The Jubilee of Nonviolence
Ancient Testimony ~ Acts 2: 42-47
April 13, 2008
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

Jubilee is a wonderful old word that has happily evolved to mean a party of some kind.  It is a feast.  A fete.  A time out of time. We hear the word mostly to name choirs: the Jubilee Choir will perform its Jubilee Concert… or some such.  It is the kind of word that makes us happy.  The early Christians took the word Jubilee from their Jewish forbears.  When the book of Acts says they held everything in common, they were living in the Jubilee time all the time.  In fact, one way early Christians described their difference from the Jews was that they thought the Jubilee had come in Jesus―as well as many other things―and thus all things were always to be shared.  This radical communism usually goes unnoticed by biblical literalists, but it sits right there in the book of Acts and in many other accounts.  These early believers were not fooling around.  They had a theology that dictated their personal economy.  Imagine that.  A theology that dictated a personal economy.

Jubilee has a more pedestrian meaning also.  Biblically it is the 7th year, and agriculturally it is designed to let the fields go fallow so that they can rest and be rejuvenated.  Before chemical fertilizers were so common, land needed to rest to be fertile.  It needed time to get the nutrients back into proper balance so the grains could grow.  Now that top soil is depleted at an astonishing rate―because we don’t let soil go fallow and we don’t fertilize in a sustainable way―we act with a suicidal stupidity regarding the land. The Jews and the early Christians did not. In fact, they took agricultural necessity―letting the land rest―and built a cosmology and economy and theology out of it.  They not only rested the soil every seven years but also played a numbers game so that on the 49th year (the 7th rest of the annual soil rests) all debts would also be forgiven and ownership of the land would rotate.  Very few scholars think this theologically based economy actually happened.  Most think it was more a matter of ritual and cult than a matter of banks and deeds.  Nevertheless, the idea persists that Jubilee is the accumulation of seven years of soil rests in a 49th year, when things were to straighten themselves out.  Your debts were forgiven.  If you had accumulated too much land, you had to give some away.  This agriculturally and theologically built economy encouraged the early Christians in their communism.

Again, very few scholars think the early Christians actually shared everything.  But enough did to keep the myth alive.  And today I want to argue that it is a very useful myth, this Jubilee business.  Again, imagine having a theology that predicated an economy.

Instead, we have theology over here and economy over there.  Even the current magnificent contradiction of the hands-off federal government playing touchy feely with Wall Street, as though the free market had been dethroned, does not link up what we believe and how we exchange.  What is impressive about the early Christians keeping in common all they had and the Jubilee idea of shepherds and goatherds is that it had integrity.  One hand shook the other.  The idea about God became the idea about money.

There are several ways in which that is happening today and I want to get to them.  One is the Debt Forgiveness Legislation currently before Congress. It is actually moving somewhere! I recommend you look at the Jubilee website (www.jubileeusa.org) to discover something you may not know: we have been forgiving debt for about ten years and have accelerated that process with certain Second and Third World countries.  The reasons are not all pristinely theological but they do hearken back to the commonality and the land forgiveness of earlier times.

Many people believe that this year the World Bank and U.S. government will forgive the debts of more countries than ever before.  Why does that matter to people like us, in a short month when we give a quick look at Satyagraha and nonviolence?  Because the forgiveness of debt is the proactive heart of nonviolence.  When poor countries have no chance to finance their own future―because they are financing ours, or Britain’s―when poor countries cannot buy seed or manage AIDS, they are cunningly forced into violence. What else can they do? Becoming a nonviolent person takes proactivity, not reactivity.

Forgiving debt is the proactive heart of nonviolence.  This principle applies to us in more ways than one.  And by the way, the U.S. immigration problem is not an immigration problem; it is a globalization problem, brought to you courtesy of the World Bank and the free trade agreement. 

Consider these applications of Jubilee as the party that keeps violence from happening in the first place.  You can tell a child all you want not to hit, but if you haven’t figured out what you want him to do before he hits, you are not going to win your argument.  I recommend a bag of cheerios.  My favorite parenting story has to do with a failed proactivity.  I had to drive our kids, ages four and six, to Washington, D.C., from Amherst―by myself.  I can’t imagine how I let that happen, but I did.  I prepared bags and bags of proactivities: things they could do in the car; things that would keep them from poking each other in the eye, arm, elbow, mouth, ear, etc.  My favorite was a string of cheerios they could wear as a necklace… and only eat when we got there.  I don’t know why I thought that was so great, but I did.  Anyway, at our first stop, which happened about 11 minutes into the trip, they found a caterpillar.  That caterpillar entertained them all the way to Washington.  They took turns and I still have fond memories of them declaring it was their turn to hold the caterpillar, whom they named Stripe.  If you know anything about parenting, you know you have to get ahead of the fight.  The fight is inevitable, unless you get ahead of it.  You either rest the soil every seven years or the soil fails you.  You either pay off debt every month on your bill to life or it comes back to bite you.  You either share what you have or there are ugly consequences.

Montessori people train parents how to model the calm, not the fight.  They swear that if you scream at a child or even slightly raise your voice―”Don’t do that!”―the child will not hear you.  They will hear you if you say, “Don’t do that.”  Tone of voice is another kind of proactivity that keeps violence away.  It assumes that things are going to be fine.  It acts as though the parent actually believes what the parent is saying. It is connecting our theology of love and peace and calm to our behavior of love and peace and calm.  Integrity matters.  Integrity matters.

