May 1, 2016
Texts:
Leviticus 25:10
Luke 4:18-21
Colossians 1:10-13
It is an honor to be with you today. I am always honored to get share my experiences, especially with you, 8th Day Church. I have so much to learn from you and your faith and am humbled that I get to share mine.
Today, I’d like to share a bit of myself with you. I’d like to share about the experiences I’ve had and what motivates me in life. Most importantly, I’d like to share with you about the Jesus that I know and love.
I grew up in a Christian faith environment, believing that God was good, that God loved humanity and cared deeply for us. At the same time, I had the privilege of living in Africa for four years when I was younger, as my parents were teachers there. Having that cross-cultural experience at a young age has impacted me and shaped my perspective on life. When you’re a young boy of eight or nine and you see children your age homeless and starving on the streets, while you go home at night to a warm meal and loving parents, that tends to leave a mark.
Over the years my faith has continued to deepen and grown into what I will call an intimate friendship. I’ve also had the blessing of getting to continue my travels. Overall, I’ve been to over seventeen countries. I’ve made friends with people who have nothing but the clothes on their backs, with refugees escaping from ISIS, with survivors of natural disasters. And at the end of each visit to a new country, I fly back to the United States. The price of my plane ticket alone could significantly change the lives of some of my friends.
Currently, I’m working for Samaritan Ministry of Greater Washington as a caseworker. The people I work with are often homeless or unemployed. They are hardworking and inspirational men and women who just want to make a living out of their lives. Many of them have lived in DC for their entire lives and struggle consistently to find steady employment and housing. And yet, here I am, a West Coast transplant, who easily got a job here, who goes home to a house every night. When you live a life of luxury and blessings and you work with talented and skilled individuals who are experiencing the complete opposite, you either choose to stick your head in the sand or you choose to ask questions. When you’ve traveled and realized that the very fact that you can travel is a sign of privilege, you can either choose to ignore an uncomfortable journey or you can choose to start asking questions.
The story of the last few years, and especially this year with DY, has been the story of asking questions. I have found that I cannot honestly follow the way of Jesus, that I cannot truly be a deep and intimate friend of Jesus, without confronting these hard questions of inequality and oppression. Day by day and step by step, I find God’s Spirit pulling me deeper into this confrontation. And it’s not just confronting the evils in society all around me; it’s confronting the sexism, the racism, the oppression inside of me! What I have discovered for myself is that the more seriously I take the gospel, the good news of Jesus, the more seriously I take oppression and liberation. I have found that if I want to love God, I will love those around me. Love God. Love people. That was the cornerstone of Jesus’ message. The question I have been tackling recently (or to be more accurate, the question that I feel like has been tackling me) has been “what does it mean to love God and love people in a world of oppression where I am one of the major benefiters of the aforementioned oppression?” I am a white, middle-class, American man. It’s hard to get more privileges than that. In light of this, how do I follow Jesus, who was born into a poor family, born into a conquered and impoverished nation?
The Scriptures that were read earlier today have been one of the ways where I’ve felt Jesus leading me to answer that question. I want you all to imagine a scene with me that is probably all too familiar. Imagine a family living together in a home. They begin to fall on hard times financially. The parents are laid off of work. They apply for food stamps and unemployment. The money they get from thosebenefits just isn’t enough for them and their kids. They begin renting out the rooms in the house, but it still isn’t enough. Finally, they’re forced to leave their home and live in a shelter or with friends and family. Homeless and unemployed, they take out loans, they borrow money from friends and family to survive. Things continue to get even worse and the family begins to work for anyone they can, getting paid practically nothing. Sound familiar? Now imagine that suddenly, one day, they get a call from the government. They’re told “your home belongs to you again. You can go back to it. You’ve been re-hired at your jobs. We’ve canceled every single debt that you accumulated over the years.” They go home again, they begin working again. Everything that they had lost is restored to them. That would be pretty cool, right?
