Leviticus
25:8-17
July
5, 2026
You
shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the
period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. 9Then
you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh
month—on the day of atonement—you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all
your land. 10And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you
shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be
a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and
every one of you to your family. 11That fiftieth year shall be
a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the
unpruned vines. 12For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you:
you shall eat only what the field itself produces.
13In this year of jubilee you shall
return, every one of you, to your property. 14When you make a
sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not cheat one
another. 15When you buy from your neighbor, you shall pay only
for the number of years since the jubilee; the seller shall charge you only for
the remaining crop-years. 16If the years are more, you shall
increase the price, and if the years are fewer, you shall diminish the price;
for it is a certain number of harvests that are being sold to you. 17You
shall not cheat one another, but you shall fear your God; for I am the Lord your
God.
**************************
I’m interrupting my scheduled sermon
series on Abraham and his family because I really don’t want to let the 250th
anniversary of the United States go by like a half-hearted parade without a marching
band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever”.
This year the country is a quarter-millenium old, and the church is only
fifty years behind that. Those are
achievements!
So my text is one that is a solid
part of the founding of both our country and our faith: written on the pages of
the Bible, cast in bronze on the body of a bell that once hung in the
Pennsylvania Statehouse that we now call Independence Hall: the Liberty Bell. It cracked irreparably 200 years ago yesterday,
July 4th, 1826 – the day that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams
died. There around the top of the
Liberty Bell, thousands of people every year can read the inscription
“Proclaim
liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof.” [Leviticus 25:10]
Liberty! Liberation!
Those are gifts. That is more than being born free, a citizen
rather than a subject. Someone is set at
liberty after they have been detained. A
prisoner of war is liberated when he is rescued. The allies landed in Normandy and began the
liberation of Europe. Liberation is the
moment when things are reset and wrongs are put right.
We don’t hear much from the book of
Leviticus. Much of it spells out
standard operating procedures for priests overseeing sacrificial worship at the
Temple in Jerusalem. Within it, though,
is this passage that lays out a vision for what that worship is to achieve,
which is a living communion of God and his people where not only individual sin
can find pardon, but the sins of a nation also can be expiated. It envisions a regular reset every fifty
years, called a “year of jubilee”.
In that year, people who have become
alienated or separated from their roots, who have been forced off the land by
financial exploitation or perhaps by natural disasters or maybe just by the changes
that generations bring – whatever it might be – are given a deliberate moment of
renewal. Inherited debts are set aside. Even
the land itself is given a rest and the fields go fallow to recover their
strength. It’s a time when roots of all
sorts are refreshed. And it’s meant to
be holy.
“And
you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout
the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall
return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your
family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow,
or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a
jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself
produces.” [Leviticus
25:10-12]
There are
disputes about whether this law was ever fully observed. The fact that the second part of this passage
spells out ways somebody could get around the provisions of the first part says
a great deal. “Whatever you do, Mr. Revere,
don’t make a ruckus; people are sleeping.”
That isn’t really as important as
the principle that it sets out, though.
There will be (and must be) God-given times of revival that are both
personal and social. When they come,
they are to be celebrated wholeheartedly.
It’s a jubilee! Even when the call
for justice and equality that should be so plain and simple results in tribulation
and conflict, when they are rooted in the Lord, they bring a fresh start. The Lord himself is shaking things up.
“He has
sounded forth the trumpet that will never call retreat.
He is sifting
out the hearts of men before his judgment seat.
O be swift,
my soul, to answer him.
Be
jubilant, my feet: our God is marching on!”
Listen for the clicking that says the
gates are unlocked and the door is opened.
Listen for the bell that rings when the cancer patient leaves the clinic
with a clear diagnosis. Listen for the buzzer
on your phone announcing that the stormfront has passed and the tornado watch
is over. Those sounds bring good
news. They bring liberation.
More than even these, listen for the
trumpet-voice that God speaks to your soul.
Listen for the declaration of life that comes from Jesus’ victory over
death and liberty from sin that his Spirit brings us and begin the pursuit of real
happiness that comes with living a new life in him. Live it out in personal holiness and live it
out on earth as citizens of the kingdom of God.
“For,” Paul reminds us,
“you
did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have
received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is
that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of
God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with
Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with
him.” [Romans
8:15-17]
We
have been set free! Be jubilant! Don’t
keep it to yourself. Don’t wait another
fifty years.
“Proclaim
liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof.” [Leviticus 25:10]
No comments:
Post a Comment