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.