A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central
Baptist Church
3rd September
2023
Genesis 4.1-16
Deuteronomy 15.1-2, 7-11
When I was at Greenbelt last weekend, I attended a seminar
in which the speaker was making the case
that much of the violence that exists in human societies
stems from land ownership and property rights.
Their reasoning was compelling,
and I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week.
In essence, the theory is humans have evolved our systems of structural violence,
specifically to safeguard ownership of land and property,
and to secure barns in which to stockpile our harvest
to build a surplus year-on-year.
So land-ownership and wealth creation are two sides of the same coin,
and protection of these assets leads to violence.
Translate this into the contemporary context,
and one might suggest that the current global economic system,
built on globalised capital assets, is not so different.
The scale may be different, but the idea of ownership
based on capital acquisitions such as land, stocks, and produce,
is simply the extension of the great shift in human society
that took place at the agrarian revolution.
The scale of violence attached to it in the modern world
is also, of course, on a far wider scale,
as we are no longer protecting a field or a barn,
but rather entire nations go to war over land and assets.
Historically speaking, therefore, it is not unreasonable to suggest
that the move from hunter-gatherer to tiller of the field
marked a profound and enduring change in the way humans see themselves
in relation to both the land, and to one another.
It was the domestication of wheat, around 10,000 years ago,
that marked this dramatic turn
in the development and evolution of human civilization,
because it was wheat that enabled the transition
from a hunter-gatherer and nomadic pastoral society
to a more sedentary agrarian one.
Without wheat, there would be no system of farming
where one plot of land can generate enough food
to sustain those who live elsewhere.
Without wheat, there would be no surplus to store away,
to see the wealthy through periods of famine.
Without wheat, there could be no cities,
because it is only wheat that enables some to till the ground
and others to build buildings and roads.
Without wheat - there is no viable human societal level
bigger than the hunter gatherer tribe.
The problem we have, however, as modern city-dwelling citizens,
is that we evolved in the tribe, we are hardwired for the tribe.
And so even those of us who live in cities
end up triablising, fragmenting into our cliques, or networks, or gangs;
and as we defend our ideological territories
from others who might be considered threatening,
violence comes lurking at the door of our homes.
The main alternative to our global system based agrarian-capitalism
is that of hunter-gatherer-nomadic,
where there is common ownership of the land,
and where people relate and live at the local level.
And there are still some hunter-gatherer societies in the world,
where land ownership is understood very differently.
Societies such as those of the Australian Aborigines,
or the Okiek people of Kenya
or the North American Arctic Inuit groups,
live in relationship to the land in ways that are much less exploitative
than those societies which have adopted wheat-based food production
and the land ownership that comes with it.
In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,
Yuval Noah Harari makes the fascinating argument
that rather than humans domesticating wheat,
it is actually better to think of it the other way around,
with wheat having domesticated humans.
So much of our effort as a species over the last 10,000 years
has gone into the preservation and proliferation of wheat,
for the simple reason that without it, many of us would die, and die fast.
In the service of wheat, we have exploited the ground,
and systematised violence to preserve our ownership of it.
And in human evolutionary terms,
this is all quite recent,
recent enough, in fact, to have still been a live issue
when the oral traditions behind Hebrew Bible were taking shape,
some three- to four-thousand years ago.
The biblical story of Cain killing Abel
can be read as an echo of the tensions of the agrarian revolution
which occurred in the Fertile Crescent of the Levant, which includes Israel,
as a direct result of the domestication of wheat.
And the story of Cain and Abel tells of the triumph
of those who till the ground
over those who tend the sheep.
But things aren’t entirely clear-cut,
because intriguingly God rejects Cain’s offering of grain,
but receives Abel’s offering of meat.
This is what gets Cain so upset:
he’s the tiller of the ground, the master of the new technology,
he’s feeding his family and far more besides,
but when he brings his grain offering to the Lord,
the Lord looks the other way.
When it becomes clear that Cain is angry,
God issues a challenge to him:
‘If you do well you will be received,
but if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door.’
At this stage in human history, it was not a foregone conclusion
that the land-based agrarian system would lead to good.
The divine jury was still out, it seems, on this new food technology,
with people tilling the ground, and claiming ownership of the land.
And there is a strong argument from 4000 years of history
that it has not, in the end, led to an entirely good outcome.
We still have poverty and starvation on a global scale,
despite having the capacity to produce enough food to feed everyone.
