Year: 2014

Blue waves of light scatter on the horizon
and ease me into quiet conversation.

A wordless dialogue: soft, pink, radiant and
framed in abstracts of powder white plumes,
the smooth, fair cheek of a fragile china doll.

The morning sun burns rouge as a ringed outline appears.
Masterful strokes of white lay against the gray-blue vastness.
A scene of grandeur painted by the Divine, the grammar of bright star and cloud speak volumes.

First, a golden scepter reclining on its side,
resting atop a plush pillow-cushion that unfurls gentleness below.

As the handle turns upward and the jewels reach heaven,
it seems the gems were not jewels after all but sparkling eyes beneath a brim.

Next, a radiant face shines beneath an adorned brow,
a handsome, pristine head-dress stands quilled; visible rays of yellow-orange feather tips giving wings to my soul.

From this height, the signal of the beacon now becomes known,
ascending the tower of sky, beyond the mist, a faint image now clear.

Finally, a lighthouse of grace upon the coast; a guide for battered ships,
away from the rocks and toward the pass as I journey near.

I shall not forget the wings of heart this morning I have discovered.
In flight, I can soar above the rocks and brush the fragile cheek of heaven.

When night arrives, and I kneel down to embrace my daughter,
it is the bright blue eyes of my china doll, that call me back again; back to the cheek of heaven.

Sitting behind the house of a dear friend of mine, having a cup of coffee, I am graced by the soft morning light that makes its way through gray clouds. Gentle gusts of wind move through the leaves of a locust tree and make their way to where we are seated. The breeze is refreshing. My hands embrace a cup of freshly brewed coffee that has both milk and honey (a mixture my friend says is “The Promised Land in a Cup”). On this particular morning my friend reminds me that “perspective is everything”; I could not agree more. In contrast to the surrounding yards… I am immersed in a garden. Tall trees of all kinds and floral colors create a perimeter where thought can soar. Blush roses and blood-orange lilies enter my contemplative gaze and make audible the inaudible voices of nature. At this moment I become consciously aware that if I were to glance over my left shoulder all of this perception would be over-shadowed by a gigantic water tower that looms above the roof of the house. I choose not to look over my shoulder. In a few minutes when I walk through the house on my way back into the world, off to work, I will see glimpses of the city’s industrial park where the tree line is thin. The urban elements that surround my friend’s home only serve to enhance my appreciation for the refuge and peace this place offers me.

Many of us recognize the Garden of Eden as a physical location that existed for a period of time in Earth’s distant past, a place where man was able to walk with God. As the story goes, immediately following mankind’s exile from Eden, our earliest ancestors were forbidden to return there. The scriptures record that the Garden and the Tree of Life within were thereafter guarded by a mystical sword that flashed back-and-forth ensuring that man would no longer be allowed to possess both knowledge (the knowledge of good and evil) and life eternal. Today, either our eyes deceive us or this Garden has vanished from the face of the planet. Eden today seems to be more a symbol of purity and innocence than an actual place we could visit to encounter grace.

As I drive to work I begin to think deeply about the mystery of Eden and the Cup of the Promised Land. Whether these places are in fact geographical locations or are purely spiritual refuges… my perception of them as either “origin” or “destination” suddenly seems of importance to me. The popular opinion held by most seems to be that ever since mankind was banished from the Garden at “The Fall of Man”, the Earth and particularly the people that dwell in it have been moving along paths toward destruction. “Times are getting worse.” I often hear, “A good man is hard to find!” Others remain hopeful that a new Eden awaits us.

Personally, I wonder if there may be an alternative perspective.

I have recently begun to think of the Garden of Eden as the place where our temporal universe and the realm of the eternal converge. Thinking of the descriptions from the Bible that tell of Eden, a place where four rivers come together, lush and green, and thriving with life. I like to imagine that two of these rivers (the Pishon and Gihon) were spiritual springs that have since quelled and that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (the two that remain today) brought in the earthly waters. I imagine that perhaps the Garden once provided man with a place in which to encounter the heavenly realms, a middle-ground with rich soil cultivated by spiritual waters, a ground upon which the true experience of God was in full bloom.

