Let us pray.
God, you are the one who sits us down and tells us we need to rest.
And commands us to rest through your laws to Moses.
And our world doesn't see that as a gift. So help us to see the gift of rest that you are
constantly offering us. And help us to steward this delight in rest.
that you require of us.
Amen.
So whenever I think about the year of Jubilee, two things happen. First, there's that song,
the oldie comes on the crowds. I don't remember the whole thing. It's like out of Zion's hill,
salvation comes. It's like the whole trumpet song. It was the big in the nineties,
maybe early two thousands. So that's just. showing when I first encountered Christianity,
which means that I first encountered Christianity in the mid-2000s because songs make it to
churches a good decade and a half after they're published. But it's also just impossible for me to
imagine what our world could look like if we ever followed it.
I know that we have zero documentation that this has ever been done.
That it was a command that's kept in the Torah, like you would think after all the revisions and
collections of oral traditions that they would have been like, let's just not write this part down.
But it's a story they still steward and told one another, even when they didn't practice it.
So I think that there's some gifts in this story for us, even if we feel like we can't get the full
benefits of a Jubilee year in our society. And I think the best...
part of this is that it asks the question who deserves rest and i'm thinking about when we think of
who deserves rest a friend of ours in our running group just recently had a baby and so as we can
all predict here in the united states that means we've hit the three-month mark she's had her 12
weeks of leave and now she's gone back to work and trying to figure things out her husband is
taking his leave for three months in order to take things out but then it was interesting because
as they were talking about how they were trying to strategically take leave so that they can help
take care of the child because child care costs as much as college tuition these days and so how do
they navigate all of this a friend of ours who's from canada goes Oh, we get 12 months,
and we're allowed to divvy up that 12 months of leave over 18 months in
order to be with our child for
the first year of the child's life.
Which is interesting. These types of policies make us question who deserves rest,
who deserves to be allowed to be with their newborn child for
what many argue is the most important year of their life.
We have built a society that has deemed some people unworthy of rest.
Recently, I had discovered a bit about the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938,
which is well before my time, but to understand the origins of minimum wage,
because I know that the United Methodist Church, with their social creed, was pushing for fair
compensation, and so that people could actually, like Ecclesiastes is arguing for, enjoy the fruit
of their own labor, to be able to have this balance of work and rest so they're not just machines
being worn out. And so FDR said,
no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any
right to continue in this country, as he was signing that. The whole intent of the minimum wage was
to give people access to a living wage so that they could work 40 hours and be able to live the
rest of the week. And we can see this rooted in our scriptures. We see this rooted in Leviticus
command for Jubilee, for rest, the Sabbath rest, and also in the way that Ecclesiastes is
constantly talking about being able to take care of the common folks. And yet we live in a world
where here in Baltimore County, The living wage, as calculated by MIT,
should be $24.28 an hour for a single adult to be able to take care of themselves and work for 40
hours and just live the rest of the hours of the week. This isn't so to have like abundant
vacations or anything like that. And that alone is 60% more than the Maryland minimum wage.
and more than three times the federal minimum wage.
And then if we look at what the living wage should be, if the adult has a child, or if there are
two adults with multiple children, or two adults but only one of them can work, the living wage
more than doubles.
We're almost 100 years after the Fair Labor Standards Act, and we've lost the point to make sure
that people can work and take care of themselves.
In our society, we also have this big idea of American independence.
And so because of that, we don't really care about how our actions impact others. I just need to
get the thing on a good discount. And so we're not thoughtful of how our spending habits impact the
livelihood of others. A lot of times when we start talking about people being compensated for their
wages, immediately people say, well, People at Starbucks shouldn't be making that much money,
which means we shouldn't be paying for that service.
Because, or that tells us that we think that they're less than us. We think that them making a cup
of coffee for us means they should make less money than us. That it's not providing a good or
service in a way that means that they deserve rest and life abundant. We can already hear how this
is already inconsistent with what the scripture is telling us today. So the first seven verses,
God is commanding a Sabbath rest for the land for seven years.
And you'll notice in our translation, the fruit of the land is then shared with everyone who
depends on the household and
making sure that everyone has access to what they need. While the Common English Bible refers to
bound and unbound laborers, Other translations start talking about how that is the foreigners in
your land. Those who aren't even citizens or people that are just coming through or people that
live among you but aren't from... Because this, if you think about it, Moses is being told all of
this as they've left Egypt. And when they left Egypt, it was a mixed multitude. So it was both
Jewish popes and Egyptians. And so to make sure... not saying that the Egyptian children deserve
less. God is commanding that even in that moment, those that they would deem as foreigners deserve
access to care for free based off of the fruit of the land that God is providing during that year.
So God demands that everyone have access to the food they need and everyone have access to that
rest.
And as we've already connected, we see that this is just true, that the land needs rest between
cover crops and crop rotations.
But then verses 18 through 19 takes us just a little bit further, as if the Sabbath year isn't
enough, and takes us to the year of Jubilee. And I will say that in my group chat this week,
because I didn't pick the... The passage, y'all picked the sermon series and the series had us
talk about the gift of rest with this passage. And a lot of preachers avoid talking about the year
of Jubilee. And so I was like, y'all, I need y'all to pray for me and pray for the people of
Arnolia because preaching and receiving the command of Jubilee rest is hard in our society.
So God commands that after every 49 years, there's a dramatic redistribution of land and wealth.
No one is allowed to over acquire the land,
to take a mass amounts of wealth from the people of Israel and claim it as their own.
