Joel 2:1-2, 12-17

13 February 2002

Ash Wednesday

“When You Don’t Know Where to Turn”

            Sometimes we in the church speak a language that those outside the church just don’t understand:  for example, “Ash Wednesday” and “Lent.”  I discovered that firsthand during my freshman year at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.  That’s a Roman Catholic school, but it really made no difference to me.  I was fairly clueless when it came to things regarding church—of whatever denomination.  Not since I was a little kid had I worshiped in church.

            Anyway, Lent was approaching, and one day during lunch in the cafeteria, I wondered aloud at the origin of the name “Ash Wednesday.”  My friend explained about the practice of marking one’s forehead with ashes.  For some reason, I found that incredibly funny and started laughing.  He looked at me as though I were an idiot—a heathen idiot.  Most of the people I hung around with at St. Edward’s weren’t exactly devout Christians—Catholic or otherwise.  But they at least had some understanding of things religious!

            Of course, “Ash Wednesday” isn’t the only term that many people outside the church find confusing.  (And by the way, it’s not completely their fault that they don’t know what the heck we’re talking about!)  More basic stuff, like “salvation” and “repentance,” can seem like a foreign language.  I remember being confused about that as well.  (Saved?  Why do I need to be saved?  What does it mean to say, “Jesus saves”?  And what about repenting?  What’s that about?  I’m not such a bad person!)

            Our Old Testament reading in Joel seems appropriate for just this sort of confusion.  The scenario is an invasion of locusts, locusts that have thoroughly decimated the plant life.  They’ve been eating everything in sight!  In language that compares the locusts to an invading army, Joel describes the infestation as a judgment from God.  He says that they symbolize the day of Yahweh, the day of the Lord.

            For the ancient Israelites, the day of the Lord is that final moment in history when God will judge the nations for their evil and will glorify Israel.  However, as Joel—and other prophets like Amos—point out, judgment begins at home!  Don’t be too eager for everyone else to get theirs, he reminds his audience; you need to get your own house in order.

            But getting back to the theme of confusion, Joel never says exactly why the people need to repent.  Unlike other prophets who call for repentance, he doesn’t give any reasons, he doesn’t list any sins they’ve committed.  Of course, it would help if we knew something about Joel himself.  He’s been placed anywhere between 900 and 200 B.C.  Still, most scholars give the early fourth century as the most likely time in which he lives.  This is well after the exile, during the time of Persian rule.

            The only fault in the people we can really point to is the lack of observance of proper worship.  Because the locusts have destroyed the crops, it’s been almost impossible to offer sacrifices of any kind.  “The grain offering and the drink offering,” we read in 1:9, “are cut off from the house of the Lord.”

            But there’s more involved here than lack of resources; there also seems to be a lack of will.  Joel isn’t demanding something that the people aren’t able to do.  Having a functioning temple has been a source of honor and glory for the people.  With the locust plague, that honor has just withered away.

It’s been observed that “Yahweh did not spare [the people] the devastation caused by the [locusts], and so they were shamed before the eyes of the nations.”  Added to their shame is the apparent “inability to keep the daily sacrifices going.  Not only had God brought devastation, and consequently, shame, upon the people, but the means by which they demonstrated their faithfulness to God had ceased.  In response, the people simply withdrew from the public practice of [worship].”[1]  Another prophet, Malachi, would also criticize the neglect of the temple sacrifices.

            In a way, it’s hard to blame the people very much.  Anyone who’s seen locusts in action knows just how ravenous they can be.  Now multiply that to the level of a swarm that engulfs the land, and it’s no wonder that despair would set in.  Lutheran writer James Limburg says of Joel’s message that it’s “a word addressed to a people who are at the end of their rope and who do not know where to turn.”  He says, “This is a text for the difficult times, for the time when a community or an individual has experienced a crisis and may be anticipating another in the future.”[2]

            Whether we’ve had to endure a plague of locusts or not, most, if not all of us, are familiar with topics like “difficult times” and “crisis.”  And that’s true, whether we’ve experienced such things as part of a community, maybe as part of a nation, or whether we’ve had to face these things all by ourselves.  And it’s also true, whether we’ve dealt with crisis in the past, or if it’s something that’s going on right now.  Unfortunately, I can promise you that difficult times aren’t just a matter of past or present, but there are more in the future!

