We are always dealing with God.  (Eugene Peterson)

Text: Joel 2:25-32

Date: October 4, 2009

Dark days

Last Sunday as one of our members was leaving the 8:30 service, he greeted me and said solemnly, “Pastor, these are dark days.  We need to pray for our country.” 

Shortly after church on Sunday, Paul Cummings called with the news that the pastor of Sandy Ridge Baptist Church had committed suicide that morning.

On Monday, Typhoon Ketsana, having left hundreds dead and missing in the Philippines, strengthened over the South China Sea as it made its way toward Vietnam.

On Tuesday, an earthquake in the South Pacific created a tsunami in Samoa that killed more than 150 people under a series of cascading walls of water.

On Wednesday, two earthquakes struck Indonesia, killing more than 1,000 – thousands more may still be trapped.

On Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 200 points.

On Friday, the leading news most of the day was about comedian David Letterman thwarting a blackmail attempt.

On Saturday, a somber annual meeting of the Western North Carolina Association (UCC) voted to remove the ministerial standing of one of its pastors due to sexual misconduct with minors.

Pick your 24-hour news cycle.  It’s been a rough week.  And I’m not sure any of those items are what my friend was referring to when he talked about “dark days.” Whether or not anything on that list qualifies as calamity in your world, calamity is sure to strike sometime.

What’s a Christian to do when calamity strikes?  It’s the question asked by my favorite minor prophet, Joel.  He is the prophet of dark days.

Locusts and such

Joel doesn’t tell us anything about himself.  He offers only small, inconclusive hints about when he wrote.  Those who take a stab at it vary by about five hundred years.

What we do know is that he wrote during a time of calamity.  Calamity that dwarfs anything happening in the U.S. or the world right now.  At least in the mind of Joel.

His calamity was locusts.

According to National Geographic, locusts look like grasshoppers and most of the time act like them as well.  But locusts are also infamous for what’s called their “gregarious phase,” a rare but apocalyptic spectacle during which locusts breed into “thick, mobile, ravenous swarms.”

A desert locust swarm can cover about the size of Catawba County (more than 400 square miles), with an average of 120 million locusts per square mile.  The noise of the swarm has been compared to a jet engine.  The insects eat everything green, with each bug eating its own weight daily. They strip bark, crawl through cracks or gnaw doors to enter closed spaces.  (In Joel’s day, however, houses weren’t “closed spaces.”  Windows were covered with lattice if anything at all.)  Eventually they die, at which point their stench is revolting and their carcasses breed typhus and other diseases threatening the lives of animals and humans.

Joel says in 1:4, “What the locust swarm has left the great locusts have eaten; what the great locusts have left the young locusts have eaten; what the young locusts have left other locusts have eaten.”  Feel the calamity.

How does faith respond in calamity?

Joel has several responses –

(1)    Turn to God. “Declare a holy fast; call a sacred assembly. Summon the elders and all who live in the land to the house of the LORD your God, and cry out to the LORD” (1:14).  Calamity of any kind is always a call to examine my own life and a call to join others in repentance.

(2)    Trust God’s character.  “Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity” (2:13).  In spite of appearances, God has not changed.  He still knows.  He still cares.

(3)    Wait for the Day.  “The LORD will roar from Zion and thunder from Jerusalem; the earth and the sky will tremble. But the LORD will be a refuge for his people, a stronghold for the people of Israel” (3:16).  Whatever good or bad might happen in the short term is only a small taste of that day when God will break into history for the final time.  That is good news for those who are attuned to God, and very bad news for those who are not.

Worth preserving

Joel is the fifth in our sermon series on the minor prophets.  Let me make a candid confession.  If all I did was read the minor prophets straight up, I would in some cases find it hard to turn them into “favorites.”  Joel is one of those.

When I start to feel that way, I remind myself that the problem has to be me.  These books are in the Bible for a reason.  The Holy Spirit inspired all sixty-six books.  In the case of the Old Testament, the Jews decided they were worth preserving.  Then the early Christians included those writings and more in our Bible.

Believers before me have read every one of these masterpieces and found deep treasures. 

When the Jews faced the possibility of a 5^th century B.C. Holocaust, Joel’s little book that inspired Queen Esther and her Uncle Mordecai to gather, fast, pray, and trust (Esther 4:3).

When the Apostle Paul was writing one of his masterpieces, the letter to the Romans, he quoted Joel 2:32.  Paul must have liked Joel, and read it enough to let this one phrase stick in his mind.  “Whoever calls on the name of the LORD will be saved.”  He thought about that text so much it created a whole motivation for him to share the good news.  “How will they call on the one of whom they have not heard?”

