Partners in World Mission Conference

Partners in World Mission Conference Sustaining Life and Faith: Climate Justice and the Mission of God Swanwick, November 2-4 2015

Bible Readings Theme: Jubilee

Reading 1: Leviticus 25:8-24

The Book of Leviticus – the third of the five books of Moses - may not be your favourite bedtime reading. Over the years, many of us, I guess, have periodically set out to read the Bible from cover to cover, enjoying the stories of Adam and Eve, of Noah and Mrs. Noah, of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, of Moses, Aaron, Miriam and the flight from Egypt. And just as it’s all seemed an easy ride, cycling on the flat, we’ve come to our first steep hill with the latter chapters of Exodus, and their long descriptions of tabernacles and altars and priestly robes; and having climbed to the brow of that hill, there’s been another straight in front of us, as we’ve moved into Leviticus, with its dreary focus on priests and sacrifices, on skin diseases and food laws. And then it’s been Numbers, and that’s not much easier either. So that once we’ve made it to Deuteronomy, if we have, it can only get better from here.

And yet – ironically – this book of Leviticus, with its often obscure priestly preoccupations, has in our lifetimes become one of the most influential and powerful of all ancient books, inspiring some of the most effective campaigns for social and global justice of the past few decades.

It all starts in Leviticus chapter 19, where two verses sum up the message of the whole book: first, ‘Be holy as I the Lord your God am holy’ – that’s v.2; and secondly, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ – that’s v.18. Did the expert in the law in Luke’s Gospel really need to ask Jesus that follow-up question, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Well, we’re glad he did, otherwise we wouldn’t have the Parable of the Good Samaritan! But if that so-called expert had known his law a little better, he might have saved his breath, because Leviticus chapter 19 continues, ‘You shall love the [foreigner who lives among you] as you love yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt’: a verse all too often ignored, incidentally, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of today.

Being holy and loving your neighbour – these twin tracks in Leviticus 19 – suggest both a negative ethic (a ‘Thou shalt not’) and a positive one (a ‘Thou shalt’), as Moses and the children of Israel camped beside Mount Sinai and looked forward to life in the Promised Land. On the one hand, they were to keep themselves pure, and that involved avoiding certain kinds of conduct; on the other they were to reach out in love and compassion. It’s quite close to what St John describes as ‘grace-and- truth’, and Jesus, he writes was full of it. It’s how St James summarises true religion in a letter that, according to some scholars, started life as a sermon based on Leviticus chapter 19. As we read in James 1:27, ‘ Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress’ – that’s the ‘Thou shalt’ - and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world’ – that’s the ‘Thou shalt not’.

And yet somehow religious people through the ages have tended to go for grace or truth, focusing either on compassion to the exclusion of personal purity, or personal purity to the exclusion of compassion.

For Jesus love is at the heart of it – the call in Deuteronomy chapter 6 to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all you soul and all your strength’; the call in Leviticus chapter 19, to ‘love for neighbour as yourself’. But no- one reading the Sermon on the Mount, say, can doubt that Jesus is also deeply serious about personal purity, especially when it comes to money, sex, power, justice, to the ups and downs of human relationships. Some Christians speak as though Jesus softened the Law of Moses – but in the Sermon on the Mount he seemed to make it more challenging still every time he used that little phrase ‘But I say to you’. Meanwhile the commandment in Leviticus 19, ‘Be holy as I the Lord your God am holy’ was surely tough enough without Jesus adding as a gloss, ‘Be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect’. And yet it’s that phrase ‘your Heavenly Father’ that reminds us that ours is a God of amazing grace: a grace that never compromises on the truth, a truth that is never divorced from grace.

What then are the practical outworkings of the twin track of Leviticus 19 – of ‘being holy as I the Lord your God am holy’ and of ‘loving your neighbour as yourself’? How does that compute, especially in the context of poverty, inequality and climate justice? The Book of Leviticus comes up with a number of down-to-earth laws designed to protect the poor, whether resident foreigners, widows, orphans or anyone else who had no land to call their own. Wages must be paid on time, money must be lent without interest, pledged cloaks must be returned to their owners before sundown, and tithes must be offered to the ‘Levite, the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow’.

