On Pentecost two years ago, I opened the sermon in a way that maybe no one else remembers, but that haunts me: with a brief overview of the mass-shooting events in the US to that point in the year. By the most widely-accepted definition, there had been 223 as of the previous Sunday, May 21. Pentecost falls eleven days later this year; as of last Sunday, by the same definition, the count stands at 173. Which is . . . better, sure; but saying “There have been fifty fewer mass shootings in eleven more days” doesn’t exactly seem like cause for wild celebration. What’s more, given human ingenuity, killing a lot of people doesn’t require a gun. You might remember that six weeks ago, I asked for prayer for the Filipino community in Vancouver, British Columbia, as someone had driven an SUV at high speed into a street festival in celebration of Lapu Lapu Day. Dozens of people were injured, and eleven people died; the driver turned out to be a thirty-year-old man, also of Asian descent, who was dealing with mental-health issues—though according to reports, his care team had seen no signs of possible violent behavior before that point.
I could go on ad nauseam, but nausea would serve us nothing. It all boils down to this, that we live in a world which generates such horrors. It makes me think of the opening stanza of William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats wrote that in 1919, but as true a description as it may have been of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, I think it may ring even truer now. But then, like John Green in the clip Emily played last week, I feel the power and pull of the statement “Everything is the way it is because everything and everyone sucks.” Green is a favorite in our house, too, in part because of his response to the steady temptation to despair. He chooses neither avoidance nor positive thinking but active resistance: he steers into it, facing the maelstrom head-on, and seeks to find and enact hope there—which is, I believe, uncommonly wise.
We as followers of Jesus are soldiers of the Prince of Peace, an army called to wage peace against a world of war. To do that, we have to face the violent life-sucking whirlpool of human sin squarely, or else we will end up speaking peace everywhere except where that word is desperately needed. Ours is not a peace that denies war, for we have been given a hope which does not deny despair. The things which tempt us to despair are real and must be answered, and ultimately made right; our hope in the face of despair is the proclamation that they will be made right, for they already have been made right—we just haven’t reached the end of the story yet.
Central to both the temptation to despair and the hope which we have been given is the reality that the maelstrom isn’t just out there in the world, it’s in here. We have to deal with that honestly, because there’s a real quandary here: how can I call down judgment on my enemies, on the violent and the oppressor, and claim not to deserve it myself? No matter how much we twist and squirm, we can’t, and so if our hope is that we win and they lose, whoever “they” might be, we’re in trouble. That’s why the description of the Day of the Lord in Joel 2:1-11 is terrifying: God’s army of judgment doesn’t discriminate between us and them, it’s a supernatural plague of locusts, swarming grasshoppers, devouring everything. You can’t reason with a locust; you can’t convince a swarm to go around your home and your fields because someone else deserves it and you don’t. Instead—well, remember the eucalyptus leaves from a couple weeks ago, and consider the experience of the bears of Koala Park:
One day a terrible thing happened to the bears of Koala Park. It was early morning. Suddenly a green cloud appeared. It was a thick cloud, full of tiny eyes, wings, and legs. The thick cloud was made up of grasshoppers. They swooped in over the gum trees. There was a noise like a thousand babies shaking rattles, then, as quickly as they had come, the grasshoppers left. The bears opened their eyes and looked around them. All their food was gone. The grasshoppers had eaten every leaf off every gum tree. . . . The country looked like a desert as far as they could see. Everything green had been eaten by the grasshoppers.
Now, the bears of Koala Park have an author who cares about them, William Pène du Bois, who brings in a troop of kangaroos to rescue them. We have an Author who cares about us, too . . . but unlike the koalas, we are complicit in our own disaster. We nurtured the locusts, we set them loose in our fields; God’s great army of judgment is a force we raised up against ourselves. Joel 2:11 declares, “Truly the Day of the Lord is great, and very terrifying. Who will be able to survive it?” Survive? At my bleakest, I wonder if we deserve to survive.
And to my bleakness, the Lord responds, “No, but when was that ever the point?” Look at Joel 2:12: “‘Even now,’ declares the Lord, ‘return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.’” Even as judgment looms, God calls out, “Just turn around and come home.” The prophet takes this and builds on it, summoning the people to repentance. “Not just an outward show this time,” he commands. “Tear your heart. Remember, the Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and full of hesed—full of covenant love and faithfulness. If we repent and run back to him, who knows? Maybe he won’t destroy us after all.”
