Texts: Exodus 22:6; Matthew 5:1-6
Speaker: Joel Miller
When fire breaks out | and catches in thorns | so that the stacked grain or the standing grain or the field is consumed | the one who started the fire | shall make full restitution.
These words appear in Exodus 22 in a section my Bible labels as “Laws of Restitution.” These laws detail how to respond to theft and property damage within the community. Some of them get pretty specific.
For example, if you steal an ox or a sheep, and you slaughter it, or sell it, and, of course, you get caught, you owe the owner five oxen or four sheep. But if you still have possession of it, you have to give it back plus two of your own oxen or sheep. And if you can’t afford this, if you don’t have a couple animals to spare, you have to sell off your foundational asset, your body, your labor, to make full restitution. All that packed into one verse, Exodus 22:1
Other laws deal with livestock grazing over a boundary line, who owes what if a borrowed work animal is injured or dies, how to respond if someone digs a pit, doesn’t cover it, and a donkey or oxen falls in and gets hurt.
The cultural setting for the one about fire breaking out is this: It was common practice then, and even now, to have a row of thorn bushes around fields. A hedgerow. These were low cost, low maintenance, multipurpose fences. They marked boundary lines and kept wild and domestic animals out of the field. If you’ve ever heard the biblical phrase “a hedge of protection” (Job 1:10), it comes from this practice. It was also common practice to burn a field after the harvest. It cleared the stubble, and the ashes were a natural fertilizer. But fire is a powerful force. If you start one, after harvest, or anytime, intentionally or unintentionally, you better be able to manage it. If it burns through the thorn row, which is not a great hedge of protection against fire, and gets into your neighbor’s field, you’re responsible for damages.
Exodus 22:6 When fire breaks out and catches in thorns so that the stacked grain (the harvested grain) or the standing grain (the unharvested grain) or the field is consumed the one who started the fire shall make full restitution.
These laws of restitution are part of a block of legal material from the middle of Exodus 20 through Exodus 23. It’s known as the Book of the Covenant. It’s considered the oldest legislation in the Bible with parallels in the Code of Hammurabi, the laws of the Hittites, and other Ancient Near Eastern legal material.
For us post-agrarian, post-industrial, digital-age urbanites, it can sound a bit archaic. I’ve never had an oxen stolen or fall into a pit. I was, however, the cause of some boundary crossing bovines during my high school days when I ran through our barn during an intense game of hide and seek and spooked the cows, who broke through the fence and headed out at impressive speeds into rural Logan County, Ohio. My restitution was spending a whole spring break with my dad trying to track them down, which was mostly, but not entirely successful.
We still loan things out that can get damaged – tools, bikes, maybe a car, or renting out a room. And sometimes things are stolen. And sometimes, like the story I’ll tell in a bit, entire estates are stolen from a whole group of people. For all these things, when something is broken, or stolen, when an injustice is committed, the just response isn’t only to punish the wrongdoer, which doesn’t restore anything that was lost, but, as fully as possible, to make restitution, to restore what was broken or taken. We call this restorative justice. Or reparative justice. It’s an old, old idea. Apparently the oldest in the legal material of what became the Bible.
We as a congregation, have committed ourselves to this practice in a specific way. Adam talked about this during the SHARE Moment. To briefly recap, we are currently committing 4% of our annual operating budget to Reparative Debt Payments – half to a local Indigenous-led organization, NAICCO, and half to a Black-led organization, Land of the Freed. Both have to do with land injustice. Or, per Exodus 22, both involve land and the hedge of protection around it – in the form of treaties and legal title – consumed by the metaphorical fire of broken promises, violence, and overt racism. In contrast, many of us have benefitted from those same legal structures and the generational wealth-building that comes with it.
But here’s the thing: In the immortal words of Billy Joel: “We didn’t start the fire.” It was always burning since the world’s been turning. And our ancestors may not have been the ones threatening the Randolph Freedpeople or violating treaties. Exodus 22:6 “…the one who started the fire shall make full restitution.” So why, one may rightly ask, are we involving ourselves in restitution for acts in which we did not even participate? We didn’t start the fire.
It’s a good question. It won’t be resolved by the end of this service.
What I would like to do, is tell more of the story of the racialized fire that consumed the inheritance of the Randolph Freedpeople in Mercer County, Ohio in the mid-1800s. I would like for us to sit with the unresolved questions of what that has to do with us right now.