I believe our own spiritual cultivations, if they are true, can produce eternal gardens in which our friends, families, and loved ones may experience the goodness of God. Isn’t this exactly how we have been taught to pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven …”?

I often love to sit and reflect on the times and the places that have represented “Eden” for me. Most of these memories involve elements of the natural world and also being in community with those whom I love most. Both nature and our loved ones are good at hiding us from the world and creating a “space” for us; they create for us places that time cannot touch, where the eternal is welcome and may become known. These spaces are heavenly gardens that are accessible from earth.

Mankind is far removed from the Garden. From the Garden to the village, from the village to the town, from the town to the city. States and nations; we have become part of established societies. But, have the urban bricks of our society built up a high wall around us… a high wall that blocks our view of the distant horizon and stifles our wonder of what is beyond?

Is the countryside now just a place that is barely visible and that can only be seen by those who dare to climb the heights of the city-wall and bravely peer into the distant unknown. How might a person shout back down the wall, how might a person describe to their friends and begin to put into words the sights they have seen? What language can dare to touch the true experience of the Divine?

Only memories perhaps…

Three young boys, just filled up on garden-fresh vegetables, country ham, and fried okra. Three young boys with smiles that reach their eyes. Fishing poles held overhead as short legs whip through tall grass. Over creek and under branch. Up this trail or down that trail? Only one worry in their minds. Only one worry in their worlds. Shall they go to the upper pond or the lower pond? Mystery will await them at either. How many fish will they bring back? Fresh, fried fish for dinner… a true country delight.

Memories such as these bring the warmth of country summers to dreary days in winter cities. Harvesting the fruits of our memory is the best way to beautify our gaze. Only when we begin to look through beautiful eyes will our perspectives begin to be transfigured.

The gravel road to Granny’s house. A cedar plank fence affront a long ranch house. Here, you are veiled from the outside world. At Granny’s house you are special. Everyone lines up at the door, each sibling does not dare enter before receiving a tight hug and more than one kiss. At Granny’s a greeting hug may span three minutes, but the effects are lasting and eternal. Many cats gather at the back door to be fed at dusk, the tall cedars become a softening canvas as the night approaches, for stories of “Barron”, the not-so-best dog they ever owned, and then Taffy, the best dog ever! Taffy, the dog that befriended the multitude of cats. In the distance is Barren’s old, rickety, cedar plank dog house still visible, just visible, outside the darkening tree line. The birds perch on this branch and flutter to that branch. From maple to walnut, and then from oak to cedar. The branches twitch until we can no longer see them and the trees become a subtle silhouette etched into the night sky. Pa Daryl stokes the wood burning stove. The smell of burnt wood and the comforting scent of hand-knitted afghans cover us; they keep us warm long after we have left the hearth of their warmth. There will be goody-bags and ginger ales for the trip home; a peaceful trip back home, to the city, not beyond the reach of a Granny’s love.

I once asked my Granny what her fondest memories were. Turns out they were with her Granny (her mother’s mother). Grandma Beal. Perhaps it was her kindness that my Granny has passed on to me. Here are my Granny’s words regarding Grandma Beal:

“Every summer we would go spend a week or two with Grandma, each one of us children (away from the rest) would have a week alone with Grandma. And she loved us all and she loved us to death. And we couldn’t do any wrong when we were down there, except that when we did something wrong we got our butt whipped ha ha ha, and we got sat in the chair… but, we didn’t do any wrong ha ha ha.

She didn’t have any running water, we had to pump the water out back. She had a cow when I first went there, in the city! She tried to teach me how to milk the cow. And she had chickens… a whole big chicken yard. I would go and get the eggs every day, she taught me how to do that. She had a garden, and she had a plum tree that was delicious (delicious prunes), and aaah, peaches!! She had peach trees all-in-one-lot, every kind of peach you can imagine, and when they were hot from the sun and ready to eat she always knew. By helping Grandma we learned country life early.”

