Psalm 103:8-11 Abba God is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness. … Abba God has not dealt with us according to our sins…. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so is God’s mercy great …

I recently received a pin from a very nice person in the New Dimensions class I’ve been teaching on Tuesday afternoons. The pin is a green dumpster, top open with a fire burning within it. The dumpster has a face, it’s smiling and there’s some sweat forming at the corner of the dumpster’s “brow.” Right below the smile is a white sign that is, when you look closely, being held by two tiny dumpster hands. The sign reads, “It’s fine. I’m’ fine. Everything is fine.”

I love this pin for two reasons. The first is that it’s my running joke/motto (?) while teaching this New Dimensions class on “Resistance and Love” that “It’s fine, everything’s fine.” It’s my way of inserting laughter into a discussion that often takes a serious posture and tone. The second reason is: it’s flat out lying. If I’m walking around saying “It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine!” then nothing is fine, and I’m trying to convince myself that everything is fine when it positively, absolutely is not fine.

Tonight, on this Ash Wednesday, let’s be completely and painfully honest: things are not fine. People are scared. People are hurting. People are dying. Everything is not fine.

Joel 2:1-2,12-17

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sound the alarm on my holy mountain!
Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,
for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near–
a day of darkness and gloom,
a day of clouds and thick darkness!
Like blackness spread upon the mountains
a great and powerful army comes;
their like has never been from of old,
nor will be again after them
in ages to come.

Through the prophetic words of Joel, God is shedding light on Israel’s past.[1] This may seem like an odd thing to say, considering Joel mentions a day that is coming. But by mentioning this coming day—this coming day of divine judgment—it’s an indictment on what the people in general and the leaders in specific have been doing. God, says Joel, is on God’s way, and when God gets here, it’s not going to be great because the leaders and thus the people have not been oriented towards God’s will on earth as in heaven.

Notice that Joel does not say that a day of gladness is coming. Rather Joel is announcing a day of gloom, requesting that the inhabitants of Israel—everyone within the range of the blowing trumpet and wailing alarm from the holy mountain—come together and tremble because of this coming day of God. Like a thermometer, Joel’s words demonstrate that Israel is not well and judgment draws nigh.

In other words, everything isn’t fine, and God is going to contend with Israel through a plague of locusts that will come like thick darkness and consume everything in its path (this is the “army” referenced by Joel[2]). This event, while common (locust plagues were common), will outperform any other locus plagues that have come and will come; it will even outperform the one form long ago when Israel was still held captive by Pharoah in Egypt. Keep in mind that that plague was the 8^th plague to hit Egypt to convince Pharoah to let God’s people go; a plague of locusts indicates a people and leadership stuck and set in their hard-heartedness, refusing to listen.

But, as there is with God and God’s dealing with God’s beloved, there’s a glimmer of relief…maybe.

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.
Who knows whether he will not turn and relent,
and leave a blessing behind him,
a grain offering and a drink offering
for the Lord, your God?

For Israel, according to Joel, there’s a possible way out, but it will demand a level of faith that Israel hasn’t displayed recently. If Israel not only hears Joel but really listens, like shema type listens (Deut. 6ff), they will turn from their errant ways and return to God. There’s a catch though, according to Joel, It must happen before God comes;[3] thus, why Israel will have to press into their faith. They will have to believe the words of Joel, and that they are fromGod. Thus, it will demand that Israel self-examine and realize they fear humans more than they fear God. They must find their way back to their love of God which results in being unafraid of the rulers and authorities of the kingdom of humanity.[4] Joel continues:

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sanctify a fast;
call a solemn assembly;
gather the people.
Sanctify the congregation;
assemble the aged;
gather the children,
even infants at the breast.
Let the bridegroom leave his room,
and the bride her canopy.

Joel declares that Israel needs to be sanctified: everyone. From the old to the young, even those invested in profound ritualistic events (like marriage). Everyone must stop what they are doing, gather, and fast together, to be sanctified together. But that’s not all. Joel shines the spotlight on the people of Israel first, and then turns that light on the leaders, exposing them, especially the priests…

Between the vestibule and the altar
let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.
Let them say, “Spare your people, O Lord,
and do not make your heritage a mockery,
a byword among the nations.
Why should it be said among the peoples,
`Where is their God?'”

