Difficult Conversations: Unity and Disputation (Philippians 2:1-11; Luke 2:41-52; February 17, 2013)

Difficult Conversations: Unity and Disputation

Philippians 2:1-11; Luke 2:41-52
Lent 1C
February 17, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

During Lent in 2013, I will be preaching a series entitled "Difficult Conversations." It will explore a number of sensitive topics and will coordinate with an adult education offering on respectful communication.
 

Conversation is a rare thing.  I don’t mean talking.  There’s plenty of talking.  I mean conversation—talking about things that matter and doing it in ways that permit new ways of seeing things.  There’s not enough of that kind of talking.  Has that always been so?  Or is this a recent event?  I’m not sure.  It’s hard to see the forest for the trees, so the proverb tells us.  We live in the midst of events, so it’s hard to step back far enough to see patterns.

There are two changes in recent years that threaten conversation.  One is the rise of the so-called social media that tend to favor short and immediate forms of expression.  Twenty years ago we sent each other physical letters written on actual paper, letters you could hold in your hand, letters that some people might keep.  They were replaced by email.  Email messages looked a little like letters, but of course you can’t hold an email in your hand.  Email messages have to be short—no more than a single screen—or they don’t get read. 

Shorter still are the forms of communication that have come after email.  Today’s college students don’t use email much.  It’s too cumbersome.  Email messages are too long.  They prefer texting with cell phones.  The longest text you can send is two hundred characters.  Or they use Twitter or similar services.  Twitter messages, called tweets, are one hundred forty characters long at most.

Just to give you an idea of how short messages have to be, we’ll start the character count now: Our messages have become shorter, more compact, simpler and more direct.  (That’s 73 characters.)  So has our thinking.  (95.)  There is evidence that our brains wire adapt (134, so we’re out of room in a Tweet.) themselves to our forms of thinking and communication. (We’re at 188, just about out of room in a text message.) 

Let me back up and remove the running character count.  Our messages have become shorter, more compact, simpler and more direct.  So has our thinking.  There is evidence that our brains adapt themselves, hard-wire themselves, to our forms of thinking and communication.[1]  Shorter, simpler and more direct communication means simpler thinking.  This means, of course, that it may become impossible even to think a complex idea.  This means, in turn, that we may cease to be able to think our way through complex problems.  A problem like global climate change may become impossible even to conceive, let alone solve.

So that’s one threat to conversation that matters.

Another threat to conversation is what has happened to public discourse, to the way that we talk in public about how to solve problems and build a shared vision of the future for ourselves and our children.  Public discourse has become nasty, even vicious.  Some people say that things have become polarized, but I’m not so sure.  I can certainly remember times when the range of opinions was as wider or wider than it is now, but the tone of the public discourse remained much more respectful than it does now.  Or so it seems to me.

The growth of social media may have something to do with that.  It’s all too easy to find our little corner of the internet where everyone thinks like we do.  Those who don’t are wrong.  They may not even be completely human.  When someone does disagree with us, we react pretty badly.  When it comes to our talk shows and debates, we like blood, well, metaphorically speaking.  The “anger-tainment” industry isn’t really interested in thoughtful conversation.  There’s just not much money in it.

I think it was Garrison Keillor who coined the phrase “pancake politics.”  I haven’t been able to track it down, so maybe he didn’t.  Maybe I only imagined it.  If that’s the case, then I coined the phrase “pancake politics.”  But I think it was Garrison Keillor.  Here is what he described:  There is a group of about men who meet at a local diner every Saturday morning at 7:30.  The membership has shifted a little over the years, but they’ve been meeting weekly for the last fifteen years.  They talk about everything.  They talk about the weather.  They talk about their health.  They talk about sports and their kids.  They talk about how the floral and greeting card industries have managed to get their wives to act as enforcers to make sure that Valentine’s Day sales don’t lag.  Like I say, they talk about everything.  They talk about politics.  They don’t always agree.  Sometimes they get angry.  Sometimes the talk gets a little uncomfortable.  But at 7:30 the next Saturday morning they’re around the table again, eating pancakes and talking about everything.  They value each other and their friendship more than they value winning arguments.  That’s pancake politics.  Pancake politics is threatened by the “anger-tainment” industry of radio and cable talk shows, blogs and Tweets.