That lovely story of Ruth, sandwiched between the Book of Judges and the Books of Samuel, is founded on some teaching in Leviticus 19: that farmers were to leave the standing grain at the edges of the fields, and not to pick up the gleanings they had accidentally missed. The same principle was applied to grapes and (in the book of Deuteronomy) to olives. For while men like Boaz would instinctively have wanted to get the very most out of the land they farmed, especially given their erratic profit margins and the unpredictability of the weather conditions from one year to the next, the gleaning principle enshrined a degree of deliberate agricultural inefficiency out of concern for the poor. And the book of Ruth shows how Boaz’s obedience to that principle resulted in a quite unexpected reward, in the form of a generous and faithful wife. Already we can begin to see some of the impact of Leviticus on contemporary culture: not just in the oft-quoted command to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’, which remains almost the only verse in the Bible that the man or woman in the street can still remember, but in the Gleaning movement (with its commitment to ending food waste) and the Foodbank movement (where tinned gleanings are increasingly left in boxes by the exit to the church or supermarket). The current Refugee crisis also found the bishops quoting from Leviticus 19:34 in our letter to the Prime Minister: ‘You shall love the [foreigner who lives among you] as you love yourself’. Leviticus has also popped up in the recent clampdown on payday lenders. When Archbishop Justin Welby first spoke out against the eye-watering rates of interest charged by Wonga and the like, only to discover that the Church of England had shares in Wonga, it looked like a spectacular own goal. There was certainly a flurry of distinctly anxious emails doing the rounds at the time. In fact though Justin’s commitment both to highlighting this issue and to putting the Church’s own house in order, led to a useful boost for the Credit Union movement and some remarkable action by the Financial Conduct Authority. We’ve certainly not embraced the no- interest world of Leviticus, but the old interest rates of up to 4200% a year have now been capped to 0.8% a day and no more than 100% during the lifetime of the loan. Of all the teaching contained in the book of Leviticus, though, the most radical of all lay long buried in the depths of Leviticus chapter 25: buried, that is, until a group of Christian enthusiasts recognised the relevance of this chapter to the issue of third world debt, so leading to the creation of the Jubilee 2000 coalition and its later manifestation, the ‘Drop the Debt’ campaign. It’s true that the provisions of Leviticus 25 were written for a unique society with a distinctive world-view. In that sense they might easily have been written off as entirely irrelevant to the markedly different world of today: but the breadth of vision behind this chapter is astonishing, and continues to speak to modern concerns about faith, poverty and the environment. Indeed faith, poverty and the environment are inextricably linked in Leviticus in teaching well ahead of its time. The link between the three lies in our relationship with the land: for if the land belongs to God, and if God’s land is fairly distributed and properly managed, there is every chance that life will become fulfilling, just and sustainable, barring the odd natural or man-made disaster. In Leviticus 25 verse 4, the land was to be given a ‘sabbath rest’, some breathing-space every seven years – a fallow period in which the wildlife had a chance to repopulate itself and the normal patterns of digging, sowing, pruning and reaping were replaced by the more nomadic existence of the hunter-gatherer. Excess crops were to be properly stored every sixth year, while everyone (from the richest to the poorest, from livestock to wild animals) was to have equal rights to whatever the land produced in years seven and eight. The whole exercise involved a radical trust in God the Provider, especially since the system effectively knocked out not just one but two years of normal food production. As if the provisions for this ‘sabbatical year’ were not remarkable enough, the idea of the ‘Sabbath of Sabbaths’, the Jubilee year, was still more extraordinary. At its heart lay a desire to give everyone a second chance during their lifetime, an opportunity to escape from the ruin into which their debt had landed them, a prospect of breaking free from the humiliation experienced by the homeless and penniless. Leviticus was clear that Israelites should not be sold as slaves in any circumstances, but the role of a ‘hired worker’ still represented a massive loss of status and independence. And so at the sounding of the trumpet on the Day of Atonement in the Jubilee year, liberty was to be proclaimed across the land. All debts were cancelled at that trumpet call, all hired workers were freed, and