Through our memories… I think we can bring country-life to the city, as spiritual waters to urban stone. I have heard it said that “prayer is the art of presence.” A person’s presence can without a doubt soften hearts of the hardest stone. It is indeed people like my grandparents that teach us the art of presence, and where did they learn it?! My Pa Daryl has one of the most peaceful presences such as this. I had often wondered how he was so able to nourish his spiritual “Garden” (that is: his presence). Here is a memory he shared, that has continued to shape him, and that now shapes me:

“I was raised on a farm. We had a ninety-six acre farm that was an extension of my grandfather’s (my father’s father’s) four-hundred acre farm. For me, I was the youngest of nine children, and what I remember was that when my mom and dad first started they lived in the bottom of what we call a hollow; they lived in a log cabin. At the hollow’s base it was no wider than two-hundred feet and opened-up beyond the hill into our family farm. Later on, my parents moved up to the hill. If I remember correctly the house was 12-by-24 feet, with an attic up there, and then later-on they finally cut wood off of our own property and made three little rooms on the back.

I think the one thing that I really enjoyed was… in that hollow where my mother and dad had that log cabin, I went back over there, and there was a spring that ran down beside it. And I went down there when I was young, maybe in the sixth-seventh grade, and I wanted to camp out. So what I did is… I cut some trees, small trees, and I made like, a lean-to. And I made a bed. I used grass-string for the mattress and I had a dog, a Collie-dog, and we would go over there. I draped some cloth for the front of it, and we would lay inside, and you could hear the water going by… and it was just real peaceful.”

Later Pa Daryl would give me more details of how at that time the log cabin was no longer there but, that there was only the reminisce of an old, small barn down there. “The roof of my lean-to,” he said, “was made from a scrap of tin. Me and Collie-dog would lay down there most nights and even if it started to rain we would stay down in the hollow until the morning.”

In my mind, I imagine what the rain may have sounded like on the roof of Pa Daryl’s lean-to. Storing away such memories in our hearts, I believe, will allow us access to a stillness and peace even when we find ourselves among unsettling times.

Eden exists within us, if we remain in exile it is because we have banished ourselves.

Dr. Lauerence Kant had this to say: “Lost we wander in the wilderness trying to find an oasis, not realizing that both the wilderness and the oasis are inside us.” So, if we continue to wander in the wilderness it is of our own choosing. But, once we enter into the Promised Land, the water flowing in that land will become a Cup that we can offer to others. When will we allow the eternal waters of memory to soften and reshape the grounds of our hearts? Because only then will we discover how our hearts and homes may become an eternal Garden that offers protection and belonging to all those we encounter.

Eden can be found within us, if we allow the Divine to come near to us.

A lot of ink has been spilled on the topic of prayer. Currently, if you search Amazon Books for “Christian Prayer”, Amazon will present you with over 55,000 possible results, a number that increases to over 96,000 if you take out the word “Christian.” Everyone is interested in prayer. Many of those books share similar ideas, quote similar passages from the Bible, and give similar advice, but I think it is probably a safe assumption that within that massive list there are thousands of different definitions of prayer and thousands of different suggestions as to how we should approach God in prayer.

Given the massive amount of material available, a person could easily get lost trying to get prayer “right.” So, I would like to set those 55,000 books aside for a moment and ask a really simple, fundamental question: What is prayer?

I’m not asking for another definition. I’m asking, at the most basic level, what is it?

The entire Bible, from Genesis through Revelation, is a long story about how God pursues people. And in that story of pursuit, God is always the first to move. John stated it as clearly as anyone ever could, “We love him because he first loved us.” People are the recipients of what God has done. God creates, and we exist. God speaks, and we listen. God reveals the corruption in the world, and we confess our sin. God loves, and we are saved. God acts first.

That means that at the most fundamental level prayer is always a response. It might be a response to our sense that God is present, or it might be a response to our sense that God is absent. It might be our way of responding to his justice, his mercy, his love, or his wrath. It might be a response to the claim that he can heal us or that he can free us from our circumstances. We might even pray simply because we believe he has told us to. Regardless of our reasons for praying, genuine prayer is always a response to God.

But that leads us to another big question: What kind of a god are we responding to?

