Sunday Service 14th July

The good Idea, the terrible plan

14/7/23

Call to worship

Hymn 74(JP): He gave me eyes

Time for all

Hymn 140(JP): Jesus loves me 

Reading:  Leviticus 25: 8-22

Prayer

Hymn 710: I have a dream

Sermon

Prayer

Hymn 553:  Just as I am

Benediction

Welcome to our meditation for 14th of July.

Have you ever had a time when you just sat with a friend and got to the point where you agreed that the world would be better if everyone did what you were suggesting...but you knew that everyone wouldn’t

so it was nothing more than a dream, but a nice dream.

I think that is what today’s reading is about, but let’s hear it first before we talk about it.

Let us pray

Heavenly Father

We worship you, today, united as children of faith.

Though the truth is that we may not look or sound that way.

We may all have finished here at this time and moment to worship you, but we didn’t start of from the same place.

We have arrived with a variety of experiences, even from just this week.

Some come rejoicing, others come mourning, some are full of hope, others are riddled with doubt, some are content others are restless and insecure.

But we come united in our purpose,

to acknowledge you, to re-centre our lives, to raise our voices in prayer and son,

listening to your word in Scripture, to take a breath and pause in the hope that you give us some insight, some guidance in the next step we should take.

As we reflect on our life and its place in the world, help us to come to you with a heart of thankfulness.

Thank you for your creation that we so enjoy and often take for granted.

Thank you for relationships that we so enjoy and often needlessly let slide.

And thank you for our church family that often encourages and supports us when we are not at our best.

We collectively ask forgiveness, especially from those feelings we hide from

from the selfishness of often just thinking of ourselves and judging our lives solely on how we are feeling rather than on the feelings we create in others,

for our innate fear of ‘others’ and judging our lives on how we compare to others rather than on how we are following your commands and path for us,

for our willingness to overlook situations where we could make a difference.

We pause now in the stillness to bring our personal regrets to you.

Silence

Give us courage to correct our behaviour,

the humility to question our motives

and the confidence to follow you in all situations.

Allow us to return to you, claiming our unity through the love and faith in Jesus Christ,

in whose name we pray...

Our Father,

Which art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy Name.

Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil;

For thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever.

Amen.

Sermon

Before we go any further we need to be clear that the Year of Jubilee never happened.

God may have given this command, but it never happened.

If you want to know what this passage is like, then it is like those rare times when you’re sitting down with a mate, and you have had one of those conversations that has lasted all night and gone all over the place, you have sat and moaned about the way the world is and then had a moment of silence and then both said at the same time, ‘Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we just tried to get on with others better?’

And then you have had that moment of silence when you try to imagine that world, and then sighed as you realise that people are often selfish and petty and act out of insecurities and no matter how much they may realise that it would be better to get along,

they too often would cave into their need to get revenge,

or to try to bring someone else down so they feel a bit better about themselves,

or they would resent someone seeming to get on better than they were, they couldn’t just be happy for them.

The Year of Jubilee, it is like a Sabbath year.

Once a week the land and the people were to have a Sabbath,

a time of rest, a time to reflect that we are more than just workers,

a time to reflect on the truth that relationships are more important than things and possessions.

A time to enjoy the gift of life rather than just trying to survive from one day to another.

And here God proclaims that not only was it important to have a Sabbath Day, once every fifty years there was to be a Sabbath year.

A year where all debts were forgiven and forgotten.

A year where no crops were grown, give the land a total rest.

A year when everything was reset, all those that had had to give up their land had it restored to them.

It was a time to restore to what had been.

When the people entered the land, the land was divided out between tribes, then between clans, then between families.

But if something unforeseen happened, a famine, and an individual family was close to starvation and had to sell their inheritance, should their children and grandchildren also have that inheritance taken away from them?

So the Year of Jubilee was a way for things to be restored.

It was a wonderful idea.

A nice dream.

But completely impractable.

Imagine the land was sold the year after the year of Jubilee, then fifty years later there are three generations of family all trying to reclaim that land. Remember Jacob had 12 male sons, if each generation had ten males then that is a thousand families all trying to reclaim pieces of the land.

Imagine if we were to implement the year of Jubilee now, and told every family that they weren’t allowed to work for a year, that might work out very well for the very rich,

but how would everyone else cope with the lack of money to buy food,

but then all the shops should be closed as well so that wouldn’t work,

every time someone became ill they went to the doctors which was closed because it was the year of Jubilee,

the rubbish piling up because the council workers were all at home because it was the year of jubilee,

the land is invaded because your neighbours don’t have a year of Jubilee but you have no army to protect you because they are all away for the year of Jubilee.

Now all these problems would have their equivalent in their own time.

It was never going to work, and it never did.

And what was more, unless whoever wrote it was a complete fanatic, then they knew it even then.

What becomes more complex is the history of the writing of this passage.

You see the original faith was passed on orally.

Most people couldn’t read or write...so the way beliefs were passed on was from father to son in an oral tradition, and that worked for centuries.