every Israelite was permitted to return to their family lands in one dramatic, instantaneous exercise in wealth redistribution. This was the ‘year of the Lord’s favour’ celebrated by the prophet Isaiah (61:1-2). This is what constituted ‘good news to the poor’ in a passage which Jesus took as the text for his first sermon in Nazareth, famously concluding ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing’ (Luke 4:16f). So did it work? Did the Israelites ever fully practise the provisions of the Jubilee programme? The truth is that we don’t quite know. Many of the later prophets castigated Israel for the increasing gap between rich and poor – Isaiah, for example, who denounced ‘those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room’ (5:8) or Amos who angrily decried those who ‘sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes’ (2:6) – and the archaeological record supports such a growing divide from the days of the monarchy onwards, with evidence of very large houses in some areas separated from far smaller, poorer housing stock huddled together some distance away. But how often the Jubilee Trumpet sounded in the earliest days of the nation is not recorded. That growing disparity between rich and poor in the days of the monarchy perhaps reminds us of the prophet Samuel’s dire health warning when the people first asked for a king to reign over them in 1 Samuel 8: ‘This is what the king who reigns over you will do’, said Samuel firmly, ‘He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants’. There’s a warning in Leviticus itself too that if Israel fails to obey her God, she will be carted off into exile and, quote, ‘All the time that it lies desolate, the land will have the rest it did not have during the sabbaths you lived in it’ (26:35). It’s a threat that came to pass many centuries later, during Israel’s exile in Babylon, where we read ‘The land enjoyed its sabbath rests… until the seventy years were completed’ (2 Chronicles 36:21), and implicit here is an environmental message: that if we fail to take care of the land, it will eventually have to take care of itself, as humankind is exiled, removed, from the land of its birth. And so to four small phrases in Leviticus 25, phrases which each pack a real theological punch: four great Biblical convictions which I’m sure we will be regularly revisiting in the coming days. Leviticus 25 verse 23: ‘The land is mine’. That’s the first conviction in a nutshell – one based fair and square on the creation accounts in Genesis, where humankind is given a vital role, yes, but a subsidiary one as servants of God, stewards of Creation, answerable to their Maker. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it’, proclaims the Psalmist (or, as they say in Essex, ‘The earth is the Lord’s and everything, innit?”!); while Jesus himself uses the image of tenants in a vineyard, to express our true calling under God - tenants though who soon get too big for their boots, increasingly disregarding the emissaries of the Landlord, and eventually killing his Son. Leviticus 25 verse 19: ‘Then the land will yield its fruit’. That’s the second basic conviction, that God is not simply Creator but Sustainer, and that there’s enough for everyone if only we follow the Maker’s instructions. For six years out of seven, those instructions include the normal patterns of preparing land, sowing into it, watering and weeding, pruning and picking, while leaving the edges of the field free for the gleaners to get to work. But even human activity at its best and most sustainable is only part of the story. Ultimately it’s the land that yields its fruit – or, as St Paul put it, it’s God who gives the growth. Which is why our covenant relationship with both Creator and (in a rather different sense) with the whole created order is so foundational to the whole exercise. Leviticus 25:4: ‘A year of sabbath rest’. That’s the third basic conviction in this chapter: that just as the creative work of God has a rhythm – that unusual rhythm of 7/4, where the seventh beat in each bar is to be a rest – so humankind, animals, indeed the whole of creation are to observe a 7-day pattern and a 7-year pattern and even a 7-times-7-year pattern. The sabbath has been called a ‘feast of enoughness’ and the Jubilee takes that feast to a whole new level. Set free from the tight-fisted culture of ownership – from the ‘it’s mine!’, that first complete sentence uttered by many a young child; set free too from the relentlesness of our working lives, and the tendency to exhaustion and burn-out, which is an alarmingly common feature of life in my new diocese; both the once-a-week sabbath and the once-in-a- lifetime Jubilee allow everything to stop for a while, to lie fallow, as human effort is replaced by divine grace. And how intriguing, in that context, that the early church rapidly moved their weekly Sabbath from Saturday, the last day of the week, to Sunday, the first day of the week. Rest comes