A Peep! A Pffft! And a Skeek!

New Year's Eve
December 31, 2000

By
The Rev. Ann M. Smith

Based on readings from Revelation 21:1-7 & Luke 4:16-21

There is a story in "Does God have a Big Toe?" called the Announcing Tool that relates in a whimsical way the story of God's call for Jubilee. (Read story: p. 85)

Jesus proclaimed the call for Jubilee. He had been through a wilderness experience. He had returned in the Spirit with newfound power. It was time for him to begin his earthly mission. It was to his hometown of Nazareth that he went. What better place to make a new beginning! There in the synagogue Jesus used words familiar to his listeners, the words of Isaiah announcing the year of liberation.

But Jesus ended with a statement that completely changed the focus of the passage. "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing," he told his listeners. With those words, he is proclaiming salvation for all, hope for all. Isaiah is prophesying the restoration of Israel as the people of God. Jesus is bringing that restoration into the very present as a personal act in the life of everyone who embraces God's saving act of grace. He is opening the way for us to proclaim Jubilee.

How is the year of the Lord's favour being fulfilled in our lives? The beginning of a new year stirs in all of us a longing for a fresh start, another chance. How much more the beginning of a new millennium! Such moments of openness for redemption and renewal, gratitude for God's great gifts to us, sorrow for past wrong lead us towards commitment and new endeavours. Christians around the world have been expressing their hope for a new beginning by recognizing this three-year period around the millennium as a time for Jubilee.

The first two years focused on economic disparity in the world – the first year on the alleviation of Third World debt, and last year on consideration of redistributing wealth. Despite the fact that the World Council of Churches collected over six million signatures calling for the G7 countries to act out of compassion for the poorest nations in our world, the initiative has gone largely unnoticed. The ram's horn is hard to play and even harder to hear.

In this third year our Jubilee initiative focuses on the theme of Renewal of the Earth. It is a timely theme that clearly touches on issues nationally and globally that relate to the environment, Aboriginal Peoples and spirituality. The call for Jubilee is a call to a new way of seeing ourselves in relation to our home, the Earth.

We live in a technological age. The increasing importance of technology in our lives has led us into a culture that alienates us further and further from our agrarian roots. Our Christian faith has often led us to restrict the focus of our lives to our relationship with God or with one another. Our actions affect the earth. It is time for us to recognize the debt that we owe to the earth for our very existence. It is time for us to widen our focus.

There is an Ojibway legend that says that the Creator has called the Aboriginal peoples to be the bearers of the Sacred Fire. When they moved to a new place, it was the sacred duty of the people to carry the fire with them to kindle it in the new community. The Creator, they believe, will permit six fires to be kindled in their journey. The kindling of the seventh fire signals the beginning of a new creation. That sounds rather like John the Divine in the Book of Revelation. Many Aboriginal people believe that it is time to kindle the seventh fire. It must be kindled by the diverse people of the world – red people, black people, yellow people, white people. And so in our service we face in four directions representing the diversity of our world. We make a commitment to a new creation.

We were warned in our opening story that the ram's horn is hard to play. The new year is hard to play too. But God will teach us. By the end of one lesson from God we will be blowing the ram's horn without a peep! A pfft! Or a skeek! We will be ushering in God's new creation.