The Minor Prophets | Lament, Desire, and The Spirit of God

Today's Scripture teaching Scripture comes to us from Joel

Joel 2 · chapter mention

chapter 2, beginning in verse 4. What the cutting locust left the

swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left,

the hopping locust has eaten, And what the hopping locust left

the destroying locust has eaten. 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. Fire devours in front of them,

and behind them a flame burns before them.

The land is like the Garden of Eden, but after them a desolate

wilderness, and nothing escapes them.

They have the appearance of horses, and like war horses they

charge. As with the rumbling of

Chariots. They leap on the tops of the

mountains like the crackling of a flame of fire devouring the

stubble, like a powerful army drawn up for battle.

Before them peoples are in anguish.

All faces grow pale. Like warriors they charge.

Like soldiers, they scale the wall.

Each keeps to his own course. They do not swerve from their

paths. They do not jostle one another.

Each keeps to its own track. They burst through the weapons

and are not halted. They leap upon the city, they

run upon the walls. They climb up into the houses.

They enter through the windows like a thief.

The earthquakes before them. The heavens tremble, the sun and

the moon are darkened, and the stars withdraw.

They're shining. This is, in fact, the word of

the Lord. I was halfway through my Master

of Divinity degree when I found myself at the point where I

could no longer put off my Intro to Preaching class.

I had two main reasons for this avoidance.

First, I'm just being honest. I was pretty judgy about sermons

and usually found them boring. The thought of needing to spend

a great deal of time with others learning how to do this boring

thing with other neophytes like myself was not at all appealing

to me. And two, my school was

wonderfully diverse in its composition and preaching.

Class had a notable mainline Christian flair, and I wasn't

sure how, as a charismatic Jesus follower, building a home within

a certain specific stripe of evangelicalism that was going to

go. But the time came when I

couldn't put it off any further. And it was a good class.

And one thing that made it good was the ways that at times it

made me wonderfully uncomfortable.

Are you familiar with that feeling?

What it is to be wonderfully uncomfortable, what it is to be

pushed from the seat of familiarity into the thing that

feels just a little bit weird, but like not too far?

One assignment in the class, this large intro class with

something like 50 students, was the delivery of a prophetic

Oracle. Now to be clear, these oracles

weren't the kind of thing you'd associate with Harry Potter's

Professor Trelawny or the Pagan fortune telling shop in a strip

mall. Neither were they kind of

prophetic ministry that we often talk about in practice in

Vineyard churches. The kind where we sit in quiet

and pray, come Holy Spirit, and then gently share a word or an

image of encouragement that came to mind as we were praying.

The assignment was essentially to write like you were one of

the Old Testament prophets or maybe a passionate psalmist, and

to exclaim, lament, grief, wrongdoing, judgement or loss.

And we had something like 30 seconds apiece.

And unlike our practice sermons, which were given in small

groups, we were to stand one at a time from our seats and

deliver our prophetic oracles to the class's large lecture hall.

That's 50 junior preachers going back-to-back to back, one at a

time in rapid succession, talking like a prophet.

And icing on the cake, the Oracle assignment was delivered

on October 31st. It was an experience, and upon

reflection, it makes sense. But I remember being surprised

by the intensity of that classes 50 minutes Oracle prophecy.

Boom, boom, boom. I thought of this assignment

when preparing for the sermon. Not only because our oracles

sounded a bit like modernized modern Minor Prophets, because

that year had seen an uncommon number of terrible hurricanes.

Harvey in Houston in the Gulf Coast, Irma in Florida and the

Caribbean, Maria wrecking havoc in Costa Rica.

Now, I wasn't in any of those places when the storms hit, but

I did sit with a friend whose family was in Houston and who

fled on foot while the storm surged in an effort to get to

safety. In that move, there were hours

where her whole family was unaccounted for.

And so states away, my friend and I sat together while we

listened to the radio calls of emergency responders.

And she tracked eyewitnesses on social media in Houston,

watching for descriptions of her family.

