To be with you in this room is an honor. The Fellowship of Reconciliation is a heroic adventure, a jewel embedded within American history. The F.O.R. has sustained, nurtured and given birth to courageous people who loved LIFE more than merely their own comforts. Those who have gone before us have given us a legacy of freedom in the midst of oppression; of joy in the pursuit of justice; of humor even in the valley of cold fear. We who have gathered here today come from a great heritage.

It is an honor to be in the midst of a people who once sustained and nurtured another, earlier United Methodist Pastor from Trinity. George Poor was a great hero who drank deeply from the F.O.R. well. It is an honor to stand before a heritage and a people who against great odds choose to live a life of positive maladjustment!

POSITIVE maladjustment. Positive because we believe that real human being is addressed and nurtured, is sustained and thrives when we live cooperatively with compassion, when we act with kindness and desire the well being of the other. But we are maladjusted because we find ourselves living in a military empire that has declared a state of permanent war on all those who do not serve the national interest. We are maladjusted to this empire of death and we are ‘out-of-place’ in this culture of violence and greed.

We are positive about the values that help life grow and evolve. But we are maladjusted to those values that destroy the earth and feed off death. We are positive towards true democracy that insists on limits to power. But we are maladjusted towards Empire that seeks all power.

Today in America we find ourselves caught in the talons of a mighty empire. It is not a unique moment. Rather, it is just our moment. There is a story in the Hebrew Scriptures that reveals how empire works (Genesis 41 and47:13ff). In the story Joseph is locked away in prison. There in prison he became known as a wise interpreter of the meaning of dreams. He came to the attention of Pharaoh who had been having several nightmares. Joseph told him that his nightmares were a warning that a great famine was coming but if Pharaoh would plan for it the people and his empire would be saved. And so Pharaoh put Joseph in charge of storing away the surplus in the good years. But when famine hit, the reader discovers that Joseph has been seduced by the privileges of Pharaoh’s wealth, power and philosophy. Rather than opening the grain silos and sharing it with the people, Joseph betrayed the people. He forced the people to sell their livestock to Pharaoh, then their land and finally their bodies until all were enslaved to Pharaoh. All, that is, but the Priests, who continued to bless the power of Pharaoh. Such is the way of Empire: stealing the commonwealth by plundering the people even while using religion as a sacred canopy under which to hide it’s evil deeds.

This administration is Pharaoh. Under the guise of Christian rhetoric it has disrespected the constitution, made a mockery of our political process that balances power between branches of government, it has abandoned the rule of international law, disregarded human and civil rights, it has used intimidation, lies, and propaganda to unleash a war on the poor and on the land. We are dealing with outlaws who are drunk on the blood of imperial power. Whether it be Afghanistan or Iraq, Venezuela or Columbia, the Philippines or Haiti, wherever brown skinned people live, the dogs of war are unleashed. Whenever people claim their own livestock, land or even their bodies this administration steps in to steal, to plunder, to rob, rape, torture and kill every vestige of democracy that dares to rise as an alternative to Empire.

The Bible tells the story of Empire and also tells a story of imperial resistance. The story of resistance centers around the vision of economic justice known as the Jubilee. The Jubilee is the very core and center of the Torah, of the Prophets, and of both the ministry of Jesus and Paul. You can’t understand the Bible without a grasp of the Jubilee. The Jubilee is a pointed political spirituality. It confronts, resists and liberates us from the empires that try to enslave us. But the Jubilee will also call our own lifestyles into question.

Justice, in the Bible, is defined through the character of God as it is revealed through God’s concrete actions within history. The defining action of God in history is God’s ability to deliver us from slavery. Within the Hebrew Scriptures slavery is social: we were once slaves to Empire but God has liberated us and given us political freedom. Within the Apostolic writings the definition of slavery expands into one’s consciousness: we are in bondage to sin, death and the Principalities and Powers (the institutions that support imperial power). We are enslaved by fears that take possession of our lives from the inside out. But God frees us, exorcizes the demons out of us, gives us a new way of thinking and empowers us to live in a New Creation.