For those of us who have been Christians for a long time that may sound like a ridiculous question, but it’s an incredibly important question, because what we believe about people determines how we respond to them, and what we believe about God will determine how we pray, or if we even bother to pray at all.

Recently, an older gentlemen and I were having coffee, and he made the following suggestion: “The entire Bible is a commentary on the first three chapters of Genesis.” I agreed with him, but when it comes to questions about God, I think we should be particularly interested in the first two chapters of Genesis.

Our scripture begins with Genesis 1:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good…

Adults don’t read Genesis enough, and when we do, it’s often for the purpose of scientific debate. But if we only read these chapters when we have a problem with something scientists are telling us, we’ve missed the point. These passages are not about us. They’re not scientific treatises. They’re inspired statements about the god to whom we pray. This opening passage, in particular, is about a god who sees nothing but chaos out in front of him. There’s formlessness; everything is a void. There’s darkness everywhere. But he does something about it. He speaks, and order comes from chaos, light is produced from darkness, and the meaningless void becomes something good.

God is presented in this passage as a god of supreme power, a god who produces good things – a god who can repair the void in your life with a single word. This god, however, stands apart from his creation. He creates the universe with his voice, from a distance. As the psalms and the prophets tell us over and over again, his ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts. He’s bigger than we are. His power extends beyond the universe, which scientists tell us is still visible from the earth 46 billion light years away. Theologians, pastors, and writers throughout history have referred to this aspect of God as his “otherness.” He’s different than we are.

I think Mr. Beaver says it best in The Chronicles of Narnia. Susan and Lucy, two of the four children who entered the enchanted land, are speaking with the Beaver family about Aslan, and they ask if he is a man:

Mr. Beaver: Aslan a man? Certainly not. I tell you, he is the king of the woods…Aslan is a lion – the lion, the great lion.

Susan: Ohhh! I’d thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.

Mrs. Beaver: That you will dearie, and make no mistake, if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.

Lucy: Then he isn’t safe?

Mr. Beaver: Safe? Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about being safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the king, I tell you.

God is good, as the saying goes, but we should never forget that he isn’t safe, and he certainly is not a man. He’s not like us. He’s “other.” As the Celtic poet, John O’Donahue has suggested, “If we had an absolute meeting with God, our consciousness could never survive it… There is a certain sense of danger and adventure about God.” So, when we pray we are responding to a wild, untamable god who, as Isaiah told the Israelites, is higher than anything we can imagine. And practically speaking, this means that our life of prayer should be characterized by humility and reverence.

I cringe when Christians, of all people, pray like they have God figured out, like he’s a vending machine and if we punch the right numbers and drop in the right coins we get what we want. There are stories in the Bible about people who think they can tame God. Those stories never end well. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t petition God for the things we need, for healing, or for our concerns, but we should remember that God is different from us. He thinks differently than we do. He’s bigger than our church, and he’s bigger than our denomination. We could be wrong about many things. So with humility, we ought to pray as Jesus did in the garden, “Take this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done.”

If we are really humble, reverence should come easy to us in our moments of prayer. I don’t think our knees should knock every time we speak to God, but I do think we ought to respect the one to whom we are praying. Respect, of course, looks different in different cultures, and most churches today contain multiple sub-cultures that cross ethnic, regional, and age based thresholds, so reverence will not always look the same. We dress differently, act differently, and speak differently, so we will pray differently, but however we do it, we have to do it with reverence. The Apostle Paul warned the Galatians that God will not be mocked. We will reap what we sow.

Genesis 1 is powerful, but it doesn’t stand alone. Genesis 2 describes God as well:

…Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed in his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed…to till it and keep it.

The second chapter of Genesis provides us with another way to understand God. Instead of a supremely powerful, distant God who creates with his words, God and his creation are intimate in this passage. The language in this chapter suggests that we ought to use our imagination as the story is told. We imagine God scooping up the earth and carefully shaping it into a human being, exactly as he wants it to be. When his project is finished, he shares his own breath – his own life – with it. Then, he gives it a divine task. This image of God is so beautiful and so profound that Jesus echoes it in John 20 immediately following his resurrection. The disciples are still in the upper room, afraid and confused – lifeless – and just as God breathed life into mankind, so Jesus breathes purpose, meaning, life, and power into his followers. And just as God instructed the man with whom he had shared his life to tend the Garden of Eden, so Jesus instructs the people with whom he shares his life to tend to one another, as well as the broken world around them.

