Sermons from Mission Hills UCC San Diego, California Rev. Dr. David Bahr [email protected] June 19, 2022 “Juneteenth and the Jubilee” Jeremiah 34: 8-16 When God delivered a Message to Jeremiah after King Zedekiah made a covenant with the people of Jerusalem to decree freedom to the slaves who were Hebrews, both men and women. The covenant stipulated that no one in Judah would own a fellow Jew as a slave. All the leaders and people who had signed the covenant set free the slaves, men and women alike. 11 But a little while later, they reneged on the covenant, broke their promise and forced their former slaves to become slaves again. 12-14 Then Jeremiah received this Message from God: “God, the God of Israel, says, ‘I made a covenant with your ancestors when I delivered them out of their slavery in Egypt. At the time I made it clear: “At the end of seven years, each of you must free any fellow Hebrew who has had to sell himself to you. After he has served six years, set him free.” But your ancestors totally ignored me. 15-16 “‘And now, you—what have you done? First you turned back to the right way and did the right thing, decreeing freedom for your brothers and sisters—and you made it official in a solemn covenant in my Temple. And then you turned right around and broke your word, making a mockery of both me and the covenant, and made them all slaves again, these men and women you’d just set free. You forced them back into slavery Now, that’s what you call an obscure passage! It’s the Prophet Jeremiah’s justification for the exile. The exile was the time when the Israelites were forced from their land and made to live as captives in Babylon for decades. This is the explanation for such a consequence. So, as the story goes, King Zedekiah made a covenant with all the people of Jerusalem to free the humans they enslaved. Everyone agreed and let them go. And then broke their promise and took back all the men and women they had freed, to enslave them again. As a result, according to the Prophet Jeremiah, God was mighty unpleased. If you won’t free these people, then I will free you – You’ll be free to die by the sword, disease, and famine. Keep reading this passage and it’s grim, unfit to read in polite company. The people re-enslaved those they had agreed to set free. So, Jeremiah basically asked them, “what’s wrong with you people!” and reminded them that God had freed their ancestors, that God had brought them out of the land of Egypt, that God had led them out of the house of slavery. This passage references one of many commands God gave to Moses during their 40 years in the wilderness. “Every seventh year each of you must free any Hebrews who have been sold to you. After they have served you for six years, you must set them free.” That’s what this obscure passage is based on. An equally obscure reference to the Book of Leviticus! Leviticus 25 contains a number of very oddly specific commands, including verses like 3 and 4: “You will plant your fields for six years, and prune your vineyards and gather their crops for six years. 4 But in the seventh year the land will have a special sabbath rest, a Sabbath to the Lord: You must not plant your fields or prune your vineyards.” There are many more just like this. Why? Well, think of the period of 40 years in the wilderness as Freedom Training. How does someone who has been held in slavery adjust to freedom? Once you have been property, how do you own property? So, they must create a new identity for themselves, one that doesn’t involve belonging to someone else. And that was the job of Moses to teach – freedom training. According to the great biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, Moses sought to give the Hebrew people a distinct identity – not an identity based on territory or ethnicity or language but an identity defined by their ethics.[1] And at the heart of it, back in Leviticus 25, is something called Jubilee. The Jubilee Year. Listen: “Count off seven weeks of years—that is, seven times seven—so that the seven weeks of years totals forty-nine years. 9 Then have the trumpet blown on the tenth day of the seventh month. 10 You will make the fiftieth year holy, proclaiming freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a year of Jubilee for you: each of you must return to your family property and to your extended family. 11 The fiftieth year will be a Jubilee year for you. Leviticus 25 has numerous specific directives, for example: Do not plant, do not harvest the secondary growth, and do not gather from the freely growing vines 12 because it is a Jubilee: it will be holy to you. 13 Each of you must return to your family property in this year of Jubilee.” And here’s a big one: 39 If one of your fellow Israelites faces financial difficulty with you and sells themselves to you, you must not make him work as a slave. 40 Instead, they will be like a hired laborer or foreign guest to you. They will work for you until the Jubilee year, 41 at which point the poor Israelite along with their children will be released from you. They can return to their extended family and to their family property. 42 You must do this because these people are my servants—I brought them out of Egypt’s land. They must not be sold as slaves. 