Here the religious leadership of Israel is exposed and called to turn back to God, too. The priests are to “weep” for their own part in straying; they are to pray for the people, and this is a confession that they’ve participated in/helped along the people’s and the leadership’s straying because they, too, have wandered away from God. They, too, have preferred their own power and privilege while the people were sacrificed by the rulers; they, too, have forgotten that they serve God thus serve the people and not their own whims and desires. Thus, they must now pray before it’s too late.

There’s a risk here in Joel’s words: God won’t show up, and Israel will be left to its own devices, left to being lost, left in the shadow of God’s departure. Joel wants his reader to imagine this horror, this gloom, this potential obliteration and feel the impending fear and identify with his voice, thus God’s merciful calling to them. Joel wants his audience to make his words their words, to step in faith, and a commit to making these actions their own so to secure their future with God and with themselves.[5]

Conclusion

Joel is setting us up to enter into this moment of Ash Wednesday with honest self-reflection to see that our tendency is, like Israel, to lie, to stray, to turn our backs, to think we know better than God, to be more afraid of other people (what they think of us, what they may say about us, losing our status and privilege) than considering loving God with our whole heart. We conflate God’s love for us with the thinking that God winks at our complicity with evil, human ideologies and actions that threaten the lives of the least of these among us (our houseless siblings, our queer siblings, our black siblings, our poor siblings, our immigrant siblings, our native siblings, our sisters, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, and the flora and non-human fauna of creation). God is merciful says the entire bible,[6] but God does not relish when human beings harm other human beings through war and genocide, through inhumane laws and policies, and through the creation of deeper and wider lines in the sand making the “in-group” smaller and the “out-group” larger, colder, hungrier, thirstier, more naked, less safe.

Joel advocates for the mercy of God in our passage, but between being caught in the death of our sins and the life that is promised in God there is a call to repentance, a call to penitence, a call to take a deep, hard, long look at ourselves in the mirror and for once…FOR ONCE… be completely and brutally honest with ourselves before turning that judgmental eye on anyone else. Ash Wednesday prepares us to come face to face with our mortality, with our own death so that as we can prepare ourselves to enter this moment and this season with the  fertile ground and nourished soil of a heart eager to see God.[7]^,[8]

We must come to terms with how prone we are to wander and leave the God we love who is the source of our love, our life, and our liberation.

Welcome to Lent.

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[1] Zvi, “Joel,” 1166. “The lack of references to specific events in Israel’s past (locust plagues were not uncommon) and the overall imagery of the book encourage its readers to understand it against the background of Israel’s past in general.”

[2] Zvi, “Joel,” 1169. “Military imagery is pervasive in this section; in this context, the army is a personification of the locusts…”

[3] Zvi, “Joel,” 1169. “On the need to turn back to the LORD, and for a communal lamentation. This must be done before the arrival of the Day of the Lord, which is near or close…otherwise Israel too will be the victim of God’s power. “

[4] Abraham K. Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: JPS, 1962), 209. “To fear God is to be unafraid of man. For God alone is king, power, and promise.”

[5] Ehud Ben Zvi, “Joel,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 1166. “The readers of the book of Joel are asked to imagine a terrifying plague of locusts and its horrifying impact on society and the natural environment created by the human society. Then the locusts become a mighty army sent by the Lord against Judah. As the text leads the readers to sense that human society and culture in Judah are at the brink of obliteration, it asks them to identify with a prophetic voice that calls on them to return to the Lord, to fast and lament. Then the book moves to Judah’s salvation and to a range of passages dealing with the ideal future, in which the fate of the nations figures prominently.”

[6] Heschel, Prophets, 290. “Merciful and gracious…are qualities which are never separable in the Bible from the thought of God.”

[7] LW 18:96 v. 13 “Return to the Lord. It is as if he were saying: ‘This will be the means—where you have come with your whole heart, with a true heart, then you are returning to the Lord. Otherwise, it will not happen.’”

[8] LW 18:98 “The righteous…use them correctly, for they are bruised and cast down by the angry threats of God; they bear divine judgment; they recognize their sin and their damnation So, when they hear these promises, they turn to the mercy of God. In this way their conscience again are lifted up and become peaceful.”