Jubilee News

A renewed call for Jubilee

An introductory note from your WebWeaver:

Ross and Gloria Kinsler were the outstanding leaders of the Ghost Ranch Seminar on globalization in the summer of 2000. Last November, as the events of September 11^thled into the "war on terrorism," they sent out a "Jubilee Memo" relating that war to "the war we must fight" against poverty around the world.

Their letter includes insights on such topics as:

	the real significance of globalization (quoting Dr. Oscar Arias, former President of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Laureate, who said that "the [globalization] system encourages insatiable consumption and consumerism for some, but denies many others the basic necessities of life."
	the meaning of the biblical faith as summed up in the Lord's Prayer, with its petitions that remind us of our calling to make God's Reign a reality on earth, partly by observing the Sabbath and Jubilee years that involve the freeing of people from their debts.
	the call to responsible discipleship in caring for the people of our world as well as our natural environment - a call for which the Kinslers suggest a variety of resources, including the Presbyterian Hunger Program and much more.

JUBILEE MEMO 2001/2
kinsler2@juno.com

Date: November 30, 2001 [posted here on 1-19-02]
To: Friends and colleagues
From: Ross and Gloria Kinsler
Re: THE WAR WE MUST FIGHT

They tell us that everything has changed, as of September llth, but we know that, for most of the world's population, nothing has changed. It is only getting worse. Probably more rapidly than before. The tragic death of 5000 innocent people that day must be compared to the 30,000 innocent people who die every day even more tragically of hunger, 900,000 every month, 10,950,000 every year. The war we are called to support is the war against poverty. The current war against terrorism, which translates into bombing of Afghanistan, vast increases in military spending, restriction of civil liberties, and postponing of justice and ecological agendas such as health and education and global warming, will greatly weaken efforts to reduce poverty, hunger, and avoidable death around the world and here in the U.S.

So we want to intensify our work for Sabbath economics/Jubilee spirituality. Since we sent out Jubilee Memo 2001/1 we have been traveling around the U.S. plus Canada, Korea, and Costa Rica. We have been invited by churches and presbyteries and regional mission conferences around the country (Louisville, Bryn Mawr, Chicago, Pasadena, San Fernando, Los Angeles, Brentwood, Santa Fe, Cherry Hill, Twin Cities, Detroit, Anaheim, Oakland) to speak about the biblical Jubilee and the struggle for life in today's world. What we have put together here is one outline of our reflections on the challenge we face. Now more than ever we believe that the biblical message of Sabbath economics/Jubilee spirituality can give us a clear message in response to the two great threats to life in the Twenty-First Century: accelerating polarization of wealth and poverty and the destruction of the biosphere. But we are finding that it is more difficult to live and witness with integrity in the U.S., especially at a time like this, than anywhere else we have lived.

TODAY'S WORLD

Dr. Oscar Arias, former President of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Laureate, expressed the problem in these words at Dartmouth College on May 12, 1999:

The [globalization] system encourages insatiable consumption and consumerism for some, but denies many others the basic necessities of life. Who would not question the priorities of a system in which Americans spend eight billion dollars a year on cosmetics--two billion more than it would cost to provide basic education for everyone in the world if these funds were redirected? Europeans spend eleven billion dollars a year purchasing ice cream, yet we know that only nine billion dollars a year would be adequate to assure water and sanitation for all people.

I tell you today that there is a much deeper crisis underlying the financial panic. I say that it is an economic crisis when nearly a billion and a half people have no access to clean water, and a billion live in miserable substandard housing. I say that it is a leadership crisis when we allow wealth to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, so that the world's three richest individuals seem only to have faith in a capricious god whose "invisible hand" guides the free market. I say it is a moral crisis when 40,000 children die each day from malnutrition and disease. And I say it is a democratic crisis when l.3 billion people live on incomes of less than one dollar a day and in their unrelenting poverty are totally excluded from public decision-making.

While the age of the cold war has ended, it has not been followed by the promised era of peace and prosperity. This is supposed to be a time of peace. But how can we say that there is peace when thousands are made to work in dehumanizing conditions? How can we say that there is peace when we build more prisons and fewer schools? How can we say that there is peace when so many go hungry? Today I challenge you to think about peace in a new way. When we demand peace, it must not only be a peace of national security, one which talks bombing and gunfire. It must also be a peace of human security, one concerned with welfare and health of humanity.

Howard Zinn, the author of A People's History of the United States, wrote the following in an LA Times opinion piece on September 23, soon after the hijackings:

We cannot be secure so long as we use our national wealth for guns, planes, bombs and nuclear weapons to maintain our position as a military superpower. We should use that wealth instead to deal with poverty and sickness in other parts of the world where desperation breeds resentment. We need to become an economic and social superpower.