Simply put the Jubilee is a co-operative mutual aid partnership that binds society together. The Jubilee puts a floor under misfortune and misery, preventing generational poverty even as it puts a ceiling on wealth preventing the emergence of an aristocratic dynasty. It does this through apolitical value system that elevates ownership of land (which is wealth) into the hands of God the Creator. Because God owns the land we human beings have no "right" to seize it for ourselves. The land is to be sharedfor the benefit of all.

The Jubilee is a blueprint of what a just economy looks like. The first lesson of the Jubilee is in the Creation story of Genesis when God rested on the seventh day. THEREFORE, we human beings, created in God’s image, are also to rest once a week. This is great good news for the poor who were easily exploited as slaves and sometimes (literally) worked to death. The Sabbath is the great release from the incessant need to produce and to consume. It is good news for all of us who work too many hours and have too little time to simply BE. Jubilee justice means to rest 1/7th of the time.

The Jubilee had an ecological ethic calling for the resting of the land every seven years (Lev. 25:1- 7); animals were to be given regular Sabbath rests (Ex. 31:12-17 Deut. 15); and every 50th year (Lev. 25) an AMNESTY on debt was declared. In agrarian societies the cycle of poverty begins when a family had to sell off its land in order to pay off debt (for example after a year or years of poor harvests). Poverty reached its conclusion when landless peasants can only sell their labor becoming bond-slaves. The great 50 year AMNESTY allowed the land that was sold to be returned to its original owners therefore ending generational poverty(Lev. 25:13, 25-28). All debt was written off (Lev. 25:35-42 Deut. 15:1-11) and all slaves were freed and given the means to be economically self sufficient (Deut. 15:12- 17). The rational for this unilateral restructuring of the economy was to remind Israel that the land belongs to God (Lev.25:23) and Israel was chosen to be a counter-cultural people who must never return to an imperial system like Pharaoh’s that produces slavery for some while enriching an elite. Lev.25:42).

The Prophets were constantly calling Israel back to the Jubilee economy.2 Chronicles 36:15-21 interprets the exile as the logical consequence of a people who refuse to rest land, animals and people. The failure to keep Sabbath and to practice Jubilee resulted in the loss of God’s promise of a counter-cultural calling. Israel became like other nations subject to the same economies and fate of other nations.

The Jubilee was at the center of Jesus’ practice and proclamation (Luke4:19), and was at the heart of the early church in Acts (ch. 2-4); it was practiced by Paul in a context that opened up God’s promises to Gentiles and it has been part of church history currently manifested through Habitat for Humanity and the Jubilee movement to cancel Third-world debt.

But the Jubilee was an economic strategy for a small, relational agrarian culture. We live, however, in a complex globally interdependent capitalist culture. Wealth itself is no longer centered in any-thing (like land) but is an electronic fiction rooted mostly in speculation. What does the Jubilee have to do with us?

Indeed, what would our economic system look like if we rooted it in the character of God who liberates the enslaved? In the political world imagine the kind of leadership our nation could have if we were willing to spend as much on debt relief and economic redevelopment as we do on the military. Imagine what could happen if we spent as much money on alternative energy sources as we do on fossil-fuel exploration and extraction. Imagine if we would focus on small-scale organic farming instead of large scale Corporate-agriculture. Instead of this our nation is adrift in the moral decadence of war mongering and financial speculation. We have chosen the path of Pharaoh: a path of domination rather than the practice of justice. If we continue down this path our nation will go the way of Pharaoh: a step by step hardening of our heart until we are washed away in the blood-red stains of history. Other empires have gone down that path. It is a journey filled with sorrow unrelenting.

Our times require from us sober clarity. Perhaps we can begin by role modeling the practices of Jubilee with each other: releasing each other from debt, forgiving each other, making sure none of us fall through the cracks. Maybe we can learn new economic practices of sharing and mutual aid. Indeed, maybe common folk like you and me can begin to sustain an alternative economy. We could withdraw our money from Corporate Banks that feed off of the debt of others, investing instead in Co-ops and community development banks. The land which houses our faith communities and our own backyards could become miniature farms growing fresh produce for Food Banks and the neighborhood. Our faith communities and civic networks could be organizing centers and creative think-tanks for an anti-debt economy.