first in this new pattern: we work from a place of rest rather than resting from a place of work. Or to put it more theologically, we are justified by God’s grace and not by human achievement. ‘ The land is mine’. ‘then the land will yield its fruit’ ‘A year of sabbath rest’. And here’s the fourth and final phrase, rich with theological significance, that jumps out at me from Leviticus 25: v.10: ‘Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants’. To all its inhabitants, note: not just to the poor or the landless, not even just to its human inhabitants, but to all its inhabitants, as the poor are set free from the bondage of debt and the rich are set free from the bondage of acquisitiveness, and the environment around them is set free from the bondage of exploitation. At this deepest level, Jubilee isn’t about winners and losers, much as it may appear that way – it is rather about the freedom of living life with open hands and open hearts. This is the ultimate ‘win win’ situation, if we get it right. Only human short-termism and selfishness can stand in its way. But here’s the rub, of course: that any attempt to bypass human short-termism and selfishness will always lead to the accusation that this whole thing is entirely unrealistic, a romantic flight of fancy, about as likely as all of us returning to subsistence farming or opening our spare rooms to Syrian refugees. We need to be pragmatic, to listen to our heads not just our hearts. After all, if there’s no real evidence that the Jubilee was ever actually practised, even by ancient Israel, isn’t the whole thing dead in the water from the start? As an argument it seems unanswerable. And yet such a view, while very common, forgets one thing: that there’s something about godly naivety – about a God-given vision that is simple in its essence but revolutionary in its scope – that can be curiously powerful, effecting real change in a way that more complex, sophisticated approaches often fail to do. The idea that the Jubilee programme could be imposed lock, stock and barrel on contemporary society is quite unrealistic. But the principles behind this chapter – care for the environment, a second chance for the destitute, simplicity, compassion and trust – are every bit as relevant today as they have ever been. 100 billion dollars is a lot of money, I think we’d all agree, and was even more money in 1999 when the G8 nations agreed to cancel $100 bn of developing world debt. And yet, that’s the power of godly naivety, of the vision of Jubilee 2000, founded on these verses hidden away in the Book of Leviticus. And it’s not as though Moses or whoever constructed this part of the Pentateuch, would have had any idea of the full implications of what they were writing, or how it would continue to resonate several thousand years’ on. Of course not. But that’s how vision often works, including perhaps a vision for climate justice. We may not end up with exactly what was envisaged in the first place: but that’s often because our imagination has been too small rather than the reverse. Truly the Word of God is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword. Or, to use another image, the Word of God is like a bouncing bomb, which can land at surprising times in human history before bouncing on to affect new generations with its explosive power. Pragmatics are important as well, of course: we need the strategy and tactics to implement the vision. But if that’s all we’re doing – if we lose touch with the bigger context of a world where God is Creator and Sustainer, of a Sabbath principle built into the whole of Creation, of the call to liberty which lies at the heart of the Christian gospel - then our motivation levels in taking public transport or installing solar panels will very quickly slide. Imagine Moses spelling out his strategy for the Exodus journey: ‘We’ll set off through the Red Sea, bearing nor-nor-west. We’ll live off a strange wafery substance called manna, which will get very dull after a while, supplemented with the odd flock of quails. Water will be a problem, and there’ll be times when it needs careful rationing. We’ll hang around in the desert for 40 years, and only a couple of us will probably get through’: all very pragmatic, yes, but hardly inspirational. So how about this: ‘Friends, we’re heading for a land where we can be free, a land that God will place into our hands, a land flowing with milk and honey’. Idealistic, yes. Naïve, possibly. Not the whole story, certainly. But inspiring too; and who knows where God-given vision might lead? And that’s my prayer for this conference, taking place as it does on the very eve of the Paris summit: that just as this book of Leviticus, with its strange priestly preoccupations, has launched such significant movements for change over the past few decades, so God might inspire us with fresh vision over this time together, to see His kingdom come and His will be done on this fragile earth as it is in heaven.

