OSC Sunday Teaching - "Jubilee" - March 9th, 2025

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the collective table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy. This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast. So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening. [00:00:41] Speaker A: Good morning. For those of you who might not know, my name is Jason Coker. I'm one of the co lead ministers here and welcome to your Sunday school class. I don't know why we don't call all of you up and then release you. Actually, I do know because you would all be less, like, well behaved than the kids be running up here. Did you guys see Luke and Henry, by the way? They thought they were super clever because they, like, snuck out the door right here. Yeah. Okay. So we have been teaching through a series that we've called Prophetic Imagination here at the Oceanside Sanctuary for the past. I don't know, it feels like eight or nine months, but I think it's only been like two months actually. And we've been leaning into this question of what is it that we can learn from the prophets from Hebrew scripture? We actually began this series in Luke where Claire talked about John the Baptist as a kind of proto. Not proto, but sort of typical Hebrew prophet. And we're actually going to return there when we wrap this up in just a couple of weeks. But in the in between time, we've been visiting various prophets from the Hebrew scripture and asking ourselves, what does it mean to think, to imagine, to dream like a prophet from the Hebrew tradition? And what can that teach us about the gospel as Christians? What can it teach us about God theologically? What can it teach us about how to have an imagination for our own time? So just to sort of bring you up to speed, that's what we've been discussing. We visited a bunch of different prophets from the Hebrew scriptures. Today we're going to revisit Moses as a prophet. I spoke about Moses as the greatest prophet in Judaism a few weeks ago, and I shared with you that passage from Exodus where Moses disagrees with God and, like, pleads with God, essentially says no to God. And I told you that a rabbi friend of mine likes to say that the reason that Moses is considered the greatest prophet in all of Judaism is because he was willing to say no to God, that he had the courage to say no to God. He did it, you know, in a clever way. He did it in a wise way. He Sort of cajoled God into making the godly decision to not wipe out all the Israelites, right? But that he was willing to say no to authority, to power. And I told you that at that time, one of the hallmarks of prophetic imagination is that it knows when to disobey authority. Today I want to revisit something that Moses imagined and then share with you, I think, a different aspect of prophetic imagination. It actually comes from Leviticus, chapter 25. So let's go ahead and read the passage now. Leviticus, chapter 25, starting in verse eight. We're just going to read eight through seven. Let's read eight through 12. Right? Starting here in verse eight, says this. You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives 49 years. Now, we are dropping right into the middle of the book of Leviticus here, so that might seem a little bit disorienting, but Leviticus is essentially their laws, right? Their code of conduct, all of the boundaries that Moses creates for their society. After they have left Egypt, they've left slavery in Egypt. Moses gives them these rules, these laws for how to live their lives. So that's what we are dipping into here, right in the middle. And right here in chapter 25, Moses is talking to them about how to order their society according to certain annual rhythms. There's something that this whole society is supposed to do on a regular basis. So here's what he means in verse 8. You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives 49 years. And then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud on the 10th day of the seventh month. On the day of atonement, you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all the land, and you shall hallow the 50th year. And you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee year for you. You shall return every one of you to your property and every one of you to your family. And that 50th year shall be a jubilee for you. You shall not sow nor reap the aftergrowth or harvest the unpruned vines, for it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you. And you shall eat only what the field itself produces. All right? So this ought to sound all very foreign to you, unless, like, I don't know, you went to seminary. By the way, the number of people in this church who have been to seminary is a little disconcerting for me. I don't know what you're all doing here. Shouldn't you be getting jobs in other churches? I don't know, but unless you, like, went to seminary or you grew up evangelical and you were super obsessed about Judaism, this might all sound very foreign to you. And it should. It is. Very foreign. Comes from an entirely different time, entirely different place, entirely different culture. We're very far removed from this. Going to give you the Reader's Digest version of what this means today and then share with you what I'm taking away from it at this moment in our history. Before I jump into that, would