When the nation started to get bigger and bigger then a whole tribe was dedicated to the belief system, the Levites, and their role was to make sure that everyone remembered the faith and the traditions of the faith, and that was through passing it on from word of mouth.

Every Sabbath the men and boys would go to the local centre and the Levites would pass on the tradition and teach the stories so that they were passed down from generation to generation.

Only once there was a stable national government with a national Temple would there be a need for administration to coordinate all the complexity of a national religion, and for that they would need a written record.

So it was that hundreds of years after these words were originally spoken were they written down, and by that time they knew that they had never had a Year of Jubilee, never had the faith to stop the crops for a whole year and just have the whole nation survive off the land.

So why write it down?

Why admit to such a failure in faith?

Because there is a bigger truth that we need to remember.

Just because we are going to fail doesn’t mean that we don’t even try.

Maybe the point of life isn’t to be perfect, maybe the point of life is to be on the journey towards perfection.

There is a conversation I remember that my parents had when I was young.

And it struck a cord with me even then that has stayed with me.

It was about a Bible study group and they were talking about faith and living the faith.

And the question was about how their faith had changed them.

And there was this woman called Betty who had come to faith later in life, who I always thought was a wonderful person...

But she said that she struggled to see how her faith had made any difference,

she was still struggling with anger at times,

still found herself annoyed at others rather than loving them,

still found herself doubting if she was good enough or would ever be good enough.

And there was an awkward silence as people tried to work out how to respond.

And it was her husband that broke the silence.

And said that she might not know the difference, but her family did.

She still would get angry at times, but before she would never admit she was wrong, never admit that she had been out of order, there would be tension in the house until everyone just forgot about it and carried on as if nothing had happened.

Now she would apologize and try to mend broken relationships.

In the past she would get upset about petty things that others did that made her life inconvenient, as if they were deliberately trying to wind her up,

now she presumed people were struggling and would try to help them.

Just because she couldn’t see a difference, doesn’t mean there wasn’t any.

The very fact that she had stayed on the journey had made a difference in itself.

The year of Jubilee might even have been an instruction given by God that God knew we could never fulfil, but just having it made ensured everyone reflected on the truth that at some point we need to just stop and reset ourselves.

At some point we need to just stop and reflect on what we are doing in life and why we are doing it.

You know the really sad thing.

The really sad thing is that too often the only time we do something like this is when we are forced into it.

When something so drastic happens in our life that we are forced to stop.

The number of times I will hear someone in a hospital bed say, ‘You know, it makes you think about life and its meaning.’

And that’s one of the better case scenarios...think about that...a good scenario is that someone has a dramatic heart attack and then they decide to think about their life and how they are living it, then they decided that maybe they could do things differently.

Unfortunately a more common case is when they can’t do something about it, someone dies and they think, I wish we had done things differently towards them.

So some very wise priests are finally writing down their oral history.

And they come across this part when they are given instructions about the Year of Jubilee, the year to reflect and reset life,

and they know it has never happened,

they know they have failed to ever complete this commandment,

and they know that their nation may never fulfil that command.

And the junior priest is asking if they just miss it out,

no one would know,

and it is just an embarrassment having it in to remind them of their failure.

But the older priest insists that it stays in.

To remind them of the dream.

Because if the dream is still there, then they can move towards it.

I know many of you feel faith is hard.

I know many of you wonder if it is even worth it.

I know many of you find it a struggle.

It is as if the person God wants you to be is just out of reach,

and no matter how often you try and how often you make an effort

that person of faith you want to be is always just a fingertip away from reality.

But maybe that’s the point, it’s the journey we are on towards that person that matters, not finally becoming that person.

That being the case, we may never have a Year of Jubilee, but that doesn’t thinking about it what it would be like,

to realise that we might never reach our final destination in this life,

but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth while taking time to stop and reflect to see where our next step should be,

to see if we can become closer to the person we could be, whom God wants us to be.

Let us pray

Holy God,

you alone have the power to proclaim liberty throughout your land,

liberty that humans, unfortunately, often prevent.

But keep the dream within us

Help us to long for freedom for those suffering from oppression.

And in that longing seek to make a difference.

To listen to your words of guidance.

To seek where we can bring relief to those who are trapped in their houses,

or alone facing debt,

or isolated by illness or bigotry.

May we be the first to reach out a hand of care, or give support to those who need a friend and someone they can trust.

We pray that we give hope to those who believe that they have done wrong that can never be forgiven.

That we bring humanity to those who think that no one cares for their plight.

That we walk beside those who are on hard journeys of grief.

May we recognise the face of God in each other and work for harmony in relationships.

And may others recognise your face in us, as we live out as best we can the discipleship you call us to follow.

May the Church itself lead the way in modelling for the world your love and care for humanity.

Help us to recognise the simplicity of faith and the uncomplicated nature of your love.

Lead us out of the wilderness of materialism and self-interest

into a deeper relationship with you.

Amen.