Jubilee!?!
Text: Leviticus 25:8-17
Jubilee! It’s a term that probably all of us are familiar with, or at very least we’ve heard it before. In Calgary, there’s a large concert hall called the “Jubilee Auditorium.” As a child, this was the only place I really heard the term. Whenever I heard someone mentioned about a Jubilee anniversary, I just thought they were having a big party at the Auditorium. It would only be later that someone actually had the heart to tell me that Jubilee actually meant a 50th Anniversary. “Oh! Okay…” I would say… “Wow, fifty years?? You must be old!!” …of course, this was also before I learned what the phrase “being tactful” meant.
The trouble is, many of you are probably thinking that I need to go back and actually learn what Jubilee means, because I am getting ahead of myself. After all, today we’re celebrating our 49th Anniversary as a congregation. The big five-oh is next year, and isn’t that what we call our Jubilee?
Well… kind of… In many ways the word “Jubilee” has long since drifted away from its original meaning. We use it to mark significant anniversaries, attaching metals or precious stones to change the timeframe… as if we’re denoting years of service. In our current definition, next year is our Golden Jubilee… our fiftieth anniversary since this congregation was founded. Silver Jubilee is the term to mark 25 years, and the diamond jubilee is either 60 or 75 years depending on who you talk to. The common element is that they are all special anniversary celebrations, but really nothing more.
Even so, there is a real irony in all this: despite the marking of Jubilee as a celebration, its original vision been almost forgotten. Jubilee is far more than simply marking a given anniversary. It’s far more than even the partying and celebrating that goes on. Most of all, Jubilee, in its original imagining, was not about the past, but about the future.
The word “Jubilee” can only be found in one place in Bible: the seldom-read Leviticus. If you put the word into a Bible search engine, it comes up in 18 places, seventeen of which are in the book of Leviticus. The only other place one can find it is in the book of Numbers, which is simply referencing the other seventeen. Curiously enough, the word Jubilee is pretty much passed from Hebrew into English without actually being translated. It’s the same actual word, just pronounced with a different accent. In other words, the translators of the first English Bibles really didn’t know what to make of it… so they just spelled it out. In truth, It is related to the word for “trumpet.” …but then again saying to a couple “Congratulations on your Golden Trumpet” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
I think it might be helpful for us to go back to Leviticus and hear it again.
Jubilee was a super-Sabbath year, coming at the end of seven groups of seven years. We know how much Sabbath as a time of rest was important to Israel’s culture. We are re-learning the importance for us to take personal days of rest for us to be able to grow and live as human beings. This year, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada has called this a “Sabbath” year… of taking time learn how to rest and play as a way of developing our relationship with God.
But for us… for Clarkson Road Presbyterian Church… this is our Jubilee year. According to Leviticus, it starts today!! Today we mark our 49th anniversary, and so we are heading into our Jubilee year. There are already plans in the works for some ways for us to mark it, and if you want to become involved in some of the ways that we are doing that as a congregation, I am sure that Gordon Coyne would love to hear from you!
But Jubilee is much more than simply celebrations, parties and potlucks. There’s something profoundly Spiritual about the original Jubilee year that goes well beyond what we normally think of anniversaries. It isn’t even that we’ve forgotten what it really means; I don’t think it really ever entered into our consciousness! As a society and as a church as a whole, we’ve never really learned the underlying meaning of Jubilee.
So what really happens in Jubilee? Read further into Leviticus, and it’s really rather profound. The books are wiped clean. Slaves are freed. People are released from whatever debts they might have… In other words, in the Jubilee year, past wrongs are forgotten, people exercise forgiveness both in material debt, but also in being reconciled to one another. They put the past behind them, and move forward with a clean slate.
As I said earlier, Jubilee is not about the past, but about the future. The principles behind it are justice and fairness, ensuring that people have a chance to start again and are placed on equal footing with their neighbour. Yet it goes well beyond the immediate economic need, to both a social and spiritual one. The starting over with a clean slate principle not only tries to break the physical cycle of poverty, but it also tries to heal those long-term resentments or grudges that divide people. Jubilee serves as a reminder that God is truly the one in charge.