Here at home our true security cannot come from putting the nation on a war footing, with the accompanying threats to civil liberties that this brings. It can only come from using our resources to make us the model of a good society, prosperous and peacemaking, with free, universal medical care, education and housing guaranteed, decent wages and a clean environment for all.

Elizabeth McAlister wrote in the September 21 National Catholic Reporter:

There is no security and there is no defense except the works of Justice.

Joan Chittister wrote in that same issue:

The only thing that can possibly resolve global situations like this is a power based on respect for the powerless before their powerlessness turns to rage.

Much has been said during these last two months about prayer, especially about the problem of both sides in this conflict praying to God to bless their cause. "God bless America." What does this mean in our present context, in the announced war against terrorism, in the demand for retribution, in the bombing of Afghanistan? Is this a demand or a petition? Either way, shouldn't it be turned around? Shouldn't we be concerned about blessing God by keeping God's commandments, by loving God and our neighbor, by loving even our enemy, as Jesus taught? The speeches and actions of our President seem to draw us into a religious war, a U.S. jihad against a radical Muslim jihad, absolute good vs absolute evil. We know that the bloodiest wars throughout history have been religious wars. How then shall we pray?

BIBLICAL FAITH

When Jesus' disciples asked him how to pray, he taught them saying, in our enduring, archaic English form of Matthew's version (Matthew 6:9-13):

Our Father, who 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.
     Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.
Amen.

It is easy to see that the Lord's Prayer is made up of six petitions, with an appropriate opening, which draws us into intimate relation to God as father or mother, and an appropriate closing (probably a later addition), that ascribes all power and glory to that intimate parent. We can divide the six petitions into two groups of three, that have been seen as, respectively, vertical and horizontal, with a clear indication that the vertical and the horizontal are integrally related by the phrase, "on earth as it is in heaven."

The first three petitions, though we have referred to them as vertical, directed to God, are all concerned with God's presence on earth, not just in heaven. For God's name is already hallowed in heaven; God's Reign is real in heaven; God's will is already done in heaven. The challenge is to hallow God's name, make real God's Reign, and carry out God's will, i.e. to do all three, on earth as it is in heaven. While we can say that all creation manifests God's holiness, God's Reign, and God's will, the challenge of the Lord's Prayer comes directly to God's people. We are the ones who are called most consciously and uniquely to glorify God, to let God reign in and through our lives, to do God's will on earth as it is in heaven.

This challenge, this calling, is spelled out in the three horizontal petitions that follow, that refer directly to humankind. It is here that we discover with remarkable clarity the mandates of Sabbath economics/Jubilee spirituality. And it is here that we find most clearly our own failure and the failure of our churches both to perceive and to practice God's will.

Give us this day our daily bread. What could be clearer than this echo of Exodus 16, the story of the manna in the wilderness, the first lesson for God's people just liberated from slavery in Egypt? This is the first reference to the Sabbath Day, which enshrined for Israel's posterity the essential lesson that to live in freedom it is necessary to live with just enough so that all can have enough, not to allow some to accumulate more because others would be reduced to hunger, poverty, indebtedness, and slavery, which would be a violation of God's holiness, reign, and will on earth as in heaven.

Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Why has this petition seemed to be so strange, so lacking in meaning, so much so that many have substituted the reference to sins or trespasses, as in Luke's version? In ancient times, as all through history, debts have provided the main mechanism by which some become rich, e.g. accumulating land through the foreclosure of mortgages, and many become poor, even to the point of slavery. The reference here is best explained in reference to Deuteronomy 15, the main text concerning the Sabbath Year, when debts were to be cancelled and slaves freed, so that there would be no poor among God's people (Deuteronomy 15:4, cp. Acts 4:34). This is how we are to pray and live for God to be glorified, for God to reign among us, for God's will to be done on earth as in heaven.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. What then is the temptation and the evil from which we are to ask for deliverance? As with the two previous petitions, a Sabbath economic reading of this petition points toward the idolatrous pursuit of wealth (Matthew 6:24, cf. Mark 10:23), which has never been so evident as it is today and which is now being promoted throughout the global economy. This leads us to Leviticus 25, the main Jubilee passage of the Old Testament, concerning the super-Sabbath, when on the Day of Atonement they were to "proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants." During the Jubilee Year, as during the Sabbath Year, the land was to lie fallow, debts were to be cancelled, and slaves were to be freed. In addition the land was to be returned to each family so that all God's people could begin again to live in freedom. This is how God's name is to be hallowed, how God is to reign among us, how God's will should be carried out on earth as in heaven.

