Today's Scripture teaching Scripture comes to us from Joel
chapter 2, beginning in verse 4. What the cutting locust left the
swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left,
the hopping locust has eaten, And what the hopping locust left
the destroying locust has eaten. Like blackness spread upon the
mountains a great and powerful army comes.
Their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after
them in ages to come. Fire devours in front of them,
and behind them a flame burns before them.
The land is like the Garden of Eden, but after them a desolate
wilderness, and nothing escapes them.
They have the appearance of horses, and like war horses they
charge. As with the rumbling of
Chariots. They leap on the tops of the
mountains like the crackling of a flame of fire devouring the
stubble, like a powerful army drawn up for battle.
Before them peoples are in anguish.
All faces grow pale. Like warriors they charge.
Like soldiers, they scale the wall.
Each keeps to his own course. They do not swerve from their
paths. They do not jostle one another.
Each keeps to its own track. They burst through the weapons
and are not halted. They leap upon the city, they
run upon the walls. They climb up into the houses.
They enter through the windows like a thief.
The earthquakes before them. The heavens tremble, the sun and
the moon are darkened, and the stars withdraw.
They're shining. This is, in fact, the word of
the Lord. I was halfway through my Master
of Divinity degree when I found myself at the point where I
could no longer put off my Intro to Preaching class.
I had two main reasons for this avoidance.
First, I'm just being honest. I was pretty judgy about sermons
and usually found them boring. The thought of needing to spend
a great deal of time with others learning how to do this boring
thing with other neophytes like myself was not at all appealing
to me. And two, my school was
wonderfully diverse in its composition and preaching.
Class had a notable mainline Christian flair, and I wasn't
sure how, as a charismatic Jesus follower, building a home within
a certain specific stripe of evangelicalism that was going to
go. But the time came when I
couldn't put it off any further. And it was a good class.
And one thing that made it good was the ways that at times it
made me wonderfully uncomfortable.
Are you familiar with that feeling?
What it is to be wonderfully uncomfortable, what it is to be
pushed from the seat of familiarity into the thing that
feels just a little bit weird, but like not too far?
One assignment in the class, this large intro class with
something like 50 students, was the delivery of a prophetic
Oracle. Now to be clear, these oracles
weren't the kind of thing you'd associate with Harry Potter's
Professor Trelawny or the Pagan fortune telling shop in a strip
mall. Neither were they kind of
prophetic ministry that we often talk about in practice in
Vineyard churches. The kind where we sit in quiet
and pray, come Holy Spirit, and then gently share a word or an
image of encouragement that came to mind as we were praying.
The assignment was essentially to write like you were one of
the Old Testament prophets or maybe a passionate psalmist, and
to exclaim, lament, grief, wrongdoing, judgement or loss.
And we had something like 30 seconds apiece.
And unlike our practice sermons, which were given in small
groups, we were to stand one at a time from our seats and
deliver our prophetic oracles to the class's large lecture hall.
That's 50 junior preachers going back-to-back to back, one at a
time in rapid succession, talking like a prophet.
And icing on the cake, the Oracle assignment was delivered
on October 31st. It was an experience, and upon
reflection, it makes sense. But I remember being surprised
by the intensity of that classes 50 minutes Oracle prophecy.
Boom, boom, boom. I thought of this assignment
when preparing for the sermon. Not only because our oracles
sounded a bit like modernized modern Minor Prophets, because
that year had seen an uncommon number of terrible hurricanes.
Harvey in Houston in the Gulf Coast, Irma in Florida and the
Caribbean, Maria wrecking havoc in Costa Rica.
Now, I wasn't in any of those places when the storms hit, but
I did sit with a friend whose family was in Houston and who
fled on foot while the storm surged in an effort to get to
safety. In that move, there were hours
where her whole family was unaccounted for.
And so states away, my friend and I sat together while we
listened to the radio calls of emergency responders.
And she tracked eyewitnesses on social media in Houston,
watching for descriptions of her family.
My Oracle was about natural disasters, A lament pleading for
God's intervention on behalf of the vulnerable.
