Hilton Head Island, SC – September 26, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Leviticus 25:8-17; Leviticus 25:18-28
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you to his family.” – Leviticus 25:10 (RSV)
The Book of Leviticus is one of the oddest and most off-putting books in the Bible. It contains strange laws about ancient cultural customs which we think have little or no relevance to us in our time and culture. We live at least 2500 years after the laws of the Torah were finally written down, having been passed down by oral tradition until that time. Presumably this codification occurred during the time of the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews in the sixth century BCE.
With the exception of the opening verse of Chapter 25 of Leviticus, everything else consists of very long quotations attributed to God Himself. The opening topic of Chapter 25 is the Promised Land, the geographical area which was to be occupied by the Israelites after the land of Canaan was conquered by Joshua and his army in the thirteenth century BCE. However, God makes it clear in Leviticus 25 that the Promised Land ultimately belongs to Him, and not to the Israelites. God tells His people, “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me.” In other words, this seems to imply that no one is to hold a permanent deed to any portion of the land of Israel, for all of it belongs to God.
Nonetheless, as you heard in the second reading for today, some Israelites did gain title to particular pieces of land, and land might be bought and sold several times through the years. But God decreed that every fifty years there was to be a “jubilee.” The word jubilee comes from the Hebrew word for “ram’s horn,” which is yobhel. To this day every synagogue in Judaism has a ram’s horn which the rabbi uses on some of the religious holidays, such as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, or Pesach, Passover. A Nubian sheep’s horn is hollow. The tip of the horn is cut off, and the rabbi blows on it. The sound is not melodious by any means, but if it is done properly, it is very loud. And as we heard in the first reading, the Jubilee was to be proclaimed every fifty years as a time of restoration for both the land and all of its inhabitants.
In several places in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, it says that Israelites were never to enslave other Israelites. They could make slaves of people from other ethnic groups and cultures, but not Israelites. You or I may think that is both unacceptable and unfair, but that’s what it says, and it even quotes God as saying it. However, it is also clear from reading Leviticus 25 that some Israelites became the equivalent of indentured servants of other more wealthy Israelites. One of the things that was supposed to happen in the Year of Jubilee is that such people were to be released from their servitude. Then they could return to the land of their ancestors. There they would be given a parcel of land for themselves and their family, where they could start all over again. God declared this obvious major social and economic upheaval was to be enacted every fifty years.
Reading between the lines, we may deduce that some of the Israelites did end up as virtual slaves of other Israelites. This was one of the factors the Jubilee was intended to rectify. God did not want anybody, including non-Jews, to be a slave or indentured servant in perpetuity, so He enunciated the law which established the jubilee as a preventative to permanent servitude.
In scores of passages in the Hebrew Bible, reference is made to God’s special concern for people who are poor and destitute, especially poor Israelites, but also those who are referred to as “strangers and sojourners in your midst.” That phrase means foreign workers, or, in 21st century American terms, immigrants or “green-card people.” The might be people like – to pick an example out of the air – Cubans, Vietnamese, or Afghans In every economic system in every nation throughout human history, inevitably there have been many poor people and a few rich people, and then everyone else in between. Regardless of how or why anybody gets to be poor, the Bible insists that God always displays a special regard for those people. That would include those whom Alfred P. Doolittle of My Fair Lady called “the undeserving poor,” of whom he considered himself one. Concern for the poor is fundamentally what the Jubilee was all about.
The odd thing is that there is no record, either in the Bible or in any other ancient Jewish documents, that the Jubilee was ever observed. Not even once. Considering how radical it was, that isn’t surprising. Purportedly it was a law given by God to Moses on Mt. Sinai, but it was never followed. Nowhere is there an explanation for this omission; that’s just the way it was.
Why? Why didn’t they institute this half-century egalitarian economic correction, as God supposedly directed, whereby the poor were allowed to return to the land which had belonged to their forebears? If God told the people to do this, why didn’t they do what He said?