Joel continues, “This has to be all hands on deck. Declare a fast day for everyone and get everyone in to church, from the nursing infants to the great-grands. Even the newlyweds on their wedding night—roust them out of the honeymoon suite and bring them along, too. Put the priests to work—make them earn their pay pleading our case to God.” And note well the basis for their plea. This is why I say the Lord sets aside my cynically despairing question as missing the point: the priests aren’t told to go to God with the promise, “We’ll do better next time.” We tend to try to bargain with God like that, but Joel offers something very different: “Lord, have mercy on us for the sake of your name, for the sake of your reputation among the nations of the world.” It’s not about us at all, it’s purely about the character and purposes of God.
In response to that plea comes the Lord’s mercy; and look at the time sequence! Verses 1-11 proclaim the Day of the Lord in the future tense: it is coming. 12-17 are in the present tense, calling Israel to repent and cry out for mercy now because judgment is coming. Verses 18-27, however, declare God’s mercy in the perfect tense, as something he has already given which is showing its effects now and will continue to do so into the future. Out of God’s mercy will come his overflowing provision, crowned by the luminous promise we see in verse 25: “I will restore the years the locusts have eaten.” All we have lost and all we have wasted, all the consequences and bitter fruit of our sin, can be redeemed in the shimmering mercy of God.
Does this mean the Day of the Lord has been canceled? No; it’s still coming, and it will still be great and terrifying; but God’s people will be positioned differently for its arrival. He will meet his people’s needs and then he will do more. In Joel’s day, only special people like prophets, priests, and kings were filled with the Spirit of God, and not necessarily all the time. In connection with the Day of the Lord, Joel says, that’s going to change. The chronology is vague, because the prophet isn’t really concerned to tell us the exact order in which things will happen. The point is that when the Lord acts to judge the world, his people won’t be passive observers or recipients, whether of condemnation or of blessing. Instead, he will fill his faithful ones with his Spirit to involve them in everything he is doing as his heralds and message-bearers.
Jump forward to Jesus’ disciples at the beginning of the book of Acts. He was crucified, resurrected, spent a few weeks with them, then left, telling them to go back to Jerusalem and wait. Ten days later, they went to the temple together to keep the Feast of Weeks, which celebrated the wheat harvest and also the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. Right in the middle of the service, the Spirit of God filled Jesus’ disciples and they began speaking in other languages, proclaiming the good news of Jesus the Messiah. Understandably, people were amazed; some retreated into defensive mockery. Lest the mockers carry the day, one of Jesus’ disciples needed to tell the congregation what they were seeing, and Peter rises to the occasion.
For that explanation, he turns to Joel 2. He interprets the chronology a bit (as we noted earlier, there’s room for it) with the words “In the last days”; obviously, what the people are seeing isn’t the ultimate fulfillment of Joel’s oracle—for one thing, no supernatural plague of locusts—but it’s the beginning. The most important piece, Peter says, is happening right here and now: the opening out of God’s promise. God said he would pour out his Spirit on all people, and he meant all people. He meant all nations, which is the reason for the linguistic miracle; the various visitors to Jerusalem could have understood the message well enough without it—after all, they understood Peter, who was one man speaking one language—but that would have made them second-class listeners, and thus implicitly second-class citizens in the kingdom of God. When the disciples burst out speaking to them in their own languages and dialects, that put everyone on an equal footing, as everyone heard the good news spoken specifically to and for them, in their own words. And as the message was spoken to everyone, and spoken by people who weren’t “special,” it was made clear that God meant all people within all nations. The curtain which veiled the Holy of Holies had been torn in half, and now the Spirit of God was out of that confinement and loose in the world.
In drawing on Joel 2, Peter is proclaiming the fulfillment of a promise, but he’s also setting an alarm bell ringing: the fulfillment he proclaims is a sign that the Day of the Lord is coming. He de-emphasizes that, however; instead of following the Hebrew text of Joel 2:31 which declares “the great and terrifying day of the Lord,” he goes with the common Greek translation, the Septuagint, which speaks of “the great and glorious day of the Lord.” He’s following the example of Jesus in Luke 4 when he ended his reading of Isaiah 61 at “the year of the Lord’s favor,” leaving off “the day of vengeance of our God.” Judgment is coming, but mercy is now.