The possibility exists for us to have a system of food distribution and land management
which revolutionises human flourishing,
releasing people from the burden of generating their own food,
and enabling the glories of cultural growth and city living,
and to do so without resorting to violence.
This is the challenge of the story of Cain and Abel,
with God’s warning to Cain,
and it is a challenge that Israel has wrestled with throughout its story,
and it’s a challenge that we continue to wrestle with today.
And this is where I want to move us into consideration
of an intriguing economic model that runs through the Hebrew Bible.
It is the three related concepts of Sabbath, Sabbatical, and Jubilee.
The Sabbath is the idea that it is not good to work continually,
that one day in seven should be a day of rest.
We’re going to come back to this next week,
but it’s worth noting now that this is the base layer
of the broader economic concepts of Sabbatical and Jubilee.
The Sabbatical year, which we heard about in our reading for this morning,
is the idea that every seventh year, there is a financial re-set,
with the forgiveness of debts and remission of obligations.
And the Jubilee year occurs in every 50th year, after seven cycles of Sabbaticals,
so with seven times seven being 49, the 50th year is the big re-set,
with the freeing of slaves, and crucially the returning of land
back to its original tribal allocations.
Inherent in these systems of Sabbath, Sabbatical, and Jubilee
is an economic model which acts as counterbalance,
a counterweight to the tendency towards violence and acquisition
which unrestrained capitalism generates,
as Cain and Abel found to their cost.
This system of resetting, or resting the land,
of releasing people from their indebtedness,
is surely one of the most significant economic experiments in human history,
and we find it in our shared scriptures with Judaism
not as an idea to consider but as a divine command.
The challenge is clear:
if we want the benefits of human society,
of money, property, culture and freedom from subsistence labour,
then the only way this can be achieved without violence
is through a carefully regulated system of economic reform.
And to those who suggest that political economic theory
has nothing to do with theology,
God says: ‘Sabbath, Sabbatical and Jubilee’!
This tradition of forgiveness of indebtedness
is rooted deeply within the Christian story also,
Matthew’s version of the Lord’s prayer has Jesus telling his disciples to pray:
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors. (Matt 6.12)
Simon Perry, formerly of this parish,
tells us in his latest book that,
‘Forgiveness of sin’ is a phrase whose root meaning is economic.
In the original language, ‘forgiveness’ means liberty
and ‘sin’ means debt. [1]
He continues:
In an empire that depended on every citizen and slave honouring their debts
– forgiveness of sin (i.e., debt cancellation)
is a dangerous political and economic threat.
For those who were submerged
beneath the Jordan River [in baptism for the forgiveness of sins]
– their debts were consigned to a watery grave.
When they re-surface [from the baptismal waters],
people are declared debt-free,
before their fellow Israelites, before their leaders, and before their God.
So not only is our central ritual of Baptism deeply rooted in the forgiveness of debts,
but so also is our most-recited prayer a plea for emancipation.
Debt-forgiveness is at the heart of our Christian faith,
and it is so because Sabbath, Sabbatical, and Jubilee
are at the heart of our parent faith in ancient Judaism.
Ann Pettifor, the British economist who led the Jubilee 2000 campaign,
reflects on that movement in the book produced this year
to mark the 50th anniversary of the Greenbelt Festival.
It’s a fairly long quote, but I’m going to read it in full,
as she says it better than I could ever do:
Back in 2000 we called it Jubilee.
And we practise it at Greenbelt every year.
It is what the economy needed then
and it is what the economy needs now.
Our economy, the global economy,
the economic system, is wildly out of balance.
As a result both the ecosystem
and the political system are out of balance, too.
To restore balance to nature, to society and to the economy
we need proper, enforced regulation to check imbalances.
We could start with the Jubilee principle.
A form of regulation the Abrahamic religions have practised
for more than 2,000 years
- every seven days, a sabbath;
every seven years, a sabbatical
- needs to be restored and re-applied to the economy.
As I write this another US bank, First Republic
- even bigger than the failed Silicon Valley Bank - has collapsed.
Its imbalances - its excess liabilities
-have been dumped on US taxpayers.
It was brought down by the weight of debts
that spiralled higher as interest rates rose.
It was granted the gift that will correct its imbalances.
According to the IMF, total public and private debt decreased in 2021
to the equivalent of 247 per cent of global gross domestic product,
falling by 10 percentage points from its peak level in 2020.