As part of the church I’d like to think that we have something to offer here.  After all, we’re God’s children, made in and bearing the image of God.  That should translate into respect.  Respect should translate into an ability to get along.

If only it were so!  We Christians have been a fractious lot!  One really good—or, rather, really bad—example will be enough.  While in Stirling, Scotland, in 2003, Carol and I visited the Church of the Holy Rude.  “Rood” by the way is an old word for cross.  In 1656 a dispute arose between those who wanted to remain Church of Scotland and those who wanted to become part of the Free Kirk that didn’t want local lairds picking their pastors.  The congregation was split down the middle and unable to decide.  They appealed to the Town Council.  Alas, the Town Council was also split down the middle.  So they did the only sensible thing: they built a partitioning wall right down the middle of the sanctuary.  On one side it was Church of Scotland; on the other side it was Free Kirk.  And so it remained for two hundred eighty years until the lack of money forced them together in 1936 during the Great Depression.

In more recent times, the United Methodist Church has been arguing about homosexuality for over forty years with no resolution in sight.  At last year’s General Conference in Tampa, Florida, we couldn’t even agree on a resolution saying that we couldn’t agree.  We have been unable to think together about the ethics or theology of the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Perhaps this is because we are afraid that if we start this conversation we will discover that we are unable to agree.  And we believe that we must agree.  There is after all a thread running through the Bible, and especially the New Testament, that says that we are supposed to agree with each other.  Paul says so in Philippians: they are to “complete [his] joy by thinking the same way, having the same love, being united, and agreeing with each other.” 

Paul, of course, has a problem: how to supervise congregations that he has founded when he is off for years at a time founding other congregations.  Congregation members are supposed to agree with each other.  But that begs the question, What agreement are they supposed to come to?  Thinking in whose way?  Well, of course, they are think in the way that Paul thinks and agree with each other by agreeing with Paul.  That would certainly make managing the Philippians at a distance easier.

The record shows that neither the Philippians nor any of his other congregations were in agreement about much of anything.  It doesn’t seem to be in their nature.  They come by it honestly.  The Jewish tradition is quite disputatious.  It loves a good argument.  The Talmud, the huge Jewish document that comments on the Scriptures and on various questions of Jewish life, is fond of saying things like, “Rabbi Soandso says this for these reasons, but Rabbi Whatsizname says that for those reasons.”  Often it simply fails to say who is right.  All it does is record the conversation.  The reader may choose to take part or not, but in many, many cases the Talmud does not tell the reader how to decide.

Even as a young man, just barely at the age of accountability, Jesus embraced this disputatious life.  Failing to return from the Passover in the caravan with his parents, Jesus was found in the Temple, sitting among the teachers (remember this would have meant that he claimed to be a teacher!), listening, asking questions, replying to their questions, in other words taking part in the debates.

“Didn’t you know that it was necessary for me to be in my Father’s house?” Jesus said to his parents.  The word “house” is not in the original text.  The original only says, “in the of my Father.”  And to complicate things further, “the” is plural.  So it could be “in the house of my Father.”  Older translations had “my Father’s business.”  But I’m wondering if the plural things that Jesus is in, that Jesus assumed that his parents would know he was in, don’t refer to the disputatious conversations that took place in the Temple, the conversations that made ancient Judaism what it was.  Jesus clearly valued vigorous debate and could hold his own in it, even at the age of twelve, even with the Ivy League rabbis in Jerusalem.