And this is the scene that we enter into in the book of Joel.
But Joel's disaster wasn't hurricanes.
It was a plague of locusts descending during a major
drought. Joel is a short 3 chapter book
that follows a familiar prophetic movement.
We'll see it a few times in the minor prophet series that we
began last week that will take us all the way through all 12
minor prophets. Near the end of the Old
Testament there's a Oh no moment of crisis, a cry to God, a
warning about the day of the Lord, and then a turning toward
the making right of weary bodies, tired hearts, and
circumstances beyond human control.
I really liked Jared's graph from last week that thinks that
the way we think about stories and and bad fortune.
Good for I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm just a nerd, but these
are the moments in which the prophets are speaking, in which
they're offering their words to the Israelites.
And so this is the terrain in which we are entering into Joel
takes place around 403 fifty BCE and Judah and Sumer and
Jerusalem. Sorry, wrong sermon.
The Israelites, God's chosen people, have already lived a
long story by this point, Called through Abraham, formed through
Moses, settled in the Promised Land, centered around the
Temple, then shattered by the destruction and exile in
Babylon. They have returned home and the
temple has been rebuilt, but there is no king and there's no
independence. This is a generation that has
never personally known exile, but also never known glory.
Not the liberation from slavery their ancestors sang about, not
the nearness of God's presence born in the ark, not even the
hope laid and urgency of those who first rebuilt the temple.
They know waiting. They know ordinary life.
And here in the book of Joel, they are experiencing profound
ecological devastation. Joel speaks to these people,
calling them to lament, promising God's response,
assuring them that God will meet their most basic needs, and then
do something wholly unexpected, pour out God's own Spirit.
And centuries later, when the Spirit falls in Jerusalem and
wind and fire and the apostle Peter will stand on the day of
Pentecost and say, this is that. This was foretold in Joel.
When their physical environment crumbles, the Israelites are
laid bare again before God. There is no illusion of control
left to cling to, and lament becomes the invitation to the
reorientation of desire. Like lined up, like glass in a
telescope, pointed toward what is true and what has always been
there. I don't know about you, but my
context for locusts is that of the plagues that were wrought in
Egypt while Moses was trying to convince Pharaoh to let God's
people go. And that's about it.
The truth is that locust plagues were common in the ancient
world, in this part of the world, and we have them in the
modern era. I believe this photo is from
2020 March 2020. Though for all of the modern
everything we have, locust swarms remain terrifying.
According to National Geographic, desert locust swarms
can cover 460 square miles, with 40 to 80 million locusts packed
in less than 1/2 square mile. A swarm of this size would each
would eat 423,000,000 lbs of plants a day.
With this in mind, I'm going to reread a portion of today's
passage, and I'm going to invite you to hear Joel's voice in the
context in which it was spoken, with the roar of a swarm of
locusts behind it. With the cutting locusts left,
the swarming locust has eaten. With the swarming locusts left,
the hopping locust has eaten. And what the hopping locusts
left with the destroying locust has eaten.
Like blackness spread upon the mountains, a great and powerful
army comes their like has never been from of old, nor will be
again after them in ages to come.
Fire devours in front of them, and behind them a flame burns
before them. The land is like the Garden of
Eden, but after them a desolate wilderness, and nothing escapes
them. They have the appearance of.
Horses. And like war horses, they
charge. As with.
Rumbling of Chariots, they leap on the tops of the mountains
like the crackling of a. Flame of fire devouring.
The stubble. Like a powerful.
Army drawn up for battle before them.
Peoples are in English. All faces grow pale.
Like warriors, they charge. Like soldiers, they.
Scale the wall. Each keeps to his own course.
They do not swerve. From their pads.
They do not jostle one another, each keeps to its own track.
They burst through the. Weapons and are not halted they
leave upon the city they. Run upon the walls.
They climb up into the houses. They enter through the windows
like a thief. The earthquakes.
Before them the huntings tremble, the sun and the moon
are darkened. And the stars withdraw.
They're shining. There is nothing left and as is
often the case with natural disaster, the effects are total.