That said, I’m not saying there’s a conflict between mercy and justice, even though such a conflict is commonly assumed. To the contrary, I believe mercy and justice are united. In Revelation 7, which we considered a few weeks ago, the multitude who have been preserved though the great suffering are praising God as the “great and terrible day of the Lord” has come. In speaking on that passage, I looked back to Isaiah 60 with its image of the kings of the earth being led into Jerusalem for judgment. Scripture understands that our sin requires a reckoning. Biblical grace is not a downplaying of human sin; true hope demands that our cries of despair be taken seriously and answered. Anything less would trivialize our pain, our grief, and our repentance, and that’s not something Jesus does. He doesn’t say, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be told to get over it,” he says, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.” Joel, and by extension Acts, holds both mercy and justice to be true. But how?
To understand this, we need to recognize that the relationship between mercy and justice is bound up with the relationship between love and wrath; and the first thing to say is that the wrath of God is an expression of the love of God. Specifically, wrath is the response of love to anyone who hurts the beloved. For me, this anchors in my experience in Winona. One thing which shames me about my time there is that I didn’t see how the people who wanted me gone were abusing my family. They did it in part because my wife and children didn’t conform to their selfishness, but also as a deliberate, explicitly intentional tactic to drive me out, since abusing me wasn’t working. I was so desperately focused on what I hoped to see happen, I missed what was actually happening . . . and there was a fair bit no one said anything about until I’d already agreed to leave. I still remember one of my supporters telling me certain people had tried to recruit her to a campaign of character assassination against my wife. In that moment, I knew what wrath was. Had I known a year or two earlier, what would I have done? After decades of dealing with anger by shoving it down, would that have been enough to blow the containment field? I don’t know, and given that my wrath was corrupted by sin, it’s probably well that I didn’t find out; but whatever might have come of it, the impulse to wrath was just and right.
Second, the wrath of God is against sin, not essentially against sinners. Take the first point and follow this out. Whom does God love? The people whom he has made. Our sin is at work in us for our destruction. If there is any being in the universe who is truly the object of God’s wrath, it would be the one who is bent on that destruction, the Enemy, the Father of Lies; justice against the Enemy is freeing those whom he has enslaved to sin. Which is to say, justice on a cosmic scale is expressed in mercy on a human scale.
Third, the divide in humanity—and this isn’t a fixed divide, we move back and forth—is between those who experience the wrath of God as love and those who experience the love of God as wrath. When the wrath of God comes down hard against sin, it presents us with a question: will we cling to our sin or allow God to cut it away from us? To the extent we cling to our sin, we put ourselves between it and his judgment, and we take the blow. If, however, we’re willing to let go of our sin, the sword of judgment becomes the surgeon’s scalpel, wielded as love, wounding to heal.
Fourth, we need the wrath of God, whether we accept that or not. One, we need God’s wrath for the wrongs done to us and those we love. Our pain matters, and when we’ve been abused and violated, those who have wounded us should not be allowed to get away free and clear. Our cries for vindication deserve a hearing. This, I think most people can get behind. Two, and this will be less popular, we need God’s wrath for the wrongs we have done. This is not a reality we feel most of the time, but there are times when we can. When we do something we can’t justify even to ourselves, that makes us sick to look at ourselves—when we feel so dirty, it would take a sandblaster to ever make us clean again—we need the grace and mercy of God for our souls, yes, but we also need his wrath to deal with our sin. We need that combination of wrath and mercy to answer and deal with those things which tempt us to despair.
All in all, I’m coming to think there’s something paradoxical about hope. I haven’t figured out how to express it, I’m still groping for words, but I think maybe hope is truest when it comes hardest. As Jess Ray and friends put it, “In the dark we learn the song of hope”—and not just in the dark, but in the whirlpool and the whirlwind, the maelstrom and the storm. That, as much as anything, is what hope is for. So maybe hope is most real in us not when we feel it but when we don’t, when we rage against it and don’t trust it, and choose to act in hope anyway.
After all, “Everything is the way it is because everything and everyone sucks” would be true, except for God, and the hope he offers is not denial of the suckage. Nor is it merely that we can reduce the suckage; working to do so is one form of the action of hope, but not its source, its essence, or its limit. Rather, our hope is that even when the world feels like a giant shrieking vortex sucking everything down and smashing it to wreckage, God is still in control, still faithful, still with us. Even when we’re caught in the whirlpool, when we’re defenseless in the storm, that doesn’t mean hope has failed or been proven false. Those are the times when we discover that, as Hebrews 6:19 says, our hope is a sure and certain anchor for the soul, and our anchor holds because it’s set in Jesus; and more, our anchor holds us, we don’t have to hold on to it, because the Spirit of God is our anchor chain. God has set his Spirit in our hearts, connecting us directly to himselves, and that connection will never break under any strain. The more desperately we need him, the more he gives us.
“Maelstrom” © Vadim Sadovski; image has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International