Joel 2:1-2, 12-17 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
be again after them in ages to come.
Yet even
now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with
weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return
to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and
abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing. Who knows whether
he will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind him, a grain offering
and a drink offering for the Lord, your God? Blow the trumpet in
Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the people. Sanctify
the congregation; assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the
breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her canopy. Between
the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord,
weep. Let them say, “Spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your
heritage a mockery, a byword among the nations. Why should it be said among the
peoples, ‘Where is their God?’”
2
Corinthians 5:20-6:10 We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be
reconciled to God. For our sake
he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness
of God.
As we work together with him, we urge you also
not to accept the grace of God in vain. For
he says, “At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of
salvation I have helped you.” See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the
day of salvation! We are putting
no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have
commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions,
hardships, calamities, beatings,
imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience,
kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful
speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right
hand and for the left; in honor
and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and
yet are true; as unknown, and yet
are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not
killed; as sorrowful, yet always
rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing
everything.
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Have
you ever played the game where you let the Bible fall open in your lap to some
random page, then stab your finger on some random spot on the page and start
reading? It’s a time-honored technique
for discerning the word of God. Either
that, or it’s silly and superstitious.
In any case, I have done it.
One
day I was with a small prayer group and I thought I’d use this method to get us
started in prayer. I landed in the book
of Joel, on a horrifying verse that sounded like Armageddon. Blood
and fire and columns of smoke; the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood
– that kind of thing. I didn’t feel
encouraged to spend more time reading Joel after that. I must confess that it is a book that I have
given short shrift. I’m guessing maybe
you have, too.
What I have learned, though, is that there isn’t really much
to the story of Joel. It’s a short book,
three chapters long, that tells about a terrible crisis – a crisis of such
magnitude that the people have never seen before. And it tells about their deliverance from
this crisis – a deliverance so memorable that it must be told for generation
upon generation upon generation to come.
Tell the story, the prophet says at the very beginning. Tell
your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their
children another generation.
What exactly is this story?
We are told that it involved locusts.
Four swarms of locusts came. The
crops were ruined. But we never learn where this happened, or when it happened.
And we never learn who Joel is, either. It
is different from the other prophets of Israel, where we are given some markers
to help us locate the story in time and place.
It would have been easy for the writer of Joel to do that, but he chose
not to. We are left to fill in the gaps. And that is what makes it useful for us.
Because terrible crises happen in all times and all
places. These things happen in our
world, too. And I think that the book of Joel is there to
help us in our own time of crisis, whatever kind of crisis it might be. Even when we can’t quite articulate the
nature of our crisis.
Our world has grown extremely complex, and tracing a problem
from its start to its end result can seem impossible, so even identifying the
nature of our crisis can elude us.
We know that we are overwhelmed by many things. There is too much traffic on our roads, and
it moves too fast because everyone is running late. There are too many choices in the stores when
we shop for groceries. There is too much
news, because cable news channels need to fill 24 hours a day with something, and
we feel pressured to keep up with it all.
There is too much violence in the world – and it is far too
deadly because of the weapons we now possess.
We are uncomfortable with the number of guns in our communities, but we
don’t want to give up our gun because it might protect us from someone else’s
gun.
There is too much obesity, and perversely, it is the poorest
among us who suffer from it the most. The
processing that keeps our food prices low also make these foods unhealthy for us. There are too many layers to our problems and
the solutions to our problems. There is
too much of too much – and it is threatening our humanity.
The young and the poor are like the canaries in the coal
mine. They show the effects the
earliest. I spoke with a young woman in
her twenties, who told me she had just learned of another friend who died. They die of drug overdoses or suicide,
alcohol related incidents or illnesses.
I read that these are called “despair deaths.” There have been so many – too many.
But the effects of this despair have reached beyond the young
and the poor. Now we hear about the
unusually high rate of death among middle-aged white men – sometimes despair
deaths, but often they are one of an assortment of illnesses that might just as
well be symptoms of deep-seated despair.
We might feel as helpless in the face of these crises as
Israel did in the time of the locusts.
The locusts threatened to starve their bodies. Our crises threaten to somehow starve our
souls. Both can lead to a premature death.
The difference for us, I believe, is that the complexity of our
world, our crisis, prevents us from feeling the urgency of it. When Israel watched the locusts devour and
destroy their food, they did the only thing they could do: they called upon the
Lord. They gathered together, young and
old, infant and elderly. They sanctified
themselves and called upon the Lord. They
wept and they cajoled, badgered, and begged.
They prayed. They prayed for
their lives.
In our time, in our crisis, we tend to withdraw, look for
diversions, go to sleep. Because we
simply don’t know what to do.
Then the season of Lent begins. And we may see there is something we can do.
Lent is an invitation to go deeper. To become more fully aware of the world. To know both the deep pain and the deep
joy. To know God’s presence in both the
pain and the joy.
The Apostle Paul writes of his own and his companions’
journey – trials of great endurance; hardships, labor, hunger. As well as purity, kindness, genuine love,
and the power of God. And he urges his
readers to make their own journeys – not to
accept the grace of God in vain. God
listens to us, God comes to us, God helps us.
God is waiting for us. Now, Paul
says, now is the acceptable time.
The season of Lent surely is the acceptable time to enter
into this deeper place with God, to bring our despair, our crisis; our
loneliness, our fear, our sense of just being overwhelmed.
There are many ways to enter into this journey, and you may
already know how you intend to do that.
But if you don’t, consider some kind of daily spiritual discipline. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Read a book of the Bible. Keep a daily prayer journal. Spend 20 minutes in silence each day.
Still don’t know what to do?
Ask God to show you.
I can’t tell you what will happen when you do this. But you will find out.
Now is the time.
photo credit: By Maya-Anaïs Yataghène from Paris, France - Japan - Tokyo, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45021129
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