The ground is ruined, the plants are gone, the vine is destroyed,
the food and drink are gone. The work of preparing food and
drink, transporting, selling, it's gone too.
The extra that you may have had in your home is gone.
The already fragile economy is shot through as everyone turns
towards the reality of their households basic day-to-day
needs. And all this happens within the
destroyed place that they have known as home.
I can recall the way I felt some while back the evening after a
particularly terrible political event.
It was a day that sort of left that lump in your throat and it
felt like the world would have no way of going back.
And it was that night that I had the very rare experience of
being encouraged by something I read on social media.
I I think the spirit spoke to me through it because it's the kind
of statement that really could have landed badly.
But an old Co worker who I knew to be carrying, to also be
carrying the great weight of the events of that day, simply said
to her friends, 10 bucks says the sun still rises tomorrow.
Now, in context, the statement wasn't making light of the
circumstances. It was the kind of declaration
that there was actually something bigger than what we
were feeling and understanding. That day.
The sun will rise and the sun will set.
Though the earth may give way and the mountains fall into the
heart of the sea, I shall not fear.
The thing is, while the sun still rose amid a locust swarm
of this size, the sun and the moon were darkened.
I don't think this was metaphorical.
The locusts covered the sky like a cloud, arriving in waves that
moved like surges of the sea, but never breaking into foam.
I am particularly taken by the language.
They leap upon the city. The militaristic language is
striking at times. In scripture, locusts are a
metaphor for a real invading army.
Not here. Here, military language is used
as a metaphor to explain locusts charging like war hoses, as with
the rumbling of Chariots, they leap on the tops of mountains.
The picture feels like something Tolkien or CS Lewis would have
crafted in their imaginative renderings of good and evil,
loss and redemption, and what is ultimately at stake in the good
life. And yet this isn't epic fiction.
It's the exclamation of a biblical prophet in a
devastating moment. In some ways, these tiny beasts
were more terrifying than sword and spear, which, at least for a
time, may be kept off by walls and fortifications.
But locusts scale a wall with no rope.
They enter through the windows like a thief, and they are so
much smaller. If you have ever had the
experience of riding a home of an invasive pest, or if you've
never had that experience, count yourself lucky if you have ever
come face to face with a company of bedbugs, roaches, lice, or
any other creature that would cause you to wash every fabric
in your home. Assume a library book or a movie
theater recliner might be contaminated.
Or in a moment of panic, pour a line of diatomaceous earth in a
circle around your body, because then you could be sure that no
tiny exoskeleton bound bug would make its way to you.
Then you might have an imagination for what it would be
like to batten down every hatch and find that you can't keep the
creature out. This is the opening picture in
Joel. It does not begin with moral
instruction, a wayward peoples and then destructions.
There is no warm up unlike a Hollywood film where we first
meet the characters and learn the back story and experience a
build up to the point where the dinosaurs are let loose or the
child tributes spar in the arena while the world watches.
We enter at the point of destruction.
In fact, Joel's first words are to the elders.
Hear this, O elders, give ear all inhabitants of the land.
Has such a thing happened in your days or in the days of your
ancestors? Tell your children of it.
Let your children tell their children and their children
another generation. This call marks the severity of
the situation because the elders are those in the community.
Who would know, who would remember, who would be able to
say, this happened in my youth? If they had a comparable
disaster, they'd have said, ah, this was like the Blizzard of
78. Haven't seen the wind and snow
that bad since then. But that's not what Joel says.
Have you? Has such a thing happened in
your days or in the days of your ancestors?
He's saying, do you know anything like this?
Not only have you experienced this before, but did your
parents or your grandparents? Did you grow up with the stories
of this disaster? The way we might hear about a
woman who grew up during the depression and never threw away
a jam jar? Or the way children and
grandchildren of Holocaust survivors relate to violence and
anti-Semitism. In this strong, shadowed moment,
Joel describes what is creation is laid bare and the Israelites
are called to lament. For a nation has invaded my
land, powerful and innumerable. Its teeth are lion's teeth, and
it has the fangs of a lioness. It has laid waste my vines and
splintered my fig trees. It is stripped off their bark
and thrown it down. Their branches have turned
white. Something very important is
going on here. It has laid waste my vines and
splintered my fig trees. Joel isn't claiming ownership of
the vines and trees. He's speaking on behalf of God.