So here we are, literally standing on the edge of our own Jubilee year. In light of what Jubilee really means, our challenge is to really embrace it… to take it beyond being simply a special Anniversary and make it something new. We won’t get another chance to do this for another fifty years, so why not turn it into something extraordinary? Why not make it more than the celebrations, parties and potlucks? Of course, let’s have them, let’s celebrate fifty years of ministry in the Clarkson area! …but why not take the next step, looking not just where we’ve been, but look at where we’re going. What does it mean for us to wipe the slate clean, to be reconciled with one other, and to really embrace the next fifty years?
In many churches today there is a gloomy pessimism about the future. We now live in a post-Christian environment, where we can no longer expect society at large to know much of anything about our faith. If they do know anything, unfortunately it takes a rather negative point of view… and much of it is unfortunately well deserved. Thirteen years ago church futurist William Easum observed that if all the church does is do what it is doing now, only better, it will die off in about twenty years. Not exactly optimistic, is it? The playing field has changed, and many churches have simply not noticed, and carry along… only occasionally stopping to lament that things aren’t the way they used to be. Society’s rules seem to be changing constantly… where the only rule, it seems is change.
Jubilee speaks volumes to this… the potential to wipe the slate clean, to have a fresh start, looking forward with hope, rather than longing for what was. Maybe this is where God is calling us to go. There are already signs of hope… the Session has already done some casting of the net forward. This week our newly formed Long-Range planning team gets together, to start peering down the road a bit, and to ask the question of where we see this congregation seven, fourteen, twenty eight, and even forty-nine years from now. This is just one of the things that we are starting to do as a congregation as part of our Jubilee year… it’s a chance for us to be creative, to really look ahead, to get that fresh start, and to celebrate who we are as Clarkson Road Presbyterian Church. So sound the trumpet… and embrace the future with hope and vision… today we start our Jubilee Year!
Amen.
Jubilee! It’s a term that probably all of us are familiar with, or at very least we’ve heard it before. In Calgary, there’s a large concert hall called the “Jubilee Auditorium.” As a child, this was the only place I really heard the term. Whenever I heard someone mentioned about a Jubilee anniversary, I just thought they were having a big party at the Auditorium. It would only be later that someone actually had the heart to tell me that Jubilee actually meant a 50th Anniversary. “Oh! Okay…” I would say… “Wow, fifty years?? You must be old!!” …of course, this was also before I learned what the phrase “being tactful” meant.
The trouble is, many of you are probably thinking that I need to go back and actually learn what Jubilee means, because I am getting ahead of myself. After all, today we’re celebrating our 49th Anniversary as a congregation. The big five-oh is next year, and isn’t that what we call our Jubilee?
Well… kind of… In many ways the word “Jubilee” has long since drifted away from its original meaning. We use it to mark significant anniversaries, attaching metals or precious stones to change the timeframe… as if we’re denoting years of service. In our current definition, next year is our Golden Jubilee… our fiftieth anniversary since this congregation was founded. Silver Jubilee is the term to mark 25 years, and the diamond jubilee is either 60 or 75 years depending on who you talk to. The common element is that they are all special anniversary celebrations, but really nothing more.
Even so, there is a real irony in all this: despite the marking of Jubilee as a celebration, its original vision been almost forgotten. Jubilee is far more than simply marking a given anniversary. It’s far more than even the partying and celebrating that goes on. Most of all, Jubilee, in its original imagining, was not about the past, but about the future.
The word “Jubilee” can only be found in one place in Bible: the seldom-read Leviticus. If you put the word into a Bible search engine, it comes up in 18 places, seventeen of which are in the book of Leviticus. The only other place one can find it is in the book of Numbers, which is simply referencing the other seventeen. Curiously enough, the word Jubilee is pretty much passed from Hebrew into English without actually being translated. It’s the same actual word, just pronounced with a different accent. In other words, the translators of the first English Bibles really didn’t know what to make of it… so they just spelled it out. In truth, It is related to the word for “trumpet.” …but then again saying to a couple “Congratulations on your Golden Trumpet” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
I think it might be helpful for us to go back to Leviticus and hear it again.