Expressed in dollar terms, however,
global debt continued to rise, although at a much slower rate,
reaching a record $235 trillion last year.
The number spirals beyond our imagination.
The debt - at more than twice the world's income - will never be repaid in full.
It must be written off, and debtors given a chance to start again.
Just as importantly, credit - the man-made system
of making and meeting obligations, a system we call money
- must be managed to ensure we do not promise
to pay more than we are capable of.
That we do not make monetary promises…
whose fulfilment draws down and destroys the capacity of the ecosystem,
which humanity holds in common for today's and future generations.
In other words, we have to lower consumption
and the extraction and exploitation of both nature's assets,
but also humanity's asset - labour.
We gather every year at Greenbelt
for the opportunity to enjoy our own personal Jubilee.
To reconnect, listen, laugh, sing, dance and rejoice
with those who share our values and beliefs.
We need to take those values out into the world to wage justice
- for nature, for the commons: our seas, atmosphere, land and sky
- and for humanity.
We need to wage justice for the poor, for the homeless,
for those who flee drought, floods, harvest failures and war.
We need to wage justice for peace.
We need a global Jubilee. [2]
Thank you Anne!
Friends, I hope you can see the connections I’m making here,
between land ownership and exploitation,
between wealth acquisition and violence,
and for the need for a new and better way of handling our common resources.
And I hope you can take hope from our scriptures,
that there is a better way open for us,
which is honouring of creation, of humanity, and of God.
But there’s one final connection I want to make,
as we come to gather around the Lord’s table,
to add the eucharistic ritual
to those of baptism and prayer that I’ve already spoken of.
The bread and wine of communion
are the product of grape and grain:
they are the fruits of Cain’s labours.
And the violence of the cross of which they speak
is the violence of Cain killing Abel,
but the message of Christ
is that in the cross violence finds its end,
as the grape and the grain of the agrarian revolution
become the symbols of forgiveness of debts,
or repentance for sins,
and the possibility of a new way of being human.
[1] Perry, Simon. Jesus Farted: The Vulgar Truth of the Biblical Christ (pp. 39-40). Thrydwulf Cambridge. Kindle Edition.
[2] FIFTY, Greenbelt Festivals, 2023.
Deuteronomy 15.1-2, 7-11
When I was at Greenbelt last weekend, I attended a seminar
in which the speaker was making the case
that much of the violence that exists in human societies
stems from land ownership and property rights.
Their reasoning was compelling,
and I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week.
In essence, the theory is humans have evolved our systems of structural violence,
specifically to safeguard ownership of land and property,
and to secure barns in which to stockpile our harvest
to build a surplus year-on-year.
So land-ownership and wealth creation are two sides of the same coin,
and protection of these assets leads to violence.
Translate this into the contemporary context,
and one might suggest that the current global economic system,
built on globalised capital assets, is not so different.
The scale may be different, but the idea of ownership
based on capital acquisitions such as land, stocks, and produce,
is simply the extension of the great shift in human society
that took place at the agrarian revolution.
The scale of violence attached to it in the modern world
is also, of course, on a far wider scale,
as we are no longer protecting a field or a barn,
but rather entire nations go to war over land and assets.
Historically speaking, therefore, it is not unreasonable to suggest
that the move from hunter-gatherer to tiller of the field
marked a profound and enduring change in the way humans see themselves
in relation to both the land, and to one another.
It was the domestication of wheat, around 10,000 years ago,
that marked this dramatic turn
in the development and evolution of human civilization,
because it was wheat that enabled the transition
from a hunter-gatherer and nomadic pastoral society
to a more sedentary agrarian one.
Without wheat, there would be no system of farming
where one plot of land can generate enough food
to sustain those who live elsewhere.
Without wheat, there would be no surplus to store away,
to see the wealthy through periods of famine.
Without wheat, there could be no cities,
because it is only wheat that enables some to till the ground
and others to build buildings and roads.
Without wheat - there is no viable human societal level
bigger than the hunter gatherer tribe.
The problem we have, however, as modern city-dwelling citizens,
is that we evolved in the tribe, we are hardwired for the tribe.
And so even those of us who live in cities
end up triablising, fragmenting into our cliques, or networks, or gangs;
and as we defend our ideological territories
from others who might be considered threatening,
violence comes lurking at the door of our homes.
