Jubilee Action on Wall Street
Friday, February 6, 2026
What does love require of us, and how can we provoke that spirit of Jubilee that God was up to?
—Shane Claiborne, The Francis Factor
At CAC’s 2015 conference The Francis Factor, activist Shane Claiborne told a story about how his community’s study of Jubilee and their unexpected receipt of $10,000 in a legal settlement led to a creative action on Wall Street:
We thought, “Wow, this money isn’t just for our nonprofit. This should go to folks on the street, because we were literally fighting anti-homeless legislation.” We said, “Let’s use that money…. Let’s have a Jubilee party and let’s do it on Wall Street.” We invited a bunch of homeless folks from all over New York, many of them friends, and we said, “Hey, we’re going to go to Wall Street and we’re going to give away the money that we won in a lawsuit. We need to be peaceful, but it’s going to be beautiful.” We didn’t want it to be too crazy, so we broke it up in small change…. We had hundreds of us that had it divvied up everywhere. We had people on bikes and people with backpacks, people with coffee mugs that were filled with money.
When we got to Wall Street, you could see folks from the street trickling in wondering, “Is this really happening?” The police are all already there … and they’re insisting, “This is not happening. If anyone’s here for this money distribution, it’s not happening.” What they didn’t know is we were already there…. As soon as the bell was about to drop on Wall Street, … we announced, “We believe another world is possible, another world where everybody has what they need and there’s not this deep inequity.”
We preached it that morning and then Sister Margaret [a Catholic sister] announced the Jubilee, blew the ram’s horn, and money started pouring out everywhere. I mean, we had people on the balconies with paper money. They start pouring it out…. It was beautiful. They’re singing. This one … street sweeper, he’s got his dustpan filled with money. He’s like, “It is a good day at work. Hallelujah!” Another guy grabs some money off the street and he said, “Now I can get the prescription I needed. Thank you.” We even had folks from inside Wall Street that heard about what was happening. They said, “We heard that there’s more fun happening out here, so we’re here.” One guy just said, “I want to start getting bagels and giving them out,” and he did. It was contagious….
I think that in the end, our goal is not to create enemies but is actually to courageously proclaim the vision of God that is so big that everyone is welcome. But it also means, as Desmond Tutu says, that those who have been oppressed are free from oppression, and those who have done the oppressing are free from being the oppressor, that everyone is set free. [1] That’s the invitation for us.
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5 On Friday John Chaffee
1.
“Love itself is a kind of knowing.”
– Gregory the Great, 6th Century Bishop
The whole of Christian tradition highlights Love as the main virtue and as a description of what God is. That said, it is fascinating how the tradition also holds that Love is a form of epistemology, it is a way of learning and therefore of knowing.
It is one thing for me to read a book about being married; it is another thing entirely to be taught by the school of love what marriage is supposed to be.
I can read 400 biographies about a person, but I could learn so much more about a person if I were to love them and be loved by them.
For all these reasons and more, as Gregory the Great teaches us, Love is a kind of knowing.
2.
“God leads into the dark night those whom He desires to purify from all these imperfections so that He may bring them farther onward.”
– John of the Cross, Spanish Monk & Reformer
When I first read the Dark Night of the Soul, it did not make sense to me. Then, after enormous heartbreak and disillusionment with the institutional church, the Dark Night of the Soul made the most sense of all the approaches of Christian spirituality.
Over the years, I have met people at various stages of the Dark Night of the Soul. Many of them felt a sense of relief to know that their path had been walked before by others, and that rather than being lost, they are on the same old journey of being found.
I think that one of the reasons the Dark Night of the Soul can feel so painful is that it is almost never a chosen path. It is a path forced upon us, or one that chooses us.
In the wisdom of John of the Cross, the Dark Night of the Soul is God stripping away every single crutch, support, or idol that gets in the way of the Beloved Soul and God…
And that even includes the experience of faith itself.
Think about that.
God allows us to experience a type of “atheism” or “lack of faith” in order to teach us that our experience of faith is not the thing we should be after. That is very much like being in love with the feeling of being in love without loving the Beloved right in front of us!
3.
“This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God.”
– Thomas Aquinas, Dominican Monk
Aquinas wrote the most impressive systematic theology in Church history. It has towered rather supremely over other works of theology. It is known as the Summa Theologiae.
Even still…
Despite writing such an impressive tome.
Aquinas still maintained the mystery that God is something beyond our comprehension.
I find that absolutely lovely.
4.
“That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.”
– Pete Rollins, Irish Philosopher
We have a problem, a predicament, a difficulty that we must overcome.
God is utterly beyond human language, symbols, ceremonies, and concepts. Every potential thought we might have about God is immediately infinitely less than the reality of what God actually is.
And yet…
We can’t not say something.
God is such a profound mystery that encompasses and penetrates everything we say or do to such a degree that we still have to say something.
This paradox could make some people despair, while others might bend the knee before the mystery.
5.
“I pray God rid me of God.”
– Meister Eckhart, 14th Century German Preacher
Years ago, I preached a Good Friday service where the main point of the sermon was this quote from Eckhart.
At some level, we need the help of God to rid us of every smaller, limited, misguided, idolatrous view of God.
It is probably true for each of us that at the end of our ropes, there is an understanding of God that we would rather die than give up. The strange reality is that that view of God is far less than what God actually is, and therefore, we need God’s help to “cleanse our palate” or “clean the slate” and to help us come to God with as few hindrances as possible.
On the surface, this quote sounds like a preacher requesting to become an atheist. On a deeper level, it is a prayer of profound insight and devotion to this mystery we all call “God.”
Funny enough, I did not preach a Good Friday service at that church again. Oh well. I still think it was a sermon that Meister Eckhart would have approved of.