My Oracle was about natural disasters, A lament pleading for

God's intervention on behalf of the vulnerable.

And this is the scene that we enter into in the book of Joel.

But Joel's disaster wasn't hurricanes.

It was a plague of locusts descending during a major

drought. Joel is a short 3 chapter book

that follows a familiar prophetic movement.

We'll see it a few times in the minor prophet series that we

began last week that will take us all the way through all 12

minor prophets. Near the end of the Old

Testament there's a Oh no moment of crisis, a cry to God, a

warning about the day of the Lord, and then a turning toward

the making right of weary bodies, tired hearts, and

circumstances beyond human control.

I really liked Jared's graph from last week that thinks that

the way we think about stories and and bad fortune.

Good for I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm just a nerd, but these

are the moments in which the prophets are speaking, in which

they're offering their words to the Israelites.

And so this is the terrain in which we are entering into Joel

takes place around 403 fifty BCE and Judah and Sumer and

Jerusalem. Sorry, wrong sermon.

The Israelites, God's chosen people, have already lived a

long story by this point, Called through Abraham, formed through

Moses, settled in the Promised Land, centered around the

Temple, then shattered by the destruction and exile in

Babylon. They have returned home and the

temple has been rebuilt, but there is no king and there's no

independence. This is a generation that has

never personally known exile, but also never known glory.

Not the liberation from slavery their ancestors sang about, not

the nearness of God's presence born in the ark, not even the

hope laid and urgency of those who first rebuilt the temple.

They know waiting. They know ordinary life.

And here in the book of Joel, they are experiencing profound

ecological devastation. Joel speaks to these people,

calling them to lament, promising God's response,

assuring them that God will meet their most basic needs, and then

do something wholly unexpected, pour out God's own Spirit.

And centuries later, when the Spirit falls in Jerusalem and

wind and fire and the apostle Peter will stand on the day of

Pentecost and say, this is that. This was foretold in Joel.

When their physical environment crumbles, the Israelites are

laid bare again before God. There is no illusion of control

left to cling to, and lament becomes the invitation to the

reorientation of desire. Like lined up, like glass in a

telescope, pointed toward what is true and what has always been

there. I don't know about you, but my

context for locusts is that of the plagues that were wrought in

Egypt while Moses was trying to convince Pharaoh to let God's

people go. And that's about it.

The truth is that locust plagues were common in the ancient

world, in this part of the world, and we have them in the

modern era. I believe this photo is from

2020 March 2020. Though for all of the modern

everything we have, locust swarms remain terrifying.

According to National Geographic, desert locust swarms

can cover 460 square miles, with 40 to 80 million locusts packed

in less than 1/2 square mile. A swarm of this size would each

would eat 423,000,000 lbs of plants a day.

With this in mind, I'm going to reread a portion of today's

passage, and I'm going to invite you to hear Joel's voice in the

context in which it was spoken, with the roar of a swarm of

locusts behind it. With the cutting locusts left,

the swarming locust has eaten. With the swarming locusts left,

the hopping locust has eaten. And what the hopping locusts

left with the destroying locust has eaten.

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.

Fire devours in front of them, and behind them a flame burns

before them. The land is like the Garden of

Eden, but after them a desolate wilderness, and nothing escapes

them. They have the appearance of.

Horses. And like war horses, they

charge. As with.

Rumbling of Chariots, they leap on the tops of the mountains

like the crackling of a. Flame of fire devouring.

The stubble. Like a powerful.

Army drawn up for battle before them.

Peoples are in English. All faces grow pale.

Like warriors, they charge. Like soldiers, they.

Scale the wall. Each keeps to his own course.

They do not swerve. From their pads.

They do not jostle one another, each keeps to its own track.

They burst through the. Weapons and are not halted they

leave upon the city they. Run upon the walls.

They climb up into the houses. They enter through the windows

like a thief. The earthquakes.

Before them the huntings tremble, the sun and the moon

are darkened. And the stars withdraw.

They're shining. There is nothing left and as is

often the case with natural disaster, the effects are total.