The most famous quote of Joel in the New Testament is from the Apostle Peter on the day of Pentecost.  Everyone is speaking in tongues, and the Jews think the Christians are drunk.  Peter says, “No!  We’re not drunk.  What you see and hear is what Joel was talking about –

And afterward,
       I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
       Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
       your old men will dream dreams,
       your young men will see visions.

 Even on my servants, both men and women,
       I will pour out my Spirit in those days.

Joel had seen a day coming when what we now call sexism and ageism would be visibly overturned by the Spirit of the living God. God’s people would see that God’s word is not just for the boys’ club.  Both young and old – who often marginalize each other – would be valued for their ability to speak for God. 

Peter could not have quoted that text unless he had already read and appreciated Joel’s prophecy.  So if it was good enough for Peter, it’s good enough for me.

But I still wanted a bit more.  What is it about this book that is so special?  Why should it be my “favorite” this week?

I found the answer in Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the Bible, called The Message.  I love what he does with the minor prophets.  It’s not just that I think he’s a brilliant poet, one of the few who can turn vivid Hebrew poetry into vivid English poetry in the text itself.  His introduction to each book is so insightful.  Here is how he starts out with Joel –

When disaster strikes, understanding of God is at risk.  Unexpected illness or death, national catastrophe, social disruption, personal loss, plague or epidemic, devastation by flood or drought, turn men and women who haven’t given God a thought in years into instant theologians.  Rumors fly: “God is absent”… “God is angry”… “God is playing favorites”….

It is the task of the prophet to stand up at such moments of catastrophe and clarify who God is and how he acts.  If the prophet is good – that is, accurate and true – the disaster becomes a lever for prying people’s lives loose from their sins and setting them free for God.  Joel is one of the good ones.  He used a current event in Israel as a text to call his people to an immediate awareness that there wasn’t a day that went by that they weren’t dealing with God.  We are always dealing with God.

Sunsets

That’s why Joel is my favorite.  That’s why I need to read Joel even when I’m not in the middle of a calamity.  Joel reminds me that I am always “dealing with God.”

But how can I remember that when there is no locust swarm or tsunami or scandal or suicide or some other calamity?  Is there some regular event or reminder that can keep me focused on the fact that isn’t a day that goes by I’m not dealing with God?

How about…sunsets?

Through the generosity of some friends, Linda and I had the opportunity earlier this week to get away to Bald Head Island for a couple of days.  I guess it was our celebration of the first anniversary of our son’s marriage on the island last October.

We were eating dinner Monday night at a little café near the golf course when the sun began to set into the ocean.  I wanted to capture the moment with my camera, but on BHI you get everywhere on golf carts.  And we couldn’t hop into the golf cart soon enough or drive fast enough before the orange ball had dropped into the water and the vivid colors had begun to fade.  Believe me, we tried.

Even though we didn’t plan it, the next night we went to dinner a little later.  We were driving along that same strip in our golf cart when the sun began to slide toward the horizon.  This time we stopped and captured the moment in a series of images.  I put one of the best ones on my Facebook page.

I also asked on Facebook, “What is it about sunsets that grabs us?”  And I got some wonderful responses.  Here is a sampling.

·         I love a sunset because it is nondiscriminatory. A sunset is equally beautiful for everyone who can see it even though its beauty can’t be measured. Those living in impoverished countries see the same sunset as those living in a ten million dollar home in a gated community.

·         For me, the sunset is a silent reckoning that today is now over. But it also an awakening and visual proof that our God, the dependable potter. is still on the throne and his work on earth is not done. Hopeful reassurance.God could have just “turned the lights off” but He chooses to do it so gloriously instead…”Sunset skies…they make me realize…creation’s only the tip of Your glory…”

·         We obsess over things like sunsets because we cannot create (or, more accurately, recreate) them.

·         The bold, vibrant color streaked across the sky speaks of God’s majesty, His power and His amazing creativity. It just leaves me awestruck. The Psalmist says that “the heavens declare the glory of God.”

A sunset is about the glory of God.  It is about the passing of time.  It is about our equality before God.  N. T. Wright, in his book, Simply Christian, says a sunset is about transience – how quickly it slips through our grasp.

It’s all about dealing with God.  I wonder if we shouldn’t make it a point to use every sunset we see to remind us that God has no favorites, that time is passing quickly, that the passing of days will soon turn into the day of the Lord, and we will be accountable for our lives.  And most importantly, that the gift of a sunset is a reminder that God is so loving and gracious.

I know that some of you are facing personal calamity right now.  Others, like my friend who commented after church last week, feel that these are “dark days” for the nation and the world.  Joel reminds us that calamity should always turn us back to God.

But I wonder if God might not need to send us less calamity if we would just remind ourselves at every sunset that we are always dealing with God.  Amen.the sunset is a silent reckoning that today is now over. But it also an awakening and visual proof that our God, the dependable potter. is still on the throne and his work on earth is not done.