ON PROCLAIMING “THE ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD”

AND THE MILLENNIUM MOMENT.

By Mark Harris
Chair of the Deputation of the Diocese of Delaware

 

The Presiding Bishop has published and widely disseminated a letter to the Church carrying the banner, “Proclaiming the Acceptable Year of the Lord.” In it he sets the context for the celebration of a Jubilee year, and names Jubilee as the theme for General Convention in Denver in July 2000. It is perhaps useful then to spend the time to assay this document, for it and its follow-up mailings will be before us as we move to Convention.

 

The call that the Episcopal Church be a “people of Jubilee” takes place against the backdrop of a broad ecumenical movement calling the world’s richest nations to cancel the international debt of the world’s poorest countries, using the occasion of the millennium as a marker. (For further web resources on this, look at http://www.j2000usa.org/)  The biblical Jubilee cancellation of debts is the formative image in this vision of justice for the world’s poor. Such international debt relief is a visionary and prophetic concept that I believe warrants our full and prolonged attention. This Church ought to join with others in support of this vision.

 

But the call for debt relief is only indirectly referenced in one sentence of that letter, “From there, we move outward into the community and world addressing the concerns of injustice and suffering that plague our global family with unbearable debt, crushing oppression and plundering of the earth’s resources, issues that cry out for liberation.” The letter makes no reference to the ecumenical origin of the “Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation” idea, but only to the JPIC Committee of the Episcopal Church. Indeed the letter would too easily lead us to assume the agenda of Jubilee and the call for a Jubilee Year is interior to the Episcopal Church just as are its own internal crises.

 

The problem is, of course, that the Presiding Bishop must encourage us as Episcopalians to joint action on the issue of international debt and on other justice issues at a time when we are indeed beset with internal problems. The use of the idea of Jubilee as a basis for an argument for international debt forgiveness has become attached to other concerns that suggest that Jubilee is a call to “lie fallow”, to “take respite from the soil of conflict that confounds us.” The temptation is too strong to mix the ecumenical agenda of debt forgiveness, and its use of Jubilee imagery, with the Episcopal Church internal wish for relief from conflict.

 

The year 2000 is too tempting a target not to be used rhetorically for whatever reason. The Pope is using it, so are many other Christian churches, so are we. Yet, the truth be told, there is no more reason for the year 2000 to be a Jubilee year than the year 2002.  What makes Jubilee Jubilee is the Sabbath sense of rest, a notion of profound and enduring value only if it is lived out as a discipline of life. To live as Jubilee people is to believe in a justice in which we put the burdens down (be they crippling debt or debilitating community discord, or even creative action.)  And that, of course, is not a belief that is temporally manifested in one particular year, but is a belief that flows through all our lives. The trouble with naming this a Jubilee year is that once done, is that it for the next fifty years?  Of course not!  If it becomes too much a theme it becomes too little a vision.  Themes are not visions; nor is “proclaiming the acceptable year of the Lord” the Acceptable Year of the Lord made real in our sight.

 

The Presiding Bishop knows this when he calls us to a “process of re-visioning.”  Louie Crew knows this when he says that, “at Denver we could surprise the world with an irenic, joy-filled gathering, for Jubilee's sake! Pray for Pentecost to begin in you and in me.” See ( http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/chartecusa.html) (The word ‘irenic’ is seldom used. I had to look it up. It is great in this context, for it mean peaceful or tending to promote peace, especially with reference to ecclesiastical difference. The perfect application of a rare word.)

 

Process and doing things for the sake of Jubilee is quite different from a short-term theme. There is in this letter from the Presiding Bishop a call to an ongoing spiritual engagement with God’s Jubilee. The Jubilee called for is a reshaping of our relationships away from works righteousness to joyful participation in God’s abundant grace. It calls us to liberation from the burdens we place on one another; it is indeed irenic.

 

There is much of great value in this letter. But it needs work. (What doesn’t?) It needs work because:

(i)                           The international debt crisis is too central to issues of justice and peace to be linked to the solution of the Episcopal Church’s internal divisions. These are concerns of quite different types. This letter makes the link seem appropriate, for it neither lifts up the ecumenical character of the first or the tribally peculiar character of the second. But we must be clear, the call for a Jubilee forgiveness of debt is quite a different thing from the call for greater mutual “lifting of burdens” within our Church. Both have some compelling features, but they ought not be linked as if justice to the poor were to be confused with, or available only if we have, charity among ourselves.

(ii)                         It is too easy, and too tempting, to take the idea that we might “take respite from the soil of conflict that confounds us” and turn it into a practice of polite but distant disengagement with those with whom we are in profound disagreement. This letter promotes a time for “the land to lie fallow.” If that fallow time includes the work of General Convention, how then will we proceed?  I do not yet see any real connection between “fallow” time and “fullness” of time. The Acceptable Year of the Lord is not a fallow, but a full time. If there is to be a Jubilee that encompasses the Episcopal Church it lies somewhere in Louie Crew’s notion of the possibility of an “irenic, joy-filled gathering, for Jubilee's sake.” The fullness of such a joyful gathering is our willingness to resolve conflict by taking refuge in God’s abundance, not by managing the avoidance of conflict. The vision of this letter must be clearly distinguished from avoidance of conflict.

(iii)                       Proclaiming the year 2000 the Acceptable Year of the Lord is not for the Presiding Bishop, his staff, the Executive Council, the House of Bishops, or even the people and clergy to do, and not indeed even for the Pope, unless there is the claim that such proclamation is by prophetic utterance. Without that claim the words “acceptable year of the Lord” lose their power as Word of God and simply become, like other forms of millennial hype, an instrument of persuasion. They become, in other words, a theme, and finally a vanity of our dreams for an easy time in hard times, and an idol.  If on the other hand, there is in this proclamation prophetic utterance, let it stand on its own. The Acceptable Year of the Lord is not a device or standard for some battle against the undue burden of internal conflict in one small Church community or even in the Anglican Communion. It is a proclamation so profound that only in vision and in the Incarnational presence of God in Jesus Christ has it ever been made. It is a proclamation to be used with profound caution and great humility. Nothing about this letter suggests such a vision has taken place. There is only the “sense of awe about being alive as history crosses from one millennium to another.” On the day after the new year such awe will dissipate.

 

The letter from the Presiding Bishop needs work because it is confusing, confounding, and just a little presumptuous. Then again, so might my comments be. 

 

Saying all that, I nonetheless believe the Presiding Bishop is right to call us to support a spirit of Jubilee. I don’t think such a call needs to be made yet another millennium event.  I believe the Presiding Bishop is right to call us to engagement in our own conflicts in a way that acknowledges the burdens we place on one another by our own search for faithful and just responses to the issues we face.  In that sense we should pray constantly for a spirit of Jubilee. At the same time, this is no time to step back from the call to welcome and continue to welcome people of color, women or gay and lesbian persons, friends all, in the full life of the church. And lest we sit smug in our recent past history, see Bishop Harris’s scathing commentary on stepping back in her Philadelphia Sermon. (go to web site http://www.diomass.org/HarrisSermon.htm) 

 

So how do we open a way to full inclusion that does not at the same time exclude? The practice of inclusion means the practice of loving our enemies. It does not release us from conflict; rather it binds us to our adversaries in ways that will be only burdensome unless there is a spirit of Jubilee, in which we find redemption and release. There is work to be done.

 

Let us look for the materials to come with great interest and in great good hope.