Reading 2: Luke 4:14-30

Magamero is a tiny village along a dirt track in southern Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world. There’s the odd little house on either side of the track as you draw near to the village – there’s the occasional stall, selling onions, tomatoes and papaya – but if you were trying to picture the phrase ‘in the middle of nowhere’, you couldn’t do much better that choose Magamero.

So what is it that drew together ten thousand Malawians from all around the country, along with then President Bingu, then Archbishop Rowan and me too, to this tiny village back in the autumn of 2011? It was the celebration of the 150 th anniversary of the birth of the church in what was then called ‘Nyasaland’. 150 years before, Bishop Charles Mackenzie, a Cambridge-educated Scotsman and friend of David Livingstone had first made his way to Magamero with a small bunch of others; and though it was only seven months before Bishop Mackenzie died of malaria – his name is still honoured in a country where 85% of the population now call themselves Christians.

So what did Charles Mackenzie do in those seven short months between arriving in Nyasaland and dying there? He is best remembered for rescuing a group of Malawians who were being brutally taken off into slavery and killing two Arab slave traders in the process. It caused a big stir in England, of course, when the news got back: the picture of a man holding a bishop’s staff in one hand and a rifle in the other shocked the society of his day, including the then Archbishop of Canterbury, who understandably didn’t like his bishops going round shooting people. But whatever the rights and wrongs of it, from that moment on, Bishop Mackenzie was treated as a hero by the Malawians and a pain in the neck by the slave traders. From that moment on, the Christian gospel was received as good news to the poor and freedom for the captive.

And incidentally that vision has been expressed in all kinds of peaceful ways by the church in Malawi over the ensuing years, including a fabulous environmental project we visited in the north of the country, training local farmers to farm the land both productively and sustainably.

And so to this morning’s Bible Reading, which has a long back-story: a story that originates in that grand Jubilee vision tucked away in the middle of the book of Leviticus with which we started our conference. A surprising number of campaigns for social and global justice have found inspiration in this book of Leviticus, we reflected, ranging from food banks to refugee movements to fights against slavery to crackdowns on payday lenders. But of all those initiatives, it’s the Jubilee Campaign that has made the biggest impact of all, as the ancient and apparently naïve vision of Leviticus 25 has led to some very modern and concrete results: members of the G8 agreeing to cancel $100 billion of world debt, for example. The original Jubilee vision, you’ll remember, was heralded by a trumpet call every 50th year, at which all debts were cancelled, all hired workers were freed, and every Israelite was permitted to return to their family lands in one dramatic, instantaneous exercise in wealth redistribution. And at the heart of it lay four basic convictions, each of which has been variously fleshed out during the course of this conference:  First, that in God’s words, ‘The land is mine’, and we are simply stewards of God’s Creation.  Secondly that ‘the land will yield its fruit’, so that our covenant relationship with both Creator and creation is fundamental to just and sustainable living.  Thirdly that the land was to enjoy ‘a year of sabbath rest’, a time of regeneration, a festival of enoughness, an opportunity for radical trust in the One who feeds the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the field.  And fourthly that ‘liberty’ lay at the centre of God’s purposes for the world, with the poor set free from the bondage of debt and the rich set free from the bondage of acquisitiveness, and the environment around them set free from the bondage of exploitation. Back on Monday afternoon I pictured Biblical prophecy as a little like a bouncing bomb, which can land at surprising times in human history before bouncing on to affect new generations with its explosive power; and this morning’s Bible reading contains not just one but two examples of how this Jubilee vision bounced its way through Biblical history, taking some unexpected twists and turns along the way. Scene One of that history dates back to the 500s BC, but has some very contemporary resonances: a large crowd of refugees living in squalid conditions in the Middle East, several hundred miles from home. This people had been there for 70 years ever since the time when King Nebuchadrezzar invaded the land of Judah with his Babylonian forces and carted most of its inhabitants into exile, destroying Jerusalem and its Temple in the process. During that time, some had settled down and have had children and grandchildren, trusting the prophet Jeremiah’s vision of a ‘hope and a future’, while others had given way to a kind of relentless despair, even to dreams of taking Babylonian babies and – to put it colloqially – bashing their heads in. And then the political landscape shifted – and the Persians conquered the Babylonians – and the Persian king Cyrus didn’t see the point of great refugee camps spreading over his newly acquired territory. ‘You can go back home now’ is the message underlying the great vision of Isaiah chapter 61. So here comes the Leviticus bomb, ready for its next bounce: ‘The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me’, proclaims Isaiah, ‘because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives, and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour and the day of vengeance of our God’. Did Isaiah ever learn the trumpet? We’re not told. But his proclamation of the ‘year of the Lord’s favour’ in this passage was every bit as dramatic as the Jubilee trumpet- blast. And as the Jews of his day prepared to leave their refugee camps and head back home, there’s a real sense that all debts had indeed been cancelled, all hired workers had indeed been freed, and every Israelite had been permitted to return to his or her family lands. There’s something new here too, that we didn’t find in Leviticus 25: the idea of God’s vengeance against those who’ve held the Jews captive, those Babylonians who now found themselves enslaved by the new imperialistic kids on the block – King Cyrus and his mighty Persians. But not even the most ardent nationalist could clear Israel herself of all blame for the exile: – and as the Jews began their second exodus to the Promised Land – an environment which had been neglected now for generations – there’s a hope that this time they might make a better ‘go’ of their covenant relationship with God their Creator, and with the rest of the created order. ‘They will rebuild the ancient ruins’, as we read later in the chapter, ‘and restore the places long devastated… For I, the Lord, love justice’. Scene Two dates back to maybe 30 AD, and is rather more domestic on the surface, as a young adult prepared to deliver his first sermon in his home town – always a tough assignment. This man had already got something of a reputation as a teacher and miracle worker, a local boy made good. He was very well-known in Nazareth, of course, as a carpenter and builder; and along with his regular attendance at the synagogue, it’s almost certain that he belonged to a local Bible study group: for every town and village in his day had meetings of so-called ‘haberim’ or ‘friends’, serious-minded Jewish lay people who met together to pray for each other and to study the scriptures. The very earliest description we have of a synagogue service is here in Luke chapter 4, where Jesus respectfully stood up to read those scriptures, much as many of us continue to stand up to read the Gospel today. Was there some kind of Jewish lectionary, some set reading allocated for that morning? We don’t know. What we do know is that Jesus found his way to Isaiah chapter 61 and began to read ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…’ It was all very close to home, of course – because just a couple of months earlier, this young preacher had indeed been anointed by the Spirit of the Lord as he’d stepped down into the waters of baptism. But what is it that Jesus was being anointed to do? That was the question that had so exercised him during those 40 days in the wilderness. And Jesus’ answer to that question dovetailed beautifully with the passage he was now reading: ‘ The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me – the Greek word, incidentally, is ‘apostled me’, reminding us that Jesus himself was the first of the apostles – ‘to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’.

