worship this Sunday…

I have a problem. Over my adult years, I’ve started to realize that most of the songs that I loved growing up, well, I don’t actually know the real words to them. I know most of the lyrics, but I’m starting to realize that many of the words that I grew up singing to these songs…well, they aren’t actually the true lyrics.

For example, in the chorus of the song “Danger Zone” from the Top Gun movie, the lyrics are “highway to the danger zone” whereas I for decades have always sung “I’ll wait to the danger zone.” — Insert shrug emoji here.

Even though I had known this for a few years. However. it was only recently that I understood just how deeply-seeded my lyric switching really was. I had this epiphany a few weeks ago when singing a few songs on the car radio with Zebbie, my oldest child. As we drove and sang, I noticed that not just in one moment but actually in multiple key moments…he was singing very different words than I was. And, worse, his words actually made far more sense than the ones I was singing and had been singing for like 30+ years! 

Since that day, I’ve been noticing all the lyrics I’ve gotten wrong over the years, and it is a shockingly long list. I don’t think my hearing was that bad, but maybe I was just good at filling in the blanks. Either way, I am realizing that I got a lot of them wrong.

I also had this experience with a lot of the things I learned about Scripture. There was just so much I grew up being taught about the Bible that now I don’t think is true. For instance, I was told that the Pharisees were all bad, and that the Jewish law was a burden to the people, and King David was a hero. Turns out, I don’t think that any of these are true. I was particularly wrong about the Jewish law.

Here’s why. Our passage this week from Leviticus shares with us part of the Jewish law that was held by the people. It outlines something called a “Jubilee year.” It was about every 50 years and was understood to be a time of universal and economic Sabbath. In other words, every week people were called to rest on the Sabbath, well every 50 years they were called to also rest the land and to reset the economic structure. What this meant was that if you had lost your land because of debt or an incident, in the Jubilee year it was returned to your family. If you had fallen into economic oppression/depression, well then this was the year of your freedom and liberation from that pain. No matter what happened, in the 50th year it all got set right again.

This certainly doesn’t sound like a law that is a burden, does it? This sounds like freedom and true equity. It sounds like just the kind of Biblical work that God’s people are called to, which is to not only to ease the burdens of others, but to have systems that conform to this understanding as well. To put it bluntly, we need to both address current inequalities, and also create ways to remove them forever. 

 This Sunday we will reflect on what this sacred work means. In particular, what it meant on June 19th, 1865, when the news of the emancipation of enslaved African Americans reached Galveston Bay, Texas…more than 2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was proclaimed. This day and its celebration known as Juneteenth is both a current celebration of that day and a reminder that we live in the in-between years of Jubilee, and many Black Americans are still waiting for full freedom from the same old systems now under new names. It’s a sacred celebration. It is the story of those who received the news that day. Each year, we should listen to the words of that day to hear them well. 

See you on Sunday as we listen and do our best to get the words right. 

Leviticus 25:1-13

The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying: Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a sabbath for the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in their yield; but in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of complete rest for the land, a sabbath for the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your unpruned vine: it shall be a year of complete rest for the land. You may eat what the land yields during its sabbath—you, your male and female slaves, your hired and your bound laborers who live with you; for your livestock also, and for the wild animals in your land all its yield shall be for food.

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. Then 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. 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. In this year of jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property.