            Still, before we dismiss Joel as some heartless beast, consider that the prophet does offer a remedy for the people’s lack of spirit.  He doesn’t just beat them over the head!  Verse 12 presents his solution:  “Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me.”  Or as Limburg puts it, “When you do not know where to turn, return to the Lord!”[3]  Our challenge is translating that advice into language that our confused world can understand—that we can understand.

            Exactly how does the prophet say to return to the Lord?  “[W]ith all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing” (vv. 12-13).  God wants us to be sincere—to really live our lives, not just drift along the surface of life.

            In his book, Being God’s Partner, Jeffrey Salkin tells the story of a Jewish rabbi who’s walking in a neighboring village late at night.[4]  He encounters another man walking alone.  For a while, the two walk together in silence.  Finally, the rabbi asks the man, “So who do you work for?”  “I work for the village,” the man answered.  “I’m the night watchman.”

            They continue walking in silence.  Finally, the night watchman asks the rabbi, “And who do you work for?”  The rabbi answers, “I’m not always sure.  But I’ll tell you this.  Name your current salary, and I’ll double it.  All you need to do is walk with me and ask me from time to time, ‘Who do you work for?’”

            The season of Lent puts that question to us:  who do you work for?  Our society tells us that ultimately the only answer that matters is:  ourselves.  But we’re unstable creatures.  We either don’t really know what we want, or if we do, we don’t know what’s best for us.  We don’t know where to turn.  We need something, we need someone, to give our lives direction.  The prophet tells us not to abandon our God, even in the bleakest of times.  Although, I think we should add:  don’t abandon God in the best of times, since that’s when we tend to think we’re invincible!

            Still, having said all this, Joel doesn’t offer any false hopes.  He doesn’t guarantee that the locusts will disappear and never come back.  All he says is, “Who knows whether [the Lord] will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind…?” (v. 14).  The worship of God doesn’t guarantee that hardships will disappear and never come back.  Friends, it isn’t supposed to!  But we can be very certain that our Lord is, as the prophet says, “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (v. 13).

            However, I find myself drawn back to the problem I mentioned at the beginning—when I referred to myself as an example of someone who finds the church completely baffling.  I’m thinking of the remedy offered by Joel, which is the remedy offered by the church in the discipline of Lent, a season that focuses on repentance.  I’m thinking of such things as fasting, prayer, almsgiving, and other forms of self-denial.  To one who doesn’t speak the language of church, who doesn’t see the relevance of who we are or what we do as church, such practices may seem useless—or even worse, they might seem as yet another way to try to make others look less righteous than ourselves!

            Dietrich Bonhoeffer has spoken of this very thing.  “Any objection that [these disciplines are] wrong, and that all we need is faith, is quite beside the point; it is cruel to suggest such a thing, and it is no help to us at all.  When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.  How is it possible to live the life of faith when we grow weary of prayer, when we lose our taste for reading the Bible, and when sleep, food and sensuality deprive us of the joy of communion with God?”[5]

            Has anyone ever tried to do a hard day’s work on an empty stomach?  It’s not easy, and you’re lucky if you don’t pass out!  Bonhoeffer makes the same point about the Lenten disciplines (though it’s not like we can’t use them at other times of the year!).  We need help in silencing the voices within us that cry out for things that do not help us draw closer to God.  It’s helpful to submit ourselves to something like Lent, something external to ourselves—because we do tend to be so confused and unstable.

            The church is right in telling us at the beginning of Lent, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  The wisdom of that strange day, Ash Wednesday, becomes clear.  Sometimes even Hollywood reflects that wisdom!  In the movie “Gladiator,” starring Russell Crowe, the late Oliver Reed plays Promixo, a former gladiator who takes the captured slaves and trains them to fight in the arena.  In a movie with a lot of great lines, Proximo reminds Crowe’s character, General Maximus, that we’re all “shadows and dust.”

            Though it’s not in our reading from Joel, it seems that the people do heed his message.  They do return to the worship of God, come what may.  We see later in chapter 2, “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” (v. 19).  And of course, there’s the greatest promise of all, quoted by Peter on the day of Pentecost:  “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh” (v. 28).

            It is that Spirit who enables us, creatures of “shadows and dust,” to speak the language of the people—to let us know where to turn.

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