December 6 2020
Joel 2:12-13, 28-32
Well, here we are in the second week of Advent 2020.It is this year that has changed so much of how we live and it seems like the way we celebrate Christmas this year will be no exception. With COVID getting worse all of the normal gatherings that we would attend have now been canceled which just seems to put a damper on the festive spirit. What makes it even worse is that we really could have used some of that festive spirit to take our minds off of all of the uncertainty that has become the norm of what we are living in. This is why having this season before the season of Christmas starts to make a lot more sense. Perhaps we do need time to reflect and remember just why Jesus was sent to us. Maybe we need time to understand that it is precisely times just as the times we are living in, now more than ever these times are when we become awakened once again to the real importance of Jesus.
When you hear our scripture for this second Sunday of Advent that comes to us from Joel, you might wonder just what does weeping and mourning and repentance have anything at all to do with Christmas the season of joy and merriment? Yet in a year such as we have been through where over two hundred and seventy five thousand people have succumbed to the coronavirus, where racial strife has demonstrated the underlying division and hatred that we would just as soon ignore and in a year where there has been so much political controversy perhaps we might have to admit that the prophet Joel, with his words of grief and mourning, he just might have something to say to us as we prepare our hearts for Jesus.
Joel is one of what are referred as the Minor prophets. You have the four major prophets in Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel and then after them come the twelve minor prophets whose books are much shorter and whose works cover much less time. Joel is one of these lesser prophets whose book is only three chapters long yet within this very condensed work there are a lot of important truths. Like with all prophets, we are told that the word of the Lord came to Joel. This is what prophets do, God speaks to them and they in turn speak to the people of God. Now the occasion for God speaking to Joel is that the land of Judah has experienced devastation through swarms of insects. In the first chapter of Joel we are told that four different types of locusts, the cutting locust, the swarming locust, the hopping locust and the destroying locust have swept down upon the land devouring everything stripping the fields clean. This meant that in turn there was a famine, a shortage of food. Now, for those familiar with the law that was given to Moses, they would have remembered the words written in the twenty eighth chapter of Deuteronomy where Moses tells the people of Israel that one of the things that they could expect if they failed to obey the voice of God is that they would carry much seed into the field but gather little because the locust would come and consume it. This is what Joel was doing reminding the people of God that this devastation they were experiencing had been forewarned.
Now what made the devastation so problematic was that the grain and animal sacrifices that were necessary to bring before God on account of their sin had been destroyed. The Temple served as a symbol of Eden of the fruitful a abundant world where all was right with God. The locusts had turned their land into a wilderness and what the people desired is to go back to an abundant and fruitful existence but this could not be done within the means provided by the priests at the Temple. This meant that they were stuck in this world without grain, without bread, without the basic means of staying alive.
This brings us then to the second chapter the twelfth verse, where we hear God tell his people that they are to turn to him with all of their heart, with fasting, weeping and mourning. They were to rend, or tear their hearts not their clothing.Now, if we pause for a moment to think about what God is implying here it becomes rather obvious that God is telling them to turn back to him with an acknowledgment that their disobedience has led them to death. The actions of fasting, weeping and mourning and the tearing of one’s clothes were actions done by people experiencing profound grief. Fasting was merely the inability to eat because one is overwhelmed by sorrow. Weeping and mourning are natural reactions to the loss of a loved one and the tearing of one’s clothes was done as an outward symbol displaying to the world that they had experienced a terrible loss. Now in this last action, God tells his people to skip the whole theatrics of ripping your clothes to shreds in order to get people to show you some sympathy. This is much like Jesus told his disciples in the sixth chapter of Matthew that when they would fast they were not to look gloomy and disfigure their faces so that their fasting might be seen by others. Instead when they fasted they were to anoint their head and wash their faces that your fasting might not be seen by others but instead might be seen by their Heavenly Father who is in secret. This is very similar to what God expects when he says to rend our hearts. God wants our focus to be on him not on what others might think about our grief. We are to confess to God that the sorrow experienced has been caused by by the base desires that reside within our heart that need to be torn away otherwise death will be the result.This is the same thing James teaches us in the first chapter of his letter, that each person is tempted when they are lured and enticed by their own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin and sin when it is full grown brings forth death. John in the second chapter of his first letter puts it this way, “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions these are not from our Heavenly Father but from the world and this world with its desires is passing away, this world is dying out but whoever does the will of the Father lives with him forever. It is as Paul explains it in the seventh chapter of Romans that we are enslaved by sin to such a degree that we cannot even do the good we know to do. What we are left with is a body of death.All of these scriptures help us understand why the language of grief, the fasting, weeping and mourning is expected because this is the truth of their situation before God; they are in fact the real walking dead. This is why God tells them to rend their hearts, to tear these desires from their innermost being because of the sorrow and grief that they have caused in their lives.
