Except for last Sunday when, as Auntie Mame said, ‘we needed a little Christmas’, our summer’s sermon series has and will continue through Labor Day, to be a study of the Minor Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures (the books found at the end of our Old Testament) and the Women of the Old Testament. These stories and scriptures are not the texts from which sermons are preached very often and all have rich messages for us even today. Because of that, we have named this sermon series Hidden Figures and Super Heroes.
Today’s Hidden Figure and Super Hero in Joel. His Book is found on pages 845-849 of the Old Testament in our pew Bibles.
Joel is a common name in the Old Testament. The name means ‘Yahweh is God’ so it is almost a faith statement in itself. In the short book of Joel, no king is mentioned so we don’t really know the exact dates he lived but we can surmise a bit about him from what is written. Some theologians have thought that the date of this book was intentionally left out. In the beginning of the Book, Joel says, ‘Tell your children, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.’ The message is meant to be timeless and to put a date on it might make one not own the message as ours as well. But Joel wants us to remember and learn.
We do know a bit about Joel. He was not a priest but had studied the other prophets as he quoted them. Perhaps he was a temple prophet. He had a knowledge of Judea and lived in Jerusalem. If we had to place a time period of his writing it would be 400BCE. We know he was a man of great sensitivity. His writings show a great empathy for others. He was impressed by the sound of a bride weeping and he is concerned for children and even talks about the well-being of nursing babies. This modern thinking ancient man believed that the gift of God’s Spirit is inclusive. In his writings he describes how it is poured out on the young, the old, male and female, and all people, even the servants.
What Joel wants us to know and to retell to our children and the generations to come, is the story of a plague of locusts that descended upon Judea as a divine judgement from God.
He tells the pain the plague caused as it brought about a drought and the area had no food or water. Everyone and everything suffer. There was literally nothing to sacrifice to God at the temple. Joel describes how even the animals cry out for relief.
Joel calls the people to repentance. He says that with repentance will come the removal of the locusts and a restoration of fertility. The people must return formally and spiritually to God. And when in word and deed we return go God, there will be a restoration of abundance and plenty.
Listen now to God’s promise of what the restoration to plentifulness will be like. Listen to God’s promise to God’s people found in Joel 2:23-32.
O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the Lord your God;
for he has given the early rain[a] for your vindication, he has poured down for you abundant rain, the early and the later rain, as before. 24 The threshing floors shall be full of grain, the vats shall overflow with wine and oil. 25 I will repay you for the years
that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent against you. 26 You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, who has dealt wondrously with you. And my people shall never again be put to shame. 27 You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I, the Lord, am your God and there is no other. And my people shall never again be put to shame. 28 [b] Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. 29 Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit. 30 I will show portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. 31 The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. 32 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the Lord has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls.
(The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.)
The last chapter of Joel, takes a turn in its direction and focus. While the rest of the book is about learning from our mistakes in the past, this chapter is about the future. You might say it is the Minor Prophet version of the Book of Revelation. It is about a day of judgement which will be heralded in by wars and astronomical disturbances. And at that time, God will judge the world. And in this prophecy the pagans and the non-God’s people do not fare so well and they will be judged also on their behavior towards God’s people while the Israelites will be protected and will dwell in Zion, in heaven, with God.
To me the message in Joel, is not the vindictive last page where the bad people will get their punishment in the end….. Because it doesn’t sync with the message found in the rest of his Book… the message he wants us to know and tell our children and all future generations. He wants us to remember that things were bad due to our neglect, our not putting things in their proper place, our holding god-like things which were not of our God, but then we pulled it together and God restored us and we were fine.
We need to remember….. I am struck by that. We need to remember, so that we are not destined to repeat our sins again. We need to remember so we learn from our mistakes and know what is right. This is the purpose of Passover for our Jewish brothers and sisters. They retell the story annually of the story of slavery to freedom so that they never forget.
In July each year, the church puts out a new calendar for church leaders. Barbie, Seth, and I use it and I know that several of you do as well. It has the church year on it, the lectionary readings for each Sunday, and other useful resources from the national church for us to use. It tells you when to need to order the materials for our special offerings and even the liturgical colors for each Sunday. But another thing I have noticed, is it increasingly has other days to remember printed on it. There are literally one or two important days of remembrance each week. There is a Hiroshima Day, and a Holocaust day, a Care of Creation day, a Higher Education day, a Native American day, and a day to celebrate the gifts of New Immigrants just to name a few in August and September. Just as Joel said, we need to retell what has happened, to remember those who have gone before us, not just in a form of thanksgiving but to learn from them and their sins and mistakes as well. We need to hear the stories as they are teachings from the past. We remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki so we remember our sin and work to build a day where there is no need for a nuclear arsenal. We have a Thanksgiving Day in order that we remember from whom our great blessings come. History should be our teacher.
This past week, we hosted a Town Forum on Gun Violence. It was a time for people to come together and talk and be with elected officials and their neighbors and ask the hard questions and look for answers. Although the politicians were eloquent and the grass root organizers and lobbyist were compelling in their stories, to me the greatest impact came from the stories of those who had been affected by gun violence themselves. They told the story we needed to hear. We heard the personal testimonies of the intense pain and grief at losing a son at the Pulse Night Club mass murder. We heard from mothers who because they are living in neighborhoods where there is gum violence is a normal thing, they have lost their young children. I talked to a young man who graduated from High School this year and spent the last four months of his high school days dedicated to stopping gun violence in schools after the February 14th in Parkland. These people’s stories are painful to listen to. But they are our sin. They call us to create reform and change in our community and country.
Joel was right. We need to hear the stories as they motivate us to make change in ourselves and in our lives. We can’t forget the Pulse Night Club shooting where 50 people died. It is call from God to work on hate crimes and gun control. We need to hear the stories about the young teens killed at the Marjorie Stoneham Douglas High school shootings as they tell us about the sin of an automatic weapon getting into the hands of the wrong person. It calls us to work for safety measures in our schools, for background checks on people wanting to buy a gun, and to fight for legislation stopping the sale of semi-automatic and automatic weapons that should only be in the hands of our military. We need to learn about the crime in the streets in our city and other cities and how young children die in gun violence so that we work to create neighborhoods that are safe and a world where third grade children do not suffer from PTSD.
Our plagues might not be locusts, but there are people dying from them just as they did in Joel’s time. God calls us to hear the stories and to claim them as ours and then to repent and change what is wrong with our society.
When I welcomed the political officials and community members into the church on Tuesday night, I told them that we are a progressive church that does not just pray for what is wrong in our world. We are also called to action and to change.
Amen.