https:\/\/youtu.be\/JGGcqhKShQ8<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\nLove divine, all loves excelling,\nJoy of heaven to earth come down,\nFix in us thy humble dwelling,\nAll thy faithful mercies crown.\nJesu, thou art all compassion,\nPure, unbounded love thou art;\nVisit us with thy salvation,\nEnter every trembling heart.\n\nBreathe, O breathe thy loving Spirit\nInto every troubled breast,\nLet us all in thee inherit,\nLet us find that second rest.\nTake away the love of sinning,\nAlpha and Omega be;\nEnd of faith, as its beginning,\nSets our hearts at liberty.\n\nCome almighty to deliver,\nLet us all thy life receive;\nSuddenly return and never,\nNever more thy temples leave.\nThee we would be always blessing,\nServe thee as thy hosts above,\nPray, and praise thee without ceasing,\nGlory in thy perfect love.\n\nFinish then thy new creation,\nPure and spotless let us be;\nLet us see thy great salvation,\nPerfectly restored in thee;\nChanged from glory into glory,\nTill in heaven we take our place,\nTill we cast our crowns before thee,\nLost in wonder, love and Praise.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nReflection<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Parable of the Unmerciful Servant in Matthew 18 is impossible to understand if we don\u2019t take into account the Jewish tradition of the Jubilee. The Jubilee was the sabbath of all sabbaths. Every forty-nine years (\u201cseven times seven\u201d), says Leviticus 25, all debts are to be forgiven, all slaves and indentured servants are to be set free, and everyone should be allowed to return to his or her ancestral land. The Jubilee was a way to bring a community back into equilibrium by dissolving all inequities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During Jesus\u2019 day, heavy taxes had forced many peasants to borrow against their land to pay those taxes off. This only pushed the problem down the line, however. Rarely could anyone make enough to pay off both debts and future taxes, so the debts kept piling up until the creditor decided to recoup his loses by selling the peasant into slavery along with his family and all he owned. Jesus tells his parable in this context. One day, the creditor \u2014 or king \u2014 decides to collect on his folks\u2019 outstanding debts and runs across someone who owes him so much that paying it off is laughable. The debtor begs for more time, but the creditor decides to do something even more radical and generous. He forgives the debt altogether. He performs, in other words, the Jubilee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can imagine the financial cost such forgiveness required. The king was out a whole bunch of money. Plenty of creditors in Jesus\u2019 day worried about the same thing. If they followed the Jewish tradition of Jubilee, they risked losing much of their capital. No wonder, then, that a workaround was created. They called it the prosboul<\/em>. A creditor was allowed to transfer a debt he owned to the courts before the year of the Jubilee and then recall it after the Jubilee had passed, thus circumventing the Jewish law\u2019s requirement to forgive that debt. <\/p>\n\n\n\nJesus\u2019 parable marks him as a staunch opponent of the prosboul<\/em>. Not only did it undermine the whole point of the Jubilee and so of God\u2019s intention for the community, it helped contribute to the impoverishment of the poor. John Howard Yoder, in The Politics of Jesus<\/em>, explains:<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe sabbatical year [or Jubilee], like the day of sabbath, must be practiced. They are both meant to liberate people and not to enslave them. This is why the prosboul<\/em>, like all the other human traditions, which were added to the law in order to attenuate its revolutionary and liberating character, called forth Jesus\u2019 indignation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nIn passages like this one in Matthew 18, we see Jesus reflecting upon and disparaging large social injustices while simultaneously expressing concern for hurting individuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Luke 4, this is how Jesus describes his salvation project altogether. Preaching in the local synagogue, he applies a quote from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah to himself, saying, \u201cThe Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord\u2019s favor.\u201d It is possible to interpret this passage in completely spiritual terms as only about release from individual sins, but to do so would we would have to discount the Jews\u2019 very real experience of economic poverty, political oppression, and even physical illness \u2014 all of which were a consistent theme among the Old Testament prophets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are quite a few passages in the Gospels like the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant that show Jesus had large social concerns in mind as well as care for the individual soul \u2014 such as when he overturned the moneychangers\u2019 tables in the Temple, which was as much a complaint against robbing the poor as it was a desecration of God\u2019s space. (See Matthew 21:12-17.) But, maybe the most powerful one for me is simply his command that we love our neighbors as ourselves. I believe that there are times when it is impossible to love our neighbors well without addressing the large social issues that cause them harm, as Jesus did with the prosboul<\/em>. We might today think of the history of American slavery, which was finally only dissolved by war and legislation. <\/p>\n\n\n\nBut, not every issue is so obvious. In a study published by the Heller Institute at Brandeis University<\/strong><\/a>, Tatjana Meschede and Joanna Taylor compared black and white college-educated families with regard to their financial status. It was believed education would level the playing field, but that is not what they discovered. Instead, the most important factor was receiving an inheritance. \u201cAmong college-educated black families, about 13 percent get an inheritance of more than $10,000, as opposed to about 41 percent of white, college-educated families. And about 16 percent of those white families receive more than one such inheritance, versus 2 percent of black families.\u201d Indeed, on average, white families received upwards of $150,00 in total inheritance whereas black families received less than $40,000. Here\u2019s how Meschede and Taylor explain their findings: \u201cWhen we think about wealth, often we think about our individual standing, but it\u2019s so strongly linked to what\u2019s happening in your family and in your networks. We think about education as the great equalizer when, clearly, it\u2019s not. It\u2019s much more complex than that. There\u2019s so much more needed in order to support the black community toward closing the racial wealth gap.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis is what we call a \u201csystemic\u201d problem, and I have to believe that Jesus cares about this sort of poverty and injustice that has plagued and continues to plague one particular group of people more than others. So, how do we love our neighbors in a systemic situation such as this? I think Jesus\u2019 life and teachings suggest that we can do a lot. At the individual level, Sara and I could (should?) give away our inheritance to help close that gap. We might be able to help one, maybe two, families. But, the systemic issue would continue to impact millions of others. Putting a bandaid on a bullet wound does little to solve the real, underlying problem. As with those crushing taxes and loopholes like the prosboul<\/em> in Jesus\u2019 day, God\u2019s command to love our neighbors as ourselves requires, I believe, that we also work to fix the big, underlying problem years of unjust laws and behaviors have caused. <\/p>\n\n\n\nSo, this is why I believe actively working toward large, social change is part of my calling as a Christian. It\u2019s one big way I can love my neighbor and one big way I can be like Jesus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Closing Prayer<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nForgiving God, keep us today in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace each of us may proclaim your truth with boldness, and perform your justice with compassion, for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ACTIVISM For our devotion today, I thought I\u2019d talk about how I came to see Jesus as addressing large social change \u2014 what we today might call \u201cactivism\u201d \u2014 as well as the change of individual hearts and minds. Over the past few weeks, since the murder of George Floyd on Memorial Day, the question […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"2880","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35955],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/wyomingbaptistchurch.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/sermons\/2020\/04\/Devotional_20200416.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wyomingbaptistchurch.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5286"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wyomingbaptistchurch.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wyomingbaptistchurch.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wyomingbaptistchurch.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wyomingbaptistchurch.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5286"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wyomingbaptistchurch.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5740,"href":"https:\/\/wyomingbaptistchurch.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5286\/revisions\/5740"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wyomingbaptistchurch.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wyomingbaptistchurch.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wyomingbaptistchurch.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wyomingbaptistchurch.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}