Jubilee Rest
Further Reading and Resources
Books:
The Sabbath Way by Travis West
Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey
Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price, PhD
Good Soil by Jeff Chu
First Nations Version Indigenous New Testament Translation
Podcast:
Jubilee: The Radical Year of Release by The Bible Project
Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate
Lily: Blessed be the name of the Lord, the God who is known and made known, in many names to all people. Blessed is the one who came in flesh, to know us and be known by us, the one who took on scars like ours, the one who died with us, not just for us. Blessed be the great. I am that. I am that. I will be the God who has always invited us to co-create with them, to co-write our stories, the God who is never done creating. Blessed be the Lord who has truly set us free. Amen.
Marta: Good morning. My name is Marta, and if we haven't met, it's probably because I have been upstairs or downstairs or somewhere else working with kids. So, second through fifth graders and kids older than that, all the way up to kids 99, age 99. I'm glad you're here. So, if you haven't met me, you probably have met my husband Brad, who's the coffee guy.
So, if you don't have kids and you don't drink coffee, you might not have met us. But I think that covers most everybody in this room. I'm really excited to be here. I'm excited to preach. I'm excited to be at a church where I can say out loud for the first time publicly that I am bisexual and Christian. It's really fun that all month we've been hearing from queer preachers focusing on the theme of celebration and transformation. So, week one we heard from Cody talking about celebrating pride beyond just saying, "Yeah, I'm affirming." The next week Justin was in town talking about the work of Pentecost and the spirit’s still moving today. Oby was here talking about divine conversations in unexpected places. And last week we heard from Jae and the true meaning of obedience.
So, when I was put on the roster to preach for today, I was awake at two in the morning and I thought, "Wouldn't it be funny if I preached from the Book of Leviticus for my pride sermon?" And then that 2 a.m. intrusive thought became a 2 p.m. incessant thought. And there I was in the middle of the afternoon digging into biblical farming laws.
So, that's where we're going to land today. A couple precursors to the sermon. So, yes, I am preaching from Leviticus. And yes, I am a queer preacher. So, I promise this is not a sermon of proof texts and condemnation. I hope that it is a soft place to land and a springboard into our futures. We are going to get in some pretty nerdy, geeky, biblical history, but I am a youth teacher. So, I hope that it's kind of fun and kind of interesting. So, if this is your jam, buckle up. We're doing nerd history stuff. And if it's not, I hope that you'll still participate with us and find something new. And we're going to look at this very old text and see if it has something to say in our very real, very messy moment, complicated moment in all that it is of June 29, 2025. And I personally truly believe that it does.
So, if you have any familiarity with the book of Leviticus, it's probably because you've heard verses taken out of context like, don't eat anything from the sea that doesn't have fins and scales. So, that's shellfish, which works for me because I'm allergic. Don't wear anything woven out of two different kinds of material, which is why I'm wearing this 100% cotton jumpsuit. And then you've probably heard someone used it as a clobber passage is what they call there's several passages used to quickly condemn queer people that man shall not lie with man as if it is a woman. So, these are all very random things to be thrown out. It feels like they're thrown back and forth as weapons of whether or not we should take this book seriously. And it is not very helpful to figure out what this book actually is.
So, in order to talk about that, we're going to go a little bit back in time in some stories that you may or may not be familiar with. So, the Israelites were called into were slaves in Egypt. They were people that were enslaved, were poorly treated. And God calls Moses, famously, if you've 90s kids, you've seen Prince of Egypt. He goes in, he asked Pharaoh to let my people go. And the 10 plagues happen. Moses takes the Israelite people after Passover, and they cross the Red Sea. They are in the desert. Moses climbs up Mount Sinai. He gets the 10 commandments of all the things that God's people should and should not do. As Moses is coming down the mountain, and one of these commandments is, you know, you should have no other gods before me. Don't make any idols. There they are making this golden calf out of all of their gold material that they have, deliberately disobeying God right out the gate.
So, now the Israelites are stuck and sent to wander. When they're wandering, before there was a temple, when they were in the Promised Land, they had a tabernacle, which is kind of like this big, giant tent. This tent is God's portable, dwelling place. This is a place of worship. This is where God resides. So, to have this tabernacle, they need rules, which is how we got the Book of Leviticus. It's teaching people how to live, interact, and worship in the presence of the Lord. Essentially, it's split up into three different sections. They kind of mirror each other.
