Half a Century: A Jubilee Year
by Cary Umhau
I've been trying, in this my 50th year, to live out biblical "Jubilee" principles in hopes that I might inhabit the world more faithfully. I've been trying to read Scripture with particular attention to what the implications of a true faith in Christ are. I've been blogging occasionally on that journey, and at the beginning of the year, I reflected on what I hoped to do. Here is part of that musing:
The Biblical Jubilee (celebrated every seven years and then in a bigger way after seven sevens or 49 years) is outlined in Leviticus 25. The important concepts include forgiveness of debt, restitution, and letting the land lie fallow after working it for years. What would those themes look like in my own relatively affluent American life?
Here are some questions I asked at the outset:
- Whom do I owe, and what would it take to forgive?
- How do I keep myself in debt? What would it look like to forgive those debts?
- Who paid or pays a price for the nice life I live?
- What would it mean to not "harvest" but to let things "lie fallow" in my non-agrarian home?
- Do I need to make restitution somewhere?
- What are the themes of Jubilee metaphorically?
- What things do I always intend to do and how can I move from the road paved in good intentions to a highway of holiness?
- How does my level of consumption affect the world?
- What could I read to learn more about Biblical Jubilee?
- What, in the spirit of Jubilee, should I read and do to carry out these principles?
Midway through the Jubilee year, I ran across a good article in the December 2008 Themelios journal. Its author, Tim Keller, is pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, whose Center for Faith and Work is a Washington Institute partner.
Here is the article, heartily recommended:
http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/publications/33-3/the-gospel-and-the-poor
In this article, Tim Keller is speaking of St. Paul's teaching in Galatians 6:2 (encouraging us to "bear one another's burdens") and Jonathan Edwards' discourse, Christian Charity, as he writes:
"Those who give to the poor out of a desire to comply with a moral prescription will always do the minimum. If we give to the poor simply because 'God says so,' the next question will be 'How much do we have to give so that we aren't out of compliance?' That question and attitude show that this is not gospel-shaped giving. In the last part of his discourse, Edwards answers the objection 'You say I should help the poor, but I'm afraid I have nothing to spare. I can't do it' by responding, ‘In many cases, we may, by the rules of the gospel, be obliged to give to others, when we cannot do it without suffering ourselves . . . else how is that rule of bearing one another's burdens fulfilled? If we never be obliged to relieve others' burdens, but when we can do it without burdening ourselves, then how do we bear our neighbor's burdens, when we bear no burdens at all?'"
I physically recoiled when I read this for I fall squarely in that category of folks who want to control how we give, manage the experience of sacrifice, and limit burden-bearing to something akin to signing up to carry someone's Hello Kitty pink purse when the other needs me to help them roll a Sisyphean boulder up Mt. Rushmore, right over Lincoln's craggy nose.
I'm willing to be willing to be changed. This Jubilee year hasn't been easy. Coherence doesn't always come naturally, and yet it matters. God help me.
Cary Umhau