you just pray with me? God, we just come before you as a congregation, each of us today. We bring to you this morning as our offering, as our sacrifice, this time, this patch of property that we stand on. We ask that as we set aside this time for. For being stretched and challenged and inspired and to worship and to. To learn and to grow and to connect with each other. That you would cause something here to grow in each of us. That we had experience a bit of rest this morning. That we would experience a bit of restoration. We would experience a bit of freedom and also a bit of resolve. That we would be emboldened today to have a prophetic imagination for our time and our place as we expose ourselves to these words and these ideas. We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen. Okay, so before we get back to Leviticus, this is my. If you're taking notes, you could write right now in your notes, Jason's illustration. Okay, so when I was a kid, I was obsessed with Monopoly. You guys ever play Monopoly? I loved Monopoly as a kid. I mean, like, I would make all my friends and all my family members play Monopoly. I was insufferable about Monopoly. Because the great thing about Monopoly is you can just, like, beat the pants off all the people you love and feel so good about the fact that you, like, made them impoverished, at least for pretend, right? Like, the idea that you could bankrupt your friends and family was delightful to me. Like, I loved everything about that feeling. Like, you know the feeling that you get when you roll the die and you land on Boardwalk or Park Place and it hasn't been bought yet and you're like, y. I am going to win this game. It's now guaranteed, right? You know that feeling, like, when you land on Boardwalk and Park Place? Not, not. Not because you're so good at rolling the dice, but just because on that day, for whatever reason, the die, like, rolled in your favor and you're like, yes. And the opposite of that feeling is when your best friend lands on Boardwalk or Park Place and you're like, no. And I would do all kinds of. I'm sure you did the same thing. I'd do all kinds of things playing Monopoly to try to game the system in my favor, right? I'd sneak hundred dollars bills under the board because you're always sizing up the competition, like, how tall are their stacks? How hard is it going to be to beat this person? I'd stash money under the board so that they didn't know that I was as rich as I was. And then I'd pull it out and be like, ha, ha, I'm buying hotels for all my properties and you are all going to be my vassals. You're all going to be the tenants for me. Okay? Am I the only one that enjoyed doing this? It didn't matter how long it took. I'd spend hours reveling in the absolute economic ruin of my closest friends. You know what never happens during Monopoly? None of us ever came up with strategies to make sure that every person sitting around the board had a place to sleep. Nobody was like, ever the little Karl Marx in the game. You know, like, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. Hotels for everybody. Nobody ever did that. Nobody was redistributing the wealth of Monopoly money. No, we all were. So, like, quickly indoctrinated into the idea that one person has to win this game, one person has to win this game, and in order for one person to win this game, everybody else has to lose. There's something about that that I find, like, sort of fascinating about the human condition. Now, what's happening here In Leviticus, chapter 25 really is. I know this is going to feel like a stretch, but it really is Moses reordering the rules of the game. This is like Moses saying, hey, life is like Monopoly, right? Sometimes we roll the dice and a few of us are going to end up landing on Boardwalk or Park Place. And because that happens, because life tends toward inequal equality, because life tends toward the unequal distribution of goods and rights and services, every so often, we are going to completely scramble the rules and make sure that everything is returned to a state of equilibrium. So instead of like, you know, going around the table and like, pulling from the community chest set of cards and getting cards to say, hey, congratulations, you know, you just got a new factory in a, you know, third world country and you can enslave millions of people so that you can get rich instead of that card. That's how Monopoly was when I grew up. Instead of that card, you pull the card that says, hey, it's the 50th year. It's time to divide all of your wealth, because that's no fun. Who would play a game where, if you win the game at the end, everybody ends up with the same amount of money, the same amount of houses and the same amount of food, the same access to education, equal access to health care? Nobody would play that game because we all want to be little kings and lords and enjoy that ego moment where we get to economically crush all of our friends. But this is what Moses is doing in this passage. This is, of course, called Jubilee. The way jubilee worked in ancient Israel is, first of all, just prior to this passage is the Sabbath year or the sabbatical year. The way this worked was every seven years. Moses dictated that in age in Israel, every seventh year would be at Sabbath year, right? So just like Sabbath is supposed to be on the seventh day, just