“8You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. 9Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month—on the day of atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. 10And you 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.”In other words, Jubilee is not a 50th Anniversary in terms of a day, but it is the fiftieth year itself. It happens after 49 years… seven time seven years. Seven… wait… that sounds kind of familiar doesn’t it? Seven days in a week, a seventh day we call “Sabbath” a day of rest. What we often forget that in Hebrew culture, they not only had Sabbath days, but they also would have Sabbath years, as a way to ensure the productivity of their fields and crops.
Jubilee was a super-Sabbath year, coming at the end of seven groups of seven years. We know how much Sabbath as a time of rest was important to Israel’s culture. We are re-learning the importance for us to take personal days of rest for us to be able to grow and live as human beings. This year, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada has called this a “Sabbath” year… of taking time learn how to rest and play as a way of developing our relationship with God.
But for us… for Clarkson Road Presbyterian Church… this is our Jubilee year. According to Leviticus, it starts today!! Today we mark our 49th anniversary, and so we are heading into our Jubilee year. There are already plans in the works for some ways for us to mark it, and if you want to become involved in some of the ways that we are doing that as a congregation, I am sure that Gordon Coyne would love to hear from you!
But Jubilee is much more than simply celebrations, parties and potlucks. There’s something profoundly Spiritual about the original Jubilee year that goes well beyond what we normally think of anniversaries. It isn’t even that we’ve forgotten what it really means; I don’t think it really ever entered into our consciousness! As a society and as a church as a whole, we’ve never really learned the underlying meaning of Jubilee.
So what really happens in Jubilee? Read further into Leviticus, and it’s really rather profound. The books are wiped clean. Slaves are freed. People are released from whatever debts they might have… In other words, in the Jubilee year, past wrongs are forgotten, people exercise forgiveness both in material debt, but also in being reconciled to one another. They put the past behind them, and move forward with a clean slate.
As I said earlier, Jubilee is not about the past, but about the future. The principles behind it are justice and fairness, ensuring that people have a chance to start again and are placed on equal footing with their neighbour. Yet it goes well beyond the immediate economic need, to both a social and spiritual one. The starting over with a clean slate principle not only tries to break the physical cycle of poverty, but it also tries to heal those long-term resentments or grudges that divide people. Jubilee serves as a reminder that God is truly the one in charge.
So here we are, literally standing on the edge of our own Jubilee year. In light of what Jubilee really means, our challenge is to really embrace it… to take it beyond being simply a special Anniversary and make it something new. We won’t get another chance to do this for another fifty years, so why not turn it into something extraordinary? Why not make it more than the celebrations, parties and potlucks? Of course, let’s have them, let’s celebrate fifty years of ministry in the Clarkson area! …but why not take the next step, looking not just where we’ve been, but look at where we’re going. What does it mean for us to wipe the slate clean, to be reconciled with one other, and to really embrace the next fifty years?
In many churches today there is a gloomy pessimism about the future. We now live in a post-Christian environment, where we can no longer expect society at large to know much of anything about our faith. If they do know anything, unfortunately it takes a rather negative point of view… and much of it is unfortunately well deserved. Thirteen years ago church futurist William Easum observed that if all the church does is do what it is doing now, only better, it will die off in about twenty years. Not exactly optimistic, is it? The playing field has changed, and many churches have simply not noticed, and carry along… only occasionally stopping to lament that things aren’t the way they used to be. Society’s rules seem to be changing constantly… where the only rule, it seems is change.
Jubilee speaks volumes to this… the potential to wipe the slate clean, to have a fresh start, looking forward with hope, rather than longing for what was. Maybe this is where God is calling us to go. There are already signs of hope… the Session has already done some casting of the net forward. This week our newly formed Long-Range planning team gets together, to start peering down the road a bit, and to ask the question of where we see this congregation seven, fourteen, twenty eight, and even forty-nine years from now. This is just one of the things that we are starting to do as a congregation as part of our Jubilee year… it’s a chance for us to be creative, to really look ahead, to get that fresh start, and to celebrate who we are as Clarkson Road Presbyterian Church. So sound the trumpet… and embrace the future with hope and vision… today we start our Jubilee Year!
Amen.
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