First section is going to be about rituals. So, that's going to be different types of offerings, whether it's like your firstfruits offering, saying, "Thank you, God. I appreciate what you've given me," or an atonement saying, "I'm sorry for what I've done. Use the sacrifice in my place." Also, talking about different feasts that happen, different celebrations that happen throughout the year. Then there are going to be laws specifically for priests, and then there are also purity laws. So, these are some of the physical hygiene. Don't touch dead animals. Avoid cultural taboos. And there's also cultural symbols that God's holiness affects our whole lives. And there's also cultural laws. So, that's looking at caring for the poor, seeking social justice. That's where a lot of those sexual purity laws come from.
That's kind of your backstory of Leviticus. So, if I was teaching, if you were a second through fifth grader or younger, I would say, "That was a lot of information. Let's move and do something different." So, if you are in second through fifth grade or a grown-up who just loves hanging out up on stage, I need about 8-10 volunteers. So, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Can I get one or two more? Can I? Trey? You don't have to say anything. You just have to stand there. All right. Who have I got? Kate will do it. All right.
All right. Here's what we got. I need seven of you to line up. So, here we go. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Okay. You are going to be our farmer. So, you go stand over here. You are going to be a cow. You are going to be a servant. Okay. Oh, I forgot. So, you all are plots of land. Do you have a hundred dollar bill in your pocket right now that I can have? No. Well, that was part of the deal. No. So, I guess you guys are just going to have to owe me later. You can be indebted to me and we can get back to this later. So, each of these is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. It's a plot of land on a different year.
So, year one, our farmer is going to come by. You are going to grow up. It will be a really great field. And you are going to plow this field and you are going to get all the materials, everything that grows.
So, that's year one. We are going to do that year two. All right. Good. You are plowed. And then we get to year three. There is a vineyard. And all the vineyard is cleared. All right. Year four. Grow. Grow, Andrew. Grow. Grow. All right. Perfect. Five. Same thing. Great. Six. Okay. Six years of heaven. Step right there. After six years of tending to the land, God commands his people every seven years to take a Sabbath year. So, can you grow beautifully? You are going to let this land rest.
And so, how do you eat if we are letting the land rest? We are just going to take what we need. So, you can come. You can take what you need as you need food. And here is our hungry little animals. The animals can come and they can take what they need. Go ahead. They take what they need. And our servants who don't own any land, they take what they need. And the land just keeps growing and doing what it needs to do. But we are not harvesting it. We are not tending to it. We are just letting the land itself rest. Very good. Okay. Everyone stand up.
So, that is a Sabbath year cycle. We are going to go. Wait. We are not done. All right. We are going to do that seven more times. So, everyone go up and down seven times. Ready? One, two, three, four, five, oh, my thighs. Six and seven. Okay. Seven Sabbath year cycles have happened, which now brings us to the year of Jubilee. Can everyone give me their best trumpet triumphant sound?
Perfect. So, that signals it starts on the Day of Atonement, which we can cover in another sermon. That is a whole separate festival feast. But on the Day of Atonement, after seven cycles of the Sabbath year, we have the Yovel, the year of Jubilee. So, what happens is liberty is proclaimed throughout all the land to all its inhabitants, and all the land gets to rest. Again, you get another year of rest. And that $100 bill that I need from you, actually, your debts are canceled. And everybody, if you are a servant or you have been an animal that has been traded back and forth, your land all goes back to where it originally came from. So, you're invited to sit down. Thank you, everybody. See, I told you history could be kind of fun.
So, that's the Sabbath year. That's the year of Jubilee. It's interesting to me that God doesn't tell the farmer to take a year off and take a rest, but tells the land itself to rest, to Shabbat. Instead of being used to maximize profit and have monopolies and ownership, a divine declaration requires everything about the land to slow down and reevaluate.
And it's interesting that these laws need to be written down in a way that so explicitly divests ownership and slavery to a people as we look back, were just freed from slavery. They were just released from slavery in Egypt and were already starting to move toward systems of ownership, inequality, and inequality to take away their neighbor's humanity. And aren't we familiar with that pattern?