From this Genesis 2 perspective, God is closer to us than we are even aware. The Apostle Paul told the Colossians that all things are held together in him. And a few hundred years later, St. Augustine, the famous fourth century theologian, claimed, “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.” God is involved. He works for us, with us, and through us. So, our life of prayer should not only be characterized by humility and reverence but also by our authentic presence and emotional conviction.

I often hear people say that we should be honest with God because he knows everything already, and I agree, but that implies we are doing all the talking, which is not how prayer really works. Sometimes we’re supposed to listen. In both cases, we have to learn how to “be present” before God. We have to learn that if we are angry or sad, God needs to be a part of that. And if we are happy and filled with excitement, God needs to be a part of that too. He has shared the breath of life with each of us, and each of us should share our life with him. This is something we have to learn and practice and discuss with one another, because we don’t do a very good job in our culture of simply being present with anything or anyone, much less with God. But Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Jesus, Paul, Peter, and many people since them knew how, and it changed their lives.

If we are authentic and present in our life of prayer, our emotional conviction will come naturally. Before I became better acquainted with charismatic Christians, I was highly critical of “emotionalism”, as many people are today. And I still think that it can become dangerously self satisfying, but I have also learned that emotional conviction is important. Our feelings can deceive us, but they are powerful motivators and a central part of who we are in any given moment. I believe an intimate creator would wish for his creation to embrace emotional experiences with him, but like reverence, how that happens will vary from person to person, so we have to give one another other plenty of room to let it happen the way it needs to happen.

If we take Genesis 1 and 2 seriously, the god that we respond to is farther away than we can ever imagine but closer than we can ever know. He’s supremely powerful but intricately forming us. There’s a mystery about him, a paradox. And it is this paradox that makes God everything we’ve ever needed him to be. There’s nothing wrong with books about prayer. There’s a little book called Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton that I read every couple of years and another book called The Art of Prayer by Igumen Chariton that I’m working through. They’re encouraging and useful. But, they aren’t necessary. I often tell my students that if they want to approach something the right way, they need to understand it the right way. And I believe that if we keep the god of Genesis 1 and 2 before us, then we will naturally approach him with humility, reverence, our authentic presence, and emotional conviction. I believe we will each be approaching God as he would have us approach him.

Like most Christians, I rarely open the book of Leviticus. It’s full of rules and regulations. It’s a book of technicalities. Until recently, I probably couldn’t name one Christian who would brew a hot cup of coffee, flip on his favorite worship play list, and then read through the property laws from ancient Hebrew society. It’s not the sort of book we enjoy. But some time ago I had a conversation with Michael Card, and now I can name at least one.

If you’re in your twenties or thirties you probably don’t know who Michael Card is, but your parents may have loved his worship music. On the other hand, they may have loved it so much that they wore his cassette tapes out listening to his hit song, El Shadai, as mine did. My parents played his music all the time; I even remember listening to Michael Card on our family camping trips.

Michael Card was a permanent member of my internal jukebox from the 80’s, and that’s probably why I was never a big fan. But then I met the man at one of my school’s chapels, and now I am tempted to convince my church to have him up for a concert just so I can take him out for coffee afterwards. That’s one of the first things I learned about him in our conversation; he loves good coffee. Not just Starbucks, he said, – “good coffee.” And where coffee is concerned, money is no object. That’s exactly what he told me. Then, he told me a story. In the story, he and Keith Green, another Christian artist your parents may have loved, were at a party where there were lots of rough individuals, and by the end of it, Keith Green was in a car with a pretty scary drug dealer, trying to convince him that there was a better way to live life.

That’s when I was really hooked. Not only was I chatting about coffee with one of my parents’ favorite Christian artists, a man who had been a regular part of my family’s long drives and rain soaked camping vacations in the Smokey Mountains, but I was becoming convinced that he was, in fact, a Christian artist – the kind that cares about Jesus’ perspective more than he cares about other people’s perspectives. For Michael Card, Jesus stands at the center of it all. Oh, and its worth mentioning that it takes a pretty cool guy to wear jeans and a t-shirt to a Presbyterian chapel. And he had an awesome beard.

