Jubilee

Our Sabbath year came to an end with the actual Jewish Sabbath year, on Sunday 13^th September at sunset. Apparently this year is 70^th Jubilee year after Joshua led the Israelites across the Jordan into the Promised Land.

Jubilee! It's a word for celebration, anniversaries, rejoicing and freedom. In the Old Testament, the Jews celebrated a Jubilee at the end of every seventh seven year cycle (every 50 years). We celebrate jubilee as a time of cancelling debt and forgiveness of sins. We've made it to the end of our Sabbath year of rest! We've enjoyed seven years as a Prayer Beacon. The Salvation Army has been in Banbury for 130 years. We’re believing that the best years are ahead of us and not behind.

Jubilee marks the end of a season, and thus the beginning of a new season. We look forward to all that God is going to do in these days, as we cross the river from the wilderness into the Promised Land. We don't know where we're going, but we know that God does (Joshua 3:4), and we can trust him to lead us forward into the good works that God has prepared in advance for us to do (Ephesians 2:10).

We’re not slowing, like we think this is done and it’s all over. We continue to wait on the Lord for what he is doing and showing and speaking to us. We've seen God show up in amazing ways over the past year: we've grown in salvation, in freedom, in healing, in depth in number. We’re keep our expectations high as we press forward, and keep praying and believing for greater things.

‘Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen'

And whew! What a weekend. We celebrated our 130^th anniversary as a corps, along with our 7^th Prayer Beacon birthday, and the end of our Sabbath year.

Saturday we held our Big Birthday Tea Party with great flair. We made it to the local papers, 13 of them in fact.

We had an African Praise choir from Luton, who were electric, we had displays up on the walls about the history of the Army in Banbury, what’s going on at the moment, and what we’re dreaming for the future. We had tonnes of balloons (and balloons really do not weigh very much), reams of bunting and shedloads of amazing cake. More than 150 people came through our doors, including the town mayor, our local MP, and a good handful of people who had no idea what was going on, but came looking for food parcels. Great connections were made, we’ve seen several groups of people come back to connect up and to worship with us since then. It was all kinds of crazy, but a lot of fun. We help two open air meetings, with marches into the town centre, which drew quite a crowd. It was a very active way to end a year of rest. That evening, we held a slightly smaller and calmer meeting, to celebrate what God has been doing, to worship, to pray, to share testimonies and to look forward to what’s coming next.

Sunday morning saw the enrolment of our first soldier since we’ve been here. It was a beautiful morning, full of heartfelt worship, inspiring testimony, glory marches, powerful prayer and just enough nostalgia. And of course, more cake, candles and singing. We ran out of time for a preach (don’t the best meetings run out of time for the preach?), but it’s ok, because we still weren’t done yet. We came in to land, after an exhausting weekend, by finishing with a shared meal at sunset to end our Sabbath year.

We were so blessed to have our good friend Sylvia Overton sharing with us this weekend, and she led us in an amazing evening that was a breath of peaceful fresh air after the manic activity of the rest of the weekend.

We ate together, of course. It’s a powerful thing, an intimate thing, to eat together.

Rosh Hashana, Jewish New Year, is a time for looking back, for confession and wiping the slate clean, as well as for looking forward to what God is calling us to in the new year.

We spent time confessing our sins before God, throwing our piece of bread into the water, like throwing pebbles in the sea, or burning a bit of paper. Our sins are gone, washed clean, we’re free from the weight of the past to move forward with a clean slate.

At twenty three minutes past seven, just as the sun went down, the shofar blew, a trumpet call to welcome in the new year, and then the first thing we did was to grab hold of the bits of paper that make up our dream wall, and pray them into being, speak them out, prophesy those things that God has laid on our hearts, so that his dreams become our future, our reality. We prayed over each other, the words and pictures that God has given us this past year, prayed them into fullness, encouraged and affirmed each other. Even if you can’t see it, I see it in you. God can he is able.

Sylvia shared with us this call to shine like stars, to  ‘become blameless and pure, ‘children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.’

To follow the call the live lives of repentance, prayer and justice, that is the strategy for God’s kingdom to keep growing.

And then we ate apples dipped in honey, a prayer for God’s sweetness and healing to follow us this year, as we follow him, into the Promised Land of his calling. Apples that we’d picked from the tree in our garden, apples shared from our neighbour who had too many. (Hers are nicer than ours, juicy red ones).

The kinaesthetic in me loves how tangible it is to worship using these ancient Jewish forms. It’s like having a toddler. It’s impossible to get religious about it all, when someone is chatting away over their dinner through the talky bits, or when the knife slips, the honey spills, the bowl of bready water gets thrown on the floor. And yet, Jesus is so present, so there. There’s no standing on ceremony, just in the middle of really, messy, human life we eat and we pray, and it’s holy.

Happy New Year.