josephholubsermons


 

Epiphany 3
January 24, 2010
Isaiah 61:1-4
Luke 4:14-21

Jubilee People 1

The prophets of the Old Testament were sometimes known for what are called “prophetic acts.”   A “prophetic act” was a dramatic gesture to make a point.  For example, Isaiah walked through the streets naked to make a point.  Jeremiah smashed a clay jar in front of the powerful priests and elders in Jerusalem to make a point.   Jesus, in the tradition of the prophets,  rode into Jerusalem on a colt on the day we call Palm Sunday to make a point. 

If I were to do a “prophetic act” right now to illustrate the point I want to make in my sermon today, no, I would not walk down the aisle naked like Isaiah, or smash anything like Jeremiah, but if I could I would  “stand on my head!”  That’s what I would do, I would get right down here on the floor and preach my sermon standing on my head!  I used to be able to do that, stand on my head that is, but if I were to try to do that today, the results could be dire, so you will have to imagine it.   These  scripture passages for today turn a lot of what we consider to be normalcy upside-down and on its head.  The same was true for the people to whom these passages were originally written. 

What we have in the gospel for today is Jesus’ keynote address according to Luke.  This is the inaugural event of Jesus’ ministry in Luke.   Jesus returns to his hometown and presents himself as the anointed prophet in the image of Isaiah who announces the “year of the Lord’s favor.”    That is an important designation, “the year of the Lord’s favor.”   According to Jewish Law, in the “year of the Lord’s favor”,  or the JUBILEE YEAR  as it was also called, debts were to be cancelled, slaves and political prisoners were to be released, and property and land was to be returned to its original family owners.  Israel understood this be the implementation of God’s desire that justice characterize their community life together.   

Much of the history of the Israelites in the centuries before and leading up to Jesus was characterized by economic exploitation of the wealthy classes over the poor.  The powerful and the wealthy elites structured the economic system so that 2/3 of the wealth ended up in the hands of wealthiest 1– 5 percent of the population.  A common strategy employed by the wealthy elites was to extend loans to the poor, and if a time came when the loan could not be repaid, due to any number of circumstances (drought, floods, death, hardships of various kinds), the wealthy would foreclose, take the property and then lease it back to the same people – in effect creating a form of indentured servitude.   

 The JUBILEE YEAR as laid out in Jewish Law, was intended to be a God-sanctioned counter-balance that leveled the playing field every 5th decade or so.   It seemed to be a way to straighten out all the crooked injustices that crept into their society over a five decade period.  Whether or not it was actually ever widely practiced is uncertain.   But it was clearly outlined in their sacred law and tradition.    

The words that Jesus read from the scroll in the synagogue came from Isaiah, the very passage read today as our first reading.  The context in Isaiah was this: After 40 or 50 years in exile in Babylon in the 6 century BCE, the Israelites were returning to their homeland as a result of Cyrus the Persian who defeated the Babylonian army.  Cyrus was a tolerant and enlightened leader, and he issued an edict liberating the Jews from captivity and permitted repatriation to their homeland.  Isaiah’s words were addressed specifically to those Jews who had chosen to return home.  Isaiah was declaring that in returning home the people now had a new opportunity to shape their life together  according to God’s design for justice and fairness; that all forms of oppression should never be reinstituted in the land and among the people.   Isaiah’s words, spoken in the authority of the “spirit of the Lord God,” stood on its head and turned upside-down old ways of conducting business; and challenged the people to recreate and reshape their corporate life together according to JUBILEE - God’s desire for fairness and justice.  Isaiah was challenging them to be a JUBILEE  PEOPLE. 

