Sermon Series, Readings from the Minor Prophets: Joel 1:11–14, 1:19–2:2, 2:18–24
There’s one thing about Lutherans everywhere: We’re love food. So when we had a week-long summer program for teenagers in Massachusetts, food was an easy topic.
One day, we went to a produce stand for lunch. The fruits and vegetables for sale were grown locally. Everything looked beautiful, perfect. Juicy cherries and shining apples and strange lettuces and watermelon quarters that you wanted to eat right in the store. We left with armfuls of them, and after stopping at the deli next door, lunch was served.
Then we went to the far end of Worcester, a city not unlike Reading. We parked at our sister church in the south neighborhood. Three times, we walked past the only grocery store in the area, before identifying it. It looked like a fortress. I asked the teens to keep their eyes open as we went in.
A tiny produce area, with mold and flies. Cheap cuts of meat that we’d never heard of before, at the end of their shelf life. Tons of cheap, over-processed food.
Then we talked with Ann Burgdorf, the pastor of our sister church. She said the neighborhood was made up mostly of refugees. People who had nothing, displaced from their homes in various parts of Africa because of war and violence. They couldn’t afford good food. They couldn’t afford kitchens to cook it in. Healthy lives were impossible.
Joel is a very Lutheran prophet. His prophecy comes in three movements, and it fits our understanding of Law and Gospel beautifully.
Our first reading today is from his first push. Widespread destruction. The crops are destroyed, the grain and wine and oil are gone. A vast army comes, like blackness pouring over the mountains. Fire destroys towns and fields. Is Joel describing something that’s about to happen, or something that has already come? Either way, it’s devastating and complete.
He calls the people to prayer and fasting, mourning and lament. This is a different than most prophets. More often they call us to repent, to give up evil and behave like God’s people. But in Joel, confession and repentance is missing. He simply says, lament.
When we talk about the Law, we think of how it convicts us, shows us what we’ve done wrong. That’s how Martin Luther describes it; the Law sends us running to Jesus. But while that can be because of the terrible things we do, it can also be from the terrible things we see. In these first five hundred years of Protestant faith, we’ve put too much emphasis on guilt. And it deserves its place; our sin matters. But the prophets go further.
A prophet isn’t someone who sees the future. A prophet is someone who sees what could be, and who sees how different it is from reality. A prophet is someone who is able to see the breathtaking beauty of love for which God created the universe, and how heartbreakingly far away we are from it. A prophet is caught up in the Spirit of Holiness who laughed creation into being, and is horrified at how laughable are our attempts to dwell in that Spirit.
In short, a prophet runs to God, crying out in sadness because the world is sad. Joel yearns for something better than destruction; God wants better for his people. He knows the best person to talk to about it is God. And he calls the people to lament as well.
In Joel’s next move, God restores Israel. Grain and wine and oil abound, and Israel is satisfied. All the destruction is undone. The army is cast into the sea, the crops spring up, life returns to the land.
Again, we expect this to happen in response to Israel’s repentance, or at least their lament. In fact, in the translation we used in our Old Testament Canticle—that is, a Psalm or song that’s not from the book of Psalms—it does indeed say that God acts “in response to his people.” But that’s a faulty translation from the Hebrew. It’s so ingrained in us that God acts in response to our repentance, that the translators missed it! God simply answers his people. God speaks to them, and proclaims restoration.
There’s no reason for it whatsoever. That’s a brilliantly Lutheran understanding of grace. Yes, we should lament, even sometimes repent and confess and change our ways. But these things never elicit God’s love. God’s love is already present. God is already at work restoring and resurrecting the world. God is tearing down injustice, renewing creation, inspiring healing and new life. There is no cause and effect here. We cry out to God because we love God. God restores because God loves us.
We usually say that Luther stops at Law and Gospel. But Joel has a third movement that would have delighted Luther. It’s visible in the New Testament reading today, where the Apostle Peter quotes from Joel as he preaches.
In ancient Israel, God’s Spirit was understood to rest only on kings and great women and men. Joel’s promise is that, as part of the restoration, God’s spirit will not come in little drops, but will be poured out, flowing onto all people. Old and young, male and female, even slaves, the lowest in society, the opposite of those kings of old.
At the first Christian Pentecost, Peter proclaims that Joel’s prophecy is fulfilled. The Spirit has come, and no one is left out. It’s a much bigger thing than even Joel expected, maybe. By the end of Acts, Gentiles have been welcomed into the community, the Spirit has traveled all over the known world, the Good News has been carried even to the heart of empire in Rome.
And this is where we get our sense of mission. The Law has sent us running for help and hope to Jesus. God has resurrected us along with him, and filled us with grace. And finally, the Spirit gives us the power and imagination to answer our own lament, or better, to participate in God’s restoration of the things that sent us running to him in the first place.
Near the end of our food week, we visited a farm just outside the city. It was part of a foundation, created by a couple who retired and didn’t know what to do with their land. They’d turned it into a huge vegetable-growing operation, which relied almost entirely on volunteer labor. We spent our morning harvesting zucchini, and our afternoon tying up tomato vines.
That year, our little bit of work was part of three hundred thousand pounds of produce, all of which went to the local food bank. It provided fresh vegetables to over 400,000 families, most of whom could never have afforded real produce otherwise.
But more significantly, I think: At the end of the day, I was tired and sore. The acid from the tomatoes loved to get into the little cuts left from the prickly zucchini plants. I never wanted to see a pair of clippers again. And our teenagers?
They begged to cancel our scheduled activities for the next day, and go back. They’d seen what people stuck in cycles of poverty ate. And then they rolled up their sleeves and made a difference, hands-on. And they loved it.
That’s what Joel teaches us. We are all prophets, to some extent. God invites us to see what could be. And the gap between that and what is is heartbreaking.
As we look to our future, we might do well to wonder what breaks our hearts. That would be a good clue to what our community here is called to do, what our mission is. The Spirit does indeed dwell within us, has sent us running to Jesus, has restored us in his grace. What are we lamenting? And how might God be calling us to bring his love to it?