like you and I, if we were Jewish folks living in ancient Israel, or even Jewish folks who are observant living today, every seventh day we would rest. We would not work. We would honor the need, the human need for rest in our lives. Just like a weekly Sabbath, the sabbatical year was every seventh year. The entire community would rest for a whole year. This sounds so good. Janelle's like, that sounds so good. We've had our grandson all weekend. So we're the opposite of rested right now. So the entire year would be a sabbatical year, not just for the people who lived in the community, but this is important. It would be a year of rest for the land. The land didn't have to produce according to the high demands of agriculture that year. The land had an opportunity to rest and to be restored. And therefore, the people who depended on the land had the opportunity to rest and be restored. And, of course, they would still have to eat. And so the idea here is that in the sixth year, God promised a crop of abundance that would last for that extra year off, essentially two years, because there's the year that you don't plant and harvest, which means that the next year you do plant and harvest, but then you got to wait till the end of the harvest for that food to come. So in the sixth year, God's promise was that there would be enough abundance to last for two years. But it doesn't end there. After seven weeks of years, which means seven periods of seven years, there would be a Jubilee. So every 49 years there would be a jubilee year declared. And that was sort of like a Sabbath year on steroids. What Moses called for is, in that Jubilee year, a trumpet would be sounded. And jubilee comes from the Hebrew word ebel, which means ram's horn. Because on the day of atonement in the 49th year, a ram's horn would be blown all over the land. And. And for the next year, for Jubilee, not only would it be like a Sabbath year, not only would the land rest, not only would the people rest, but anybody who was enslaved, which back then would have been like indentured servitude, like, you are in debt, you have fallen way behind. You are losing the game of Monopoly in your life. Anybody who was in indentured servitude or would be forgiven of their debts and would be freed from their slavery. But it doesn't end there for anybody in the previous 49 years who was losing at the game of life, who had become indebted and had to sell their family property in order to, you know, make ends meet. They would be returned to their land. So not only were slaves freed, but land was returned to its family owners. I know. So what was happening is every 50th year, there was a complete recalibration of the economy. People were not just figuratively liberated, they were literally liberated, and the land itself was liberated. This is Moses's way, I think, of solving the problem that life has a kind of economic gravity to it. Just like Monopoly tends toward one person who is going to win at the end of the game. Like, you can't help it. If you just follow the rules of Monopoly, one person will end up with all the money, and they won't. And this is, I think, such a profound and important lesson that Monopoly teaches us. They won't win at the end of the game because they were so good at playing the game. Now, there's strategy to Monopoly. You can be good at Monopoly or bad at it, but no matter how good or bad at it you are, a whole lot of it is just the roll of the dice. You didn't choose what kind of family you were born into. You didn't choose what kind of nation state you were born into. You didn't choose how successful or unsuccessful your parents were. But the reality of Monopoly, which is also the reality of life, is that when you stumble into success, either because of luck or because you have good strategy or good discipline, that when you stumble into success, it becomes easier to succeed again. Now, I often say to my educator friends, and I know we have a lot of educators in here, so please don't be mad at me, but every school I've ever walked into has a sign on the wall that says something like this. Failure leads to success, and I am here to disabuse you of that lie from the pit of hell. Of course, failure is deeply important for learning if you learn from your failure. But unless you're taught how to learn from failure, we naturally just repeat patterns of failure. And unless you're taught to take your success and share it with those who are less fortunate, we just very naturally hoard our success. And so life, if left unchecked by just and righteous structures, will always end up with some jerk who just happens to make electric vehicles, who thinks that he is so smart and so righteous and so good that the rest of society should be subject to his infantile whims. I have. Anyway, okay, so what Moses is trying to do is recognizing that life has a kind of economic gravity towards injustice, towards inequality, and he is trying to correct that inequality by creating a structure that corrects it every 50 years. Moses was able to imagine this. You guys, just. Just consider the miracle of that for a moment, that some guy in the ancient world was able to imagine a society that was structured to keep greed and inequality and oppressive power in check by once every generation, reshuffling the deck. And not just reshuffling the deck in a kind