Let me tell you about the time I was raptured. Or rather, the time I was very sure everyone else had been, and I had been left behind to face the tribulation alone at age nine.
I came home from school. The house was empty. My mother’s shoes were by the door but my mother was not. And the theology I had absorbed from reading Left Behind, clicked instantly into place: it had happened. Jesus had come back, taken the worthy, and left me — obviously the one kid with too much doubt in her heart — behind. I stood in the kitchen doing the math on how I’d survive the antichrist. (My mother was in the backyard. With, I believe, the dogs. Their tribulation was a garden hose.)
I laugh about it now, but that panic was manufactured, and it was doing something. It was training me to live like this world was a burning building we were all just waiting to escape. And if the whole thing is going to burn anyway — the planet, the body, the ordinary feeling of a normal Tuesday — then why would you care for any of it? That theology has consequences. It makes us careless. Careless with the earth, careless with our bodies, careless with our one actual life.
Today I want to show you that the God of the Bible is far, far more interested in this world than the faith of my childhood let on. And it starts with a phrase we’ve already met.
What Jesus was actually proclaiming
Remember Jesus’ mission statement in Nazareth — the one we started this whole series with? The last line was “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” We’ve mostly let that phrase float by as a warm, vague nicety. It is not vague. It’s a technical term. Jesus was proclaiming a Jubilee.
And the Jubilee, laid out in Leviticus 25, is one of the wildest, most beautiful economic ideas in the whole Bible.
The great reset
Here’s how it worked, at least on the page. Every seventh year was a sabbath for the land — a whole year when the fields were left unplanted so the soil could rest. And then, after seven of those cycles — every fiftieth year — came the Jubilee. And in the Jubilee, everything reset.
“You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.” (Leviticus 25:10)
Debts were canceled. People who’d sold themselves into servitude to survive were set free. Land that families had lost went back to them. The whole economy, which always drifts toward a few people holding everything and everyone else falling behind, got hit with a giant reset button. A holy leveling, built right into the calendar.
(Small delight worth knowing: that verse — “proclaim liberty throughout the land” — is the one cast onto the Liberty Bell. A line about canceling debts and freeing the enslaved, hanging in Philadelphia. The Jubilee gets around.)
And listen to the reason God gives for the whole arrangement:
“The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants.” (Leviticus 25:23)
The land is mine, God says. You don’t own it. You’re tenants. That single sentence dismantles the idea that we’re the proprietors of creation, free to use it up. We’re renters in a house we didn’t build, and the landlord cares how we treat it.
Your actual first job
Which takes us all the way back to the beginning. When the story of the Bible opens and God places the human in the garden, listen to the job description:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” (Genesis 2:15)
The very first vocation — before any rules, before any religion — is to till and keep. The Hebrew words underneath are richer than they sound in English: one means to serve or work, the other means to guard, watch over, protect. The first human job was to serve and protect the garden. We were made to be caretakers before we were anything else.
About that word “dominion”
Now, I know what some of you are thinking, because it got quoted at me too. Doesn’t Genesis also say humans should have “dominion” over the earth and “subdue” it? Hasn’t that verse been used to justify treating the planet like a supply closet?
It has. Honestly, it has. So let’s actually look at the word. “Dominion” translates a Hebrew word about the rule of a king. But here’s the thing about how a good king was supposed to rule in the ancient world: not by plunder, but by protection. A good king made his realm flourish. And to “image” God — which is the same passage — means to represent God’s own care to creation, the way an ambassador represents a nation. So dominion, read in its own world, isn’t a license to exploit. It’s a commission to tend, the way God tends. Same idea as the garden: serve and keep.
I’ll be honest that the word can grammatically bear the harsher reading — which is exactly why interpretation matters, and why the people who wanted to strip-mine the earth found a verse to bless it. But held next to “the land is mine” and “till it and keep it,” the exploitative reading doesn’t survive contact with the rest of the text.
An honest complication
I don’t want to oversell the Jubilee, so here’s the honest part. Scholars genuinely debate whether Israel ever actually practiced it. There’s very little historical evidence that the great fiftieth-year reset was regularly carried out. It may have been more of an ideal held up than a policy ever fully enacted.
But I don’t think that undoes it because it means the Jubilee stood in Israel’s scriptures as a permanent holy dream: a picture of what a just, rested, un-hoarded world could be. And then Jesus stands up in Nazareth, reads the line about the year of the Lord’s favor, and says, today this is fulfilled. He takes the dream off the shelf and says: this. This is what I’m here to proclaim. The reset is on.
So what do we do with this
If you were handed a faith that treated this world as a disposable waiting room — hear the Jubilee. This world is not trash to be escaped. It’s a garden you were made to keep. God calls it mine and calls you a tenant, which is another way of saying it matters, and so does how you live in it.
And notice — the Jubilee’s very first gift is rest. Rest for the land. Rest for the debtor. Rest for the enslaved. If God built a sabbath into the dirt itself — if even the soil gets a year off — then maybe, just maybe, the relentless message that you must always produce, always hustle, always earn your keep was never from God either. You are not a machine for output. You are a tenant in a good world, and you are allowed to rest in it.
You don’t have to escape this life to find God. God is in the garden. Always has been. Probably out back, with the dogs.
The Greenhouse Preview
🌿 This Friday in the Greenhouse (paid): an embodied, get-outside-if-you-can practice for a body that forgot it's allowed to rest, five journal prompts on hustle and escapism and belonging, and a personal liturgy for coming home to the earth.
The Closing Question
💬 In the comments: What did your faith teach you — out loud or under the surface — about this physical world and your own body? I'll be reading every one.
P.S. This Sunday on Streams, I'll come at Jubilee from a gentler door — the simple, radical permission to rest. Come exhale with us.