The ground is ruined, the plants are gone, the vine is destroyed,

the food and drink are gone. The work of preparing food and

drink, transporting, selling, it's gone too.

The extra that you may have had in your home is gone.

The already fragile economy is shot through as everyone turns

towards the reality of their households basic day-to-day

needs. And all this happens within the

destroyed place that they have known as home.

I can recall the way I felt some while back the evening after a

particularly terrible political event.

It was a day that sort of left that lump in your throat and it

felt like the world would have no way of going back.

And it was that night that I had the very rare experience of

being encouraged by something I read on social media.

I I think the spirit spoke to me through it because it's the kind

of statement that really could have landed badly.

But an old Co worker who I knew to be carrying, to also be

carrying the great weight of the events of that day, simply said

to her friends, 10 bucks says the sun still rises tomorrow.

Now, in context, the statement wasn't making light of the

circumstances. It was the kind of declaration

that there was actually something bigger than what we

were feeling and understanding. That day.

The sun will rise and the sun will set.

Though the earth may give way and the mountains fall into the

heart of the sea, I shall not fear.

The thing is, while the sun still rose amid a locust swarm

of this size, the sun and the moon were darkened.

I don't think this was metaphorical.

The locusts covered the sky like a cloud, arriving in waves that

moved like surges of the sea, but never breaking into foam.

I am particularly taken by the language.

They leap upon the city. The militaristic language is

striking at times. In scripture, locusts are a

metaphor for a real invading army.

Not here. Here, military language is used

as a metaphor to explain locusts charging like war hoses, as with

the rumbling of Chariots, they leap on the tops of mountains.

The picture feels like something Tolkien or CS Lewis would have

crafted in their imaginative renderings of good and evil,

loss and redemption, and what is ultimately at stake in the good

life. And yet this isn't epic fiction.

It's the exclamation of a biblical prophet in a

devastating moment. In some ways, these tiny beasts

were more terrifying than sword and spear, which, at least for a

time, may be kept off by walls and fortifications.

But locusts scale a wall with no rope.

They enter through the windows like a thief, and they are so

much smaller. If you have ever had the

experience of riding a home of an invasive pest, or if you've

never had that experience, count yourself lucky if you have ever

come face to face with a company of bedbugs, roaches, lice, or

any other creature that would cause you to wash every fabric

in your home. Assume a library book or a movie

theater recliner might be contaminated.

Or in a moment of panic, pour a line of diatomaceous earth in a

circle around your body, because then you could be sure that no

tiny exoskeleton bound bug would make its way to you.

Then you might have an imagination for what it would be

like to batten down every hatch and find that you can't keep the

creature out. This is the opening picture in

Joel. It does not begin with moral

instruction, a wayward peoples and then destructions.

There is no warm up unlike a Hollywood film where we first

meet the characters and learn the back story and experience a

build up to the point where the dinosaurs are let loose or the

child tributes spar in the arena while the world watches.

We enter at the point of destruction.

In fact, Joel's first words are to the elders.

Hear this, O elders, give ear all inhabitants of the land.

Has such a thing happened in your days or in the days of your

ancestors? Tell your children of it.

Let your children tell their children and their children

another generation. This call marks the severity of

the situation because the elders are those in the community.

Who would know, who would remember, who would be able to

say, this happened in my youth? If they had a comparable

disaster, they'd have said, ah, this was like the Blizzard of

78. Haven't seen the wind and snow

that bad since then. But that's not what Joel says.

Have you? Has such a thing happened in

your days or in the days of your ancestors?

He's saying, do you know anything like this?

Not only have you experienced this before, but did your

parents or your grandparents? Did you grow up with the stories

of this disaster? The way we might hear about a

woman who grew up during the depression and never threw away

a jam jar? Or the way children and

grandchildren of Holocaust survivors relate to violence and

anti-Semitism. In this strong, shadowed moment,

Joel describes what is creation is laid bare and the Israelites

are called to lament. For a nation has invaded my

land, powerful and innumerable. Its teeth are lion's teeth, and

it has the fangs of a lioness. It has laid waste my vines and

splintered my fig trees. It is stripped off their bark

and thrown it down. Their branches have turned

white. Something very important is

going on here. It has laid waste my vines and

splintered my fig trees. Joel isn't claiming ownership of

the vines and trees. He's speaking on behalf of God.

