Deuteronomy 15:1-2, 7-11
September 3, 2023
Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
My mom gave me this book for Christmas 2016 and it lived on my nightstand all that next year. Whenever I felt exhausted and hopeless, I picked it up and read a chapter or two. It’s called “The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear.” It contains over 50 contributions by activists, poets, academics, artists, dreamers, and doers. All of them people who have spent their lives working for a more just world, sharing words of hope and pointing the way to resilience in the face of adversity. [1]
The title alone is powerful, isn’t it? “The impossible will take a little while.” It’s taken from a Billie Holiday song, actually. “The difficult I'll do right now. The impossible will take a little while.” When you try to wrap your brain around it, you can’t quite. Because if it’s impossible, it can’t be done. So how’s it taking a little while? It’s a real head-scratcher.
It’s in that space of head-scratching wonderment that we can enter today’s passage from Deuteronomy. In the spirit of wonderment, let’s work backwards, shall we?
Verse 11: “Poor persons will never disappear from the earth. That’s why I’m giving you this command….”
Verse 7: “Now if there are some poor persons among you… don’t be hard-hearted or tightfisted…”
Verse 4: “Of course there won’t be any poor persons among you because the Lord will bless you…”
Uh….so which is it?
Biblical scholar Robert Williamson, Jr. points out that it’s actually verse 5 that’s crucial: “Of course there won’t be any poor persons among you…but only if you carefully obey the Lord your God’s voice, by carefully doing every bit of this commandment that I’m giving you right now.” [2]
God has provided a world with enough for everyone. No one needs to live in poverty. But only if we humans do OUR part, too. So….what’s our part?
Verse 1: Every seventh year you must cancel all debts.
Oh. Okay.
If we follow this sabbath commandment - canceling all debts every seventh year - the world of “enough” that God has created will ensure that no one has to live in poverty. Sounds good, right?
Jewish scholar Amy Robertson says it’s as if you can see the commandment springing forth and before the words even make it into the air we already know this is beyond what humans can handle. [3] Canceling all debts every seven years? You can see how we move from “of course there won’t be any poor persons among you” to “poor persons will never disappear from the earth” in 8 short verses.
I mean, just try to wrap your brain around it. Student loans, credit card debt, medical debt, pay day loans, mortgages - all of them POOF - wiped clean every seven years.
Can you imagine the impact this would have?
The thing about debt is that it snowballs. Once you’re in debt, it becomes so hard to get out. One small loan leads to another. The money coming in is barely enough to cover the interest, let alone touch the principal. This is one of the many reasons why the poor usually get poorer while the rich get richer. When you’re rich you don’t even have to work - you can let your money do the work for you. But when you’re born into a family that’s already in debt? Oof.
But imagine if there was a reset every 7 years. A big PAUSE button. A sabbath for debt. The playing field is leveled.
It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? But wait, there’s more! In this seventh - sabbath year - not only were debts to be forgiven but the people also were not supposed to plant or work their fields. It was both an economic and agricultural sabbath year.
The impossible here all comes back to this commandment of sabbath-keeping. It’s got to be one of the hardest commandments to keep, right? I mean, think about it, most of the 10 big ones are actually things we’re NOT supposed to do - don’t worship other gods, don’t murder, don’t steal. But sabbath is something we have to actively pursue.
I think that we Christians, when we think of sabbath at all, think of it as perhaps a quaint, individual practice. I’m reminded of my first awareness of the practice - Laura Ingalls Wilder writing about sitting still all day on the sabbath with NOTHING to do, bored out of her gourd. It did not sound enticing to me.
But sabbath in the Hebrew Bible is not at all quaint or individualistic. It’s communal and significant. Dr. Robertson says that sabbath has at least three dimensions in the Hebrew Bible:
Spiritual sabbath - resting from work, spending time with God
Agricultural sabbath - giving the land time to rest
Economic sabbath - forgiving debts, divesting from the world’s economic systems for a time [4]
However you look at it - spiritual, agricultural, economic - sabbath is a tall order. It’s not as simple as sitting still on a Sunday afternoon like Ingalls Wilder described. It’s a radical interruption of life as we know it. Sabbath interrupts the flow of absolutely everything it touches. Sabbath radically disrupts our economic systems, dismantling business-as-usual. Sabbath radically reorients our hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits. Sabbath invites us to ponder - truly consider - the question of how the impossible can take a little while.
I think there are many who would say that sabbath is a silly idea. Impractical, irresponsible, a waste of time. Not sustainable.
There are many who would look at this passage from Deuteronomy and say the same. This idea of forgiving debts every seven years? Silly. Impractical. Irresponsible. A waste of time. Certainly not sustainable.
But perhaps we’re engaging with a God who hears all of our objections and whispers quietly, “I know. I know. The impossible will take a little while.”
God’s dreams - especially these wild and radical sabbath dreams - may feel impossible to us. These ancient texts hold in front of us the possibility of worlds of justice that we can scarcely imagine. A world where the last is first, the hungry are filled with good things, release is proclaimed to the captives, and justice rolls down like a mighty stream. [5]
We squint and we can almost see it come into focus. We reach out for it and it slips from our grasp.
Do God’s dreams matter? Or are they just fanciful pipe dreams? When we spend our time pondering them, is it a worthy pursuit? Or just daydreaming?
I guess it may depend on whether you think daydreaming is a waste of time or not. The Bible is full of dreamers - not just God but prophets and poets and ordinary people like you and like me.
When we make space for sabbath - in all its many forms - we accept an interruption of the status quo and accept the invitation to step into God’s dreams for a time. We are not alone in taking that step - people of faith have been daydreaming alongside the Holy since the dawn of time. Where would we be without our dreamers?
Catholic peace activist and poet Rose Marie Berger has an essay in this book called “Getting Our Gaze Back.” In it, she narrates what it’s like to sometimes stare absentmindedly out her window and slip into a daydreamlike state. Sabbath, yes?
She shares that Benedictine monk Bernard of Clairvaux called this “resting in the mind of God. It is this kind of meditation, he says, that ‘replaces confusion with order…gathers together that which is dispersed, penetrates into that which is hidden, discovers that which is true and distinguishes it from that which merely appears as such.’” [6]
In the spirit of seeking sabbath: may the parts of us that are dispersed be gathered together. May our confused and weary hearts and spirits find a semblance of order. And may we continue to seek the truth of the world of God’s dreams. May it be so.
NOTES:
[1] The Impossible Will Take a Little While. Edited by Paul Rogat Loeb.
[2] BibleWorm podcast.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Matt 20:16, Luke 1:53, Luke 4:18, Amos 5:24.
[6] Loeb.
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