Of course, centuries later the church, or rather that part of the church that called itself “catholic,” that is, “universal,” and “orthodox,” that is, right-thinking, took uniform thinking very seriously.  But maybe, like Paul, its main concern was controlling what had become a massive movement.  The church wanted everyone to have the same ideas, namely its ideas. 

We’ve gotten the idea that we’re not supposed to have a thought, at least about religion, that disagrees with the official teaching of the church.  People still come to me every once in a while to know what that official teaching is.  I used to tell them.  Now, if I’m well-rested and have my wits about me, I’m more likely to answer, “Well, some people think this.  And some people think that.  And I find myself leaning toward this.”  I confess that sometimes I just tell them, but I’m trying to get over that.

More and more I see that the Bible is not a single book that says one thing.  It’s a collection of writings that say many, many things.  These writings often agree, but they also often disagree, sometimes wildly.  The Bible is not a statement about God and faith.  The Bible is a conversation, a conversation that is sometimes quite raucous.  This is true of the Christian movement, too.  More and more I’m convinced that to be a Christian is not to believe certain things, but to enter into a conversation. 

And here are a couple of wonderful things that I have found about this conversation.  While I have strong opinions about many things, I seldom find God in my opinions.  I find that God is in the give and take of conversation and even in the parry and riposte of debate.  When I disagree with someone or someone disagrees with me the conversation itself is more important than whether either of us is right or wrong.  I think that’s wonderful.  And I think that’s a gift that the world needs.

Another wonderful thing about this conversation is that, while it began thousands of years ago, it isn’t finished.  We are still in the same conversation that Abraham and Sarah started all those centuries ago. 

Judging by what I see in Washington, in the media and in the social media, our world very much needs to learn the art of conversation.  Who better to model this art than a movement that is a conversation?

But if we’re going to do that well we need to think together about conversation.  We’ll need some practice, too.  So, having consulted with the Staff-Pastor/Parish Relations and Social Concerns Committees, I’m inviting you into a Lenten discipline.  Today during the education hour I invite you to gather in the back of the sanctuary to think together with me about conversation, about what good conversation looks like and how we can learn how to do it better. 

Then for the other Sundays in Lent, the sermon will introduce one of the topics we struggle with in the church and in the world.  I will try my utmost to preach in a way that opens rather than closes a conversation.  That doesn’t mean that you’ll agree with me, but I will intend to leave an opening for you to reply.

In the education hour that follows, we’ll keeping learning about good conversation and practice our skills by continuing the conversation that the sermon started.  We may not be very good at it at first.  We may even fail spectacularly.  That’s okay as long as we agree that we’re going to keep trying.

The habits of our culture are hard to kick.  Our culture tells us that it’s more important to win than to understand.  The competitive nature of vigorous conversation gives us greater clarity about our own and about each other’s thinking.  That’s a good thing.  But our culture isn’t satisfied with that.  It tells us that we have to win.  And the result is the sort of rancor we’re all so tired of witnessing in Washington.   

Our culture tells us that if we can’t win we must at least be right.  But if we’re already right then we no longer need our conversation partners, we no longer need a community.  If we’re already right then we’ve nothing left to learn and where’s the fun in that?

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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[1] Carr, By Nicholas. “How the Internet Is Making Us Stupid.” Telegraph.co.uk, August 27, 2010, sec. internet. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/7967894/How-the-Internet-is-making-us-stupid.html.

In a Glass Darkly (Transfiguration, Luke 9:28-36, February 3, 2013)

In a Glass Darkly

The Festival of the Transfiguration – C
Luke 9:28-36
February 3, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Let’s just be honest: the story of what is called “the transfiguration” of Jesus is a troublesome one.

Matthew and Luke both took the basic sequence of events from Mark’s gospel.  Mark tells us that Jesus and his disciples were in the far north of Galilee at Caesarea Philippi.  Jesus asked what people were saying about him.  The disciples volunteered a few responses.  Then Jesus asked them who they thought he was.  Peter blurted out that Jesus was the Messiah, that is, “the anointed one.”  Jesus ordered the disciples to say nothing about this to anyone.

