The Twelve Minor Prophets: Joel
Kurtis McCathern
Joel
11 September 2005
Listen to this sermon.
Pastor Jim began last Sunday by preaching on the book of Hosea. Jim started this series of minor prophets, and while I was excited to hear that's what he'd chosen, I was less excited when he emailed me a couple of weeks ago to ask me to fill in for him. It's important that an elder be honest with his flock, so here it goes: I know very little about the minor prophets. Sure, I know about Jonah, especially after our sermon series there just a little while ago. Then there are the few selected passages that are part of the text of the Messiah, that great work by Handel. And of course, there are a few other passages here and there that because of other sermons or studies or friends I have some familiarity with: the song we sing from Micah 6:8, the tortured Hebrew of Habbakuk, the lamp with the seven lights in Zechariah (and yes, even the woman in a basket from that same book), and Amos, whom Sharon and I sometimes refer to as the remedial prophet. If you want to know why, ask me after church.
But honestly, there are great tracks of the minor prophets where, I confess, I am not even qualified, much less an expert. So, when Pastor Jim asked me to fill in for him this Sunday, and mentioned the topic was the book of Joel, I want you to know, I accepted mostly because I didn't want him to worry, though I was worried.
It turns out, though, that Joel is an interesting little work with absolutely great imagery, and I have been missing out.
If you haven't followed Jim's advice and read Joel this week (and let me take this opportunity to also greatly encourage you to read each minor prophet before it is preached on - it'll make what is said so much more instructive) I'll attempt to briefly summarize. First of all... you may forget the chapter dividers. John Calvin in his commentary he states "that the chapters have been absurdly and foolishly divided" and while my handy dandy little NIV section headings try to bolster them, I have to agree. To explain, I think it best to give an example from contemporary music.
How many of you are familiar with the new phenomenon of music "mashups"? What happens is someone out there will take two songs, and will cut them and splice them and layer them digitally to produce a new work completely out of the two pieces of the old, usually playing them off of each other, using one to highlight the images in the other in unexpected or startling ways. For instance, in DJ Danger Mouse's "Grey Album", each track is a mashup of a song from the Beatles' "White Album" and rapper Jay-Z's "Black Album". The interesting thing to me is that the book of Joel really feels like a prophetic mashup, taking your repentant calls and Kingdom of God words and layering it and mashing it up with your Lamentations and utterences of destruction. It's really best enjoyed and understood all it once, letting each back and forth show you something new and unexpected about the grace and wrath of God.
Take chapter 1. You have the destruction of famine and the mourning for loss it causes followed immediately by a call for repentance and the mourning for past sin required. Phrases are mirrored in each part of the mashup: "mourn like a virgin in sackcloth, grieving for the husband of her youth" (in 1:8) becomes "put on sackcloth, O priests, and mourn; wail, you who minister before the altar, come spend the night in sackcloth" (in 1:13), and "the fields are ruined, the ground mourns" becomes "the grain has dried up, How the cattle mourn!" (in 1:17-18). In two places, the layering is so close (1:12 and 1:18) that the loss of field and crop becomes the loss of joy from both mankind and the house of God!
I'm not going to point out every place in Joel that I feel like these juxtapositions occur, but if you follow them through you'll see that each one makes a comparison between destruction and redemption, between mourning for loss and coming home to the blessing of God. How interesting.
Could it be, in fact, that maybe some of these actions and feelings are one and the same? Could it be that Joel is telling us that redemption can only come out of destruction, and coming home to God through mouring?
Joel's prophecies here are double or even multiple prophecies, meaning they have fulfillment in multiple occurences. Some believe that the famine talked about in Joel actually occured as a famine, while the army imagery refers to the Chaldean invasion. That's all fine and good, but it seems at times that the famine is being caused by an army, or possibly even the army of God, because of the layering, or that the army isn't really made of men, but of locusts or other natural phenomenon because of the juxtapositions.
I think, maybe, what the Spirit was telling me this week through the prophet of Joel is that many of these images can be mashed together because they all talk about the same thing. The punishing circumstances of the locusts and the army were not unique; the coming judgement of the Lord will bear the same quality (although not quantity). The call for repentence wasn't one simply to stop the coming punishments of the Lord, but tie in to the great call for dedication to our God required to measure up to His calling on that great day. This book, to me, is less interesting for the events it describes, and more interesting for the pattern it creates.
It's been a rough couple of years in Iraq, and a rough couple of weeks in New Orleans. Across the globe the global economy has been pushed by breaks in oil production and record consumption from China and the US. The capabilities of international organizations have been hampered both by the independence of certain actors like the US and Russia and from within, by scandals involving oil-for-food and favors.
Bringing the focus closer in, it's been a divisive five years: an impossibly close election, fears of terror and recession, political balkanization, and judicial bickering. Look even closer in, and you see the scandals of the state and local governments, the budgetary woes of the states, the problem of the poor in an urban environment, the fighting over the point, the struggle to pay for and maintain a building, down even to the individual struggles of getting a PhD, or getting your new baby to sleep at night.
Struggle has its purpose, Joel tells us. Hard times have their purpose. Within the desolation is a mourning and fear that can be recognized by us and sympathized with by us, because while they vary in magnitude, form, and cause, they are similar in ubiquity, attack, and effect.
Likewise, Joel tell us, the mercy of God isn't measured by individual acts, whether they be restoring new oil or the restoration of mankind to holiness, but rather the mercy of God is systemic: it is inherent in every fiber of creation, and it sings of the wonderous love of God for his creation.
In almost the exact middle of the book, Joel declares: "Then the Lord will be jealous for His land and take pity on His people. Not merely in new blessing or repayment for old suffering, but in that great passage, God announces that "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. I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth... and everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance, as the Lord has said."
This isn't a pronouncement that is time-bound or tied to a specific prophesy. The scripture teaches us that the Lord poured out His Spirit upon us at Pentecost, and this is our birthright in the new convenant He has offered us: His Spirit, as Paul says in Ephesians, "who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possesion - to the praise of His glory."
Whatever your struggle or desolation, read the words of Joel and in them see the provision of God. Each of us faces our desert; each of us faces our army. Each of us must mourn for the lives and opportunities we have lost due to our sin. But this mourning, this loss, is what leads to repentance, and the opportunity to blow away the chaff of our lives, to burn away the dross of our lives, that what remains might be entirely the work of God and His Son Jesus Christ.
So that about does it for the book of Joel. Next week is the book of Amos. Please read and pray about it this week, and maybe I shouldn't have mentioned to you all that Sharon and I call him the remedial prophet.
Let's pray.