And so God is joining Israel in her grief.

The loss is that somehow separate from God because God is

removed from all that is broken. God's holiness does not keep God

from the four lone place. No, the Creator leans towards

creation, ruined land, flattened plant, and hopeless humanity.

And so the invitation to turn toward lament isn't an

invitation that Israel enters into onto its own.

The God who grieves is there as well.

And so, says Joel, lament like a virgin dressed in sackcloth for

the husband of her youth. The grain offering and the drink

offering are cut off from the House of the Lord.

The priests mourn the ministers of the Lord.

The fields are devastated. The ground mourns, for the grain

is destroyed. The wine dries up, the oil

fails. Be dismayed.

You farmers whale. You vine dressers over the wheat

and the barley, for the crops of the field are ruined.

Consecrate a fast, call a whole solemn assembly, gather the

elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the House of the

Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord.

Part of what I find striking here is that regardless of a of

Israel's ability or desire to follow Joel's instructions or

not, grief and lament would be present in some capacity no

matter what. Sometimes loss is subtle and

deceptive. Indeed, it's not until the cats

in the cradle that you realize something important is gone.

The pursuit of happiness can take you to college, Wall

Street, or Vegas. And we can fill our days with

ostensibly good things, activities we enjoy, people we

want to spend time with, and in pursuit of goals we find

meaningful. And yet, the production,

consumption and experience of these things can swallow up our

attention and reroute our desire.

This is to say, you can design your life without ever giving

consideration to what it is that is worth wanting in the 1st

place. The issue is not the work that

you do, the relationships you prioritize, or the hobbies you

spend your time and money on per SE.

So bless you, the bread Baker with your lamb, the skier with

your poles, and the pickerball pickle baller on thy court.

But these things in the American Disney asked prioritation of

maximizing happiness often bypasses the deep and deeper

formation of longing of what we are oriented toward and being

shaped by. We just did a whole series on

the passions gluttony, lust, avarice, despondency, anger,

acedia, Vainglory, and pride. This isn't just a random list of

sins. They are misdirected responses

to real desire. You can hang a Da Vinci on your

wall and still never know Beauty and Joel.

That illusion collapses. Everything that distracts is

stripped away, and the people's desire, their longing for life,

for meaning, for God, stands exposed before God.

The invitation to lament is to take all that is laid bare and

turn before God rather than into and onto themselves.

The Israelites no longer have any illusion of control, at

least not anymore. In their lament, Joel implores

his listeners to heed the day of the Lord.

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 ever be again

in the ages to come. At first glance, Joel Chapter 2

Joel 2 · chapter mention

sounds a lot like Joel chapter 1.

Joel 1 · chapter mention

Darkness and gloom, A great and powerful force spread across the

mountains. Language insisting that the

devastation is unparalleled. But there's a crucial shift.

In chapter 2, Joel says the Day of the Lord is coming.

It is near. He does not say this is the day

of the Lord. Instead, Joel uses the language

of their present literal environment to gesture towards

something more, something that presses beyond the immediate

disaster. For that reason, the invasion

described in Joel 2 is likely not a second literal army, nor a

new locust plague. Rather, Joel One and Joel 2 are

parallel chapters describing the same ecological catastrophe.

Joel One names it, grieves it, and calls the people to lament.

And Joel 2 does all of that. But it also turns up the alarm,

interpreting the plague as a sign that something deeper is at

stake. As Bible scholar Terence

Fretheim observes, Joel 2 reflects a more immediate,

imminent threat. The disaster was already

unfolding, and it has now reached a new level of danger

for Israel's future. What began as devastation is now

disclosed as warning, and the people are being asked not only

to grieve what is happening, but to reckon with where it is

leading. And verse 212 picks up.