I suspect there were two primary explanations for their resistance to the Law of the Jubilee. First is that it would be very cumbersome equitably to try to sort out who deserved a piece of land after fifty years had passed. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, those people who had become big land owners would not be happy to have to give up any of their property. After half a century, how could anybody know exactly who had owned what particular parcels of property fifty years earlier? With no official registrars of deeds, or even an informal listing of who owned what from way back when, how could this major re-distribution be equitably arranged?
We have a saying: “Ownership is nine-tenths of the law.” What it means is that ownership is nine-tenths of property law, not nine-tenths of all laws. Ownership is what most people want --- to own a home or a car or boat or membership in a golf club or a large investment portfolio, or whatever. No doubt that was relatively as true two or three thousand years ago as it is today.
If the Law of Jubilee, as it is written in Leviticus 25, were to be followed, it would result in a major restructuring of Israelite society every fifty years. Many who had lost their land due to drought or floods or crop failure or bad management were to have land restored to them. If they lost the land due to no fault of their own or if they were simply inept farmers, everyone was to have some land restored to them which had once belonged to them or to their grandparents. God’s favoritism of the poor was to be obeyed - - - except that it wasn’t.
No matter what economic system is operative in any nation or society --- agrarianism, bartering, feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism, socialism --- there are always Haves and Have-Nots. Nearly everyone in one family might be Have-Nots for a few generations, and then some of them are Haves for a few generations. In poor countries most of the populace are Have-Nots, but in highly developed nations there is a much higher percentage of Haves, and a much larger middle class of Have-Enoughs.
But God – and the Bible – have a particular interest in the Have-Nots. To deny that is deliberately to misread the Bible, and perhaps even to do it obstinately. So does the concept of the Jubilee have any relevance for us in a very different kind of world?
A growing number of economists and political observers are claiming that the asset gap between the very wealthy and everyone else is greater than it has ever been: wider than in the Gilded Age of the 1890s (which was followed by a fairly deep recession), or the Roaring Twenties (which were followed by the Great Depression), or the Twenty-Aughts (which were followed by the Great Recession). When there is too great a gap between the very wealthy and everyone else, inevitably it seems to result in a major economic downturn and a restructuring of –to use the title of Adam’s Smith’s famous book, but not in a way he would approve – the Wealth of Nations. An informal and painful Jubilee usually follows an intolerable disparity between the Really Rich and Everyone Else. It doesn’t happen because God commanded it. Instead it occurs because socially and politically, no society can or will abide it any longer.
The Economic Policy Institute is a think tank about economic issues. They reported that in 2019, the average annual realized income for the CEOs of the 350 largest corporations in America was $21.3 million. In 1989 the ratio for CEO income compared to the average worker was 61-to-1. In 2018 it was 293-to-1, and in 2019 320-to-1. In almost all types of economy and in almost all countries, the rich constantly get richer and the poor get poorer, at least relative to the rich.
From 1978 to 2019, CEO compensation, adjusted for inflation, rose 1,167%. For the top 0.1% of wage earners, in that same span their income rose only 337%. Furthermore, the typical wage earner’s real income rose only 13.7% in those four decades. As the song says, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” The song further declares, “In the meantime, in-between-time, ain’t we got fun?” By itself, however, fun can’t buy groceries or pay the rent, so the poor just keep on getting poorer. Inevitably and invariably, though, the rich get richer. They have so much income they can’t sensibly spend it all, so their assets just keep growing. The Jubilee was meant to reverse, or at least slow, that process. But it was never instituted among the Jews.
A year ago at this time, the richest man in America, Jeff Bezos of the Amazon Corporation, had a net worth of $179 billion. The tenth richest American, Alice Walton, the widow of Walmart founder Sam Walton, was worth $$62 billion. In between were captains of other industries with recognizable names, from $111 billion to $66 billion. (Keep in mind, that’s billion, with a “B.”) According to The Economist magazine, in the thirty years from 1979 to 2019, the cumulative change in hourly wages for the top 20% of wage earners was an increase of 63%. For those in the exact middle, the increase was 15%. For the bottom tenth, the increase was 3%. If you’re not good at math, you just have to accept that even for hourly income people, those at the upper levels do far better over the long haul than those at the bottom level. In the first sixteen months of the pandemic, the income of the 706 billionaires in the US rose 62 %, or $2.8 trillion. There is no way they spend but a minute fraction of that sum, so it only grows still more quickly.
