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God, Church & Stuff, Society

Rethinking Christmas

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Redefining Christmas has been on my mind this year. As I was editing a like-minded blog entry for Church Marketing Sucks, I realized how insane it is that people go into debt for Christmas. How crazy it is that we’re so obsessed with shopping that people get trampled. How sad it is that people feel the need to apologize when they can’t buy as many presents as they bought last year.

How ironic that the celebration of a baby born in shit and straw has become so materialistic. Mary and Joseph had very little in that stable. They didn’t have a fancy crib with a light up mobile. They didn’t have an iPod to soothe the crying baby. They didn’t have a credit card to reserve a better room. But they had more than they needed.

  • Wouldn’t it be cool if Christmas was a time when people got out of debt instead of into it?
  • Wouldn’t it change your city if instead of trampling people to get gifts, we lined up to serve one another?
  • Wouldn’t it be refreshing if instead of packing our own shelves and closets we gave gifts to people who really need them?

I’m rethinking Christmas. I hope you are too.

“The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor.” (Isaiah 61:1-2/Luke 4:18-19)

God, Church & Stuff, Society

The Wacky Jubilee

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Last Sunday the sermon at church covered a little known bit of Jewish law called the Sabbath Year and the Year of Jubilee. I had heard about the latter in 1999 with Jubilee 2000 and the Drop the Debt Campaign (this perhaps marked the beginning of Bono’s most public crusader years), and produced perhaps my favorite quote from Bono which nicely summarizes the concepts:

“I’m learning more and more about Jubilee—the biblical concept that every seven days there’s a Sabbath and every seven years the land is to lie fallow and every seven times seven, i.e. in the 50th year, a year of grace, your debts were forgiven, slaves set free, etc. Quite punk rock for God. In fact, there are a lot of squeakies involved in Jubilee (Christians are hard to tolerate, I don’t know how Jesus does it … I’m one of them).”

What an incredible concept. Leviticus 25 details all the rules (interesting that nobody ever quotes that bit of Leviticus) and Wikipedia gives a vague overview

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