Sermon for December 4

The reading: Joel 2:12-13, 28-29 

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.

Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;

your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,  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

The summary

Today’s reading from the prophet Joel is well known.  Each group of verses is a large part of what we believe about God

The first selection on repentance is very similar to the work and words of John the Baptist, who shared God’s word centuries after the prophet Joel.  John the Baptist worked in the time immediately before Jesus public ministry began.  John called the people to repent, to return to God, to change their lives and obey God’s law.  He prepared the way of the Lord.  Like Joel, John also called the people to rend their hearts and not their clothes.  Both prophets focused on faith, trust, inward belief and changes in our thoughts and actions.   Just following the rituals, the offering of sacrifices or tearing clothing was okay but those things were just external signs.  They needed to be accompanied by changes in hearts, minds and actions.

The second selection which promised that God would pour out God’s spirit on all flesh was a significant part of the first Christian sermon. In Acts 2, we hear the story of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus disciples.  They start to speak  of God’s saving love in foreign languages that they did not know.  This creates a scene of chaos and Peter stands up to explain to the confused and amazed crowds what they were witnessing.  Peter starts by telling them, they are seeing and hearing the fulfillment of what the prophet Joel spoke, God’s promise “ I will pour out my spirit on all flesh”.

In terms of his time frame and history, there are not a lot of details that we know about the prophet Joel.   We do know that Joel was a cultic prophet, meaning that he was part of the religious life in the temple.  Unlike many of the other prophets who were outsiders,  Joel was accepted as part of the religious system and authority of the time.   Joel observes the aftermath of a plague of Locusts.  The land, food and way of life in an agricultural society was wiped out.  These bugs, which ate everything, was a devastating experience. 

Joel declares that this plague was God’s punishment on the people for their disobedience. If they repent, God would show mercy and relent from further punishment.  If they did not repent, they would be fully destroyed on “the day of the Lord”, in God’s final judgment.

This is very close to one of the things I hate to hear, which many churches and Christian leaders say.  Today, we often hear pastors and church leaders say things like “Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on the people of New Orleans for drunkenness”, “September 11^th was God’s punishment for accepting homosexuality” or the devastating events in Indonesia was “God’s punishment on them for being muslim”.  This is not the work of the God Jesus brings us to, the God who loves us, cares for us and is present with us in times of suffering.   

Of course, Joel is right about the power of repentance to change things and advert tragedy. In our prayers each week, we share our concern for victims of natural and human made disasters.  Since natural disasters are not God’s punishment, repenting cannot do much about them.  It’s with the human made disasters that repenting makes all the difference.

If we look at something like disease, we cannot repent away en epidemic, but we can provide medicine, treatment and help that often costs mere pennies to make and can cure diseases like Malaria or other illnesses. We can research the treatment of diseases which dominatingly effect majority world nations but are not profitable to sell in poor countries.   In these cases repenting from greed can prevent a human made disaster.

There are many other human made disasters, war, poverty, racism, food insecurity, homelessness and sexual exploitation, where repenting can make a big difference and advert tragedy.  To make this happen,  this has to be the sort of repenting that Joel and John the Baptist preach, repentance that changes our hearts and minds, that allows us to each other as children of God, as people loved by the same God.   Repentance can lead us away from the sins of thinking in terms of scarcity, of protecting what we have and anxiety about not having enough to the joy of trusting in God’s promises and sharing what we have.