Ordination | June 1, 2025 | Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey

The title on the order of service may cause you to wonder. If not it should. I have so much grey hair, and also with tremors in my hand and foot, that one would naturally expect me to have a sad ending ceremony, or maybe a “home-going” ceremony—certainly not a celebratory beginning ceremony, certainly not an ordination.

            Why would I undergo ordination approaching my mid-seventies. Why not ten years ago when it was expected/offered? Granted I was not young then, but I definitely am old now.

            Something was missing back then (for me anyway). Call it a master plan. The world didn’t make sense. Surely the powers that be were in the wings (or maybe in the winds) making sure things would not get too far out of hand.

            Maybe they were and still are, but the key that opened the door was the realization that we are God’s hands. That calls for a different attitude.

            The love that I share outwardly is counterfeit unless it stems from profound love of a self that is also connected to everyone else. If I don’t love myself I am trying to bring about change with hands that have estranged themselves from God.

            Now this brings up specters of narcissism and egotism, but I simply reply that narcissism and egotism (as with all things) are fine as long as they are in healthy balance. They only become specters when they are not in healthy balance.

            A healthy balance is what it has taken me seven decades to locate. It is why I am undergoing ordination so late in life. It is also what I would like to talk briefly about today.

            My definition of healthy balance comes from Black American biblical roots, where it’s referred to as jubilee. It is a balance that has to be reset regularly in order to occur.

            The love in the balance comes from several sources, but the definition of it I found in a book entitled All About Love by bell hooks that I encountered in one of the church’s Engaged Spirituality meetings.

            hooks quotes a previously published author to define love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” All of this brings us back to the jubilee.

            The jubilee idea was so popular amongst enslaved Africans that a whole genre of spirituals, and sometimes spirituals in general, were referred to as jubilee songs. These were the songs of freedom. They were also love songs—when love is understood as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

            I have a prayer that I sing for the love that begins authentically within and travels without. It’s based on the spiritual “Oh Freedom,” and it climbs the spiritual chakras within the singer’s body and without, while simultaneously climbing a musical scale.

            It might be thought of as a community-life meditation on spiritual growth without and within. The rhythm comes from the Brazilian martial art, Capoeira.

before we will enslave

we’ll plant slavery in the grave

and grow home with a soul

that is free.

home giving birth to light

your love shelters clothes and feeds,

creates life in your ri-

vers and seas

song breathes in us your air

drum fires light through heart's desires

dance aspires to fly high

soulfully.

your love sings through hips, limbs, and lips

with works and words of stewardship

and tears shed for both

joys and strife

come fill our days with light

guide us home come dark of night

bring us home. feed our soul.

me, we, THEE.

before we will enslave

we’ll plant slavery in the grave

and grow home with a soul

that is free.

            Our society is deep in the destruction of community life now, but our hands are the creator’s hands. So we have to bring the balance back, or perhaps more accurately continue the work of establishing it. Learn we must, and we shall.

            The education we receive from the empire overlooks this. It teaches us to hate ourselves, so we will fight in wars. But those are the empires’ agendas. We know otherwise. What we are created of keeps asserting itself in different ways. It is the spiritual growth that love nurtures.

            Telling histories in which wars are not the main events shows this. For instance, four years in seminary focused on Black religion, followed by six years studying music focused on Black sacred music, followed by three years of independent data analysis and environmental and Womanist readings produced the following historical and religious narrative.

            In the beginning, a war was fought, and then there was a Genesis of diverse enslaved people who came together singing folk music, some of which was spiritual. This Genesis created Black Americans and the first music to be recognized worldwide as American.

            Then another war was fought that was followed within a couple of decades by a massive Exodus from the empire’s lands of slavery: a Great Migration. A new folk music called “the blues” arose from Black Americans. It cried for freedom so poignantly that even white Americans sang it.

            A couple more wars were fought (internationally this time), and people came home determined to make change. So, a Gospel of civil and human rights was spread along with many variations on the blues, including Gospel blues.

            Massive incarceration was the response of the empire. Black Americans responded with the Judgement of hip-hop and rap, which flowed into the world music that the blues had created. And that is where things stand today: a world calling out for jubilee, unconditionally.

