October 26, 2025
The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost
Every time we get to the last few weeks of the liturgical year, someone asks why we call this season Jubilee. Usually, I just give a short explanation to the person who is asking me. Today, however, I want to say a bit more about jubilee, since starting right now, Seekers is beginning our Golden Jubilee anniversary year.
The word jubilee is derived from a Hebrew word, יובל (yovel), which is used in the Hebrew Scriptures to describe the last year in a cycle of seven times seven years. As you have probably noticed in your own study of scripture, seven is an important number in our deep tradition. In the opening chapters of Genesis, God is depicted as resting from all the work that went into creating the universe. This period of rest is emphasized in Exodus in what has come to be known as the fourth of the Ten Commandments (or Ten Words, which is a better translation):
Remember the seventh day and keep it holy! For six days you will labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a rest for the Holy One. Do no work on that day, neither you nor your daughter nor your son, nor your workers—women or men—nor your animals, nor the foreigner who lives among you. For in the six days the Holy One made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that they hold, but rested on the seventh day; this is why the Holy One has blessed the seventh day and made it sacred. [Exodus 20:8-11]
Later, we learn that just as the Hebrew people were taught to rest every seventh day, they were expected to allow the land to rest and to cancel all debts every seventh year. And after seven cycles of seven years, everything was to be reset to a new beginning. As we read in Leviticus 25:10-12:
Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines. For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields.
Or, as Diana Butler Bass puts it in her Sunday Musings for July 26 of this year (thank you Elizabeth, for the link!):
Every seven years, all debts were to be cancelled (Deuteronomy 15:1-2). All debts. And to really whoop it up, every forty-nine years, all land was to be returned to its original owners. All enslaved people were freed. The land laid fallow to renew itself. No one was to work the soil for an entire year; people were to simply live from the land’s natural abundance (Lev. 25: 8–13).
…
The Bible calls us to Sabbath and depicts a world without work, a world with no debt, one founded on full equality, human dignity, and care for the earth. [Diana Butler Bass, 7/26/25https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-091 ]
Today, the word jubilee refers to a celebration, a special occasion, and, very often, a 50th anniversary. However, as Butler Bass points out, in the Hebrew scriptures, jubilee is not just a celebration or a marking of an anniversary. It is a call to restorative justice, to freedom, and to awareness that even the earth needs to rest from time to time.
It is this understanding of jubilee that Jesus references when he reads from Isaiah:
The Spirit of our God is upon me: because the Most High has anointed me to bring Good News to those who are poor. God has sent me to proclaim liberty to those held captive, recovery of sight to those who are blind,and release to those in prison—to proclaim the year of our God’s favor. [Luke 4:18-19, compare to Isaiah 61:1-2]
With all that talk of good news for those who are poor, cancellation of debts, and freedom from slavery and captivity, it seems to me that there is a direct connection between our current conversation around reparations, many indigenous understandings of reciprocal relationships among humans and the natural world, and the biblical concept of Jubilee. Alas, there isn’t enough time for me to explore all that today, so I’ll leave that for another conversation. Today, I want to consider the connection between jubilee and this morning’s gospel reading. It’s not exactly direct or explicit, so bear with me as I try to find the threads that connect them.
As we’ve just heard, Jesus tells a story about a Pharisee and a tax collector. The Pharisee practically breaks an arm patting himself on the back, remembering all the ways that he has done the right thing and thanking God that he is not like that no-good scum tax collector over there. Meanwhile, the tax collector, thinking of all the ways that he has cheated the powerless and bribed the powerful, simply asks God to have mercy. At the end of the story, Jesus says that the tax collector “went home right with God, while the Pharisee didn’t. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, while those who humble themselves will be exalted.” [Luke 18:9-14]
The more I reflect on this passage, the more troubled and confused I become. As it becomes increasingly clear that many of the people currently in power are greedy, dishonest, and just, plain mean, it is easy to compare their public behavior and policies with the ones that I approve of, to call one evil and the other manifestly good (at least by comparison). Like the Pharisee in the story, I want to be on the side of goodness and righteousness. I’m not an adulterer, I pay my tithes and my taxes, I write weekly spiritual reports, I vote for public education and SNAP and universal health care. But those guys, the ones in power – well, aren’t they all liars, hypocrites, and thieves, taking bribes or bribing others, oppressing widows and orphans, and throwing innocent into prison without even checking their citizenship status? Thank God I’m not like them.
