Cacophony and Complacency

Some days I’m pretty sick of myself. I’ve had 48.5 years to get used to the alternating cacophony and complacency in my brain. Look how well those words mirror each other in print. Evil twins.

So I decided to do something about it. Convicted that I was pretty likely to go through the second half of my life with a “business as usual” approach to my faith, I decided to take seriously the Biblical concept of Jubilee. I was entering into my 49th year as a white, affluent, middle-aged, fairly clueless American woman (not to say that I’ve been middle-aged for all of those 49 years, mind you), and I asked God to help me think through what it would look like to live out the principles of “jubilee.”

I will need a jubilee year, and maybe two, to live into whatever I learn and hopefully begin to reverse the trend. I’ve had 48.5 years of American ethnocentric conditioning. 48.5 years of comfort and ease and entitlement. 48.5 years of ignoring many things under the guise of “there’s only so much one person can do.” And hopefully I’ll have 48.5 years more (give or take a decade or two on the short end) to rectify some things and reorient towards the things God cares most about.

My own jubilee call popped into my head one day, some association of the number “49” (and my approaching birthday) with “jubilee” and a “What would that look like?” pondering. Jubilee, in the Old Testament, is the ultimate Sabbath, the culmination of the seven-year cycles. Seven, that number of Biblical perfection, times seven. Forty nine. Leviticus 25 is the main Scriptural mandate for this, while other passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy challenged the Hebrews similarly. Letting land lie fallow for the benefit of the poor, setting slaves free after seven years of service, and a year of remission in which those who have debts will be released from them are concepts espoused.

Even a cursory reading of these would convince you that my trying to live out the letter of this concept (vs. the spirit of it) would be ludicrous and legalistic. I don’t have land. I have no slaves. No one owes me money. And besides, Jesus’ arrival on the scene was the ultimate jubilee, the redemption of all that was amiss in our inability to live as we were commanded. Yet it’s incumbent on us as modern-day believers to do our parts to usher His kingdom into our world here and now, even though the completion and perfection of the new heavens and new earth are not within our power or assignment to bring about.

For my purposes, therefore, I’m thinking of my jubilee year (which could become two years, satisfying those folks who read Leviticus to mean that the 49th year is the jubilee and those who see it as the 50th) as a time of reorientation, not a time of ultimate repentance and perfection. Good thing huh?

In Old Testament times, the year of jubilee was announced with a trumpet on the Day of Atonement, so repentance certainly is in order (actually… when is it not?). That’s how I began my reorientation “project” on January 1, 2009. I really have little else to give as I start, other than a weak prayer of “Make me want to live in ways I don’t yet want to, for the sake of loving you, God, with all that I have, and loving my neighbor as myself. I am willing to be changed and even turned upside down.”

I also started with questions, disciplines and external actions.

My questions:

- How will this affect my husband and young adult children living at home? How can I bring them into it without forcing it on them?

- What sources should I turn to to learn more?

- What will the challenges be? What will the default slacker positions be?

- Whom will I inevitably offend?

A few of the orienting disciplines I am undertaking (though ideally not legalistically) include:

- Scripture reading and reflection (starting with Isaiah 58 and Micah 6:8)

- Expressing gratitude, even when it’s hard

- Prayer categories including “Bold Prayers,” “Nailing Sins to the Cross,” “The Old Has Gone; the New Has Come,” “Debts I Must Forgive (Some of Them Repeatedly)”

- Study, reading and listening in areas of environmentalism, economics, racism, slavery, resource distribution, world history and current events.

I’m examining and reflecting on the following concepts with a commitment to action and not just head game analysis:

- Redistribution of property (my excess at the expense of others’ lack)

- Forgiveness of debt (including, it seems, a lot of things that I erroneously feel I owe to society or some unseen critic)

- A cycle of rest after seasons of striving (emotionally, spiritually, and in terms of deriving my value from what I do and not who I am)

- Expressing gratitude to people (known and unknown) who have sacrificed for my benefit

- Mindfulness of the effect of my lifestyle on the rest of the world

Already, about a month into this undertaking, I have seen how easy it is to simply make a new and improved set of rules to follow and how joyless that is. I have seen how quick I am to beat myself up because I don’t know more about important issues and I don’t care enough or quickly do something about each new thing I learn. I’m suffering from compassion fatigue already, and I see that I’ll need to extend grace to my efforts and take this as a slow turning around of a great big cruise ship that was heading slightly in the wrong direction instead of a change of plans for the motor-boat captain who decides to run back to the dock for more beer.

I’m blogging about this and will be giving quarterly updates here at Burnside Writer’s Collective. The journey of one middle-aged woman wouldn’t be particularly interesting or fruitful on its own, but I do have hopes that my jubilee year can be effective in inviting others in to think about the same things (don’t wait until you’re 49!) and that I can learn from others who came to these explorations more naturally, with less contradictory preconditioning, or earlier. Join me. Help me. Read me at www.jubileeyear.wordpress.com.