Because every 49 years, there's a reset. People that had to sell off their land to survive,
get it back. Everyone returns back to their homeland.
And they're supposed to be treating each other fairly as they sell off the land because they know
they're only renting the land for so many years until the next Jubilee comes.
This is a deliberately political organizing that... is doing for the people as they go into the
promised land, that is rooted in the abundance that God provides instead of falling for the lies
regarding scarcity of resources.
Now, you might have remembered at some point I mentioned André Trocmé, who was a...
French priest who helped take care and save an abundance of Jewish folks who were fleeing from Nazi
Germany and hiding inside of Nazi France and an entire neighborhood took care of them.
In his book, Jesus and the Nonviolent Resolution, he argues that Jesus's teachings are actually
going back to the command for the Jubilee year. And this return to a dramatic redistribution of
wealth that follows God's command for abundance is what gets him killed.
Which doesn't sound far-fetched. Because all of the things that I am preaching straight from the
text sounds like the type of things that would get you laughed at or killed in our society.
Because our world is so far from what God has commanded.
Can we even imagine... A radical redistribution of wealth in our nation like this on like a small
scale.
I mean, honestly, let's be real. If I made everyone get up now and sit in different seats,
there would be a lot of grumbling, right? I've already heard about full-on arguments that have
happened in the past because someone parked in someone else's spot.
Like, we can't handle stewarding spots in a parking lot and pews in a church,
which makes it almost impossible to imagine what a redistribution of wealth could even potentially
look like at a local scale or a national scale, especially in a nation that negotiated compensation
of enslavers and left the formerly enslaved Africans with just dreams of 40 acres and a mule.
This God-manded Jubilee year is received as a threat to those in power instead of assuring care
for all of God's children. Because in God's eyes,
everyone deserves rest and access to rest, and it is inherently sinful to withhold that rest from
any of God's beloved children.
So, you might be wondering, If we can't change the entire financial system of the United States,
or even locally, what does this even mean for us as individuals?
So once again, if this has never actually happened in history, what can the text even teach us?
Well, the Jubilee year reminds us that it is holy to let some things lie fallow in our own lives.
To lean into the trust that just because we're not productive doesn't mean something's not
happening.
To stop over-planting or over-harvesting, both literally in the land but also in our own lives,
pushing ourselves too far.
The jubilee year reminds us that we might just need to slow down.
And then since this is a gift, it's not just a gift for us, but it's a gift we must ensure that
everyone else can have.
So we honor each other's needs for rest. And that could be giving family members a day off from
normal expectations, which is like easier to say in the summer.
It was like for those that have children, or you might remember when you had children that were
school age, they might've fought you over homework, right? And be like, you know what?
You can just not do it tonight. And that's a way of giving the gift of rest. But like, it's hard to
say that in the summer when like, What's homework? Paxton, if they're assigning homework at camp,
I'm going to be mad for you.
Or it might be shifting domestic responsibilities. Maybe you have a normal rhythm as who does what
around the house, but as one of us needs rest, the other picks up more responsibilities so that it
can just go back and forth, this wave of who is taking care of who.
Or maybe it's just, practicing patience when waiting for things. Because when we're waiting in
line, we might get a little agitated, but if we just practice patience, then we're going to be more
delightful when we get to the end of that line and encounter whoever is stuck there working.
And as someone who used to work at Food Lion, let me just say that delightful customer was always a
breath of fresh air. Always. Even though I was still on my feet moving.
When someone was intentionally kind, it did bring a little bit of rest to that moment because I
could breathe, I wasn't tense about what was going to happen next. Or maybe it's going over to a
young parent's house to watch the kids, or going over to someone's house who's been taking care of
a loved one and assuring them that you can watch them for a little while so that they can go. be
taken care of. Maybe they need a haircut or a massage or just a nice nap in the other room.
Because if the Jubilee year teaches us that everyone deserves the gift of rest, we start to find
ways to snap. that rest for ourselves and carve out spaces for others to be able to rest.
We could even, for those that do advocacy work, advocating for people to be able to have access to
the same rest to make sure that we maybe are more like our Canadian neighbors where people with
newborns can actually have rest and be in that time to build that relationship because Delighting
in creation and building these relationships was the entire point of the Sabbath command in the
first place. And so that same thing is what is being built into the Sabbath year and the Jubilee
year.
And so I leave us wondering, what would it mean for us as a community of Christ followers to model
the gift of rest, renewal, and equity within our own community?
How do we then extend these gifts of restoration to a broader community?
Just those within a seven-minute drive of us.
And what's one little action step that we can take to ensure the kingdom of God in this place is
rooted and grounded in God's gift of rest?
And so maybe as you continue to journal through the ways that you've seen God at work,
maybe this week you might notice how God is leading you to help others find rest.
Or just other ways you've seen the Spirit work in order for people to cultivate that rest.
Because when we get to, when I get back from camp, I'll be looking for people who want to share
their stories tied to the themes of our Love Boldly series.
Of all the different ways that we've seen God at work. So that as a community,
we can continue to steward this attentiveness to God and God's desires for us.
so that we can all grow and move on towards perfection.
And so let us pray.
God, it is your spirit that moves through us and leaves us aching for rest.
Help us find time to take the breath that we need,
to find rest and cultivate rest for others in whatever ways are best for our skill sets,
for the gifts that you have given us in our lives.
God, we see in your command for the Sabbath year and Jubilee year that you desire so much more for
us. So may your spirit empower us as your people so that we can go forth and love boldly,
serve one another joyfully, and lead courageously in ways that help cultivate your rest in this
world.
Amen.