A Just Economy Prompts Us to Normalize Jubilee

FOR SOME REASON, conversations about economics and the church are rare these days — even though scripture includes more than 2,000 verses on poverty, such as laws in the Hebrew Bible on debt, labor, and land ownership. In the gospels, Jesus had many conversations with people about their relationship to money.

Our daily lives wade in the waters of economics, even in the most ordinary ways. When I brushed my teeth this morning, for instance, I used a brand-name electric toothbrush and a brand-name toothpaste, one that claims to be gentle on tooth enamel. After leaving my apartment, I gazed ahead to the street corner, where a man with a familiar face extended his hand in need to passersby. On the streets of New York City, the human cost of economic insecurity is painfully evident. I made my way eastbound toward Park Avenue; the potholes had me pondering how my hood is often overlooked in the city’s infrastructure budget. Yet, somehow, new “affordable” luxury apartments pop up, seemingly out of nowhere; I sometimes wonder if these buildings just appear overnight, ready-made. I’m also reminded that our local community board, through its land use committee, had some say in these new developments.

Almost everything I encounter, in just two square blocks, is connected to a line item on a federal, state, or city budget. I reminisce how Sojourners has referred to budgets as moral documents. If this is true, how can we invite the church into seeing the economy beyond just a conversation on tithes and offerings and into a dialogue about God’s ecosystem of Jubilee justice?

In scripture, we witness God instituting Sabbath and Jubilee laws to govern people’s relationships to their stuff. Sabbath ensured a day was set apart — for people freed from Egypt — to foster a more appropriate relationship to labor. The seventh year of the sabbatical cycle was a time when debts would be canceled in the community. Yahweh’s laws even factored in grace for those who would either mismanage resources or fall on hard times. Meanwhile, to guard against extractive practices that strip lands of their ability to produce, the land was to be left untouched, allowing it to find its own rest. One of the most radical laws, Jubilee, mandated the return of land to its original owner after seven sabbatical cycles, or 49 years.

In each case, these laws were cyclical, circling back to purify processes that can go awry in a community ecosystem. Today, echoes of this wisdom can be witnessed across the country. For example, we can look to the Moravian church in Winston-Salem, N.C., that bought close to $3.3 million worth of debt to help people in its community. To celebrate the burning of this debt, the church partied and called it a Jubilee celebration. In Ohio, the United Methodist Church joined the Land Back Movement, returning three acres of land to the Wyandotte Nation. They, too, celebrated like it was Jubilee.

To think about a just economy is to consider how justice can circle back, and how Jubilee can become a more regular occurrence in our society. It’s not just any freedom, but the kind that can lead to a conversation — and then perhaps a party.