43 You will not harshly rule over them but must fear your God. These are not generalities but specific instructions. Moses wanted his people to be unlike their neighboring nations. They were not to be known because of any great wealth. He wanted them to be distinct as people who had once been someone else’s property to have a different, ethical, relationship with property. And what is that? To have a lifestyle not based on accumulation or always trying to acquire more. After all, at the end of 49 years, it reverts to the original owners. There’s no purpose for greed or monopoly for them. They were not to be a community based on haves and have-nots because whatever inequality had grown over the course of 49 years, it was to be returned in the 50th. Where did this idea come from? Moses watched the extreme inequality of the neighboring Canaanites and declared they would live differently. He named and declared it Jubilee. As Brueggemann said, “this was not just about good intentions or kind thoughts or a religious idea. These were concrete, material, economic acts to be undertaken with discipline and intentionality.” He adds, it’s the “most difficult, most demanding, and most outrageous requirement of biblical faith.” And as many will note, there is no evidence that there actually ever was a Jubilee Year. Taking the Bible literally is not regularly applied to this text. But it does set a vision. It sets an expectation for God’s people. From Brueggemann: God’s vision is not of accumulation so that those with the most at the end win but a vision of peaceableness, of neighborliness “when the vicious cycles of violent accumulation are broken.” When the vicious cycles of violent accumulation are broken. Such as when no human owns another human. Or that no human is ever so indebted that they can never be free. That’s Jubilee freedom. And that’s Juneteenth – a celebration of people finally set free. This once obscure observance now turned national holiday is finally getting the attention it deserves. We should take every opportunity to acknowledge there was a time when some people owned other human beings in our country. To tell the truth. To understand the consequences. And then to repair and continue to ensure freedom remains in all its forms forever. And to celebrate: that God is a God of freedom for the enslaved God is a God of liberty for the captives God is a God of Jubilee for the indebted This is central to our biblical faith. And it is central to the followers of Jesus who declared his mission of heaven on earth in Luke chapter 4. 16 Jesus went to Nazareth, where he had been raised. On the Sabbath he went to the synagogue as he normally did and stood up to read. 17 The synagogue assistant gave him the scroll from the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me and sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, 19 and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. 20 He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the assistant, and sat down. Every eye in the synagogue was fixed on him. 21 He began to explain to them, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled just as you heard it.” The year of the Lord’s favor is an enactment of Jubilee. Release from captivity. Enslaved humans freed. Debts cancelled. Families returned to their land. And the land itself is given a break. Let me say briefly that biblical slavery and the kind of chattel slavery practiced in the Americas are not the same thing. Those enslaved in the Bible might have been conquered people but not because of a hierarchy based upon an entire race deemed inferior. And someone might have found themselves enslaved because of debt, or even sold themselves to pay a debt, but not the kind of economic exploitation that fueled an entire nation’s expansion of extreme wealth on the backs of one race without any hope of release, in fact whose children and grandchildren were born enslaved too. So, Juneteenth. We’re becoming more familiar with the broad strokes of the story. Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, word had not yet reached Texans who were enslaved. Union General Gordon Granger issued Order No. 3 announcing their emancipation and “absolute equality.” But it wasn’t just his word. He was flanked by two transports full of Black soldiers. The enslaved saw the evidence of their freedom in the uniforms of all those soldiers, an entire Corp composed of free and formerly enslaved Black men. What a sight that must have been to behold. But here’s a detail I didn’t know.[2] Granger and his soldiers had not been sent to Galveston to spread the news, as I had imagined. They were enroute to secure the Mexican border against the invading army of Napoleon. What? The French were establishing colonies in Mexico so the southern border had to be secured from the French! That sort of blew my mind. It was while they were on their way for that assignment that a storm hit, bad enough to cause their ships to seek shelter. The storm forced the transport ships to anchor in Galveston Bay on June 18, 1865. It was the day after that they went ashore and discovered thousands of enslaved people working in the ports and houses and fields. And so, Order No. 3 was written. What if there had been no storm? When would have word of emancipation, freedom, reached Texas? You know how sometimes storms are called Acts of God. I’ve never liked that. But at least in this case, I’m glad for such an Act of God storm. If Jesus had continued reading from the scroll of Isaiah, after said, “To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” it continues: to give them garlands in place of ashes, oil of joy in place of mourning, a mantle of praise in place of discouragement. 4 They will rebuild the ancient ruins; they will restore formerly deserted places; they will renew their ruined cities and places deserted in generations past. So, on this Juneteenth, let’s commit to building a land where we bind up the broken. To build a land where anyone captive can go free. A promised land where everyone is truly free to be who God created each of us to be. [1] Walter Brueggemann, The Collected Sermons, Westminster John Knox, 2011, page 143 [2] Jayne Marie Smith, Sojourners, June 17, 2021
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