“That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow or reap the aftergrowth or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you; you shall eat only what the field itself produces” (Leviticus 25: 11-2)
I am not a good gardener, let alone an agriculturist. In elementary school I may have learned about the importance of rotating crops, and when that concept was introduced in commercial agriculture during the Industrial revolution. But I do know about the idea of “lying fallow”. It was a central part of the ideal of a Jubilee year. Even nature must be released from our relentless usage and consumerism. And so must we.
We live in a generation that experienced the world cease its business as usual for two whole years, as we navigated the COVID pandemic. The church, as we knew it, has never recovered, and continues to reimagine itself. As our Associate Pastor, Sarah Christopher, once said, “we told people that they could find God at home; and they did! And we haven’t seen them since!” People’s work habits have changed. I held two Diocesan Conventions from home, turning my dining room into a TV production room. And began regular gathering of clergy on zoom which were found priceless and continued under my successor. We found different ways of encountering each other. Life lie fallow.
It was not, however, intentional as was the proclamation of the Year of the Lord, the Jubilee. Jubilee as an expression of the more fundamental concept of Sabbath is tied to God’s revealed nature – as One who finds rest from work and walks with God’s creation and with the children of Israel during the Exodus. If God finds joy in rest, so might we.
How might this translate into a Lenten way?
One of the more incongruous prayers in the Book of Common Prayer is the prayer for Saturdays. It reads: “Almighty God, who after the creation of the world rested from all your works and sanctified a day of rest for all your creatures: Grant that we, putting away all our earthly anxieties, may be duly prepared for the service of your sanctuary, and that our rest here upon earth may be a preparation for the eternal rest promised to your people in heaven; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen”
Maybe it’s because I am clergy and often the preacher on Sunday that I have found myself laughing at the collect, and I can imagine altar guild thinking the same. But I am learning to ease on a little down the road, and to enter that space of the holy presence – represented by God’s holy people gathered as well as the liturgy and sacramental presence of God offered – with anticipation and joy. Of course, we only have to open the bulletin and find a misprint or a faulty hymn number, and there goes all that wonderful preparation!
Maria Harris in “Proclaim Jubilee” sees fallowness applying to the land on this planet, and the land which we physically inhabit, our bodies. She notes: “the ideal (of Jubilee teaching regarding the fallow land) is appropriate across widely varying cultures, many of which direct attention to attitudes of reverence, care for, and listing to the land. Not only are these attitudes found among the ancient Hebrews who gave us the Jubilee, they are also found among many of the world’s peoples. These attitudes have special meaning for our own time, when the theme of connectedness with the earth has reappeared, although our era is not one that “discovered” a spirituality of fallow land. At best ours is a time of rediscovery and renewal”. (p.23)
We may be less familiar with applying the idea of fallowness to our own lives. I think of a book about the coaching methods of Kenyan distance runners as they dominated long distance running. They would often train to exhaustion for nine or ten months of the year and then take a complete break and let their bodies lie fallow, without any thought of “maintaining a level of fitness”.
There is a pejorative phrase when we say someone is “going to seed”. But that is not what we are talking about here. Harris writes: “While on earth, however, we food from the land not only nourishes us, it becomes us. …. Such is the way of all living animals. ‘Let the land lie fallow’ means the land of ourselves be still periodically, giving it not only physical nourishment but regular, ritual rest”. (Proclaim Jubilee, p. 25) She continues: “We need to imitate the wise old woman who describes her life-music this way – “Sometimes ah sets and thinks, and sometimes ah jes sets”.
Walter Bruegemann reminds us that the God in whose image we are created is not a workaholic “and does not need to be more secure, more sufficient, more in control or more noticed”. Similarly, we are to “remember that God’s world is not a place of endless productivity, ambition, or anxiety. Instead, it is a place where listening to and receiving word and world precedes our tending to them”. (Harris, p 30)
How might a Jubilee of lying fallow impact how we are Church? How can Church assist us in lying fallow and not add to our work burden? The answer may lie more in our approach than in our action, if that makes sense. How would it be if we gathered for church in fellowship first and worshipped later? Get the connecting and socializing done early, and then with our arms around each other’s shoulders, we head into give thanks and praise and receive the reminder of who and whose we are? What does lying fallow look like to you?
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