These past two weeks we have especially been carrying the people of Haiti in our hearts in the face of their country’s destruction.  The words of JUBILEE spoken by Isaiah and Luke’s Jesus are especially relevant to Haiti.  Over the past 200 years Haiti’s every attempt at self-government has been seriously undermined.  In the 1820’s, for instance, two decades after the Haitian slave rebellion ousted the French overlords, France surrounded the country with gunboats and demanded "reparations" of 150 million gold francs ($21 billion in current value), for their lost slave income.  Haiti, under threat, capitulated, and spent the next century hemorrhaging its own treasury to pay it off, finding itself trapped in a new form of slavery to French and also American bankers.  This began a cycle of debt that further locked the Haitian people into a cycle of poverty. Over a century after global slave trade was recognized and eliminated for the evil it was, the Haitians were still paying their ancestors’ masters for their freedom.

In the early 1800’s, the United States, a slave-holding nation, refused to recognize free Haiti for 60 years until President Lincoln finally recognized the autonomy of Haiti in early 1865.

Although an independent government was created in Haiti in 1804, its society continued to be deeply affected by despotic patterns established under colonial rule: like a system of minority rule over the illiterate poor majority by using violence and intimidation. The unjust paradigms created by colonialism and slavery continued  the legacy of oppressive rule and corruption that have kept Haiti entrenched in  poverty ever since.

The United States invaded Haiti in 1915 and occupied it until 1934 in an attempt to bring order to a destabilized political environment, but during that period over 40% of Haiti's gross domestic product was diverted to U.S. banks.

From 1957 to 1986, the CIA-backed “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier regimes ruled Haiti with cruelty, stole millions, and ran up an enormous international debt that has kept the country further mired in impossible poverty.  The story continues on to the present day…

These are but a few chapters in Haiti’s tragic history.  The point is, it is time for JUBILEE in Haiti in the biblical sense of the meaning.    A band aid fix will not be enough for the Haitian people.  Only deep fundamental and radical changes in the way  business has traditionally been conducted in Haiti can truly bring a new and hope-filled day for Haiti.  Questions, of course,  that need to be answered include: Can the powers of the world truly employ a Jubilee strategy for Haiti?  Do the world’s powers have the will to do so?  Can they make that kind of selfless commitment?  Or are the powers too self-indulgent and self-preoccupied?  

Luke portrays Jesus taking these very Jubilee words of Isaiah and using them in his inaugural speech.  It’s a reflection of the meaning Luke’s community had found and experienced in Jesus.   Luke’s community of faith understood themselves to be a JUBILEE PEOPLE  centered in the life and witness of Jesus.  As we follow Jesus through the pages of Luke’s story, we see that he expressed and embodied the spirit of JUBILEE in his life and ministry, emphasizing that God’s inclusive love knows no boundaries as he reached out to those in his day that had been marginalized, exploited and oppressed.  He affirmed Samaritans, Gentiles, the poor, the persecuted, women, children and the rejected of all expressions.

 In a recently rediscovered 1960 speech by Martin Luther King, delivered at Bethel College, entitled “The Future of Integration”,  MLK  said, “I call upon you to be maladjusted.  I never intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation and discrimination.  I never intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry…”   When it came to the evils of racism and bigotry, Martin Luther King was a Jubilee person in the truest biblical sense.

I like that imagery.  Jubilee people are “maladjusted” people, never adjusting to or accommodating any form of oppression or exploitation that is accepted merely as a part of everyday normalcy. 

It is my conviction that, in Jesus, we are called to be Jubilee people and a Jubilee community.  Paul describes his vision of a Jubilee community in our epistle reading for today; a diverse community that has no hierarchy of relative importance, where every person and every gift is deemed precious and critical to community life; a community so sensitive to one another’s needs that if one member suffers then all  suffer, and if one member rejoices then all rejoice. 

The real litmus test of a Jubilee community is if Paul’s vision can expand beyond the narrow limits of a community’s own  membership, and include the world’s most broken, marginalized and suffering people. 

Luke’s Jesus is a challenge for us to be a Jubilee people and Jubilee community - those “maladjusted”, upside-down, standing-on-our-heads people upon whom “the spirit of the Lord God rests”:

 “…who bring good news to the oppressed; bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives; and proclaim (and embody with intentionality and commitment) the year of the Lord’s favor.”    JUBILEE!       

JUBILEE!