The Year of Jubilee Across the Covenants

         We are working through the life of Abraham in our Wednesday Night Bible Study.  To date, we are almost to the middle of the book of Genesis.  And there are connections.  Always connections.  Several times God has taken Abraham through the covenant promises that are between God and Abraham and Abraham’s descendants after him.

            Abraham will be the Father of multitudes, as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore.  In other words, uncountable.  But there is also the promise of land.  But it was always God’s land, provided in the covenant.  Abraham is repeatedly listed as a sojourner in the land, until God gives the land to the people.  

            The land is indeed given to the people.  Continue through the Bible of Jesus, after the Torah-the Law of Moses-to the book of Joshua.  It begins with conquest but concludes with distribution of the land, tribe by tribe.  It is from that moment that have the Year of Jubilee.  In Joshua, God's gift of land is made real.  In the Jubilee, God’s gift of land is renewed.  Restored.  Reestablished.   

            Within the covenant promises made to Abraham, there is another to build on the promises of progeny and Promised Land.  It is that by Abraham, all the nations of the world will be blessed, will be restored to God.  This is the promise that is carried out in our Lord Jesus.  Jesus, who comes to us from the progeny and Promised Land of Abraham and as Son of God.   

            What was God's one select nation blows open to the whole world as Jesus fulfills the promises made to Abraham.  It is no longer the ‘line of Abraham’ but, in Jesus, all God's Children who are able to come back to Him.  It is no longer one little strip of land along the Mediterranean that is the ‘Promised Land’, but, in Jesus, the whole Earth, all of Creation, is God's gift to us.  

            So, the Year of Jubilee, which began as part of the covenant law of Moses, becomes something so much more.  Jubilee was for one people in one land.  But, in Jesus, Jubilee is for all people, living in all the land that is God's gift to us.  In this do we celebrate.    

Amen and thanks be to God.  We hope to see you Sunday.

Peace,

Pastor pete

The Year of Jubilee: God's Call for A New Age.

Dear Fellow Church Members,                      

         Our passages for Sunday are from Leviticus 25 and 2 Timothy 1.  From Leviticus, here are verses 25-28:

 ²⁵ “If anyone of your kin falls into difficulty and sells a piece of property, then the next of kin shall come and redeem what the relative has sold. ²⁶ If the person has no one to redeem it but then prospers and finds sufficient means to do so, ²⁷ the years since its sale shall be computed and the difference refunded to the person to whom it was sold, and the property shall be returned. ²⁸ But if there are not sufficient means to recover it, what was sold shall remain with the purchaser until the year of Jubilee; in the Jubilee it shall be released, and the property shall be returned.

 And from 2 Timothy 1, from our passage a few weeks ago, verses 3-6:

 ³ I am grateful to God—whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did—when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. ⁴ Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. ⁵ I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. ⁶ For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands, 

          This Sunday begins for us a Year of Jubilee.  We take this from the year of Jubilee set in the Law of Moses.  In Leviticus 25, a legal reset was established that every fifty years the people returned to the land God had given to them.  There were already Sabbath years, every seventh year, as a year of rest for the land to lie fallow.  But after seven sets of seven years, there comes the fiftieth, a year of rest AND reset.

          God gives the Promised Land to His people.  It will be given tribe by tribe, family by family-each on their own piece of God's land (the tribal survey is described at the end of the book of Joshua).  The land can be bought, sold, traded, moved about, but with the provision that every fifty years, everybody returns to their portion of God's gift.  Read the Book of Ruth in light of the verses given from Lev. 25 above, do you see a Year of Jubilee in action.

          In 2 Timothy, Paul calls upon Timothy, the third generation of believer, as his successor in ministry.  In Jesus, the promise of Jubilee, God's grace to us forever, finds fulfillment in the generations of Timothy, foreshadowing the generations coming down to us.   

          That is at the heart of Sunday’s kickoff of a year of Jubilee for this church.  Recognizing the generations that have built this church are not only its legacy, but are, as the people of Israel were, called back to the gift of God’s church.  The generations that have built this church are the foundation not only for their families, but of the new families who will find God’s Heart among us in the future.    

          It is time to renew, to rekindle, to step into God’s light once again.  Jesus’ message of hope is needed now more than ever.  This Sunday, we gather together to carry that light boldly forward into a Jubilee of FPC Merchantville’s ministry.  Come and join us.

 

Joyfully,

Pastor Peter

Take It, Especially the Big Day, to the Lord in Prayer

 Our passage for Sunday is Psalm 17: 1-9,

 ¹ Hear a just cause, O Lord; attend to my cry; give ear to my prayer from lips free of deceit. ² From you let my vindication come; let your eyes see the right.

³ If you try my heart, if you visit me by night, if you test me, you will find no wickedness in me; my mouth does not transgress.
⁴ As for what others do, by the word of your lips I have avoided the ways of the violent. ⁵ My steps have held fast to your paths; my feet have not slipped.

⁶ I call upon you, for you will answer me, O God; incline your ear to me; hear my words. ⁷ Wondrously show your steadfast love, O savior of those who seek refuge from their adversaries at your right hand.

⁸ Guard me as the apple of the eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings, ⁹ from the wicked who despoil me, my deadly enemies who surround me.

          It is a prayer of David.  It is not the entire psalm but carries us through the first ‘stanza’ (as best we can tell that the Psalms have 'stanzas').  We do not have context for this prayer, unlike Psalm 3.  Psalm 3 marks David's plea to the Lord when fleeing from Absalom.  But even without context, we have David's heart open to us. 

          It is a psalm of preparation.  David is preparing for something and is coming before the Lord to clear the path.  He begins with “hear a just cause”.  

            But he recognizes a world of danger.  He concludes with “guard me…, hide me…from the wicked who despoil me, my deadly enemies who surround me.”  It may be a time of war for King David.  Or maybe David was simply looking around and seeing with clear eyes something that has not changed to our time.  That the wicked and deadly enemies continue to surround us.  Not a conspiracy against us, but random acts, muggings, carjackings, home invasions, violent moments that strike without rhyme or reason.  Bad people doing bad things.  It simply happens, despite all our precautions.  

And it is only one verse in the whole prayer, one piece of daily life.  It is side by side with David calling on God’s wondrous love, of laying open his own heart before the Lord that God will not find deception there.  Life in a sinful world consists of the good, the bad, and the ugly, and David lifts all in prayer.  

As I read these words as part of our lectionary passages, what struck me is that this is an uncomplicated, open and honest, direct prayer to God in advance of our Big Day.  David speaks of a ‘just cause’, something important to his heart and life.  I do not know if I would characterize a Sunday to Rekindle the Gifts of God as a ‘just cause’, but it is certainly a cause integral to our work in the Kingdom of God.

So that’s the ‘in’.  This prayer of David; one we speak 3000 years after David wrote it; a prayer integrated-by God’s inspiration-into the Songbook (the Book of Psalms) of the Bible of Jesus (our OT).  Words that speak from the heart, acknowledge the reality of a world of sin, and call for a world made better in the love and power of God.

This prayer was answered incarnately (in the flesh) a millennium later when David’s heir and descendant, our Lord Jesus, came to us.  In Him, it is a prayer that continues to be answered to this day.

 

Peace,

Pastor Pete