These weren’t just Isaiah’s words, they were Jesus’ words. This wasn’t just Isaiah’s calling, this was Jesus’ calling. These weren’t just words in a book, they were words that jumped out of the scroll, sharper than a two-edged sword.

And Jesus followed tradition by sitting down at the end of the reading: the normal rabbinical sermon was a teaching exercise rather than a rhetorical one, and was delivered from a seated position. But the atmosphere was electric, as the congregation picked up the sheer power of the reading and fixed their eyes on him. So here’s the Jubilee trumpet blast once again: ‘Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing’. The bouncing bomb was back.

So far so good, we might think: but once again this bounce of the Jubilee bomb took an unexpected turn. As people first commented on the excellence of the preaching, seriously impressed by the passion and authority with which this young man had spoken; as they hoped perhaps that he might help put that town – otherwise known as ‘can-anything-good-come-out-of-Nazareth’ – on the tourist map, as indeed he has done; one or two dissenting voices began to be heard: ‘Yes, he’s an eloquent preacher, no doubt about that – but didn’t you hear what he said? ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing’? Who does he think he is? And how about those miracles we’ve heard about?: until he does some of that kind of thing in Nazareth he shouldn’t start giving himself airs and graces. Physician, heal yourself. Charity begins at home’.

For those who knew their Isaiah well, there was another concern here too: that Jesus had stopped the Isaiah reading in the middle of the sentence – in fact for some of them he’d missed out the best bit. From the days of Leviticus 25, the Jubilee had been a celebration for the Jews, as debts were released and they each returned to their homeland. From Isaiah 61 a new note of vengeance had crept in: a note that would have resonated with Jesus’ hearers as they dreamt of a new Jubilee in which the latest imperialistic kids on the block – Caesar and the Romans – would be roundly defeated and the land could be returned to its rightful owners.

But Jesus had stopped the reading with the ‘year of the Lord’s favour’. Like some of our modern lectionaries he’d missed out the note of vengeance against Israel’s enemies. And as Jesus joined the worshippers, it soon became clear that stopping in the middle of that sentence had been completely deliberate – how God’s blessing, His Jubilee plan, was now going to reach out to the most unexpected of people, to Gentiles, even to Israel’s enemies. Hadn’t that always been so, Jesus added: hadn’t Israel previously rejected some of her greatest prophets, Elijah and Elisha among them, and hadn’t those prophets gone on to bless completely the wrong people, to bring relief to the widow of Zarephath, a Gentile woman, and to Naaman, a Syrian soldier?