And so God is joining Israel in her grief.
The loss is that somehow separate from God because God is
removed from all that is broken. God's holiness does not keep God
from the four lone place. No, the Creator leans towards
creation, ruined land, flattened plant, and hopeless humanity.
And so the invitation to turn toward lament isn't an
invitation that Israel enters into onto its own.
The God who grieves is there as well.
And so, says Joel, lament like a virgin dressed in sackcloth for
the husband of her youth. The grain offering and the drink
offering are cut off from the House of the Lord.
The priests mourn the ministers of the Lord.
The fields are devastated. The ground mourns, for the grain
is destroyed. The wine dries up, the oil
fails. Be dismayed.
You farmers whale. You vine dressers over the wheat
and the barley, for the crops of the field are ruined.
Consecrate a fast, call a whole solemn assembly, gather the
elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the House of the
Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord.
Part of what I find striking here is that regardless of a of
Israel's ability or desire to follow Joel's instructions or
not, grief and lament would be present in some capacity no
matter what. Sometimes loss is subtle and
deceptive. Indeed, it's not until the cats
in the cradle that you realize something important is gone.
The pursuit of happiness can take you to college, Wall
Street, or Vegas. And we can fill our days with
ostensibly good things, activities we enjoy, people we
want to spend time with, and in pursuit of goals we find
meaningful. And yet, the production,
consumption and experience of these things can swallow up our
attention and reroute our desire.
This is to say, you can design your life without ever giving
consideration to what it is that is worth wanting in the 1st
place. The issue is not the work that
you do, the relationships you prioritize, or the hobbies you
spend your time and money on per SE.
So bless you, the bread Baker with your lamb, the skier with
your poles, and the pickerball pickle baller on thy court.
But these things in the American Disney asked prioritation of
maximizing happiness often bypasses the deep and deeper
formation of longing of what we are oriented toward and being
shaped by. We just did a whole series on
the passions gluttony, lust, avarice, despondency, anger,
acedia, Vainglory, and pride. This isn't just a random list of
sins. They are misdirected responses
to real desire. You can hang a Da Vinci on your
wall and still never know Beauty and Joel.
That illusion collapses. Everything that distracts is
stripped away, and the people's desire, their longing for life,
for meaning, for God, stands exposed before God.
The invitation to lament is to take all that is laid bare and
turn before God rather than into and onto themselves.
The Israelites no longer have any illusion of control, at
least not anymore. In their lament, Joel implores
his listeners to heed the day of the Lord.
Blow the trumpet in Zion, sound the alarm on my holy mountain.
Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the
Lord is coming. It is near a day of darkness and
gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness like blackness spread
upon the mountains. A great and powerful army comes
their like has never been from of old, nor will ever be again
in the ages to come. At first glance, Joel Chapter 2
sounds a lot like Joel chapter 1.
Darkness and gloom, A great and powerful force spread across the
mountains. Language insisting that the
devastation is unparalleled. But there's a crucial shift.
In chapter 2, Joel says the Day of the Lord is coming.
It is near. He does not say this is the day
of the Lord. Instead, Joel uses the language
of their present literal environment to gesture towards
something more, something that presses beyond the immediate
disaster. For that reason, the invasion
described in Joel 2 is likely not a second literal army, nor a
new locust plague. Rather, Joel One and Joel 2 are
parallel chapters describing the same ecological catastrophe.
Joel One names it, grieves it, and calls the people to lament.
And Joel 2 does all of that. But it also turns up the alarm,
interpreting the plague as a sign that something deeper is at
stake. As Bible scholar Terence
Fretheim observes, Joel 2 reflects a more immediate,
imminent threat. The disaster was already
unfolding, and it has now reached a new level of danger
for Israel's future. What began as devastation is now
disclosed as warning, and the people are being asked not only
to grieve what is happening, but to reckon with where it is
leading. And verse 212 picks up.