After our conversation, Michael (I’m pretty sure we were on a first name basis by then.) did his thing. He played all of my parents’ old favorites. There were points when I actually thought I was sitting in my family’s old station wagon heading down I-75 toward Tennessee, the mountains growing larger in front of us and my dad threatening to pull over and spank me for punching my sister while the rest of the family was trying to listen to El Shadai.

But at some point in that short Presbyterian chapel, Michael began commenting on another famous song, Jubilee. Nostalgia had been working on me, and I was daydreaming about the mountains, but when he began citing a passage from Leviticus 25, I began to listen a little more closely, because I was pretty sure I had never seen a worship leader crack open the bible and encourage a congregation to worship with ancient Hebrew property regulations.

He spoke for a moment. Then he sang:

The Lord provided for a time

For the slaves to be set free

For the debts to all be cancelled

So his chosen ones could see

His deep desire was for forgiveness

He longed to see their liberty

And his yearning was embodied

In the Year of Jubilee

Once again, this man had intrigued me. I grabbed my phone, recorded a note to take a closer look at Leviticus 25, and let myself drift back to the Smokey Mountains.

As I later discovered, the passage in Leviticus is part of the Holiness Code, supposedly given to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The passage contains a set of regulations that were to be observed by all levels of ancient Israelite society. It was a celebration that rolled around every 50 years or so called the Year of Jubilee.

Jubilee literally means “trumpet,” after the instrument that was designated to announce its opening. “Have the trumpet sounded everywhere…sound the trumpet throughout the land” (25:9). The name itself is significant, because at that time trumpets were not used for musical purposes much at all. They were primarily used in military and religious ceremonies, and they invoked a certain sense of attention and respect. They were public proclamations that something very significant, probably life altering, was getting ready to take place. The book of Exodus, for example, tells us that “the voice of a trumpet” was heard amid the thunder and lighting on Sinai when God met with Moses, and it caused the people to tremble. Trumpets were also used when the Ark of the Covenant was returned after being captured, when Jericho was destroyed, when there were victories in battle, when kings were anointed, and when the temple was dedicated. The sound of a trumpet was a signal that everyday life was about to change – that it must change.

So, the Jubilee was actually a time of celebration that God used to announce to all of his people that it was time for their lives to change. And thankfully, God did not let his people decide for themselves what changes they needed to make. He made it very clear. Leviticus 25 contains a detailed list of the things that must be done during this celebration, and they can generally be boiled down to three dominant themes: freedom, return, and forgiveness.

The ancient Israelite economy, like most all ancient civilizations of that time, was heavily influenced by slavery. Slaves could be attained any number of ways, and in most of the world, slavery was a permanent condition. For the Greeks and the Romans, for example, slaves could be set free by their masters or they could purchase their freedom, but most of the time, slaves remained slaves for life. But that is not what God desired for his people. They were not to remain slaves, nor possess one another as slaves permanently. The people were instructed, “Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants” (v. 10). One of the conditions of the Jubilee was a complete emancipation, a complete proclamation of freedom throughout the land.

Another theme that dominates all of Leviticus 25 is the theme of return. “In the year of jubilee everyone is to return to his own property” (v. 13). For the Israelite civilization, which was largely agricultural, the specific form of return to which God called them was to their ancestral lands and farms. People were supposed to move back to where they came from. They were supposed to reconnect with the land of their family heritage. But for them, a return to ancestral property represented much more than a change in location. It was not simply an opportunity to pack up and move. The Israelites associated their land with their relationship with God and the covenant God made with their forefathers. For example, God told Abraham, “I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant…The whole land of Canaan where you are now an alien, I will give you as an everlasting possession, to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God” (Gen 17: 7-8). For the Israelites, words such as: God, land, presence, blessing, tradition, family, heritage, and salvation were all related to one another. They were not interchangeable, but in the minds of the ancient Israelites, they occurred together. So, a second condition of the Jubilee was that the people should return, not just to their land, but to God, to the traditions of their ancestors, to the way God intended things to be.