So, if we stand back and look at the situation in the book of Joel what we see is the mercy hidden within the curses of God. The famine brought about by the plagues of locusts caused the people of Israel to pump the brakes on their ordinary everyday life which was drifting further from God, veering down that wide road that leads to destruction. As the noted author C.S. Lewis put it, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” The message God shouted to his people was that they were to assume the position of death because this is where they were headed. The sin that brought about the plague though, was done when everything was all right in their word. God’s warning had a hard time getting through to them until they watched their grain be devoured and the bread they needed for life become a memory. The pain of their hunger, the pain of knowing that death was closer than ever, this pain is where the voice of God came through loud and clear. Is it becoming clear just why this scripture is so important for us, those living out the new normal of twenty twenty? It is easy for us to make life all about the fulfillment of our desires right up until our world gets turned upside down by unprecedented events. Then in the pain of constant uncertainty, overwhelming sickness and death, in a world full of racial and political strife, in this pain, in this season, God truly is speaking to us this year through a megaphone. In our pain, God is crying out to us to come back to him. As we read further in the second chapter of Joel, “Return to the Lord your God for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love…” What is recorded here is the name of God, his unchanging character. We first read of God’s name in the thirty fourth chapter of Exodus where Moses asks to see the glory of God. God places Moses in a cleft in the rock because no one can look on God’s glory and live and there Moses hears God speak to him. God speaks to Moses about himself and God tells Moses that he is a God who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. You see what God was saying is that this is what the glory of God is, it is His unchangeable nature, the one perfect constant in a world that is constantly changing. Just as God did in the days of Joel, when our world is shaken God pleads for us to come to Him and find life in his unshakeable kingdom. When we turn back to God we leave behind a life of fear and sin and death to experience a life where we bear the name of God.
Life is the reward for those who realize that there is no life apart from God.We must never forget that Jesus teaches us in the sixth chapter of John that he is the bread of God who came down from heaven and gives life to the world. Now we have to stop and meditate on what Jesus is saying to us here. When he declares that he came down from heaven to give life to the world what he is implying is that there is no life on this earth apart from him.We can understand how this is so when we remember that in the first chapter of John’s gospel that we are told that Jesus is the Word, the word that is with God, the very word that is God. All things were made through him and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life and the life was the light of men.So life is what entered into our world on Christmas morning. That is a mind blowing way to think about Jesus yet I believe that this is what this season of Advent is to do, it is to make us ask ourselves once again, is Jesus really our life? Are we really holding fast that it is Jesus and nothing else that is our life?
Jesus goes on to further explain in the sixth chapter of John’s gospel that as those who come to him the bread of life, they shall not hunger, and whoever believes in him shall never thirst. This is so different from in the book of Joel where earthly bread had run out and the people were hungering. The bread ran out because in their making the stuffing of their faces their sole goal in life they drifted far from God. But when we turn to God, make him our one desire, then Jesus tells us, the anxiety and worry that drive our base desires diminishes. This is because when we come to Jesus and make him our life we have a life built upon the faithfulness of God. So when Jesus is our bread of life we have life of peace and blessing.
This life of peace and blessing is what Joel prophesied would one day be given without measure to everyone. In the beginning of the third chapter of Joel we hear God tell his people “And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit.” This is what Jesus was referring to when again from the sixth chapter of John, Jesus again using this idea of the bread of heaven tells the people, “This is the bread of heaven so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread I give for the world is my flesh.” This was a hard saying for his audience to understand and it still is for us today. But as Jesus explained to his disciples, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words I have spoken are spirit and life.” This teaching of Jesus has to be held on to when we hear in the seventh chapter of John, Jesus cry out in the midst of the Temple, “Have faith in me for out of my heart will flow rivers of living water. Now this Jesus said about the Spirit which those who had faith in Jesus were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given because Jesus was not yet glorified.” Here, after seven hundred years, the promise God gave to Joel that he would pour out his Spirit of all flesh was finally going to be fulfilled. The only way though that the Spirit could come as a mighty living river is as Jesus said that he had to be glorified. Where would the world see his glory, see the true embodiment of the name of God, to see one who was slow to anger, one who was gracious and merciful, one who overflowed with steadfast love and faithfulness? Where could we say that the world saw the most clear and evident portrayal of a life that bore the name of God, well, obviously we would have to say at the cross. It was there at the cross, as Jesus himself foretold, that Jesus gave his flesh, gave up his desires, gave up what his strength could do, and relied solely upon his Heavenly Father to vindicate him. And his Heavenly Father did prove that the life of Jesus was the life victorious when Jesus walked out of the grave three days later. Jesus gave up his flesh upon the cross so that he could the King of Kings and Lord of Lords who would pour out upon the world without measure the Holy Spirit, the very Spirit of life that Joel spoke of so long ago. When Jesus spoke of needing to eat the living bread that comes down from heaven what he meant is that it is in the Spirit that they find their whole source of life which we make our life by faith.
This promise of God’s Spirit being poured out on all flesh found in the book of Joel gives us hope that no more do we have to fear condemnation because of our slavery to sin. No more must we like the people of Israel feel the shame of the curses God brought against them for their sin. Now, the death of Jesus has broken the power of sin; we have died to a life held captive by our flesh and its desires. Now we have risen to a new life whose power is the very power of God. Where Joel and the people of Israel faced a severe famine because locusts had eaten the grain and left them without any bread needed for life we instead have been given Jesus who is our bread of life. Jesus is our source of life, a life he promises will be a life that lives forever.
So as we prepare ourselves once again for the coming of Jesus may we remember that Jesus, is the bread that came down from heaven to give life to the world. It is easy to begin to believe that life is the life we make by our flesh, by our effort, a life driven by our desire but as God’s word assures us this life is an illusion for we are more dead than alive when we listen to anything but the word of God. No, life, the life that lives forever is as Joel saw so long ago, a life empowered by the Holy Spirit. It is this Holy Spirit that we must find to be our true source of life, the life given to us that first Christmas. May we once again turn to the God who loves us and find our life in him. Amen!
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