclaimed his coming and the coming of God’s kingdom as the time of Jubilee – a time of release for all people from those things that enslave us and trap us.

Each one of us is a slave to sin and blind to the truth about God because we have chosen to live selfish lives turning our backs on God and the way of life that he had created for human beings to live. In turning away from God’s ways, we do not do away with gods altogether instead our desires run riot and we become slaves to them worshipping other gods; whether they come in the form of money, sex, celebrity or whatever.

Jesus comes to free us from all of these enslavements and to open our eyes to the way in which God created human beings to live; loving God with all our being and loving our neighbours as ourselves.

This isn’t something that is just for us as individuals however. It is also something which can impact all of society. After all, the Old Testament Jubilee was intended for the nation of Israel, not simply individuals within it. A contemporary example of this happening in practice is Debt Justice, formerly the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which is part of a global movement demanding freedom from the slavery of unjust debts and a new financial system that puts people first. Originally inspired by the ancient concept of ‘jubilee’, Debt Justice works for a world where debt is no longer used as a form of power by which the rich exploit the poor. Freedom from debt slavery is a necessary step towards a world in which our common resources are used to realise equality, justice and human dignity.

We can see from all this that, in order to understand what our release means, we need to be people who know and understand the Bible. Chapter 4 of Luke’s gospel shows us clearly that Jesus was immersed in the Hebrew scriptures and saw them as speaking about himself. When he was tempted by the Devil at the beginning of Chapter 4, he defended himself by quoting from the Bible. In that passage he used the Bible to tell the Devil what he will not be like and here, in the synagogue, he used the Bible to tell everyone what he will be like. We can do the same if we read and understand what God is saying to us in the Bible both about those things from which our lives need to be freed and those things to which we need to dedicate our lives, talents and time.

The people who heard Jesus were, initially, impressed by what he said but as they realised that Jesus intended this Jubilee to be for all people they rejected him and tried to kill him. What will our response to Jesus’ manifesto be? Will it be the rejection that he experienced from the people of Nazareth? Will it be the apathy and disbelief that we accord to most political manifestos? Will it be the cynicism or distrust that some feel towards campaigns like Debt Justice? Or will it be acceptance of the release from slavery to sin that Jesus offers to us and involvement in his work of releasing others from sin and from debt? Amen.

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Bruce Cockburn - Call It Democracy.

Harvest Festival

The Harvest Festival at St John's Seven Kings had the theme of 'reduce, recycle and reuse' and included our children and young people performing a poem and song as well as making a green heart sculpture using junk items. Our music group led the singing of contemporary and traditional Harvest songs in a service that also featured The Lord's Prayer being read in old English. We collected Harvest goods for the Redbridge foodbank and were thrilled with the genorosity of those who came. We explored our theme with projected information on green initiatives as well as thinking through Bible passages about reducing the yield from the harvest in order to leave grain for others (Leviticus 23. 22), recycling by remaking failed pots (Jeremiah 18. 1 - 6), and minimising waste by reusing leftover food (John 6. 12).
Reduce, re-use and re-cycle isn’t a message that is very obviously found in the Bible – certainly not as a punchy slogan! However, we’ve found three examples to share with you briefly today of those three things as found in different parts of the Bible.

Leviticus 23 v 22

We don’t often read Leviticus, as it is a book filled with rules and regulations for the People of Israel rather than stories about them. However, this passage is actually well known to because of a story found in another book of the Bible; the book of Ruth. When Ruth and Naomi return to Israel they are very poor and a local farmer, Boaz, takes pity on Ruth and allows her to do what is described in this passage; to leave the grain at the edges of the fields so that poor people like Ruth can harvest it and make food to survive. Boaz could harvest the whole of his fields and keep all the grain for himself but doesn’t. Instead he deliberately reduces what he harvests for himself in order to ensure that there is something left over for those less well off than himself. In doing so, he is following a specific instruction from God, which is not directly applicable to us today because we are not farmers harvesting fields, but can still apply if we reduce what we have for ourselves in order that we share something of what we have with others less well off than ourselves.

Jeremiah 18. 1 – 6

This is a well known passage to do with God shaping and moulding our lives. It is a passage that we often sing in church through songs like ‘Spirit of the Living God’ and ‘Jesus, you are changing me’. In the passage, God as the potter recycles the clay. When it does turn out well on the wheel, he doesn’t simply throw away the clay with which the mistake was made. Instead he reworks and recycles it turns it into something new. The green heart which our children have made today is intended to symbolise the same thing. Often things which we ordinarily throw away can be recycled, whether through the Council’s recycling service or because we turn junk into something useful. Monica Abdala, who some of you will know as heading up Redbridge Street Pastors, is currently setting up a social enterprise to make new products from old pieces of material in order to raise funds to help street girls leave the streets. By doing that, she is putting into practice what this passage teaches.

John 6. 12

One of the interesting points about the feeding of the 5,000 which we often overlook is that the disciples cleared up after the people and kept, presumably to reuse, all the leftover food – 12 baskets full. We live in a culture which is incredibly wasteful. Last year a report called ‘Waste Not, Want Not’ estimated that as much as half of all the food produced in the world – equivalent to 2bn tonnes – ends up as waste every year. Tim Fox, head of energy and environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers who produced the report, said: "The amount of food wasted and lost around the world is staggering. This is food that could be used to feed the world's growing population – as well as those in hunger today. It is also an unnecessary waste of the land, water and energy resources that were used in the production, processing and distribution of this food." What has to change, they said, are people's mindsets on waste in order to discourage wasteful practices by farmers, food producers, supermarkets and consumers. In this passage, we see Jesus and his disciples modelling that kind of change.

Reduce, re-use and re-cycle isn’t a slogan that is found in the Bible but it is a message that these passages from the Bible endorse and commend.

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We Plough The Fields And Scatter.