Finally, having been commanded to proclaim freedom and return, the Israelites were to practice forgiveness. In the Jubilee this primarily took the form of the forgiveness of financial debt. “If one of your countrymen becomes poor and is unable to support himself among you, help him as you would an alien or a temporary resident, so he can continue to live among you. Do not take interest of any kind from him…he is to work for you until the year of jubilee” (v. 35-40). In a society where debt could lead to oppression, God offered his people a way out, a light at the end of the tunnel. But God’s insistence that his people’s debt be forgiven in the Jubilee was not the only way he protected them. Leviticus 25 lists many different ways someone’s debt may be ‘redeemed’, even if the jubilee year had not yet arrived. “If one of your countrymen becomes poor…he retains the right of redemption…a relative may redeem him…any blood relative may redeem him…but if he is not redeemed in any of these ways, he and his children are to be released in the jubilee year” (v. 47-55). Redeem means “to gain or regain possession of”, and God expected the Israelites to redeem one another, especially those with family ties. He expected them to work hard and to sacrifice in order to free one another of their debts and the things that oppressed them, even if it was costly.

If we step back for a moment and look at the bigger picture, we can imagine what a beautiful moment we would be witnessing if we saw an entire nation of people proclaiming freedom, return, and forgiveness. The trumpet blasts would echo across Israelite territory – through the crowded city of Jerusalem and out into the countryside beyond. Parents, broken beneath insurmountable debt would cling to one another and praise God for his provision. Children, living in terrible, oppressive conditions would erupt into the streets singing the songs of their ancestors. The evening meals would be taken with gratitude and thanksgiving. Fathers would slaughter the fatted calf and mothers would serve the best wine. Entire villages would dance and laugh together. And they would bless the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who commanded Moses to rescue them from slavery, the God who brought them safely through the waters of the sea.

It’s a wonderful image isn’t it? But it gets even better.

There was a prophet named Isaiah, and he believed there would be a day when this celebration of freedom would not belong to the Israelites alone but to every nation, to every person from one side of the world to the other. He believed there would be a day when God would extend his peace and his love, his shalom, to the entire world. And here is the interesting part: he believed that when this happened, that celebration would occur in the form of a person. This ancient tradition of freedom, return, and forgiveness would no longer just be an Israelite festival rolling around every 50 years or so. Instead, freedom and forgiveness would exist in the form of a living, breathing person.

Isaiah called this person the ‘Servant of God’. He was convinced that this person would be anointed by God to accomplish a specific task, and he believed that this person’s task would be to set things right in the world again. Isaiah said that God’s spirit would be upon this servant in an incredibly special way. He said this person would be determined and strong, that he would be unstoppable, that he wouldn’t rest until justice and peace had been established on earth. This servant would be a symbol of all Israel, but he would be a light to all the nations. He would open the eyes of the blind and he would set the prisoners free. His very existence would be the proclamation of the year of God’s favor (42:1-7). The Servant of God would be a perpetual, living Jubilee, a celebration that would cross oceans and seas, deserts and mountains, political ideologies, language barriers, ethnicities, philosophical differences, intellectual disputes, and cultural norms. This person would be a Jubilee for everyone.

And we know the rest of the story, don’t we?

Hundreds of years after Isaiah, a man came from one of the poorer regions around Jerusalem, and he began teaching in local synagogues – just the small ones – but it was enough for him to build a reputation and get himself invited to speak at the larger synagogue in a town called Nazareth. There, he opened Isaiah’s scroll and found one of the more famous passages about the Servant of God. Then he read:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Lk 4:18-19).

We are told that he finished the reading, rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the synagogue official, and simply took his seat. So, people began whispering. They already knew that passage by heart. It had been read to them hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. Was this all he was going to say, this man whom they had heard so much about?

But he wasn’t finished, not even close.