Yet even now says the Lord, return to me with all your

heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.

Ren your hearts and not your clothing.

Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful,

slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting

from punishment. Return to me with all your

heart. Ren your hearts and not your

clothing. This call is communal and it

reckons deeply with desire. The tearing of garments was a

visible sign of mourning, and God is not forbidding that

expression. Rather, God is saying, I care

about what is beneath it. Not your performance, not your

display, not your ability to do this correctly.

But you return to me with all your heart, because it is God's

desire to meet you there. God's character is then named

with remarkable clarity, as direct as it could possibly be.

Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful,

slow to anger, abounding and steadfast love, and relenting

from punishment. The locust pet plague is not

framed as God's judgement for a particular sin.

God has already joined Israel in grief.

Speaking of my vines and my fig trees, This devastation happens

because devastation happens because the world is fragile and

creation groans. And yet even here, especially

here, there's a call to return. Not because Israel has failed

some moral test this time, but because in this moment they are

laid bare, with desire exposed and illusion stripped away.

They are invited to Orient themselves fully toward God, to

cry out not in self repair, but in trust, and to call upon who

God is and to ask God to act. My favorite part is here at the

end. Then the Lord became jealous for

His land and had pity on his people.

In response to his people, the Lord said, I am sending you

grain, wine and oil, and you will be satisfied, and I will no

more make you a mockery among the nations.

I will remove the northern army from you and drive it into

parched and desolate land, its front into the eastern sea and

its rear into the western sea. Its stench and foul small will

rise up. Surely He has done great things,

so do not fear you animals of the field, for the pastures of

the wilderness are green. The tree bears its fruit.

The fig tree and the vine give their full yield.

O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the Lord your God,

for He has given the early rain for your vindication.

He has poured down for you abundant rain, the early and the

later rain as before. Then afterward I will pour out

my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters

shall prophecy, Your old men shall dream dreams, and your

young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female

slaves in those days I will pour out my spirit.

This is a sudden and dramatic move from lament to promise,

including the reversal of the damage done to the crops and to

the land by the locusts. This change is cause for

celebration. And then, then we find what is

certainly the most famous passage in the book of Joel.

I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.

It's the most famous passage because Peter quotes it in his

address to the crowd gathered on the Day of Pentecost, the day

the Spirit of God was poured out.

And Peter quotes Joel at Pentecost because he needed an

interpretive theological framework to explain what was

happening. Acts 2 states that when the day

of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, and

suddenly from heaven there came a sound like a rush of a violent

wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.

Divided tongues as of fire appeared among them, and a

tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the

Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit

gave them ability. That's really cool, and it kind

of freaked people out. The crowd was amazed, astonished

and confused. They began hypothesizing about

what was going on, supposing that the people around them must

be drunk because there was no box to process what they were

observing and experiencing. And so supposing drunkenness was

the most logical explanation that they could come up with.

And to that reasoning, Peter quotes Joel.

He quotes Joel because the prophet gave an interpretation

for Pentecost centuries prior. He quotes Joel because there's

comfort and realizing that this really weird thing you are

experiencing was foretold in the Scriptures that have oriented

one's community to God and God's faithfulness to creation for

generations. Faced with something

overwhelming and bewildering, Peter reaches back to Joel and

says, in effect, this is not chaos.

This is a promise fulfilled. What God once spoke in the

middle of catastrophe has now come to pass.

Friends, the same Spirit of God who was present in creation, who

was promised through Joel in the midst of devastation and full

bodied lament, and who was poured out at Pentecost, is

still at work today. Circumstances we cannot fix.

Ecological devastation, grief, loss in situation that we have

no imagination for exiting. They strip away our illusions of

control. And in that exposed place,

lament is an invitation. It's an opening to stand before

God where God is already waiting and saying return to me that I

am here for you and I love you. God meets us with God's Spirit.

Jared, if you want to come on up, we're going to transition

into ministry time if the the worship team wants to come on up

and begin to get situated if the folks are going to be praying.