Acts 2:1-21
The prophet Joel wrote, “Your young men
shall see visions and your old men will dream dreams.” I am certain most of you
have never read the Book of Joel. It is one of the books of the Bible we
unceremoniously call the “minor prophets”. If something is important, why would we call
it minor? Yet there it is, one of the last twelve books of the Bible, stuck
between Hosea and Amos. It’s a wonder anyone ever reads it. We are all familiar
with the great love Hosea had for Gomer. We all know Amos 5:24, “Let justice
roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” When we
finish Hosea, why not skip Joel, and go
straight to the shepherd from Tekoa?
Truth is, we don’t know a lot about
Joel. His name means, “The Lord is God”. He probably lived around 400 B.C. This was after the Babylonian Exile and the Temple of Jerusalem had been reconstructed. The
book itself is a response to an agricultural crisis, an invasion of locust. Old
Testament prophets never explain a political or economic crisis using the
indicators we have come to trust such as, the consumer price index, the
interest rate, or the gross domestic product. Their language tended to bit more
theological. If there was a crisis the prophets, from Isaiah to Malachi, usually
declared the people were taking God for granted. They came to the Temple only on High
Holidays. They prayed only for their personal needs. They sang songs celebrating creation but
seldom used words such as justice or righteousness. Of course this WAS a primitive people from a
primitive society that pretty much worshipped a primitive God. This primitive
man named Joel declared the locust and the lack of attention the people gave God
to be in direct correlation. If they wanted the locust to leave they had better
get on their knees and pray. So this primitive people, who had not yet
discovered the wonders of DDT, got on their knees and the crisis was averted. As
quick as the locust had come, they were gone. And all the people celebrated
before resuming their otherwise unassuming lives.
But Joel was not finished. In fact he
was just getting started. Reaching way back into his theological bag of tricks
Joel promised the Day of the Lord, a threat
that had been spoken of 5 centuries earlier but never experienced. Joel said,
“God’s Spirit will be poured out on you. The day of the Lord is near. It will
be both a terrible and glorious day. You will witness the power and justice of
God. It will be beyond what you have ever imagined. Your youth will have
visions and your elderly will dream dreams and the way of the Lord will be
restored.”
The people of Jerusalem got real excited. They headed back
to the Temple.
They canceled all the youth soccer games scheduled on the Sabbath and even
declared no Saturday tee times before 1:00. People who stayed home from the synagogue
had enough sense to hide and not do yard work until late in the afternoon.
Fishing licenses carried bold letters that declared no fishing on the Sabbath. This
primitive, superstitious people went absolutely crazy because of the dead
locust on their sidewalks. And a few
youth and a few more elderly folks began to dream.
This domestication of God, a process
that started shortly after the death of the locust, began to gather steam. By
the birth of Jesus, the ritualization of Judaism was less interested in faith
and more interested food laws and clean utensils. There was a scroll in each home titled, A Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior and it was followed religiously. Everything
was done correctly. The religious elite prescribed what was kosher and what was
not. A good rule of thumb was if you are not sure, it must be wrong. Fewer
people dreamed, no one had visions, and God was really no longer needed.
I was listening to a song by Patty
Griffin recently. It was about an old dog that had been the family pet. When
the dog was young and obedient she was the family’s best friend. She fetched,
rolled over, and played dead on demand. But the dog started to get a little old
and slowed down quite a bit. Instead of chasing the ball, the dog preferred to
lay around the house. So they took the
dog out into the country and let her go. They loved the dog too much to watch
it die.
Once she was on her own, an amazing
transition took place. The dog regained her strength and willingness to live. The
family would take rides out in the country and the children swore they saw
their old dog running along side the car. They stopped but the dog would head
back into the brush and disappear. She had little desire to be anyone’s pet. The
first line of the chorus is, “God is a wild old dog.”
I had to listen to the song a couple of
times before I realized what Patty was saying. At first I was shocked, and then
delighted. If ever there was a song to be sung during the Pentecost season this
should be the one.
Pentecost is a holy declaration that God’s
domestication is over. No more fetching the ball or being a convenient side
show when things get dull. On Pentecost, God took a walk on the wild side. God’s
Spirit blew into the upper chamber of the disciples hearts and they became
dreamers. Dashing out into the streets they began to tell a story Jesus had been
telling for three years. You can’t regulate God to only the kitchen and the
bedroom. God wants to be part of your entire house. You can’t regulate God to
one day out of the week. The One who created the other six days wants to do
more than just rest. Perhaps most importantly, God will not be regulated by the
desires and wishes of a few. The word of God is there for anyone with ears to
hear.
On Pentecost, folks from Mesopotamia,
Judea, and Cappadocia understood the Word of
the Lord. Folks from Egypt, Libya, and Rome
understood the Way of the Lord. Arabs and Jews understood the Wonders of the Lord.
Men, women, of all racial make-ups heard the Word. Rich and poor devoured the Word.
No one was excluded and everyone was invited to respond to this God who would
no longer be domesticated.
And people began to dream. What seemed
impossible became probable. Words like justice and righteousness reentered not
only the vocabulary but the landscape of the human experiment. Suddenly, God
became relevant.
Now I’m not suggesting that God is only
relevant when we declare God relevant, but I do believe we are guilty of relegating
God to particular moments and the occasional crisis. We call on God when we
need God. We worship God when it fits within our schedules. We like having God
around, particularly in the later days of our lives. The problem becomes relegating
and dreaming are seldom found in the same sentence.
That’s why I love Pentecost. First, it
is exclusively our day. If you go to Hallmark, you won’t find a single Pentecost
Card. Second, it is our day to remember that once, in the midst of the ordinary,
a wind blew into the lives of a people trapped by their lack of imagination. A
flame ignited tongues and hearts swore allegiance to a timeless vision. Everyone
who listened was captured by a wild old God’s liberating promise of grace.
And
God, not shackled to any religion, ran free, inviting folks of all creeds and cultures
to join in this glorious revolution.
Imagine being transformed by God’s undomesticated
breath.
Imagine living God’s dream.
Imagine Pentecost,
Today.
No comments:
Post a Comment