The Lord's Prayer is a Jubilee prayer. All six petitions come together with a powerful message when understood in terms of Sabbath economics/Jubilee spirituality. Which points to a Sabbath/Jubilee reading of Jesus' ministry as a whole, beginning with Luke's opening story of Jesus' ministry at the Nazareth synagogue, when Jesus read from and affirmed Isaiah 61:1, indicating that he himself was anointed by the Spirit "to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

RESPONSIBLE DISCIPLESHIP

The possibilities for discipleship in today's world in terms of this reading of the Lord's Prayer are innumerable. This memo is just one more attempt to reflect on and share meaningful responses in the current war against poverty, which is becoming so far-reaching and so urgent. We need to help each other identify and strengthen the avenues we are finding in the struggle for life through personal, ecclesial, and social transformation. We need to pray not "God bless America" but God help Americans to love and serve God through love and service to humankind, beginning with the most vulnerable.

In her book, Life Abundant, Sally McFague constructs an economic ecological model for a planetary theology for the glory of God.

The glory of God is every creature fully alive and, therefore, we live to give God glory by loving the world and everything in it. The particular, historical context for interpreting what this means for us today is an economic one, and our self-definition must be economic: Who we are should be understood in terms of how much we consume of the planet's bounty, both in terms of its health and of justice to other inhabitants. We cannot "love the world and everything in it" unless we take the economic context with utter seriousness, since economics means the allocation of scarce resources among users. Love without economics is empty rhetoric. The question is not how each of us can win salvation, but how all of us can give God glory by living together as God's creatures. (P. 128)

Our response to today's local-global economic crisis will necessarily be polifacetic. The Presbyterian Hunger Program, for example, works to alleviate hunger and eliminate its causes through five program areas: Hunger Education & Interpretation, Direct Food Relief, Development Assistance, Public Policy Advocacy, and Lifestyle Integrity. A new related program called Enough for Everyone offers simple, concrete actions: promotion of fair trade (not free trade) coffee, which raises consciousness about the land, the farmers, and the market; the sale of sweat free t-shirts, which raises concern for sweatshop workers around the world; and oikocredit, which offers alternative investment to provide resources for the self-development of the poor. Programs like these are easily accessible, and they can lead to deeper and deeper engagement with the causes and solutions of global and local poverty.

In our previous memo we mentioned the World Alliance of Reformed Churches' appeal to all its member churches to take up a Committed Process of Recognition, Education, Confession & Action (Processus Confessionis) regarding Economic Injustice and the Destruction of the Earth. We shall enclose a brief description of that proposal, which focuses on these issues as matters central to our faith, i.e. as essential for responsible discipleship in today's world. The coordinator of that program is Dr. Seong-Won Park, WARC, P.O. Box 2100, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland (swp@warc.ch).

Another excellent resource for study and action is the new book by Ched Myers, The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics, which is available at $4.00 (50% off for 10 or more) from Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries (ched@bcm-net.org) or from Church of the Savior (office@cofs.org). This is a collection of Ched's articles in Sojourners, The Other Side, and other publications.

Also recommended is the booklet, Portfolio Prophets: Investing in a Jubilee Economy, by Lee Van Ham, available at $3.00 from Jubilee Economics Ministries (manvan@megsinet.net). Lee has been offering workshops to enable participants to consider prophetic rather than simply profitable uses of their capital resources, an important way to practice Jubilee.

Word & World: A People's School, will be launched next year as an alternative theological education movement for social transformation, rooted in the experiences of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church, the freedom schools of the Civil Rights movement, nonviolent resistance movements of the 1970s and '80s, experiments of Christian feminism, base communities animated by liberation theology, and existing experiments in alternative theological education.

Since our last memo, Orbis has put out a third edition of The Biblical Jubilee and the Struggle for Life [authored by Ross and Gloria Kinsler -- WebWeaver's note] and confirmed that a 40% discount is available for orders of 10 or more (l-800-258-5838). The Asian edition in English is available at $3.50 from Paulines Publishing House in the Philippines (jmjp@skyinet.net). The Spanish edition is available at $6.00 from the Universidad Biblica Latinoamericana in Costa Rica (bsebila@racsa.co.cr) or from the Latin American Council of Churches in Ecuador (manuel@clai.org.ec).

Finally, here is a quotation we found in one of Tony Hillerman's novels, The Fallen Man. It is a Navajo saying: "I grew up knowing it's wrong to have more than you need. It means you're not taking care of your people."

Please send us your reflections and other resources for this war against poverty, which we in turn can pass on to others. Perhaps in this way we can all work to eliminate some of the causes of terrorism and the war against terrorism. May God help us grow in faithfulness to the Sabbath/Jubilee vision.