Then he started to tell them what was going to happen to “the anointed one,” namely, that he was going to go to Jerusalem.  He would suffer at the hands of the leaders of religious and political establishment, be put to death, and rise from the dead after three days.  Peter could not bear to hear this and said so.  Jesus rebuked him with the famous line: “Get behind me, Satan!”  Not a particularly nice way to talk to your friends, but there it is.  

Then Jesus began to tell his disciples (according to Matthew and Luke) or the disciples and the crowd (according to Mark) that only those who take on Jesus’ pattern—taking up their own cross and giving up their lives for the sake of the good news—will be Jesus’ disciples.  Like teacher, like student.  Discipleship is not a matter of mastering a certain body of knowledge, but of living a life that conforms to a certain pattern.

This was hard to swallow.  Perhaps for that reason we have Jesus’ assurance at the end of this episode that “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.” 

But what does that mean?  What does it mean to “see the kingdom of God”?  What does it mean to “taste death”?  On the face of it, if we don’t force the reading, it seems to be that Jesus is promising that the end of history would occur before the last of the disciples had died.

But the years passed and the original disciples of Jesus began to die.  The “kingdom of God” remained unseen.  There was still injustice.  The poor and weak still suffered in a world rigged in favor of the rich and strong.  The world went on, untransformed, as the whole generation of Jesus’ first followers grew old and died.

Luke’s readers had not seen the promise kept.  Jesus had gone on to Jerusalem after these conversations.  He had gone on and he had been arrested.  He was put to death by the authorities, whether at the hands of the Roman occupiers or their local collaborators.  Jesus had challenged the ruling classes by calling into question their claims to divine authority and they had responded by killing him.  Where was the “kingdom of God” in that?  Where was the “kingdom of God” in being executed as an enemy of the state?  Where was the “kingdom of God” in Jesus’ death on a cross?

Where indeed?

We might ask similar questions.  We’ve had a rough year in this country that has renewed old controversies most political insiders had considered to be dead.  2012 saw 16 mass shootings in the United States, leaving at least 88 dead.[1]  The tipping point that ended the silence of course was the shooting in Newtown, CT, that resulted in 28 deaths, including 20 children.

But it’s really been worse for us than that.  These headline-grabbing mass shootings are just the tip of the iceberg.  Every day seven children and teens die from gun violence, one Newtown every three days.  In the three decades beginning in 1979, nearly 120,000 children and teens died from gun violence, more than the number of U.S. military combat deaths in the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars combined.[2]  

We might hope to distance ourselves from these disturbing numbers.  Iowa, after all, isn’t California, Illinois or New York.  These things are rare in Iowa.  That’s true, but nearly true enough.  Iowa is a safer place for children and teens than, say, Illinois, twice as safe in fact.  It’s four times safer than the most dangerous state in the nation which I was surprised to learn is not California or New York, but Alaska.[3]  But saf-er doesn’t mean safe.  Not for the 197 children and teens who were killed in Iowa by guns in the first decade of this century.  What I find especially disturbing is that nearly three-quarters of these died at their own hand.  Fourteen young Iowa lives a year on the average ended their lives senselessly in self-inflicted and meaningless violence.  

So what I want to know is this: Where is the kingdom of God?  Where is the kingdom of God in these deaths?  Where is the kingdom of God in these lives that ended too soon and left such misery and grief behind them in exchange for promise and potential snuffed out in a violent instant?

Where indeed?

There are no easy answers to that question.  In the end there may not be any answer that truly satisfies.  Not unless we find an answer that restores these victims to their lives and gives them back to their families and us.  There are no easy answers.  But there are hints and suggestions and gestures that point in a certain direction.