Uh-oh….. Well, we already know what Jesus would say about that attitude!
Just a few chapters earlier, Luke records Jesus’ telling his disciples to “love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you.” [Luke 6:27-28] And in case we missed that, he expands on the point a few verses later:
Love your enemies and do good to them. Lend without expecting repayment, and your reward will be great. You’ll rightly be called children of the Holy One, since God is good even to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be compassionate, as your loving God is compassionate. Don’t judge, and you won’t be judged. Don’t condemn, and you won’t be condemned. Pardon, and you’ll be pardoned. [Luke 6:35-37]
So when Jesus says that the tax collector went home right with God and the Pharisee did not, it seems to me that he is saying that whatever good the Pharisee thinks he has been doing by following the rules, he has missed the point. The Pharisee has compared himself to the tax collector and decided that he is better than that other guy.
But Jesus tells us that when we imagine that we are better, more holy, more righteous than anyone else, we are no better than those who we condemn. The reason that the tax collector went home right with God is that he was honest about his need for mercy and forgiveness. He didn’t say that he was the worst person in the world, nor did he deny responsibility for his actions. He simply admitted he had done wrong, and trusted that God’s love was big enough to forgive him.
Now, I realize that people who are going around deliberately making everyone else’s lives miserable are probably more likely to be as self-righteous as the Pharisee than as humble as the tax collector in the story. And I’m not going to pretend that it’s easy to love and pray for people who are destroying the rule of law, putting people in prison arbitrarily, and cutting off aid to people who will have to choose between heating their homes and getting medical attention or even buying food for their families. I would much rather feel self-righteous than see their humanity. But if I want to claim that I follow Jesus, I need to see the humanity of both the Pharisee and the tax collector, holding them both with compassion and care as I see my own behavior in each of them
It seems to me that the connection between the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector and God’s instruction to observe those sabbath and jubilee years is a vision of a world founded on equality and human dignity rather than hierarchy and oppression, a world founded on love and grace rather debt and judgment.
And I believe that is what we are called to live out here at Seekers. A little over a month ago, on September 14, we started a conversation about the future of Seekers Church that is grounded in our values of shared leadership, deep commitment, peace, social justice, inclusiveness, creativity, and trust in the leading of the Holy Spirit. It is now time to enter more deeply into that conversation, to find new forms that express these values in ways that speak to people in this time and place, to make whatever changes are necessary to our structures and practices.
By now, most of you will have seen the email that John M sent out on behalf of the Servant Leadership Team, inviting you to join one or two of the four working groups we envisioned. In case you are as behind in reading your email as I often get, the groups will focus on the following areas:
- Finding new language to describe our faith and our church
- Our demographics and our outreach
- Imagining new paths to leadership in Seekers
- Taking action for justice
For a fuller explanation of what these areas involve, look for that email from John. We hope that you will let us know which of them you are most interested in. And if you are interested in something that doesn’t seem to fit one of the four areas named, choose the group that seems closest to your reasons for being interested in whatever it is. In the initial group meetings, the group can decide if your topic is something they want to address. If not, you can explore another group that seems closer to your concerns.
As Seekers begins to envision the future beyond the celebration of our Golden Jubilee—the 50th anniversary of the founding of Seekers in 1976—let us remember that original vision of jubilee, in which every person is valued, the land is cared for and respected, all debts are erased, and all live in harmony, love, and grace. In this season of Jubilee, let us remember to trust in the presence of God, in us, around us, and through us, in every moment of every day. Amen.