Pouring Down

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
10.28.07; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Joel 2: 23-32

This was the year I’d decided to do something different with my back yard. I had a vision, a vision of no more marching back and forth behind a self-propelled Honda mower every single Saturday afternoon, spitting out racket and greenhouse gases. The grass never seemed to like it back there anyway. Most of what I was mowing was just grass-like weeds.

Every spring since I moved into our house I’ve been forced to weed and lay down seed, like I was growing orchids or some other impossibly high maintenance flower and not grass. I mean...sweet Mary and Joseph..it’s grass. Without me doing a thing, it’ll grow up like wildfire in the cracks in my driveway. If you’d sent Kentucky Bluegrass seeds across 50 million miles of space with the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, I’m sure those diligent little bots could’ve planted it on the Martian equator and it’d have done just fine. Surely it shouldn’t be that hard to grow. But year after year, it’s been nearly impossible, and I’d gotten tired of it. It isn’t like we actually used the back yard, anyway...the mosquitos had claimed it years ago.

This year, I was going to do something different. In the late spring, I walked out into the middle of my back yard, took up a sharp bladed shovel, and turned the earth. Not over all the yard, but in strategically placed sites throughout the yard, I planted wildflowers. My hope was that I’d end up with a little field of waving grasses speckled with a riot of daisies and cornflowers and bluebells and poppies. It would be magnificent, a little spot of Eden right there behind my flagstone patio.

And then it stopped raining. Well, pretty much stopped raining. We’d get a drop here and a drop there. An August storm might pass tantalizingly in the distance, rumbling with the promise of possible moisture and driving grumbling children from the pool. The sky might grow grey one September morning, only to have all of that life-giving water vapor disappear before noon. And underfoot, the grass grew as crunchy and brown as toast.

In my back yard, the flowers...and these weren’t flowers that require even the tiniest little bit of human attention...grew feebly, putting out a little bud here or there. For the most part, they just looked as sad and wilted as the rest of my yard. But for those who need rain for their livelihoods, this was a harder season. The summer’s yield of crops in Maryland was paltry, as drought struck county after county. Driving out to the beaches, you could see acre after acre of stunted brown corn, struggling it’s way out of the ground.

Man, was it dry. Thirty eight days the sky gave us nothing, nothing but clear blue and wisps of tantalizing cloud. All the streams in the woods near my house had run dry. When I went out to the deserts of New Mexico to do a wedding this last month, I saw rain there....but not here. That’s never a good sign.

It began to seem that we might never see rain again. Then, this last week, the skies finally grew heavy...and it rained.

That first afternoon, as the rain began to patter down on the green metal roof above the church office, I just had to go outside. I stood there with my head tilted back, and savored each and every precious drop as they splapped against my face. You could almost hear the thirsty earth as it gulped that sweet, sweet water. It’s hard to believe, after a long drought, after the rain has been gone, that it’ll ever return.

Yet hope returns, even when it seems impossible. That was the point of the prophet Joel’s proclamation, recorded for us in this little book. We don’t know much about Joel himself. There’s not much in his writings to clue us in to when they were written. They could come to us from anywhere between three hundred and eight hundred years before Christ. The primary thrust of his book is pretty simple. There’s been a plague on the land, which Joel describes as a massive swarm of locusts. Locusts were the bane of agriculture in the ancient world, as great clouds of these migratory insects would sweep across entire nations, and could devastate an entire harvest.

Bible scholars aren’t quite sure what to make of the descriptions that Joel provides of this ravenous army. Some think that the “locusts” are actually one of the armies that invaded Judah, and that Joel was using images of an insect plague to refer indirectly to Assyria or Babylon. Then again, he seems to also use army imagery to describe the bugs, so some Bible scholars think...well..he might just talking about plain ol’ grasshoppers.

Whichever way you slice it, most of the first two chapters of this three-chapter book describe devastation befalling the people of Israel. At least, that’s what they say through the eleventh verse of chapter two, and then things change. This morning’s reading comes to us after Joel calls out to Israel to renew their commitment to their God. Even after their land has been turned into a desolate wilderness, God does not forget his people...and the promise of his renewal is played out all over these nine verses.

To a people who had experienced loss and devastation, Joel offers images of abundant rain, rain coming and renewing the land, turning ravaged fields into bountiful harvests. Where the larders had been empty, now they would be full. The rain will pour down from the skies, and wine will pour from the wine jars, and everything will be just as good as it was before.

Well, actually, no. That’s not what Joel says. Sure, it looks like he’s going in that direction, but he ends up taking it a bit further. He’s not just promising copious precipitation and all the cases of Trader Joel’s three-buck Chuck you can carry. After the renewal will come another pouring out, one that is different than the simple earthy harvest that has come before.

Suddenly we get this: “Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; you 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 shall our out my spirit.”

What we’re hearing is the promise of a fulfillment that goes well beyond renewal. It’s not just restoring the thing that came before, going back to exactly the way things were before the plague year hit. It’s about God giving something better still. At some point in the future as vague as the dating of Joel’s letter...afterward...God will give his own self, his own spirit, to everyone who has sought it. Doesn’t matter their age. Doesn’t matter where they stand in the social pecking order. It’ll be given to all.

And that, as the verses that follow so bluntly illustrate, is a frightening thing. The idea that God’s spirit could move outside of the temple would have been terrifying to Hebrew people. Remember, the temple wasn’t viewed just a place of worship, a place where you went to get your God-fix and hand the priests a few shekels. From the perspective of that ancient people, that temple was a divine containment field, a hard perimeter cast around the terrifying power of God’s presence. If you let God loose...who knows what might happen?

Because we’re happy to receive back the harvest we expected. We’re happy to embrace the return of the thing we knew before. We want to be back to business as usual, church as usual, life as usual. When we’re struggling with the cutters and hoppers and devourers that chomp their way through our lives, it’s hard for us to imagine anything more.

But what Joel tells each of us is two things. First, he tells us that in the midst of those times when things have been taken away, when everything around us seems shattered and devoured and hopelessly ruined..there is always hope. When we’re struggling in our relationships, or can’t seem to find work that fulfills us, there is hope. When we’re struggling with illness or loss or despair, there is hope. That desert time will pass. God will bring the lifegiving rain.

But afterward comes the second thing...after the struggle, after the hardship is past, God may bring something more, a change in us that we didn’t expect, that we couldn’t see coming. That transformation...that truly new thing...is something that we have to be willing to embrace. When the Spirit of the Living God is poured out, the harvest that will bring in us is...well...we’ll just have to leave our minds and our hearts open, and see for ourselves.