John Randolph was a planter and politician from Roanoke, Virginia. He was also a slaver. In his will he pledged freedom for those he had enslaved – after his death. In his words, “heartily regretting that I have ever been the owner of one.”* Each former slave over the age of 40 was to be provided with at least 10 acres of land. For these real estate purchases, $38,000 was set aside in the estate. That’s $1.6 million in today’s dollars.
He actually wrote three wills, each a little different, which led to a legal battle. But finally, 13 years after his death, the 383 Randolph slaves became the Randolph freedpeople. Under the guidance of the executor of the will, they set off together from Virginia, on foot, with wagons carrying their supplies. For a month they walked and camped for 300 miles, toward the Ohio River. They chartered boats at Kanawa, West Virginia, and arrived in Cincinnati on July 1, 1846. They were not well received in Cincinnati, but they were just passing through. They made their way up the Miami and Erie Canal through Dayton. A local newspaper editor wrote it would have been better had they “been sent to Liberia (where) they would have enjoyed…liberty and equality, which it is not their lot to meet with, save in the land of their fathers.”*
Legally, these recently enslaved folks were already Ohio landowners. The executor had used the estate money to purchase 3200 acres in Mercer County. That’s on the Indiana border, with Celina as the current county seat. It was a place with a growing Black community. About a decade earlier a seminary student named of Augustus Wattles had purchased land in the area. He started a school, a farming network, and industry, drawing in former slaves from Kentucky. These Virginia freedpeople were coming to claim their land, and continue building the community.
But they were not met with liberty and equality. Perhaps out of an already rising suspicion of Black wealth through Augustus Wattles’ movement, and certainly through a growing fear as news of the freedpeople’s arrival traveled faster than their canal boats, the local White population organized in opposition. When the boats arrived in the village of New Bremen on a Sunday afternoon, armed White landowners demanded they leave the county, which they soon did. The executor couldn’t find a suitable negotiation. He decided to sell the land to recoup the money. Local resolutions were passed that declared “that we will resist the settlement of blacks and mulattoes in this county to the full extent of our means, the bayonet not excepted.” And that Blacks already living in the county had to leave by March of the next year, 1847, otherwise “we pledge ourselves to remove them, peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must.”*
The freedpeople settled in different surrounding communities, outside Piqua and Troy, in towns like Rossville – but as day laborers, domestic workers, and tenants – not as owners. There is no record of any of them, ever, receiving any of the land, or money – the $1.6 million dollars set aside for them in the Randolph will for their lifetimes of unpaid labor.
The fire of fear and racism broke out, burned through the hedge of legal protections and civil rights, consumed the fields and wealth of the Randolph Freedpeople…and restitution was not made.
This is not the end of the story. The descendants of these original 383 folks, now 7 or 8 generations down the line, have kept this story alive. And now there’s an organization dedicated to this. The Land of the Freed. The Ohio History Connection is partnering with them. Miami University had a whole semester-long geography class meticulously research the original deeds of purchased land. For the first time we now have a nearly complete map of those 3200 acres that were bought and sold. The class created a website with extensive information about their project. Paisha Thomas leads Land of the Freed. She lives in Columbus, is a friend of a number of us, and has preached here. They are currently working to restore the African Jackson Cemetery near Rossville. A design firm has presented plans that include a welcome center and museum. And of course, there are still calls for some form of restitution, all these years later.
Along with NAICCO and their Land Back campaign, this is the organization to which we have been releasing our reparative debt payments.
Regarding fires that destroy – be they real or metaphorical, Exodus 22:6 states: “the one who started the fire shall make full restitution.”
We did not start this fire, and what we are doing is nowhere near full restitution. But as the great theologian Billy Joel once sang, and maybe you can join in for the final line:
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it
Jesus once said, in his Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the meek, those who live with humility, for they will inherit the land.” This is not how history tends to play out. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the story. Restorative justice offers a path that is ultimately healing and good for those who have been harmed, and those who have done harm or benefitted from that harm. Blessed are those who keep this story alive.
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* All quotes from “John Randolph’s Freedmen: The Thwarting of a Will” by Frank F. Mathias, The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 39, No. 2 (May, 1973), pp. 263-272 (10 pages)