Even today, if you were to stand in Nazareth and proclaim, ‘God loves to heal Syrian soldiers, you’d be asking for trouble. And on that Sabbath the crowd’s attitude to Jesus passed from admiration to doubt to pure nationalistic rage. Indeed if it wasn’t for the sheer authority of Jesus in simply walking through the crowds, he might well have met his death there and then – not flamboyantly flinging himself off the top of the Temple, as he’d been tempted to do in the wilderness, but being ignominiously thrown off a cliff by his fellow countrymen. ‘He came to his own, but his own did not receive him’, as John later reflected. And this pattern of good news to the poor, freedom to the captive, sight to the blind and God blessing completely the wrong people, is a story played out through the rest of Luke’s Gospel – along with the pattern of ever-increasing persecution culminating in that old rugged cross.

Jesus’ Jubilee – the Messiah’s Manifesto, as it’s sometimes been described - would have political consequences, of course it would, consequences which are still resonating in the world of today: but those consequences wouldn’t be primarily worked out through some nationalistic or party political agenda. They would be birthed instead in the transformed and transforming lives of all anointed with the Spirit of the Sovereign Lord to bring good news to the poor and release to the captive and sight to the blind: the Bishop Charles Mackenzies of each generation, though preferably without a rifle at their side! Elsewhere in the New Testament we pick up these Jubilee themes and how they might be fleshed out in the life of the Christian believer. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus calls us to ‘consider’ – that it to meditate deeply upon – the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, rather than getting caught up in anxiety and that insatiable desire for more which is causing such devastation across the planet. In his parable of the tenants, Jesus reminds us that God is the owner of the vineyard, and not us. In Acts chapters 2 and 4 we are given two little portraits of a Jubilee community in action: ‘All the believers were together and everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need’. In his letter to Philemon, Paul subtly undermines the institution of slavery within the Christian community at least, urging Philemon to welcome back the runaway Onesimus ‘no longer as a slave but better than a slave, as a dear brother’. ‘Godliness with contentment is great gain’, continued Paul to his young protégé Timothy – a sentiment of the utmost relevance to the theme of climate justice.

On a grand cosmic scale too, Paul’s letter to the Romans proclaims liberty not just to human beings but to all that God has made: ‘The whole creation’, he wrote, ‘has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time’ – yet through the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, a time was coming when that same creation would be ‘brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God’. And meanwhile the letter to the Hebrews proclaims a Sabbath-rest for all God’s people – that ability to stand in God’s grace, to rest in His presence, rather than anxiously trying to earn our way into his good books.

But perhaps the most radical vision of them all – the ultimate bounce of the Jubilee bomb - is to be found in the book of Revelation, as John captures a glimpse of the new heaven and the new earth that God is bringing into being. Within that vision, there is no space for petty nationalism, for here is a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language standing before the throne and before the Lamb. Within that vision, the Jubilee rest of the people of God comes to its ultimate conclusion, as Paradise is regained, as men and women walk with God once more in the cool of the day, as miraculous supplies of living water are freely available, refreshing the trees that dutifully bear fruit each month.

And whenever we pray ‘Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven’, that is in part a Jubilee prayer, a mark of mission prayer, a prayer that the life, the wholeness, the justice, the shalom of heaven might touch the battered world around us, not least through the positive actions of those called to steward God’s Creation.

In closing, I’d like to say this: that the privilege, from my point of view, of the past 48 hours has been this: that as members of the global Church, of which the Anglican Communion is a significant part, that bigger vision of all that Jubilee means is somehow easier to capture here, and through our various diocesan links and mission agencies, than within the often more parochial settings of our parish churches. When we actually meet people whose communities are being seriously affected through climate change – when we worship with them and love them as fellow human beings, fellow believers, as we have done this week – then issues that can all too easily be thrust into the ‘too hard basket’ start to become personal in a way that we can no longer ignore. Praying, engaging, acting, campaigning all take their place within the response to which God is calling us at this genuinely momentous time in world history. And as Christians, with our covenant relationship with God our Creator and our family connections all around the world, how important that we do indeed live as Jubilee people, developing patterns of life and faith that are generous and just and sustainable.