Thus, when a great nation like ours takes interest on money it has loaned other countries―while also supporting a large defense program against the violence it fears from those countries―that country is acting without integrity.  Its best interest is not being served.

Its best interest is peace in other countries so those countries don’t have to attack it.

Jubilee practices in debt cancellation and child-raising―because we won’t always be lucky enough to find a caterpillar―prevent trouble.  They are the heart of nonviolence.

Practicing the presence of peace in our personal lives is also a proactive way to know Jubilee as the precursor of larger peace.  That fallow in the seventh year is not enough for most land or most people.  Fallow is more important than that; otherwise, all the cartilage on our knees goes, all the nutrients seep out of us, and there is that “nothing left” feeling.

That nothing left feeling will keep you from even bothering to go on the Jubilee website to learn about the great possibility of congressional level debt cancellation.  Well people have time enough to spend on the “big stuff.”  They aren’t afraid of it.  Exhausted people can’t even click a button.

Let me tell you a Jubilee Story.  It is a more proactive way of talking about the peace of Jubilee.  Until now I have been warning you about what will happen if we don’t do the Jubilee.  Montessori people wouldn’t like that.  Instead, we might give ourselves pictures of liberation.  They are often accidental, like the caterpillar, but they deserve telling.

Around 12:30 a.m. on April 4, a silver 2002 New Jersey-plated Saturn crashed through the wrought-iron gate on the north side of Gramercy Park.  The driver did $60,000 worth of damages, taking out one of seven new fiberglass planters and damaging the park gate.  He also exited, going the wrong way on the one-way street there, according to the security guard at the nearby hotel.    Whenever we think or talk about Jubilee, it is important to note that we are going the wrong way on the one-way street.  We are trying to link our theology and our economy.  To do that we have to turn the whole ship, not just the car, around.

The President of the Gramercy Park Association says that drivers make similar mistakes every few years.  It is odd that the street ends so quickly. Or is it odder that the park begins so quickly?  This is one of those glass half full or glass half empty problems that bother many of us much of the time.  Do I really have time to click to the Jubilee site or string cheerios or care?  Don’t I have to deal with how depleted the soil already is in others and me and just do personal debt cancellation?  Don’t I have my own credit card debt to deal with?  Will it really do any good if I make a call to help cancel global debt? 

These are the ways people think when the soil in them is not rested and the economy and the theology in them are not linked.  They just keep going the right way on the one-way street, as though it was the only street possible.  Most agree that we have to turn around, but very few people do turn around, even after they have made a big mistake, like crashing a gate.

I think Jubilee is going to require crashing gates and going the wrong way on the one-way street.  I think Jubilee says that liberation will come as a gate-crashing, in our hearts and then in our worlds.  I think this question about possibility is very important.  Dare I try to help?  How?   What is really true, that the pavement is ending too quickly or the park beginning too quickly, is the glass half full or half empty?

As I strolled past Gramercy Park the Sunday morning of this particular gate-crashing, I realized that the gate was not only damaged but also open.  I could go into the park.  I would not have to view the perfectly planted red tulips through the bars but could get up close and personal.  I would not have to manage both the green of the park and the green of my envy of those who had keys to it.

Anyway, last Sunday with a brain full of glasses and gates and disputes between the concrete and the green, and who would have sway and who would not, I happened upon the open gate.  I began to laugh: it was, after all, the second Sunday after Easter.  I all but jumped over the broken gate and got into the park, feeling guilty and like a cop was going to stop me any second.  I had an unexpected chance to play the lead role in the Easter story. I could be Mary in a reversal of the script.   “What are you doing here?” the cop would say.   I would answer something snippy, like where have they taken the body, you know, the body of the man who crashed the gate.

No cop ever came.  I just walked around the park’s circled, graveled, well-combed walkway for the first time, with a well-defended trepidation.  Then I walked a second time and a third, practically breaking into a dance. No one was there.  No cop, no Savior, no gamed conversation―just me.  The tulips were there.  The expensive blue flowers whose name I don’t know were there.  The raked gravel marked the paths in the way that speaks of money.  I had a chance to think of more than the usual.  I had a little Jubilee, a little restoration of the soil and soul, the kind that caterpillars bring if cars from New Jersey don’t.  We do get relief from debt―and so do the people of the world, even those in the most trouble.  They may not have money but they have their spirit, as our meditation quote for today notes.

I got to wondering about the privatization of parks, another of dozens of issues like global debt relief that I rarely even think about.  Gramercy is the gold standard. But Bryant Park is also a new “public/private cooperation.”  Soon Washington Square Park will have the Tish Fountain at its center, although the movement grows to name it the “People’s Fountain.”  Let the Tish’s pay for it, if they must.  But giving them the name and the privatization feels like more than even the fountain, which is nearly priceless, is worth.

I don’t know the guy who ran away from the scene of the crime.  I know lots of people who go the wrong way on one-way streets. In fact, these people are my friends.  These people are “the people” in whose names the fountains should all be named.  They are the people in whose names the debt should be forgiven.  I have no idea if the glass is happy or half full.   I have no idea which is the lead in the play: the concrete or the green.  I do know if you go the wrong way on a one-way street you see things better.

I also know the truth of the occasional liberation.  May its tribe increase.  Gates have nowhere near the power they think they do.  Nor does debt.  Join me in calmly proclaiming that another world is possible, that all may be held in common, that soil may replenish itself.  Note that I am not begging the universe for a handshake between our theologies and our economies.  I am simply noting that one exists.

Amen.