Yet even now says the Lord, return to me with all your
heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.
Ren your hearts and not your clothing.
Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting
from punishment. Return to me with all your
heart. Ren your hearts and not your
clothing. This call is communal and it
reckons deeply with desire. The tearing of garments was a
visible sign of mourning, and God is not forbidding that
expression. Rather, God is saying, I care
about what is beneath it. Not your performance, not your
display, not your ability to do this correctly.
But you return to me with all your heart, because it is God's
desire to meet you there. God's character is then named
with remarkable clarity, as direct as it could possibly be.
Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, abounding and steadfast love, and relenting
from punishment. The locust pet plague is not
framed as God's judgement for a particular sin.
God has already joined Israel in grief.
Speaking of my vines and my fig trees, This devastation happens
because devastation happens because the world is fragile and
creation groans. And yet even here, especially
here, there's a call to return. Not because Israel has failed
some moral test this time, but because in this moment they are
laid bare, with desire exposed and illusion stripped away.
They are invited to Orient themselves fully toward God, to
cry out not in self repair, but in trust, and to call upon who
God is and to ask God to act. My favorite part is here at the
end. Then the Lord became jealous for
His land and had pity on his people.
In response to his people, the Lord said, I am sending you
grain, wine and oil, and you will be satisfied, and I will no
more make you a mockery among the nations.
I will remove the northern army from you and drive it into
parched and desolate land, its front into the eastern sea and
its rear into the western sea. Its stench and foul small will
rise up. Surely He has done great things,
so do not fear you animals of the field, for the pastures of
the wilderness are green. The tree bears its fruit.
The fig tree and the vine give their full yield.
O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the Lord your God,
for He has given the early rain for your vindication.
He has poured down for you abundant rain, the early and the
later rain as before. Then afterward I will pour out
my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters
shall prophecy, Your old men shall dream dreams, and your
young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female
slaves in those days I will pour out my spirit.
This is a sudden and dramatic move from lament to promise,
including the reversal of the damage done to the crops and to
the land by the locusts. This change is cause for
celebration. And then, then we find what is
certainly the most famous passage in the book of Joel.
I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.
It's the most famous passage because Peter quotes it in his
address to the crowd gathered on the Day of Pentecost, the day
the Spirit of God was poured out.
And Peter quotes Joel at Pentecost because he needed an
interpretive theological framework to explain what was
happening. Acts 2 states that when the day
of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, and
suddenly from heaven there came a sound like a rush of a violent
wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.
Divided tongues as of fire appeared among them, and a
tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the
Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit
gave them ability. That's really cool, and it kind
of freaked people out. The crowd was amazed, astonished
and confused. They began hypothesizing about
what was going on, supposing that the people around them must
be drunk because there was no box to process what they were
observing and experiencing. And so supposing drunkenness was
the most logical explanation that they could come up with.
And to that reasoning, Peter quotes Joel.
He quotes Joel because the prophet gave an interpretation
for Pentecost centuries prior. He quotes Joel because there's
comfort and realizing that this really weird thing you are
experiencing was foretold in the Scriptures that have oriented
one's community to God and God's faithfulness to creation for
generations. Faced with something
overwhelming and bewildering, Peter reaches back to Joel and
says, in effect, this is not chaos.
This is a promise fulfilled. What God once spoke in the
middle of catastrophe has now come to pass.
Friends, the same Spirit of God who was present in creation, who
was promised through Joel in the midst of devastation and full
bodied lament, and who was poured out at Pentecost, is
still at work today. Circumstances we cannot fix.
Ecological devastation, grief, loss in situation that we have
no imagination for exiting. They strip away our illusions of
control. And in that exposed place,
lament is an invitation. It's an opening to stand before
God where God is already waiting and saying return to me that I
am here for you and I love you. God meets us with God's Spirit.
Jared, if you want to come on up, we're going to transition
into ministry time if the the worship team wants to come on up
and begin to get situated if the folks are going to be praying.