This story is an imperfect illustration of what is described in Leviticus 25, which we read from earlier. That chapter describes the Jewish festival known as the Year of Jubilee. Now, the illustration I used isn’t totally accurate for several reasons. The Year of Jubilee had a number of components to it that we don’t have time today to talk about. Jewish society was also set up quite a bit differently than ours, so their practice of jubilee can’t be directly translated into our world. But the core, the heart of Jubilee, was restoration. Every 50 years, Israelites who had been forced to sell their land were able to return and get all of their land back. Israelites who were working as slaves and hired workers had every single debt canceled and went home free. It was a year of liberty! It was a year of restoration. It was about establishing people back to their original conditions, about a restoration of captives. The year of jubilee was about going home again, about getting to start over, about new beginnings. It ensured that there would be no such thing as a cycle of poverty, that nobody how bad things got for people, restoration and starting over would always be possible. Howard Thurman, in his book “Jesus and the Disinherited” tells the story of a minister who would come and visit slaves and encourage them saying “you are not a slave. You are a child of God!” What this minister was telling them was that no matter what labels society put on them, they were children of God, they were special, they were sacred, and they came from God. The Year of Jubilee was a reminder to the people of Israel that they were more than slaves, that their financial status did not get to define them, that at their very core, they belonged to God. It was a reminder of the truth that before God, we are all human, born with dignity and sacredness.
It is this year of jubilee that I believe Jesus is referencing in the passage we read from Luke. He speaks of the year of the Lord’s favor, of captives being set free, of restoration! To me, that sounds like jubilee. Now, I really like the ideas outlined in Leviticus 25, but the good news found in the year of Jubilee pales in comparison to the good news found in Jesus. Jesus calls his own message the good news of the kingdom of God. And he began to build a community, a community of ragtag losers, criminals, terrorists, women, and untouchables. The despised, the oppressed flocked to him. Jesus embodied jubilee, but on a much deeper level. It is my personal belief that the mission of Jesus was to restore humanity to itself. I believe that there is something that warps us, that distorts, that poisonsus that leads us to kill, to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to destroy. When I look around at the world, at the poverty, at the pain, I see a world that has lost track of who we are. A world that has forgotten that we are children of God.
This is something that I’ve experienced on a personal level. When I was 18 I became severely depressed and suicidal. I became addicted to self-harm, cutting myself compulsively. Thanks to some of my wonderful friends, I was able to get through that time. But even after I no longer struggled with self-harm, I still struggled with shame. I have a row of scars on my left arm and every time I looked at them I was reminded of my pain, of my shame and guilt. It tore me up inside. But one day, I was praying and as I was praying I looked down at my arm and instead of scars, I saw the word “Jubilee”. It stunned me, to say the least. As I stared at my arm, I began realizing that I was a deeply loved and cared for child of God and that I had always been that way, even in my worst moments. I was a deeply loved person, who had no clue just how valuable I was. From that point on, I could no longer think of myself as a cutter or an even an ex-cutter. That’s never who I was. Deeper than my pain, deeper than my scars, was the joyful and beautiful person that God had made me to be. I realized that I am jubilee, I am one who has been restored to myself and every day I find myself more and more. I am not defined by my captivity, by my mistakes, by pain. I am defined by what God says about me.We all need to experience this personal healing and restoration.
This jubilee of Jesus is more than just personal though. The community of Jesus, the church, is called to be a jubilee church, a restoration church, a church that stands up and demands that people be allowed to return home. Honestly, I don’t know for sure what that looks like, given the societal differences between us and Israel. That’s a question that we have to struggle with. But here are two things that I know for sure. We, the church, the kingdom community of God, have a responsibility to speak out for jubilee in our communities. I don’t know exactly how we do that, but it is essential to our very identity as the beloved community. The second thing I know is this: displacement of long-time DC residents is the opposite of jubilee. The displacement of poor people to make room for wealthy white millennials, like myself, is in complete and total opposition to year of the Lord’s favor that Jesus claimed to have fulfilled. Jubilee is about people going home again, about economic opportunities being restored to them. If something is the antithesis of jubilee, we have a duty to speak out against it.
My friends, my hope today is that all of us, myself included, will realize that we are called to be a jubilee people, a people who joyfully experience the home-coming that Jesus proclaimed. The good news is that the kingdom of God is near. Welcome home. Let us follow Jesus, the Beloved of God, into his kingdom.