There was a Bloomberg News article in The Island Packet recently whose headline said, “Inequality has cost the US nearly $23 trillion since 1990.” This was stated in a paper by the president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. The thrust of the article was that if lower income workers were paid more, they would pump more money into the economy. I realize there are lots of fiscal factors involved in paying workers more, but still, it’s a very thought-provoking insight. In other words, everyone would do better if the poor did better.
As you probably know, robots are taking the place of more and more workers, especially in hourly wage jobs. It may cost companies many thousands of dollars to invest in a robot, but over time they cost much less than workers, because there are no benefits which must paid, no sick days to worry about, and no robotic unions with which to settle pay contracts. So here’s an idea: Raise the corporate taxes at a fixed amount for every worker in every business who is replaced by a robot. Then use those particular funds to help provide a universal basic income for all displaced workers. That way there is a government-sponsored Jubilee for all the employees who become unemployed because of automation. If something like that is not instituted, increasing numbers of those kinds of our fellow citizens fall between the economic cracks.
What we now call “the welfare state” was first instituted by Otto von Bismarck in Germany in the 1870s. Its fullest expression appeared in many other European nations in the twentieth century. Many Americans incorrectly think the United States has become a welfare state. We are nowhere close to Europe in providing reasonable incomes for lower income people. We might also note there is much lower social unrest in Europe in general than there is in the USA. Do you suppose that is because they have discovered the political wisdom of a welfare state?
Tax policies are the best way, and maybe the only way, to guarantee a sufficient income for the people on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. The highest levels of taxation for corporations and for individuals must be raised, and most of their tax loopholes must be eliminated, which up to now have been intended to insure the certainty that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. Instead of a corporate tax rate in the teens, it should be in the high twenties or low thirties. Instead of the highest individual rate in the mid-thirties, it should be in the mid-forties or –fifties.
It will be argued that is socialism. It isn’t. Socialism is this, and only this (and socialism is really a bad idea): socialism is the government ownership of all the means of production and distribution. The emphasis is on the word “all.” In genuine socialism, the government owns and controls the entire economy. Although Messrs. Marx and Engels would be appalled, genuine socialism has never been tried, not even in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, or Cuba. In those countries, there were always vestiges of capitalism, because true socialism can’t operate successfully - - - anywhere. Human nature will fiercely resist it. But the trope is often raised that higher taxes bring socialism. They don’t, because Marxist socialism, which is the only kind of true socialism that exists, even in theory, has never been tried. Anybody who calls anybody a socialist is ignorant of what socialism is. When administered equitably, proper taxation equals biblical social ethics --- in the 10th century BCE, the first century CE, or the 21st century CE.
The United States Congress has passed too many tax laws that allow the wealthiest corporations and individual citizens to avoid paying taxes. That isn’t a crime, exactly, but it is a deliberate avoidance of biblical social morality. God always has had a special interest in the welfare of the poor: always. Moses said it, the prophets said it, and Jesus said it. And why do we not follow what God, Moses, the prophets, and Jesus say? The answer is that most of us personally want the opportunity to advance financially above others. There is certainly nothing immoral in that. But if our acquiring more assets means that other people invariably lose both assets and income, something must be done to prevent the disparity. More equitable tax policies are the best and maybe the only realistic way to prevent it. The Jubilee was no proposed to benefit people like us. It was intended for all the folks on the lowest levels of the income spectrum.
This sermon may sound more like a lecture than a sermon. But in an age when religion is losing its influence, addressing secular morality in secular terms may be the only way to convince contemporary religious people that changes must be made if social progress is to be made. If religion can’t institute the changes that need to be made to improve society (and it can’t and shouldn’t), then government must do it.
Given the trends which we are seeing, is that likely to happen? And if it isn’t likely, then what is the only way in a democracy to change things? I’ll give you a three-word hint: the voting booth.