One of them is in the story itself as Luke tells it.  Unlike the other accounts of the story, Luke tells us what Jesus was talking about with Moses and Elijah.  Our translation says they “spoke about Jesus’ departure, which he would achieve in Jerusalem.”  But our translation doesn’t tell us the overtones of the original.  In the original the word that is translated “departure” is eksodos.  That’s the name of the second book of the Bible, Exodus.  Yes, you can translate eksodos as “departure.”  But “departure” is a pretty weak word to describe the events of the Book of Exodus.  The “departure” in the story of God’s people is a story of liberation.  It marks the creation of the people of Israel.  It is an account of emancipation from slavery to the Empire.  

The fact that the disciples are on the mountaintop, the glory of God made visible as nearly blinding light, the presence of Moses the leader of the liberation and Elijah the tireless denouncer of Empire, all remind us of God’s mighty acts of deliverance in the past.  The God who is present here, whose glory shines around this meeting of Lawgiver, Prophet and Messiah, the God who speaks from the cloud on the mountain, the God who has frustrated the designs of empires to set the people free, is present once more.

In the presence of this God and saturated in the memories of release, rescue and relief, we cannot read eksodos as simply “departure.”  Jesus’ “departure” will be more than his exit from the scene.  It will be an exodus, a deliverance of God’s people, a victory over Empire, and a triumph over oppressors.

How?  We aren’t told, at least not yet.  Luke doesn’t tell us how; he only tells us where to look.  We are to look into the heart of the suffering, surrounded by scorn, into death itself.  There is where the act of liberation is taking place, there is where God is at work.  There—if we had the eyes to see—is the kingdom of God.

Does that make Jesus’ death a good thing?  Does it mean that his suffering is somehow to be viewed positively?  Some people view the cross as the place where Jesus satisfies a wrathful God by giving God his own suffering as some sort of payment on our behalf.  Are they right?  Is that what we mean when we say that Christ died for us?

I don’t think so.  I don’t believe so.  But neither does that mean that we can tell this story of good news without telling the story of Jesus’ death.

Does that make it all better?  No, not at all.  We still have our questions and our deep conviction that some things ought not to be, that some things are just wrong.  Among those things that are just wrong is that a single child should die violently.  No reasons that we can understand are adequate to make things okay. All of our explanations fall short.  

Luke points us toward something besides an explanation.  Luke points us toward the possibility that God is not absent from the senselessness of these violent deaths in our country and in our state.  Luke points us toward the possibility that beyond our ability to understand it the transfiguration is about Jesus’ death and Jesus’ death is about the Kingdom of God.  Luke points us toward the possibility that it is in the very taste of death itself that we will see the Kingdom of God.

That doesn’t make it okay, that seven children are shot and killed each day.  But it helps me just a little to know that if there is suffering at the center of the glory on the mountaintop, there is also hope at the center of suffering, the hope that dares to be born when optimism dies, simply because against all evidence God is not absent.  This strange and disturbing story opens up a place for hope.  Today on this wonderful and disturbing day in the church’s calendar, God invites us to live in that hope.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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[1] Zornick, George. “Sixteen US Mass Shootings Happened in 2012, Leaving at Least 88 Dead.” The Nation. Accessed February 9, 2013. http://www.thenation.com/blog/171774/fifteen-us-mass-shootings-happened-2012-84-dead#.

[2] Protect Children, Not Guns: Key Facts. Children’s Defense Fund, January 3, 2013.

[3] Protect Children, Not Guns: Gun Violence in the States, 2000-2010. Children’s Defense Fund, January 18, 2013.

Jubilee (Luke 4:14-21; Epiphany 3C; January 27, 2013)

Good News to the Poor

Luke 4:14-21
Epiphany 3C
January 27, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Note: Due to inclement weather on January 20, 2013, the texts for that day were used for the following Sunday, accounting for the use of the texts for the 3^rd Sunday after Epiphany being used on the 4^th Sunday after Epiphany.