You who are sustained and nurtured by this Fellowship know that these are difficult times. You know that we are ‘up against it’. You know that it is people like yourselves who have now become ‘suspicious’; who are now worthy of surveillance; who are now ‘not to be trusted’ by theEmpire.

In this way we are all becoming just like Jesus who was himself a suspicious person, under the watchful eye of government, betrayed by the church of his day, hunted down and handed over to be humiliated, tortured, and put to death. But his message and his lifestyle was one of nonviolence. Jesus walked this earth as a courageous man unafraid of the threats that this world can give. Jesus resisted the imperial way of life with its use of violence as a way to "get one’s way". He taught his disciples to resist it too. He said:

For Jesus, the practice of a nonviolent politics was his mode of imperial resistance. He rejected the violent paths of guerilla warfare, of patriotic nationalism, of theocratic revolution. Instead of these, Jesus embraced a path of patient endurance, solidarity with the poor, compassion toward the enemy. The nonviolent politics of Jesus were rooted in a call for debt release, wealth redistribution, embrace of the other, welcome toward the stranger. In his own life Jesus reached out to his enemies healing a Centurion’s servant. He brought together opposites and formed them as his first students. The disciples shouldn’t have gotten along. Inside that gang of 12 were patriotic zealots like Simon, alongside of tax collecting, imperial collaborators like Levi. But Jesus, like Gandhi and King after him didn’t want his enemies annihilated. Rather, he wanted to form a ‘beloved community’ that embraced a future without violence.

Jesus, I think, offers us a hopeful and encouraging word during these times of imperial unmasking. Indeed, part of the wisdom of the Church is the living knowledge that there is a dawn in every darkness, there is new life springing out of death, that there are always possibilities no matter how bleak the situation appears. I think a word of hope is to live with the teaching of Jesus: "BE NOT AFRAID!"

Be not afraid because all that is before us has been before others. Be not afraid because underneath the headlines of history there is an emerging story that already embodies change for the future. Be not afraid of the waves that wash over us today. Rather, look deeper into the currents and learn to swim there.

Fear is exactly what this administration and its Christian backers want us to feel. Like a kid in a graveyard late on a moonless night they want us jumpy and nervous and suspicious of every fleeting sight and sound. We have tore-learn how to whistle in the graveyard; how to laugh at the pretense, how to accept our fears because we live in a power that can overcome fear: the power of hope.

What I’m saying is this: the old order is dying. America was built and conceived in violence and war. Europeans invaded this country and ethnically cleansed it of its indigenous people. We have always been in Empire-mode. The empire, as all empires do, is today dying. The American way of life is not sustainable: 6% of the world’s population consuming 40% of the world’s resources is neither sustainable nor just. We need to let it die.

In the meantime, as it is dying, we need to build a parallel culture to replace it. There are examples of this parallel culture coming to birth. I think of the growing movement towards locally grown organics. When you buy locally grown organic foods, as well as locally raised, free ranging pasture-fed meat you are stepping out of the war making, land-raping, Corporate culture that is enslaving millions throughout the world. More to the point you are stepping into a new future and voting for a new way of life.

The same is true with folks who shop locally. The same is true with those who boycott the Wal-Marts of the world. These little small scale choices that we make with our dollars have large scale ripples. This is the beginning first steps of a movement away from the old order toward something new. It requires patient endurance.

Those of you who try to move off the fossil-fuel grid are pioneers of the New Creation that is coming. Your new way of life is heroic and needs to be honored and translated into all of our lifestyles. Indeed, unless we are willing to change our lifestyles there will be no hope. Our solidarity with the poor, rooted in compassion, requires from each of us a personal disciplining of desire and limiting of consumption.

