"Have the trumpet sounded." Make it loud. This is a Super Sabbath that God is proclaiming.

Not simply the 7^th day of the week when we humans are to rest from our usual toils and preoccupations. When we are to lean back in faithful acknowledgement that the earth spins without our feet on the treadmill. That fruit grows and fish leap from impulses more profound than our prodding. Not simply Sabbath. The 7^th day. But 7 weeks of years. You shall count off 7 TIMES 7 years "so that the period of 7 weeks of 7 years gives 49 years." And then you have the trumpet sounded. LOUD.

On the day of atonement that 49^th year of the cycle, with noisy brash brass you proclaim that the 50^th year will be holy. "You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you." Extravagance is always a factor in the equations of Divine mathematics.

Proclaiming Liberty. Setting the captives free. Letting the land itself rest. Forgiving debts.

In the year of Jubilee we acknowledge that we cannot repay the debt we owe to God for creating the earth and the heavens, for giving us life. But as our debt is forgiven-written off-swept away-so we are instructed to forgive the puny debts owed to us. To forgive from the heart, as the Jesus-Jubilee personified-so hauntingly words it.

Love is a gift. Salvation is a gift. Life is a gift. Something totally unearned. Given by a gracious God for God knows what reason. As Frederich Buechner says, "There's nothing you can do to earn it. There's nothing YOU can do. There's nothing you can DO." Sound that trumpet. Make it LOUD. As wild as God's love for us.

We are forever indebted. And we know it. We have been given gifts all out of proportion to what we could ever conceivably have done to earn them. Given with pizzazz [in the words of Annie Dillard] given in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. Amazing grace. How sweet the sound-of that trumpet.

"Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants." Freedom from debt. Freedom from bondage. Freedom from addictions. Freedom from self-destructive behaviors. Freedom from old grudges. [And maybe that's Bob Marley singing counterpoint to the trumpet, "Free yourself from mental slavery.."] Freedom to forgive-not only to forgive debts, but to forgive one another.

No wonder this Jubilee rolls in on the Day of Atonement. The day of becoming one again as a community. The Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, calls for reconciliation of fractured relationships within the community, before there can be restoration of right relationship of the community with God.

A couple of weeks before the first all-race elections in South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu preached a sermon on forgiveness. I didn't hear the sermon, but while I was doing my peace-monitoring work in Port Elizabeth, wearing my nametag identifying me as "The Rev." Mary Susan Gast, I was repeatedly and exuberantly engaged in conversation about forgiveness, how it would benefit those who forgave. The air was ionized with forgiveness. In his inaugural address, President Mandela spoke of the need to "forgive what we dare not forget." To acknowledge the horrific wrongs that had been done, lest such depravity come again and not be recognized. But to forgive, to administer that healing ointment so that the country might knit together, mending its broken bones, treating its torn ligaments. Sound the trumpet. Jubilee was at hand.

"You shall return, every one of you to your family." To your flesh and blood. To your kin.

Flesh. Kin. The intertwining of the subtleties of meaning give depth to the concept. All flesh is related. All human beings are garbed in the same suit of flesh. Flesh, the soft tissue--not skin, not bones. Below the externals; above the rigid framework: Flesh. Not implying corruption. Not defined as the antithesis of "Spirit" but flesh. The only way we can live in the world. Enfleshed. Incarnate.

Kin. The theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz has said that the Kingdom of God is more accurately called a "Kin-dom," because all within it are kin, related. The theologian Alice Walker clearly states this understanding through the character Shug in The Color Purple. Shug talks about God being in everyone and everything and she relates how one day, "it come to me that if I cut a tree my arm would bleed."

In English, the word kin is related to the word ken which means "to know" or "to understand." Something that is "beyond my ken" is "beyond my understanding." Kin-folks are ken-folks-the folks you "know" or "have an understanding with."

When you've done this, when you know all humanity as "kin" and refuse to turn your back on them, then, Isaiah tells us, then shall your light break forth like the dawn; the glory of The Almighty will surround you, front and back, present and future, and your healing shall spring up quickly. Your healing.

To heal is to become whole. Not "perfect" on some abstract and arbitrary scale of mobility, ability, beauty or achievement. But whole. Of one piece. "At one" rather than "at odds" with yourself, with your Creator, with your community. And of course that "at one" stuff brings us back to the word "atonement." The Day of Atonement. And there goes that loud intrusive trumpet again.

What healing awaits us as a community around the communion table? What healing awaits us as individuals at a healing station?

What injuries, what bruises, what shattered dreams what rifts in relationships could be mended? What resentments have been aging into a bitter and noxious wine? What justified anger has blazed and then frozen, coating your heart with ice? What pain daily seeps into your pores and pulses through your being so that all else is obscured? How often has your voice gone unheeded, your needs gone unnoticed? Has your trust been betrayed? Has grief immobilized you? Are you deadened somewhere deep in the core of you by the infuriatingly casual or violently intentional brutality of racism or gender bias or homophobia?

The communion table does not dish up magic. The oil of salvation is not the agent of alchemy, curing disease, re-fashioning body or mind into a more socially "desireable" mold than what has been entrusted to us. Human community will not be transformed because we come to the table-or will it?

Here we come, together, dull and brilliant, powerbrokers and serfs, to partake together as kin. Folks who know one another, who share some common understandings that Jesus came bearing love for each of us. Around the communion table all are fed. We feed each other, saying implicitly, I want you to live, to thrive, to grow. We are family here, we take care of one another. We come to the table, each of us, in need, wounded, cherished.

I haven't yet had the courage to see the movie Boys Don't Cry. Whenever I go to the video store I'm surprised and a little relieved that all the copies have already been rented. I know that Hilary Swank won the Oscar for Best Actress for what by all measures was an exceptional performance of Tina, a girl growing up in Nebraska, convinced she was really a boy, leaving home and living as a young man, Brandon, whose physical sexual identity is eventually discovered, who is then raped and killed by the guys who had been Brandon's closest friends.

I listened to a radio interview with the writer and director of the movie, who talked about how difficult it was to find someone who could play the lead role convincingly. And then how excruciating it was to film the final violent scenes. How she worked and worked with the actor playing the part of the young man who commits the murder. How she called up all the rage and fear that was buried anywhere in that actor so he could focus it into those moments in front of the camera until finally he exploded, went wild, it was captured on film and he tore away and couldn't be found. The director hunted and hunted and finally came upon him sobbing in a closet, terrified that he might be capable of such an act. "No," the director assured him, "no, no. You're crying. The boys who did this didn't cry. Couldn't cry."

Around this table, we can cry. For what we may have done. For what has been done to us. Is that a trumpet that I hear? Jubilee in the blest release of tears?

And where was the trumpet for Tina? For all or any of us who have been fleetingly persuaded or constantly stalked by the conviction that something is just not right about us? Maybe it's in a lullaby that was written by a mother for her daughter. Or a woman for her sister [I've heard both expositions]. A song that I imagine God might sing to us all in the season of Jubilee.

For previous editions of "Pacific Currents", click here.

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