In her book, Rest is Resistance, Tricia Hersey says:
We're socialized into systems that cause us to conform and believe our worth is connected to how much we can produce. Our constant labor becomes a prison that allows us to be disembodied. We become easy for systems to manipulate, disconnected from our power as divine beings and hopeless. We forget how to dream. This is how grind culture continues. We internalize the lies and in turn become agents of an unsustainable way of living.
This greedy machine that we're all part of tries to turn us into one specific type of person. Usually straight, usually white, usually male, usually productive, usually powerful. And I do want to make clear—because we have a lot of great straight white men allies in this room and I love you all—married to one, right? Those parts of your identity are not wrong. They don't make you bad automatically. It's when those are the only stories we listen to. It's when we push other people to become and mirror those types of stories, not allowing any other part of diversity through that lens.
So when we're working in that greedy machine, we see things like jobs being minimized and cut left and right and easily replaced with AI, a tool that frankly I used to help write the sermon a little bit, but when we use it unwisely, it wastes energy, it steamrolls over other people's work without their permission, and misinterprets nuances for quick summations.
We see it in Amazon ads popping up with a one click delivery and it'll be on your doorstep sometimes overnight, ignoring the conditions that warehouse workers and delivery drivers go through to make it so. We see it in ICE being sent in to remove people who just aren't American enough, even if they have the appropriate visa. Now, it seems even if they were born here, if you aren't seen American enough, you're out the door. We see it in trans people being denied healthcare, being kept out of communities and being barred from existing for us who they are, primarily because of a lack of understanding in education.
And even if we in this room are not the people doing the harm on this large scale, grind culture still numbs us and takes away our humanity and detracts from our calling to internal goodness. One of my profs in seminary just released a book on Sabbath and he says:
"Greed isn't just a cannibalistic monster jonesing for its next meal." He says, "The greed is apathy about and complicity with the status quo." It's when we get stuck in our own narratives, in our own pursuit to hustle more, to make more, to earn more, to do more, to be more, we lose the intrinsic goodness of what makes us who we are. We say it a lot around here, we haven't necessarily said it in a while, so if you're new here, one of our little catch phrases is, "Who you are is more important than what you do, even if what you do gets more attention than who you are."
But it's so hard to actually believe that. I'm going to read to you a list by Devon Price, a social psychologist, of things that they associate with what they call the laziness lie. These are signs that you are more often than not living the lie that productivity is the key to goodness. You know you're living this lie when you get less done during the day than you anticipated, you feel guilty. You have trouble enjoying your free time. You believe you have to earn the right to vacation or a break. You take care of your health only in order to remain productive. And having nothing to do makes you feel useless. You find the idea of growing old or becoming disabled to be incredibly depressing. When you say no to someone, you feel compelled to say yes to something else to make up for it.
I'm not going to ask for a show of hands, but I imagine at least one, if not all, of these bullet points hit a little too close to home. The laziness lie, greed, and grind culture are not new to God's people in our story. This narrative runs deep and it's difficult to subvert in our time, in their time. And that's why God builds in rhythms of rest. There's the weekly Sabbath.
Every year there are different festivals that cause the people to slow down. Every seven years there's the Sabbath year. Every 50 years there's the year of Jubilee. These varying patterns of rest restore identity and remind them who they are after slavery. Explicitly written into the codes of Israelite law, it is made clear that Sabbath, every step of the way, is for everyone. It's not based on what you earn. It's not based on what you own. It's not based on your gender. We even see that the land and animals is not based on your status as a human being. It is entitled to God's creation for Sabbath.
I was going over this sermon with my friend from seminary and he says, "All of this reminds me of that quote from Dan Savage." And this friend is the type of person who just kind of collects tidbits of knowledge all along the way. I'm like, "Who are you talking about? What are you talking about?" And so he tells me the story of Dan, who is a writer and co-creator of the It Gets Better Project, which I had heard of, maybe you have as well. It's a nonprofit that works to prevent suicide in LGBTQ plus teens by connecting them with queer adults to show that it gets better, that life continues moving forward and there is life to be lived. I listened to one of Dan Savage's talks and he talked about being a gay man in the AIDS epidemic.