The main alternative to our global system based agrarian-capitalism
is that of hunter-gatherer-nomadic,
where there is common ownership of the land,
and where people relate and live at the local level.
And there are still some hunter-gatherer societies in the world,
where land ownership is understood very differently.
Societies such as those of the Australian Aborigines,
or the Okiek people of Kenya
or the North American Arctic Inuit groups,
live in relationship to the land in ways that are much less exploitative
than those societies which have adopted wheat-based food production
and the land ownership that comes with it.
In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,
Yuval Noah Harari makes the fascinating argument
that rather than humans domesticating wheat,
it is actually better to think of it the other way around,
with wheat having domesticated humans.
So much of our effort as a species over the last 10,000 years
has gone into the preservation and proliferation of wheat,
for the simple reason that without it, many of us would die, and die fast.
In the service of wheat, we have exploited the ground,
and systematised violence to preserve our ownership of it.
And in human evolutionary terms,
this is all quite recent,
recent enough, in fact, to have still been a live issue
when the oral traditions behind Hebrew Bible were taking shape,
some three- to four-thousand years ago.
The biblical story of Cain killing Abel
can be read as an echo of the tensions of the agrarian revolution
which occurred in the Fertile Crescent of the Levant, which includes Israel,
as a direct result of the domestication of wheat.
And the story of Cain and Abel tells of the triumph
of those who till the ground
over those who tend the sheep.
But things aren’t entirely clear-cut,
because intriguingly God rejects Cain’s offering of grain,
but receives Abel’s offering of meat.
This is what gets Cain so upset:
he’s the tiller of the ground, the master of the new technology,
he’s feeding his family and far more besides,
but when he brings his grain offering to the Lord,
the Lord looks the other way.
When it becomes clear that Cain is angry,
God issues a challenge to him:
‘If you do well you will be received,
but if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door.’
At this stage in human history, it was not a foregone conclusion
that the land-based agrarian system would lead to good.
The divine jury was still out, it seems, on this new food technology,
with people tilling the ground, and claiming ownership of the land.
And there is a strong argument from 4000 years of history
that it has not, in the end, led to an entirely good outcome.
We still have poverty and starvation on a global scale,
despite having the capacity to produce enough food to feed everyone.
The possibility exists for us to have a system of food distribution and land management
which revolutionises human flourishing,
releasing people from the burden of generating their own food,
and enabling the glories of cultural growth and city living,
and to do so without resorting to violence.
This is the challenge of the story of Cain and Abel,
with God’s warning to Cain,
and it is a challenge that Israel has wrestled with throughout its story,
and it’s a challenge that we continue to wrestle with today.
And this is where I want to move us into consideration
of an intriguing economic model that runs through the Hebrew Bible.
It is the three related concepts of Sabbath, Sabbatical, and Jubilee.
The Sabbath is the idea that it is not good to work continually,
that one day in seven should be a day of rest.
We’re going to come back to this next week,
but it’s worth noting now that this is the base layer
of the broader economic concepts of Sabbatical and Jubilee.
The Sabbatical year, which we heard about in our reading for this morning,
is the idea that every seventh year, there is a financial re-set,
with the forgiveness of debts and remission of obligations.
And the Jubilee year occurs in every 50th year, after seven cycles of Sabbaticals,
so with seven times seven being 49, the 50th year is the big re-set,
with the freeing of slaves, and crucially the returning of land
back to its original tribal allocations.
Inherent in these systems of Sabbath, Sabbatical, and Jubilee
is an economic model which acts as counterbalance,
a counterweight to the tendency towards violence and acquisition
which unrestrained capitalism generates,
as Cain and Abel found to their cost.
This system of resetting, or resting the land,
of releasing people from their indebtedness,
is surely one of the most significant economic experiments in human history,
and we find it in our shared scriptures with Judaism
not as an idea to consider but as a divine command.
The challenge is clear:
if we want the benefits of human society,
of money, property, culture and freedom from subsistence labour,
then the only way this can be achieved without violence
is through a carefully regulated system of economic reform.
And to those who suggest that political economic theory
has nothing to do with theology,
God says: ‘Sabbath, Sabbatical and Jubilee’!
This tradition of forgiveness of indebtedness
is rooted deeply within the Christian story also,
Matthew’s version of the Lord’s prayer has Jesus telling his disciples to pray:
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors. (Matt 6.12)
Simon Perry, formerly of this parish,
tells us in his latest book that,
‘Forgiveness of sin’ is a phrase whose root meaning is economic.
