Jubilee!

Our culture is sometimes obsessed with winning and losing.  I don’t mean the good and healthy competition that motivates people to strive for excellence and achievement.  What I mean is the obsession with winning and losing, to the point that we invest our sense of self-worth, fulfillment and joy exclusively to winning and losing.

Years ago I was invited to speak at a baccalaureate at my college alma mater.  Normally, at those kinds of graduation occasions, the speakers take the opportunity to speak in glowing terms about success, achievement, advancement and all the rest - which is great!  On this particular occasion I spoke to the issue, “How are you going to handle failure when it comes?” 

Some people were surprised I would to speak to such a subject on such an occasion, but others appreciated my willingness to take up the subject because as several said to me, “Nobody ever talks about that.”

It is play-off time in the NFL, and people are obsessed with winning and losing.  We hear the heightened cheers and laments of fans and see the annual round of coach dismissals with owners and general mangers renewing their quest to find the perfect winning coach who will provide them with the coveted Super Bowl Ring – anything short of which is considered failure.  

We see this similar obsession manifested in the last few years in the plethora of so-called  "Reality" TV Shows” that parade across our TV screens including the likes of Survivor, The Apprentice, American Idol, the Last Comic Standing and many more!  We see the competition at times become almost brutal and cut-throat, with the crescendo of each show being that one or more are bounced, fired or dismissed. I suppose it makes for interesting entertainment, but when we make that reality our everyday reality it can spell trouble.

There are a million ways we can feel like losers; feel like we've played the game hard to the best of our ability; played it well; and yet still feel like we are at the proverbial bottom; or on the outside looking in.  It can be over jobs, careers, family issues, relationship issues, health issues, gender issues, racial issues, ethnic issues - all sorts of issues.

Of course nobody wants to lose.  Nobody wants to feel like a loser, not even in the church.  Notice how easily Christians adopt winning and losing language: winning people to Christ; winning souls for Jesus?  Winning and losing, and the difference between the two, is embedded in our souls.  There is a temptation to envision Jesus as a kind of Ultimate CEO, mapping out successful corporate strategies, takeovers and personal victories.  We all want to be perceived as winners, think of ourselves as winners, and others to think of us as winners.

But we get a glimpse something else in today's gospel.  From Luke we are reminded of the self-proclaimed focus of Jesus' message and his mission.  Jesus stood up among his home town folk, opened the book of Isaiah and read:

"…he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor… proclaim release to the captives… recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free… to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor… "  Lk 4:18-19

We see Jesus defining his ministry here, declaring he had come to proclaim the "year of the Lord's favor," also known as the "Jubilee Year."  The Jubilee Year, as outlined in Leviticus, occurred every 50^th year, and during that year each household was to recover wayward members, slaves were to be set free and all debts cancelled.  It was a year in which the social and economic playing field was leveled for everybody.  Imagine a world where all debts were cancelled? It's hard to imagine isn't? The world runs on debt, and I do not only mean financial debt.  The world is built with the mortar and bricks of those who owe and those who are owed.  By inaugurating such a radical re-adjustment of fortunes and debt, Jesus undermined the conventional notion of winning and losing, those who owe and those who are owed, as a premise within the kingdom of God.  In the Kingdom of God, the Jubilee Year is extended indefinitely; there are no winners and no losers. There are only the cherished children of God.

The church isn't made up of employees of a corporation.  Living at the height of the Roman empire, the apostle Paul had numerous political, hierarchical, and civic organizational models he could have used as analogies to describe the character and function of the church.  But Paul chose to use the analogy of the human body; an organic unity in which all facets look out for the care of one another and the well-being of the whole; an organic unity so close that he described this experience, ”…when one member rejoices all rejoice; and when one member suffers all suffer.”

If you have a stone in your shoe, you don't curse your foot.  The whole body stoops to take the stone out.  Likewise in the transformed reality of the Kingdom of God, the body of Christ, the lost and last are not discarded, ignored, abandoned or cursed.  It is the work of the body of Christ to care for the entire body with compassion, understanding and a lifelong commitment of service.  For the children of God winning isn't the only thing, it is merely another thing.  Winning is not the operative value within the body of Christ.  If anything, Jesus called on winners to get lost: lost in service, lost in wonder, lost in compassion, lost in love, lost in praise.  In fact, Jesus said if we are to truly find ourselves, we first must be willing to lose ourselves. Later in Luke Jesus says, "For those who want to save their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives for my sake will save them." Luke 9:24

The real Jesus came to embrace the lost and wipe out the insidious distinctions that we draw between people.  We often live as if we have pencils with no erasers drawing indelible lines between one another.  As children of the Kingdom, our question is no longer whether we're among the losers or the winners.  Our question is: "Are we a healthy body of Christ?  Do we see and treat each other as cherished children of God, significant parts of the single body of Christ?"   Or do we isolate from one another in prisons of individuality, concerned primarily about advancing personal agendas winning little victories over others; seeing ourselves as mutually exclusive from one another, distant and disconnected?

Unlike in culture, in the body of Christ self-esteem is not found in asserting ourselves over and against one another, but rather self-esteem is found in all of us standing before one Lord as both losers and winners alike: sinners but forgiven; allowing Christ to join our hands inseparably together, and then receiving the gift of being named his child and placed among others in His community.

In the body of Christ we don't keep score.  The one with the most merit badges or accumulated points doesn't win; but rather the points are given away to others.  In the body of Christ we recognized that before God we are all bankrupted by sin and any points we're given are pure gifts from God. 

A Sunday school teacher had a class of eight young children.  One Sunday she had a project for them that involved Play Dough.  One little boy came in late, and all the Play Dough had been distributed.  He sat down and immediately noticed everybody had Play Dough except him.   You could see his lip begin to quiver and his eyes fill with tears.  He felt left out; lost; alone; a little like a loser.  Before the teacher could even act, a little girl sitting next to him spontaneously broke a hunk of play dough off of the crude angel she was making and gave it to the little boy.  Before the teacher could say a word each of the other children followed her lead and broke off some of their play dough and gave it to the boy. 

Is it just a cute story and child’s play?  Or is it a model of the kingdom of heaven and the body of Christ working the way Jesus envisioned it.  Jesus said, "Unless you change and become like children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven."  Matthew 18:3.

Gandhi said, "There is enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed."

In a world where the affluent “winners" tacitly accept that 80% of the world's resources are gobbled up by 20% of the world's population, the church, the body of Christ, needs to stand in contrast and model an alternative.  Jesus stood up among the home folk and announced a new and different way, and then he went on and embodied it in his life -- a life that eventually took him to a cross, upon which your debts to God were eternally cancelled.  And on the way he lifted the losers and the lost; touched the lepers; laughed and dined with the outcasts; comforted the grieving, ministered to the sick, and raised the dead.  The only distinction he seemed to acknowledge (and it stirred his anger) were those who had arrogantly separated themselves from others, using faith in God to justify it.

My dear friends:  Let us keep the vision of the Year of Jubilee alive in our hearts and our minds and in this fellowship.  Let us receive each other as cherished children of God.  May we allow Christ to join us together and empower us to be his body in and to the world.  Amen.