“Today,” he told them, “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This man from Nazareth was claiming to be the Servant of God, the one who would proclaim Isaiah’s world wide Jubilee. Everywhere he went he preached those same themes: freedom, return, and forgiveness. He acquired a following, people that wanted to help him. And he told those people to free the poor and the helpless, to be a light so others could return to God, and to forgive as many times as they needed to along the way. As Isaiah had believed, this man from Nazareth healed people, raised the dead, cast out demons, and destroyed all kinds of oppression. He was powerful, determined, and strong. Nothing, not even death, could stop him from his world wide mission of Jubilee.

This is the Gospel, and it’s not just good news; it’s the best news possible! So, I wish we could stop right now and celebrate God’s Jubilee and worship the Servant of God. But there is one more really important point.

Before he played the song, Jubilee, Michael made a casual comment in that Presbyterian chapel service that has not left me since. In fact, I would say it has changed everything for me. He said that there is no biblical, historical, or archaeological evidence that the ancient Israelites ever fully practiced the Jubilee. And, having done some investigation, it seems like most scholars agree with him. Apparently, the Israelites talked a lot about the Jubilee. They even used it to help measure time. For hundreds of years, their religious leaders argued about it, wrote books about it, and studied it. They talked about its symbolism, its meaning, and its theology. They read about it publicly. The people memorized it, hoped for it, and longed for it. But they didn’t actually do it. God had commanded his people to follow a straightforward list of laws that would revolutionize their own hearts and their entire society. The laws were a compulsory invitation to experience God’s blessings for his people, a way for them to take the advice of the Psalmist – to taste and see that the Lord is good. But they didn’t do it, because it was too impractical. It would have cost them too much. It would have elevated the lowly members of society and humbled the proud. Unlikely individuals would have stood alongside the successful, the wealthy, the moral, and, by the standards of those days, the righteous. Freedom, return, and forgiveness would have altered the entire world that the Israelites had built, but it was the world that they had built around themselves, so they wouldn’t do it.

Typically, this would be the point when good Christians who know their bible and their systematic theology would say, “Of course they didn’t do it. Those Israelites never got anything right. But it was all part of the plan anyway. Now we believe in Jesus!”

We believe in Jesus? What do we mean when we say we believe in Jesus?

Let’s rephrase the question: What does it mean to believe in a man who claimed to be committed to freedom, return, and forgiveness?

Jesus said amazing things like: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” “When you give a cup of cold water to the least of these you do it for me,” and “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall see God.” Did he really mean all of that stuff about making peace and seeing God, or was it just nice talk? What does it mean to believe in a man who says things like that?

Jesus did amazing things. He fed the masses, healed the sick, and raised the dead. He died for the world. But he told his followers that they would do even greater things than that. So, have you raised anyone from the dead lately? What does it mean to believe in a man who does things like that?

The Apostle Paul and many of the other early followers of Jesus taught their churches that belief in Jesus was not just an idea but an actual agreement to be his hands and his feet. They agreed to be his body, his presence among the brokenhearted, the blind, and the oppressed. They would partner in his Jubilee mission. The problem is: followers of Jesus are often a lot like the ancient Israelites. We spend a lot of time arguing about Jesus, writing books about Jesus, studying Jesus, memorizing Jesus, hoping for Jesus, publicly preaching Jesus, and even personally longing for Jesus, but sometimes his mission is strangely absent. So, I’ll ask again. Have you raised anyone from the dead lately? Have you even tried?

I know people who are trying. I know a girl who is obsessed with combating the child slave trade that is creeping into the U.S. I know an older gentleman with a PhD who teaches for pennies at a local business college, because he is passionate about helping his students return to the love of God. He teaches Business Writing, but he always tells me his real mission is restoration. Recently, I spoke with a young person who wanted to make people more aware of the growing rate of teen suicide. I know people in medicine, business, legal professions, education, and all kinds of other careers who see their real mission as freedom, return, and forgiveness. The mission looks different for each of them, and they aren’t physically raising people from the dead, but they aren’t afraid of being impractical either.

My prayer is that we won’t sacrifice the real world aspect of our mission simply because it’s impractical, costly, or because we have built a church culture and put ourselves at the center of it. If we do, we will miss out on the blessings of renewed, spirit filled hearts and a changed society.