            The Biblical jubilee (like all scriptures) has got conditions on it for the specific people, culture, and language it was revealed to. Removing the conditions, reveals striking similarities with other cultures and religions. So it behooves us as a church for the fellowship of all peoples (in the tradition of Howard Thurman’s writings) to do that.

            Once you remove the conditions, you can find similar practices and prohibitions in Islam, Babylon, Ancient Egypt, and the early Catholic Church, to name a few. The concept of jubilee, however, retains in our language a positive lifestyle practice, instead of just a negative prohibition of usury, for instance.

            The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, was written for Israelites, the children of Israel. So, in being promoted as a book for everyone, the bible effectively invites everyone to become Israelites, children of Israel. So, everyone becomes—before God (and God’s land)—as the children of Israel.

            The jubilee verses, on the one hand, tell the children of Israel, “the land is mine [God’s] and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers [sojourners].” In indigenous, nature traditions—on the other hand—human sojourners are orally integrated, verbally balanced, into the earth, the flora and the fauna. Still, such sojourners, in either case, are to be dealt with kindly, compassionately and givingly, and they are to care for the land.

            So, an unconditional jubilee offers a written balance in human affairs, but also with respect to the earth. The key pieces are that 1) the land, the earth, actually belongs to God; 2) farmed land must lie fallow regularly to regenerate; 3) do not charge interest on loans; 4) free the enslaved and do not enslave; and 5) forgive debts.

            In one of the jubilee passages from Leviticus 25 below, I have removed some of the conditions. I have kept the references to Israelites, and simply interpret it as a reference to all peoples. I have replaced references to Egypt in the Biblical story with bracketed references to Empire.

8 “‘Count off seven sabbath years—seven times seven years—so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. 9 Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. 10 Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. 11 The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines. 12 For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields.

13 “‘In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to return to their own property….

23 “‘The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. 24 Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.…

35 “‘If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, help them as you would a foreigner and stranger, so they can continue to live among you. 36 Do not take interest or any profit from them, but fear your God, so that they may continue to live among you. 37 You must not lend them money at interest or sell them food at a profit. 38 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of [Empire] to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God.

39 “‘If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and sell themselves to you, do not make them work as slaves. 40 They are to be treated as hired workers or temporary residents among you; they are to work for you until the Year of Jubilee. 41 Then they and their children are to be released, and they will go back to their own clans and to the property of their ancestors. 42 Because the Israelites are my servants, whom I brought out of [Empire], they must not be sold as slaves. 43 Do not rule over them ruthlessly, but fear your God.

            The fifty year cycle seems long. Catholicism has one every 25 years, and this year, 2025, is one. A passage in Deuteronomy schedules the debt cancellation every seven years. Again, in 18th century BC Mesopotamia, Hammurabi is said to have canceled debt and restored the rights of serfs every 10 years or so during his 42-year reign as king of Babylon.

            So the principal is the thing. It would do away with massive incarceration. Interpreting the word Israelites—and Palestinians as well for that matter—as “humans who have learned to love themselves and their neighbors unconditionally” would do away with the current situation in Gaza.

            Considering the crises of the current hour, this then becomes the vow of my ordination: To pray for, promote, work for, learn, share and write for an unconditional jubilee, because I love myself, and everyone else is connected to me.

            To do all of this with the humble inquisitiveness and clear insightfulness of a child, and the life experience of an old geezer—justice built economically: the life balance of unconditional jubilee, that regularly frees the enslaved, forgives the debt and fallows the farmed earth, to regularly regenerate the fecundity and fertility of community life.

            I will add (along these lines) that I am a grandparent, and a church whose membership does not actively include and focus on the generations of my children and their children is literally dying. So a big part of my jubilee work must focus on youth.

Do what I can

To promote and unleash

An unconditional jubilee.

Define being free by

Awakening the jubilee.

Unconditionally,

Debt- and bondage-free

An unconditional home for all

Renewed regularly

By you and by me.

            On the other side of the world, people are gathering for an annual pilgrimage. This ordination might be thought of as a pilgrimage preparation for me, as I begin a crucially defining life journey.

            Such is my case for ordination.