To build a parallel culture will also require media. I think it extremely important for us to build working partnerships with each other. The Seattle SNOW movement is a great example of this. The Peace movement, the Fair Trade movement, the Environmental movement, the Interfaith movement, the Sexual rights movement, the Civil rights movement … all of these movements need to come together as one ‘beloved community’ held together with common core values. This requires trust and a willingness to do both self- examination and community dialogue.

I think the F.O.R. can play a very useful role in teaching the various movements in our society how to communicate. Our people need to know the skill set of thinking, speaking and acting nonviolently. The FOR has been doing this for 90 years and its purpose is needed now more than ever. We need the skill set that can teach us to live humbly YET courageously. We need a humility with each other that opens our eyes, ears and heart to the sufferings and anguish of the other: even our enemy. BUT, at the same time we need the steel backbone of one who insists that unless all are invited to the table then the party doesn’t happen. We need training in how to be more like Gandhi and more like Dorothy Day.

The media I’m talking about would be an educational infrastructure that would educate us in nonviolence. I have always been enamored with the Highlander Folk School. Highlander is a little jewel of American history. Started in the 1930’s in the Appalachian region of Tennessee its purpose was to train folks to organize labor in the coal mines and textile factories of the south. In the 1950’s they switched their orientation to civil rights and trained folks like Rosa Parks, Martin King, Clarence Jordan (who trained Millard Fuller of Habitat for Humanity), the Freedom riders, the Berrigan brothers and so on. Highlander was this little seed-factory that nurtured and sustained the Civil Rights movement. It’s still around today working on local issues. We need more Highlanders. I’d love to see a Highlander evolve that would help educate us in lifestyle change. I’d love to see a youth Highlander evolve that would train high school kids to be anti-recruiters and war resisters.

In many ways we who are gathered in this room are already a parallel culture. I just think we need to grow. I think we need to find strategic ways to connect with our neighbors, family and friends with a positive, life affirming, joyous, fun lifestyle whose very existence exposes the imperial way of life as a path of destruction and death. Folks are living in great fear and bewilderment. Someone needs to throw a party to chase those blues away.

So where is hope? I think hope is where it has always been. I think hope is embodied in a people who take the sins of the nation upon their own shoulders carrying its guilt, WHILE, at the same time, living in such away that a New Creation, a new way of living evolves and is role modeled. Hope is found in the willingness of a people to be ‘positively maladjusted’ to the ways of empire.

Concretely put: the existence of the Fellowship of Reconciliation is a sign of hope and a moment of courage in the face of our fears. It is a sign of hope that a small band of dreamers can still take time out of life to gather to boldly and prophetically call the community together to act as healing agents in a time of crisis. It is a sign of hope that you have gathered hereto learn together, to think together, to have fun together, to experience life together. It is a sign of hope that some of us would dare to envision what a non-imperial nation might look like. It is a sign of hope that we, who are gathered here, in the face of overwhelming stress and fatigue, reject despair and cynicism. Rather than death we choose life. We choose to focus our minds, and hearts around something positive that we can directly become involved with.

Hope always starts small. It starts right where we live. It calls us together for the purpose of focusing our collective community energy on a specific problem goaled towards a concrete solution. In a time that asks us to submit to the leadership of others, it is more important than ever to acknowledge "that we are the ones we are looking for". Heroes are no longer the superstars we admire. Rather, true heroes are those we work right along side of, building peace with justice one step at a time.

The immediate reality is that we might not be able to change the orientation of this present course of sufferings and sorrows. But together we can create a community of light in a time of darkness. Empires come and go. They rise and fall. But underneath the headlines of history there is another story often untold. It is a story of God’s merciful grace spread throughout the world. It is a story of harmony and the ending of hostility. It is a story of well being for human beings and for all of creation. Each day is a day of free choice: each one of us, and all of us as a community, face this free choice with every sunrise. We can live in fear and follow the violence embodied in the Empire. Or, we can live in the courage of compassionate solidarity that the Fellowship of Reconciliation has role modeled for decades. Each way has consequences and each way calls for commitments. One way leads to death but the other to the ‘positive maladjustment’ of new life and Jubilee. Which way do you trust? The choice is always yours to make.

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