He said people didn't believe our love to be equivalent to heterosexual love, not even people who consider themselves to be down with the gays. As men got sick with AIDS, many were rejected by their families after being unwillingly outed by illness. People not only correlated being gay with being less than or people only correlated being gay with being less than, being sick and being other." And then when people were watching the news of how people responded, they saw something different. They started seeing love in the protests that were taking on the American Medical Association, the CDC and the Reagan Administration. They saw love in gay people taking care of each other in the hospital, fighting through trauma and holding each other in death. The queer community's actions against and in spite of the AIDS epidemic proved that love is not just for those in power or for those whose stories are prominently featured, but it's for all people. This is where the quote that my friend referenced came in.
Dan says,
"During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn't look like we were going to win and then we did. And it doesn't feel like we're going to win now, but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing.”
Sabbath is what keeps us in the fight and Jubilee is what keeps us dancing. Liberation and rest go hand in hand. We cannot have one without the other.
So I see glimpses of Jubilee in our world today by things like Zohran Mamdani running for mayor in New York on a platform based on cost of living justice for all people. And he won the primary. I see it in political conversations still ongoing about student loan forgiveness and the ethical pricing of ongoing education.
I see it in community members protecting their coworkers and neighbors in unjust ICE raids through protests and education. I see it not just in our church's pride booth, but the fact that there's an entire corner of the Minneapolis pride of churches and nonprofits showing up and proclaiming good news to the queer community. And I see it in small things. I see it in my Facebook Buy Nothing group. If you're not a part of one, it'll change your life. You throw out a request of I need someone, I just need to borrow a drill. I need to borrow a book for my monthly book club. I need a window air conditioner unit and its neighbors showing up saying, "I've got that. Here you go. My living room, my poor husband, I'll just come home." And I'll be like, "Look, I got the stained glass lamp that I've always wanted. I have a Tiffany lamp because someone in my neighborhood gave it away." I see it in this generosity and spirit of reciprocity.
I see it in casseroles, lining freezers, and door dash gift cards filling in boxes for those in times of need. I see it in queer folks, leading worship, serving on the board, preaching, teaching our kids, greeting at the door. People who are once told, "Change who you are before you come back." Now fully present, fully beloved, fully themselves.
So here's the thing. I have a little secret. The year of Jubilee, scholars aren't sure that they actually ever enacted it all the way through. There's no scriptural account of it ever actually fully being carried through. Why? Because it's hard. Because real Sabbath is more than a spa day or a nap after church. And because the concept of Jubilee is not just found in the first testament, but comes up again in the second testament with Jesus in the temple.
In Luke chapter 4, you may remember this story. He opens up a scroll with deep respect in his voice and a strong, clear voice saying, "The spirit of the Creator has come to rest on me. He's chosen me to tell a good story to the ones who are poor. He sent me to men broken hearts to tell prisoners that they've been set free and to make the blind see again and to lift up the ones who have been pushed down to make it known that the Creator's year of setting free, the year of Jubilee, has come at last. He rolled up the scroll, returned it to the headman and sat down. With all eyes fixed on him, he said, "Today, these words you have heard have found their full meaning."
He's reading from the book of Isaiah, which references the passage in Leviticus that we talked about today. The person of Jesus extends the year of Jubilee, not just to the people of Israel in the times of Leviticus, but to all people full stop. If you are hearing these words today, you are empowered to freely step into places that you were once told you had no business being in, and you can do so with celebration and jubilation. You can do so with transformation and empowerment, and you can do so truly rested. God didn't free the Israelites because they were productive. Christ didn't come for us because we have it all together, and the Spirit moves not in our striving, but in our resting.
And so if you have to start somewhere that feels like there's too much to be done, start small. Start with reciprocity. Start with gratitude. Start with taking just what you need. This rest is radical and sacrificial, but ultimately it is a joyful form of rebellion.
I want to close with a poem written in the scribbles of Pastor Debbie's Planner a few months ago by one of the smallest members of our congregation. And as soon as I read it, I locked it in, and it's something that really hasn't left my mind since April when he wrote it. Soren writes, "Love is love. We will stand tall like the fairy dome," which his dad says. I don't know what that means, but it's up for your interpretation. We are strong. No animal is too small because we are a community. Love, hope, peace, family, our community. Love is love. We are animals. Animals are strong. Love is strong.
Abundance, flourishing, jubilation are not reserved for the powerful or the privileged. You have every right to step into them now just as you are. No animal is too small because we are a community. Amen.