of, like, arbitrary way. Like, we're going to take the pot of money and the pot of land, and we're just going to, like, randomly hand it back out. No, no, no, no, no. They returned slaves to their families and families to their land. This restructuring sort of honors and recognizes the very indigenous idea that land and property don't belong to people, but people belong to their land and property. And so there's a deep sense that we are connected to the place in which we are born and nurtured and raised. Moses was able to imagine this crazy idea. And I think the reason he was able to imagine it is because he was raised with tremendous power and privilege. He was. Of course, you've all seen the movie. He was a prince of Egypt. He was raised a prince in the most powerful empire of his day. He was raised an heir to the most powerful military force on the planet at that time. And he enjoyed that privilege until he discovered that his family was actually those who were enslaved. When he rediscovered his roots in an ethnic group who were oppressed and marginalized and utterly decimated, considered chattel and unworthy of anything, but forced Labor. When he discovered that that was his heritage, he was transformed. And so he was able, because he came from power and privilege, but was rooted in a marginalized and oppressed group. He was able to imagine a society where nobody would remain a slave forever, where nobody would remain disconnected from their heritage, from their land, where nobody could gather and hoard too much wealth or power, because once every generation, it would all be rebuilt, calibrated. Here's what I'm taking from the story of Jubilee. What I'm taking from this is that prophetic imagination, in addition to other things that we have said on Sunday mornings, prophetic imagination is a political imagination. It is inescapably political. And when I say political, I don't mean that it is a conservative imagination or a liberal imagination. I'm not saying prophetic imagination is a Democrat imagination or Republican imagination. I'm not saying that it is a communist imagination. I'm not, Tina, I'm not saying that. But I am saying that prophetic imagination is political in the sense that it is an imagination that creates structures and systems that exist for the common good. What I mean by that is that prophetic imagination has a bias, because you might be thinking to yourself, rightly so, if prophetic imagination is political, isn't Christian nationalism a form of political imagination? And the answer of course is yes. Christian nationalism is a political imagination. It is an imagination that borrows Christian identity and uses it as an excuse to return power to the powerful, to take money from the poor and put it into the pockets of the richest people on earth. It's an imagination that takes Christianity and supposes that it should be in power and therefore it will hoard all the power it can for Christians. Did I specific Christians? Well, they would love for us to be a part of it as long as we obeyed there interpretations of what that meant. But prophetic political imagination has a bias not for those who are in power, but for those who have been abused by power. Prophetic political imagination has a bias for the poor. This is why Isaiah in chapter 61, verse 2 picks up these passages about Jubilee. And in the middle of his prophetic utterances he says, for the spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor, recovery of sight for the blind and liberation for the captives, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. The year of the Lord's favor In Isaiah, chapter 61, verse 2 is the Jubilee year that what he's referring to the year of the Lord's favor is the year that comes around every 50 years, where slaves hear the sound of the trumpet and they recognize that they're free. When people who have had to sell their family land hear the sound of the trumpet and they recognize that it all gets returned to them. That's the year of the Lord's favor. And so Isaiah, in chapter 61, when he is speaking to a generation of people who have been conquered by a foreign power and carried off into captivity, when he says, I'm here to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor to you, what they hear is, we are finally going to be free from our captivity. We're going to be returned to our land. We're going to experience freedom and goodness again for the first time in a generation. For Isaiah, the prophetic imagination of the jubilee signals that those who have been conquered, carried off by a foreign power are finally liberated again. Jesus, of course, quotes these same words from Isaiah 60:1. When Jesus stands up in the synagogue in Luke 4 and he unrolls the scroll and he reads the scheduled reading for that day. It's Isaiah 61, verse 2. And Jesus declares to his people, I am here to declare the jubilee. For the Spirit of the Lord is on me to bring good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the captives, for Jesus, this idea of jubilee, this prophetic imagination for the restructuring of society, for the liberation of all who are oppressed, is the gospel. Everybody hearing him would have known that. Everybody hearing him would have thought to themselves, he's talking about Jubilee. He's saying, jubilee is finally here. He's saying he's the guy who's going to deliver us