Renewal amid desolation (Joel 2) - Kyle Matthew Oliver

A sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25C): Joel 2 :23-32; Psalm 65; 2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18; Luke 18:9-14.

The Book of the Prophet Joel begins with bugs. Lots and lots of bugs.

It can honestly feel a little amusing to read about swarms of locust in scripture. It turns out there are various locust roles or specialities, at least in the biblical imagination: cutting locusts, swarming locusts, etc.

My favorite is the “hopping locust,” which I always picture jumping along accompanied by a cartoon “boing boing boing.”

Things get funnier still when, if you are a non-native Spanish speaker, you encounter locusts in the scripture for the first time.

Because a third or fourth year Spanish student may well know the word for locust, langosta. But that’s because langosta is also the word for a creature more commonly found at a seafood purveyor or on fancy restaurant menus.

You can perhaps imagine the confusion that ensues when such students first read in Exodus about the eighth Plague of Egypt, the Plague of Lobsters. Oh to be so stricken…

Of course, in biblical times as in ours, plagues of locusts are no laughing matter. They are a natural, economic, and often humanitarian disaster. Indeed, the closing verses of Joel Chapter 1 hit a little close to home as they describe the plague and its apparent aftermath:

The seed shrivels under the clods,
   the storehouses are desolate;
the granaries are ruined
   because the grain has failed …
To you, O Lord, I cry.
For fire has devoured
   the pastures of the wilderness,
and flames have burned
   all the trees of the field.
Joel 1:17,19 (NRSV)

The historical backdrop for today’s lesson is desolation. And perhaps we can relate.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote in a funeral sermon that in the midst of housing crises and wage crises and rolling blackouts and ecological disasters we all need to be making more room to honestly grieve. It may well be that we are seeing entire ways of life passing away.

But that is not the whole story, and not our whole call.

Forces are at work changing our world not just for the worse but for the better, even now, even now.

This too was the case in Joel’s day. Scholars believe this book was written in the midst of the Judeans’ gradual return to their land, and to the city of Jerusalem, after their Babylonian captivity. Joel seems to be familiar with the rebuilding of the temple, and the restoration of the priestly traditions there.

It was not an easy time. There were labor shortages. There was opposition from neighboring communities. Long days, short nights, tight belts, sore backs.

Especially after the locusts showed up, I have no doubt that, like the Hebrews in the desert remembering their fleshpots in Egypt, some Judeans probably looked back with fond longing on the houses they’d built in Babylon, now furnished and lived in, and to the gardens they’d planted, now lush and fruitful.

How do you simultaneously grieve the loss of one way of life and build a new and sustaining one together? This is the spiritual question for our times, and not just for Christians, and not just for Americans.

Hope and trust are the twin pillars that support the gateway to this path, and they are the paving stones that will mark each footstep. Hope and trust in God, for those of us who have received these gifts, but also hope and trust in each other. These days that feels like an even bigger spiritual challenge.

Our hope and our trust require inspiration, and nurture.

The prophet Joel understood that, full of a word from the LORD, the God of Israel. The Apostle Peter understood that, drunk on the Spirit and quoting from Joel on a momentous day in the life of the early church, the Day of Pentecost.

You will know that I am with you, says the Lord.
And that I love you.
I will breathe my enlivening spirit onto and into and through you.
I will make you prophets.
I will make you dreamers.
I will make you visionaries.
Not only the powerful but also all you who are in bondage.
(Joel 2 :27–29, my paraphrase)

These familiar words from Joel 2 do not an easy prophecy make.

It’s hard to trust that we’re Beloved as we reckon with the consequences of how we have been treating each other, and our planet.

But Beloved we are. All of us. Still.

It’s hard to hope that we can make a difference for others when we are tempted to look out only for ourselves, to protect whatever nest egg we might have socked away.

But Powerful we are. Together, with and for each other.

God in Christ is healing and rejuvenating and forming us for mission in the midst of our confusion, in the midst of our anxiety, in the midst of our anger both righteous and resentful.

You will catch glimpses of this sacred presence: this morning, and this week, and in the weeks to come.

Tell each other about your glimpses. Ask each other about your glimpses.

There is more than desolation and despair in our fields and forests, and in our future. There is passion, and compassion, and resilience, and the joy of both resistance and celebration.

All who cry out will receive solace, and renewal, says the Lord.

Image credit: “Foggy Dreamscape” by Mike Behnken via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Read more: Joel 2 & beyond