Last week we read in John’s gospel that the very first act of ministry that Jesus did was to turn 150 gallons of water into a first-rate wine.  This is no accident, since the first story discloses the heart of Jesus’ life and work.  If we ask John’s Jesus what his message is in a nutshell, he answers that it is that the life of God’s people is like a wedding where the wine gets better and better and never runs out.

Luke does much the same thing in a quite different way.  We are told that Jesus wandered through Galilee working wonders and teaching in the synagogues.  Then, when Jesus was back in his hometown of Nazareth, before he called any disciples or did anything else, he went to synagogue on the Sabbath. 

He was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.  This would not have been unusual.  Any adult Jewish male could read in synagogue.  Jesus had developed a bit of a reputation and it was only natural to give the hometown boy and visiting celebrity a chance to shine. 

Jesus read some words from Isaiah and it’s clear that he wanted to read those particular words.  He rolled the scroll until he got to the section.  It took a while.  There were no chapter or verse numbers, no column headings.  Everyone was waiting.  He wasn’t flustered by the silence hanging in the air.  Finally he found what he was looking for at Isaiah 61, a part of what scholars now call III Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me 

     to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind, 

     to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

He read these words and then he sat down.  This is important.  In our practice it is the congregation who sits and it is the preacher or teacher who stands.  In Jesus’ day it was the other way around.  The congregation stood out of respect and the teacher sat.  I’ve always kind of liked that idea, but I can’t ever seem to get a congregation to go along.  Anyway, Jesus sat down to teach and the congregation was standing. 

Jesus sat down to make the text he had just read clear and this was the whole of his sermon: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  (Maybe if my sermons were that short, you’d be willing to stand!)

Jesus’ ministry, as Luke sees it, is grounded in an old dream that calls upon an ancient ideal.  The dream is the dream of restoration, of repair and renewal.  But that dream in turn hearkens back to bedrock beliefs of God’s covenant people.  Those beliefs have to do with how God’s people are joined to the land.

In the story that God’s people told themselves, land was not something that could be owned outright.  It wasn’t something to be bought and sold.  It was not a commodity that could be bundled, parceled, subdivided, or developed.  It was not a thing that was supposed to turn a profit.  The land even had rights.  It had, above all, the right to Sabbath rest. It had the right to rest for a year after six years of crop production.  Every seven years the land would lie fallow.  If it happened to bring forth a crop on its own, that belonged to the poor who alone had a right to harvest it.

Land was a gift from God to God’s people, a gift to all of God’s people.  Each family had its own plot.  Under the covenant each plot was joined to a particular family.  The family cared for the land.  The land under God’s care provided for the needs of each family.  The prophet Micah had this in mind when he proclaimed an end to war, when

 “[nations] shall beat their swords into plowshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

neither shall they learn war anymore;

but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,

and no one shall make them afraid.”[1] 

Everyone, not just in Israel but even among the nations, is entitled to “their own vines and their own fig trees.”

Of course, not all land was equal and not all families were equal either.  Some families prospered on their land.  Others, either through lack of skill or through laziness or through plain bad luck, found themselves in financial trouble.  They might even be faced with the choice between selling their land or starving.  Of course, they would choose to sell their land before they starved.  In that case, there was the risk that the bond that held the land and its family together might be broken.

God’s people, though, had a clause in their covenant that answered to this need.  Every fifty years, after seven cycles of years of production and a year of Sabbath for the land, the land would go back to its original family.  If the family had been forced to sell itself into slavery, they would be released from that slavery at the same time.  This year was known as the Year of Jubilee.  As the Torah puts it:

“[Y]ou shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.”[2]

Ancient Israel, at least in the story that it told itself about itself, had a way of resetting the economic game.  It had a way to keep the rich from becoming too rich and the poor from becoming too poor.  It had a way of reminding those who did well and those who did poorly that they were still bound to each other in God’s covenant.  The terms of the covenant were such that the wealth of the whole community was based on living justly with each other and with the land.  The rich could not have a special deal of their very own that let them live as if they were not part of the covenant.

