Pour
Joel 2: 23-32
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“Pour”
Joel 2: 23-32
October 23, 2022
Rev. Matthew Miller
What are some of the things that you’ve had to put on hold, or cancel over the past two-and-half years due to COVID? What’s been lost? Early on, the losses were easy to calculate and pretty overwhelming. We lost connection as schools, businesses and churches were all closed down, our shared spaces shuttered. Then, as we learned to use technology like Zoom and Facetime and others, we regained some of that connection, but at a distance. So, we lost closeness. Mixed messages about public health and masks, along with copious amounts of misinformation meant that we lost trust in institutions and one another. In the process, we seemed to lose consideration. Personal comfort and convenience got privileged over care for others and their health, and so we lost our sense of neighborliness, the feeling that we were all in this together. The data suggests that we lost our cool as frustration with the ongoing threat and uncertainty boiled over. Even as people drove less, increased aggression behind the wheel contributed to a rise in the number of car accidents. Certainly, sobriety was lost. Rates of alcohol consumption and abuse rose, along with drug use and deaths due to overdose. According to recent studies learning was lost too as students fell behind. Maybe saddest of all is the relationships that were lost. Lost to divisions deepened by partisanship as blood sport. Lost to disagreements about vaccination and public health measures. Lost to so many needless COVID deaths from precautions that were ignored, if not deliberately disobeyed. We may not know what it is to have an army of locusts decimate the land, like the people of Israel who are addressed by the prophet Joel in this morning’s reading, but we do know a thing or two about loss. We know what it is to lose years to something as pervasive and devastating as a viral plague.
Even now, as so many of our patterns have returned to a sense of normalcy, there are reminders. Visit any hospital or medical practice and you’ll be asked to put a mask over your nose and mouth. Or simply look around this room/sanctuary. There are fewer people gathering to worship each Sunday. Some of that is due to the ongoing vulnerability of those who run a high risk of complications should they be infected by COVID. Some of it is due to the natural migration of older church members who have moved to be closer to family, or who have died. And some of it has to do with the fact that sometimes it is easier to stay home on Sunday mornings than it is to drive to this building to worship with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Not everything that was lost in the years that COVID devoured has been restored. It’s only natural to wonder if it ever will be. And if it is, what that might look like.
That is where the people addressed in the passage find themselves. The worst of the damage has been done. But as they consider what the future looks like going forward, it’s hard to imagine. It’s a little jarring then to hear the prophet announce, “O children of Zion, be glad.” Um, really? Glad can be a hard emotion to access when you’re still coming to terms with everything that’s been lost. That doesn’t stop the prophet who doubles down, “rejoice in the Lord your God.” If you’re like me, one of the last things that makes me rejoice is someone telling me to rejoice. Especially at a time like this. But then the prophet continues. Now remember, the swarming locust have not just consumed and destroyed their food crops, they’ve destroyed years. Because when you are contending with a crisis of any kind, you aren’t just contending with the situation at hand, but how that situation consumes the time it takes to deal with it. That’s one more day, month, year that you won’t get back. And so the prophet calls their attention to the rains. And in doing so he is reminding them that this disruption to their lives, this break to the normal rhythms that they were used to, can’t interrupt or stop what is in God’s very nature to do. What is in God’s very nature is to water the earth, to bring forth abundance. The rain poured down on the land that’s been cut down and destroyed will once again yield threshing floors full of grain and vats overflowing with wine and oil. Some things, like the time lost, we will never get back. But that doesn’t stop the ongoing cycle of rains and harvest God pours out that allow us to flourish in the aftermath.
I think that is where we get the idea of judgement wrong. We’ve been conditioned to fear and avoid judgement because we’ve been led to believe that it is about condemnation and punishment. What if, instead of looking at the disasters that befall us -whether it’s a swarm of locust, a global pandemic, or something as simple and painful as a divorce- what if instead of seeing disaster as God’s punishment for some misdeed, we viewed it as a course correction? I was listening to a pastor the other day who was talking about a parishioner of hers who lost two years to a painful and contentious divorce. She asked the woman what, if anything, she had learned through the experience. “Well,” she said, “God turned my divorce into my assignment. Now I am the person helping other people who are going through nasty divorces.” This what the judgement of God does. It names what isn’t working, or what may be afflicting us and then turns around and calls us to take what we’ve experienced and put it to use helping others who are going through something similar. Judgement is the fulcrum on which our redemption turns. It’s very hard to heal when we don’t know the source of ailment, and it’s hard to fix something if we don’t know or won’t acknowledge that it’s broken.
My guess is that the devastation wrought by the swarm of locusts described in this passage, while doing a lot of harm, also brought a number of things into focus for the people; how and where they had become complacent, what they had taken for granted. There is nothing like loss to make us aware of how much something means to us. The same is true after the worst of the pandemic. As grateful as I am for the gift of technology that kept us connected to work and learning and worship, I have that much more appreciation for the experience of doing all of those things WITH other people, together, in the same place. And our own experiences of disconnection have made us that much more aware of the friends and neighbors who were, and continue to be without connections to family, friends, and their church communities. If the judgement of God corrects our course, calling and sending us out to love and serve those encountering a course correction of their own, then it is the abundance of God’s spirit poured out like the early and later rain on all flesh that nourishes us and enables us to do so with an abundance.
Peter’s use of this passage from Joel on the day of Pentecost, when God’s Spirit roars through locked doors and drives the disciples out of hiding and into the streets, highlights the fact that Christians and Christianity didn’t invent the Holy Spirit. God’s people have always known that whatever new thing God is getting ready to bring forth will only come about as a product of God’s Spirit poured out on us. The church isn’t our idea. And it isn’t our creation. It is the result of a power beyond ourselves that is nonetheless poured out abundantly upon us. And when it is, look out. Because it means we will need to start listening to the prophetic voices of our children who see what we’ve conditioned ourselves to ignore: a planet overheated by our insatiable appetites and consumption, a country struggling to do the hard work of coming to terms with its deeply entrenched racial animus, a human race trying to make sense of gender and identity and the imbalance of power between men and women. If we will risk it. If we will set aside our own rigid ideas for the new thing shown to us by the generation to come, it will indeed produce an overflowing of justice and love. But more than that, the spirit poured out means allowing ourselves to dream what God has yet to do and envision a future that invariably looks far different than what came before. We will never recover what used to be, as fond as our memories may be for what the church once was. But again, the church isn’t our idea, it isn’t a place for us to rest in the comfort of what we’ve always known. The church is God’s idea for the flourishing of human life and community for the whole world. What worked before may not be what is needed to meet the current moment, but by the power of the spirit of God poured out upon us we can dream of something beyond our wildest dreams. We can envision something that we would never be able to see for ourselves, let alone for those in bondage who we have likely overlooked.
Ultimately what is lost to disaster and to judgment is never the end of the story that God would have us hear and tell. The end of the story is the flourishing that comes in the aftermath as God’s spirit is poured upon us and we move into a future we never dreamed possible, until God gave us the dreams and the vision to see it. As that Spirit is poured out upon us, God creates the conditions of abundance that make things better. And we are saved. We are saved from dwelling on all that may have been lost. We are saved from our fear and predictions that things cannot get better. We are saved by the only one who can and does make all things new.