In the original language, ‘forgiveness’ means liberty
and ‘sin’ means debt. [1]
He continues:
In an empire that depended on every citizen and slave honouring their debts
– forgiveness of sin (i.e., debt cancellation)
is a dangerous political and economic threat.
For those who were submerged
beneath the Jordan River [in baptism for the forgiveness of sins]
– their debts were consigned to a watery grave.
When they re-surface [from the baptismal waters],
people are declared debt-free,
before their fellow Israelites, before their leaders, and before their God.
So not only is our central ritual of Baptism deeply rooted in the forgiveness of debts,
but so also is our most-recited prayer a plea for emancipation.
Debt-forgiveness is at the heart of our Christian faith,
and it is so because Sabbath, Sabbatical, and Jubilee
are at the heart of our parent faith in ancient Judaism.
Ann Pettifor, the British economist who led the Jubilee 2000 campaign,
reflects on that movement in the book produced this year
to mark the 50th anniversary of the Greenbelt Festival.
It’s a fairly long quote, but I’m going to read it in full,
as she says it better than I could ever do:
Back in 2000 we called it Jubilee.
And we practise it at Greenbelt every year.
It is what the economy needed then
and it is what the economy needs now.
Our economy, the global economy,
the economic system, is wildly out of balance.
As a result both the ecosystem
and the political system are out of balance, too.
To restore balance to nature, to society and to the economy
we need proper, enforced regulation to check imbalances.
We could start with the Jubilee principle.
A form of regulation the Abrahamic religions have practised
for more than 2,000 years
- every seven days, a sabbath;
every seven years, a sabbatical
- needs to be restored and re-applied to the economy.
As I write this another US bank, First Republic
- even bigger than the failed Silicon Valley Bank - has collapsed.
Its imbalances - its excess liabilities
-have been dumped on US taxpayers.
It was brought down by the weight of debts
that spiralled higher as interest rates rose.
It was granted the gift that will correct its imbalances.
According to the IMF, total public and private debt decreased in 2021
to the equivalent of 247 per cent of global gross domestic product,
falling by 10 percentage points from its peak level in 2020.
Expressed in dollar terms, however,
global debt continued to rise, although at a much slower rate,
reaching a record $235 trillion last year.
The number spirals beyond our imagination.
The debt - at more than twice the world's income - will never be repaid in full.
It must be written off, and debtors given a chance to start again.
Just as importantly, credit - the man-made system
of making and meeting obligations, a system we call money
- must be managed to ensure we do not promise
to pay more than we are capable of.
That we do not make monetary promises…
whose fulfilment draws down and destroys the capacity of the ecosystem,
which humanity holds in common for today's and future generations.
In other words, we have to lower consumption
and the extraction and exploitation of both nature's assets,
but also humanity's asset - labour.
We gather every year at Greenbelt
for the opportunity to enjoy our own personal Jubilee.
To reconnect, listen, laugh, sing, dance and rejoice
with those who share our values and beliefs.
We need to take those values out into the world to wage justice
- for nature, for the commons: our seas, atmosphere, land and sky
- and for humanity.
We need to wage justice for the poor, for the homeless,
for those who flee drought, floods, harvest failures and war.
We need to wage justice for peace.
We need a global Jubilee. [2]
Thank you Anne!
Friends, I hope you can see the connections I’m making here,
between land ownership and exploitation,
between wealth acquisition and violence,
and for the need for a new and better way of handling our common resources.
And I hope you can take hope from our scriptures,
that there is a better way open for us,
which is honouring of creation, of humanity, and of God.
But there’s one final connection I want to make,
as we come to gather around the Lord’s table,
to add the eucharistic ritual
to those of baptism and prayer that I’ve already spoken of.
The bread and wine of communion
are the product of grape and grain:
they are the fruits of Cain’s labours.
And the violence of the cross of which they speak
is the violence of Cain killing Abel,
but the message of Christ
is that in the cross violence finds its end,
as the grape and the grain of the agrarian revolution
become the symbols of forgiveness of debts,
or repentance for sins,
and the possibility of a new way of being human.
[1] Perry, Simon. Jesus Farted: The Vulgar Truth of the Biblical Christ (pp. 39-40). Thrydwulf Cambridge. Kindle Edition.
[2] FIFTY, Greenbelt Festivals, 2023.
