Ecosystems of Jubilee
A manifesto for the church to join Jesus's Jubilee campaign and bring God's economy to the neighborhood.
My friends Adam and José have written a wonderful book, Ecosystems of Jubilee, that was released last week. I'm thrilled to share the following excerpt with you and hope you'll consider picking up a copy.
Jesus’s invitation was not for the rich man to throw away his riches but to gift them to people impacted by poverty. He was to open his hands in a sacrificial way and enter God’s economy—a place where the gift would continue to circulate for the blessing of the ecosystem. Entering into God’s subversive gift economy is transgressive, as money and resources will bypass the traditional channels to meet the needs. Jubilee also initiates a gift-giving economy in which the rich are no longer separated from people impacted by poverty; the nature of the exchange being the gift of mutuality that comes from being the beloved community.
While the rich man was not ready to join Jesus’s Jubilee campaign, as Sider mentioned earlier, there are many Christians with means who are desiring to join Jesus’s campaign for the world. Many of us are at the intersections of holding different forms of privilege. For one thing, simply being born in North America places middle-class people in the top tenth percentile when it comes to wealth worldwide. Many of us have the privilege of being liberated to exercise our gifts in this world. By virtue of this, we are given the capacity to do the serious work of healing the divides that fragment our worlds.
We can cross over, seeking to integrate individuals and communities into God’s dream for the neighborhood. In part, this means small actions and big imagination. Jesus spoke about the reign of God in start-up metaphors, such as mustard seeds and starter dough. He told stories about the reign of God starting small and expanding. He focused on the aspirational nature of the reign of God, essentially, how the reign of God is already here and not yet. Jesus will continue to invite, while the Spirit will continue to lead.
I (José) would like to campaign, with millions of others, for Jesus’s Jubilee invitation during this new season of the church. Following is a platform for the church in towns, cities, suburbs, and rural areas.
A 7-Point Manifesto Inspired by Jesus’s Jubilee Platform
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As the church of Christ, we will pray for our neighbor- hoods individually and collectively. This will include embodied prayers, “praying with our feet,” walking through our neighborhoods with sacred curiosity, even marching together when the time calls for it. We will discern our sacred role as part of the fellowship of the neighborhood. As curators of our local ecosystems, we recognize this prayerful task permeates neighborhood life on the individual, communal, and systemic level.
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We are committed to God’s “harmony way.” As the church in the neighborhood, as part of God’s small unit of change, we believe mission can be framed around patterns of “faithful presence” and contextual prac- tices, where even just two or three can gather in Christ’s name. We join God, one another, and our neighbors in the gospel of liberation, beginning where Jubilee begins: with the most vulnerable in our world.
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In the Spirit of creation and biodiversity, we believe that on a small scale we can participate in mustard-seed movements, bringing indigenous wisdom, the business community, wisdom keepers, and wealth holders into a community of practice. We will, as a church, partic- ipate in dismantling and opposing extractive practices in our community. We will consistently keep in mind Christianity’s past allegiance to empire, while main- taining a continued posture of repentance and an eye toward reparations.
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Justice, like Sabbath and Jubilee, is cyclical. We believe justice circles back for us to revisit systems and struc- tures in our neighborhoods that obstruct the circulation of resources and corrode mutuality and reciprocity. We also believe no one totally rests from their labor until the most vulnerable in society are able to rest from theirs.
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We believe that even in our capitalist society, that the land belongs to the Creator. As part of our economic discipleship, we will pursue more liberative and imag- inative ways of thinking about ownership, stewarding what we are privileged to own, for the benefit of more people in our communities. Across contexts we think about the power of space and place to hold and invite people into belonging together, from parks to sidewalks, homes to trailers, and apartments to gardens, even in the farms that produce nourishment for our bodies.
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As people are created in the image of their Creator, they have all been given gifts to contribute to their neighbor- hoods and world. Our liberative spaces will make room for the identification and the use of these gifts. The church can get on God’s agenda for people in the world. We will advocate for opportunities, in collaboration, to ensure people are compensated for their labor in ways that are just and preserve the dignity of their work. We will work to remove exploitive labor that destroys the dignity of work and obscures the image of God, reducing bodies to units of labor.
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We believe it is ideology that sustains economic systems. These systems disciple and shape our everyday approaches to money and commerce, our daily trans- actions. As a church, we embark on creating distinct agreements with our money and resources that will ren- der open hands and hearts, stewarding our spending. We also both challenge and invite those with means connected to the market to guard their mutual funds and portfolios from the extractive practices of certain global corporations.
I (José) am always on the lookout for small signs of Jubilee, the big little farms that embody new possibility, those who see the signs and wonders of what could be in our neighborhoods and beyond.
Jesus came to our world and led with a Jubilee platform—a divine initiative that would bring the priorities of Heaven into the world: to liberate the prisoner, to free the oppressed, to declare the year of the Lord’s favor. With very little fanfare, these signs and wonders can take root today through the experiments of the church in the world. Every time people experience the freedom that comes with Christ, a positive environmental impact can follow, for true salvation is salvation of body, soul, and ecosystem.
Jesus for president.
Regular readers of this newsletter remember that this time of year is when I come to you, hat in hand, asking for a donation as I prepare to run the annual Race Against Gun Violence in support of the organization I helped start, New Community Outreach. If you've found anything in these newsletters helpful, would you consider chipping in here? Thanks!