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We’ve been on the 4-year lectionary cycle, so every 4 years we come back to the same bible text, work through it in a new way because each of us is a different person and we are a different community.
When last we read this text for Joel it was… November 2020 and we were going through it. I was preaching to an empty sanctuary. Were kids at school? We hadn’t returned to church in person since being out in the parking lot. Healthcare workers were still leaking in different rooms of the house when they came home to not get their family sick.
And of course, the whole thing was made worse by people. Not you, never you, other people with bad health advice, bad treatment suggestions, with not being concerned. COVID was exasperated by folks having to work in places that were unsafe on the best days and were a Petri dish during the COVID days. Or those who needed to work but their jobs just weren’t happening. Poverty made COVID worse.
And we made it political and we pointed fingers and blamed groups of people. And when you blame a group of people, there’s another group who’s going to take it out on that group of people. And so we watch assault zone. Anyone who looked vaguely Asian. It was a bad time made worse by people.
Now Joel is an usual prophet in the Bible. There is nothing in book that give us information to date it–no king nor empire. when people give a window or guess when Joel might been written, It’s anywhere from 850 BC and 350 BCE.
What we do know is catastrophe has happened. Joel tells the hearers and readers of this prophet to recount to their children for generations to come of this moment they are in and then Joel tells of locust that came and ate the fields and what the locust failed to eat the grasshoppers aid and what remained from the grasshoppers the swarmers ate and what remained of the swarmers the grubs ate. Joel compares this polite to an invading army stripping bear, the grain and the vineyards.
And what happens when people are hungry and scared and ashamed. angry, we tend to make things worse. We tend to go into our own corners to hide in our own homes to point fingers at someone else. They are the reset. They use the wrong seed. They didn’t use the right pesticide don’t use pesticides. They were doing the wrong thing.
In the verses between what we read, Joel calls for the blowing of this Ram’s Horn, to call the people together, all the people from the oldest to the youngest, the infant nursing with his mother and the couple who were exempt from grieving and mourning because of the joy of their wedding day. Everyone is called in together for the rending of their hearts, for mourning, and weeping. Hoping that maybe if they do these things, the tearing and the weeping and the grievance and the petitioning, God would change God’s mind and give them what they need to give an offering to God, so there may be enough for them too.
We don’t know what Joel’s community did but it seems like they weren’t coming together and naming anything, let alone the places where they contributed where they the suffering they were all going through and the suffering that was happening on the land and to the creatures.
I wanted a book to listen to sometime this week and I ended up picking wool because it was available on my library app. I dismissed it in 2011 when it came out because I thought the cover was stupid and nobody recommended it. I’m going to try not to spoil too much because it’s now a TV show on Apple TV. The premise is that something terrible has happened to the Earth to the air and so there is some remnant that has continued existing and living and underground. Silo bunker. And they are very clear rules because sometimes there is rebellion and we can’t have rebellion and part of those rules are not talking about the world outside and not knowing the history. How did this happen? Was it just the natural course of the Earth? It was not. Was it the human influence on the earth reaching a terrible conclusion? Or was there some kind of catalyst? Did someone look at a situation happening in the earth, the brokenness of earth and its people and intentionally make it worse?
And what then is the solution? I don’t know yet. I haven’t read the third book but I think the solution is honesty. I think it is vulnerability. I think it’s admitting the reality of the past. It’s not hating yourself and beating yourself up or hating someone else and beating them up; and it’s not accepting it without any hope for change. But start with the honest truth. Make repentance if necessary. Open your heart. Try again.
Because we do the other thing all the time. We’re doing our politics. We do it when companies close a factory. You spend all our time being angry that we lose the space for creativity. I think we’ve done it in our churches as we’ve watched the world around us change, even if we haven’t. We’ve watched fewer people come and we want to blame that other generation and sports and school. Two parents having to work, general distrust of institutions, a whole lot of churches and church leaders who have done terrible things to people and to children. And when we’re afraid and when we’re tired and when we’re anxious and we’re scared, it doesn’t bring out our best selves. It doesn’t bring us to wanting to tear, open our hearts and be introspective and to look and lay bare the reality whether it’s the reality of our politics or our communities or families or institutions, including our churches. And how we have contributed to the brokenness. It’s why every week we come together for confession and in some version say the old prayer of the good we have left undone and the love we failed to give or receive.
We are all flawed and fallible living in a broken world. Me too. I have consistently said the wrong thing or I said or done things that have hurt others without any intent to do so and still broke relationships. We lay bare while we can’t tear open our hearts, expose those places where we tried and failed and hopefully the love and the intent and hand them over to God and put the pieces back together.
A God who is not finished with us, God who promises and bestows upon us. A spirit of visions and dreams and prophecy of Truth of wisdom and the future. It is our old who drink dreams of the future, generations into the future of who we could be as a community as a church. It is our young age who speak words of wisdom of visions. They have visions of the world as it should be and the god who makes it so. It is our children who will speak wisdom and truth to power. Will call us back to ourselves to who God who made us, and together we can re-imagine life together. We re-imagined church. We re-imagined community. We re-imagine what it is to live this life together.
The church is one of the, if not the only place where unrelated people across generations come together. What if it is our very youngest who has a vision for how the world could be? She’ll speak truth to us of how the world could be and how we could respond to that world. Call us back to love. What if it’s our very oldest who call us toward a new future to dream seven generations into the future
How might we treat each other differently if we thought the young had something to teach us, had wisdom we do not. or that the oldest among us have a dream for the future for generations to come?
Advent is a time of waiting. It’s waiting for Christmas. as we remember the Christ child and we move into that celebration. But Advent is also a recognition that we are still waiting for the return of the Messiah for Christ’s return to us and that expectation and we wait between the first coming and incarnation and the second coming, we’re in the messy middle portion, living in this broken world trying to do our best.
We are not left or abandoned to wait on our own. God is still present. Christ is still with us. The spirit still moves and dreams and visions prophecy and fire and language. The same Spirit that moved the earliest days of the church is just waiting for us to be waiting for it to prepare our hearts to crack them open to live in honesty, to no longer point fingers somewhere else for where they screwed up
What if you lay it all there–we lay it all out? What if we are really honest about where we dug our heels in about where we have hurt each other about where we made decisions to stand still instead of going forward to take the easy road instead of the hard way? What if we were real honest what if we lament and weep for what was and we breathe into the spirit that is coming? That is here. That is New Life. And dreams and visions are given to everyone who is broken open. What is your dream? What vision of the world, of God, of creation, of what could be, do you have? Imagine that future. Then let’s go there. Together.