Now, as I said, this was a part of the story that they told themselves about themselves.  We may surely ask if they actually did as they said they were to do.  We can ask, but it is very hard to say that they did.  They may have, but there is little or no evidence for it.  Still, it would be a stretch to argue from the lack of evidence that they never kept the law of Jubilee

We do know for certain that there were times when they did not do as they said they would do.  As happens under every system, those who gained wealth and power used their wealth and power to make sure that they could keep and even increase their wealth and power.  It was what my father calls The Golden Rule: “Those with the gold make the rules.”

We know that in ancient Israel the rich and powerful figured out ways to keep the land permanently.  This also created a permanent underclass of poor people who had no land.  The Jewish prophets railed against the corruption of the system that made this possible and scolded the rich who made use of this possibility.  Isaiah for example says to the greedy rich:

“Ah, you who join house to house,

who add field to field,

until there is room for no one but you,

and you are left to live alone

in the midst of the land!”[3] 

We know then that there were people who figured out how to get around the law of Jubilee.  Maybe it was a law that fell into disuse.  Maybe there was a crisis and the rich and powerful managed to convince the king that they needed their extra land so that they could give jobs to the laborers who had been displaced.  Maybe the king himself was rich and so this argument made good sense to him.  So maybe the law of Jubilee became dead letter, considered by the elites to be as quaint as the laws still on the books in some places that forbid kissing in public or require riders to tie their horses to a hitching post when they go into T-Bocks.

But somehow the dream survived.  It survived so that III Isaiah could use it as a promise of restoration, of return and renewal.  It survived so that Jesus could use this dream to under-gird his life and ministry.  It survived for the descendants of Africans who had been stolen from their homes and shipped across the Atlantic and sold to plantation owners—good Christians all, and more than a few of them Methodists—who would forget God’s Torah and own them like cattle.  These slaves remembered the dream of Jubilee and its promise that their freedom was a promise from God and it would come.  The dream of Jubilee fired the imagination of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrated a couple of weeks ago.  The dream of Jubilee survived.

Downtown in the city of Philadelphia there is one of the smallest national parks in the land, a little piece of land that somehow, miraculously hasn’t fallen into private hands, a little piece of land that still belongs to all of us together.  It’s called Independence National Historical Park.  It contains what we now call Independence Hall where the Continental Congress commissioned and received and edited the Declaration of Independence.  It also contains the Liberty Bell Center that houses the famous Liberty Bell.

The Liberty Bell is not just a bell.  It’s a symbol that various groups and causes have used to help put their ideas or plans forward.  It was first called the Liberty Bell by abolitionists who were working to free slaves.  That’s certainly a rather important meaning of liberty. 

For some people today, liberty means the freedom to get whatever they can and keep whatever they can get.  Some of those folks use the Liberty Bell as a symbol for that notion of liberty. 

But the Liberty Bell itself protests that use, if we will trouble ourselves to read what it has to say.  Written around the bell are these words: “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”  Yes, it comes from Leviticus 5, the part of the Torah that establishes the Law of Jubilee.  What the Liberty Bell itself preaches is Jubilee.  So, it warns the rich “who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but [them].”  It declares that the poor will be able to have what is theirs by right and that neither they nor we will have to go on serving the whims of the wealthy and powerful.  It announces that the day is coming when each us may sit “under [our] own vines and under [our] own fig trees and no one shall make [us] afraid.”

This is the Jubilee that Jesus announced.  This is the Jubilee longed for and dreamt of ever since when—to borrow words from a more recent preacher of Jubilee—we and all of God’s children shall join hands and sing, “Free at last!  Free at last!  I thank God I’m free at last!”

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[1] Micah 4:3b-4a.

[2] Leviticus 25:10.

[3] Isaiah 5:8.