from the oppression of the Roman Empire. He's the guy who's going to return us to our land. He's the guy who's going to return us to our common good. I don't know what version of the gospel you were sold, but when I was nine years old, my Sunday school teacher did the same thing she did every single Sunday. This was at the Calvert Chapel in San Bernardino, California, because, yes, I'm from San Bernardino. Don't tell anybody that. And every Sunday morning at the Calvary Chapel in San Bernardino, which met at the YMCA at Paris Hill Park. Tina and I, man, we're like brother and sister. So she was raised in San Bernardino too. So every Sunday my Sunday school teacher would say, who wants to accept Jesus into their heart? And I would watch every Sunday as a couple of like other 8 or 9 year olds would go out into the hall with her and then they'd Come back in with a look on their face like they'd been told the secrets of the universe. And because I'm an enneagram5, I was not going to be the first to go. I was like, let's see what happens. Pretty soon I was one of the few kids left who hadn't gone out into the hall. And I was like, all right, if I do it and it turns out to be wrong, I mean, what have I lost? But if I don't do it and she's right, I'm going to burn in hell forever. I did this when I was nine and I was like, well, that's kind of an easy bet. So I did it. I went out into the hall and then I was out in the hall with her and she told me to repeat after her. And I prayed this prayer and she said that Jesus came into my heart. And I went back in and I was like, I don't know anything that I didn't already know. Certainly not the secrets of the universe, but I guess I'm not going to hell and that's a good thing. So listen, I'm not saying that that's not something. It was something for me as a nine year old, it was the most capacity I had for thinking about being connected to this thing that we called God. And it was the most capacity that I had for understanding what we might call grace. The idea that all I needed was to welcome something that I hadn't worked for or earned. And that's a good thing. But I am saying that that is not the gospel. And if that was your way into a sense of connection to God, that's okay. It was for me too. But if that remains your sense of connection to God, if you have not come to the realization that the gospel that Jesus preached is about a vision for the common good of all people, the material common good of all people, starting with the people who have been deprived of it, then you have not really understood the gospel. And I want you to understand it because it's political. And if you don't know that God's imagination is for the liberation of the poor, for the healing of the sick, if you don't know that it's for the release of captives, then you might vote the wrong way. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, scratch that. So then really, this is really what I mean to say, What I really mean to say is that if you don't know that, then you'll be deprived of it. And so if you don't recognize what goodness is for us as a people, as a community. If you don't recognize that goodness means putting our thumbs on the scales intentionally to rebalance our world, then you won't put your thumb on that scale and you will suffer. Because for every oppressed person, for every marginalized person of which most of us are not, but. But many of us are, the world is worse for the privileged because the privileged insist on oppressing the poor. Do you understand that? The world is worse for all of us because we refuse to practice jubilee. The world would be so much better if we did. That's not a requirement, is it? That's another sermon. Okay, so let's end with this. What does this mean for us? Means that salvation is bigger than many of us were taught. That's bigger than just your individual relationship with God. It includes that. But it's much bigger than that. That the gospel is about the common good. And then that means working for new structures in our society to ensure the common good. And we have a part to play in that. This is why our church has a Justice Works team that advocates for social policies that are good for all people, beginning with the poor. And we want to invite you into that here. So, as the band come up and lead us in our last song together, I want to ask that you reflect a bit on how your imagination for the gospel includes a kind of political imagination. How are you being called to advocate for systems and structures that help rebalance the scales? Amen. Would you pray with me? God, we thank you again for today for this opportunity for us to gather. We ask that you would enlarge our imagination for what is possible. That, like Moses, you would give us a vision of a society whose policies and structures can intentionally rebalance the scales for the common good. We pray that you would cause us to fall in love with that sense of a vision for a community that exists for the good of everyone. And we ask that you give us the courage to participate in making that real. We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen. [00:37:25] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching. No matter when or where you're tuning in. To learn more about our community or to support the work we do, Visit [email protected] We hope to see you again soon.