abuse – Big Circumstance

Joel 2:21-32

Many years ago, listeners to Radio 4’s Sunday morning service choked on their corn flakes when the minister leading a harvest festival announced: “And now, the children will bring up their gifts.”

I am glad I never witnessed that!

At harvest festival, there are certain themes that we regularly celebrate – not least the goodness of God in creation but also God’s concern for justice, because not everyone receives what they need from the harvest of the land. These are important themes to consider, even if harvest festival as we know it was merely the invention of a Victorian clergyman in the Cornish village of Morwenstow in 1843. In case you ever need to know it for a quiz, his name was Robert Hawker.

But our reading from Joel prompts another harvest theme, and that is restoration.

The context of Joel’s prophecy is that a locust swarm has invaded the Holy Land, devastating all the crops, and leaving the people facing starvation. Joel says that this is a warning from God to call the people back to him in repentance, although it’s hard to be sure what particular sins have been committed. Part of their returning to the Lord includes fasting – which they may already have been doing involuntarily due to the food shortages.

But now it appears God has heard their cry for mercy. Crops are growing again and he has driven out the locusts. In this context we hear the wonderful words of restoration in our reading. The people truly have reason to give thanks for having crops to harvest again.

Moreover, Joel tells the people that God’s restoration project is bigger and better than they ever asked or imagined. What does it include?

Firstly and most obviously, restoration of the land:

We hear that once again there will be pasture for the wild animals, autumn and spring rains, threshing-floors filled with grains, and vats overflowing with new wine and oil, and that these are reasons for rejoicing, not fear (verses 21-24).

We are used to supporting charities that help with disaster relief – whether it’s earthquakes, floods, droughts, or war. But in the popular mind we are often only thinking about helping those who are in trouble there and then. Yet many of these organisations will want to be in the affected areas for the long haul. Providing temporary accommodation, food, and medical help is only the beginning for them. They know there is a rebuilding job to be done. It’s not for nothing that ‘All We Can’ used to be called the ‘Methodist Relief and Development Fund’.

So, for example, if I visit the ‘Stories’ section of Tearfund’s website, then yes, I will find one account of emergency relief in South Sudan following floods. Homes, infrastructure, and farming land have all been destroyed, and relief workers are trying to bring in temporary shelters, food supplies, and clean water.

But I will also find the story of a small church in Bangladesh that is transforming its village. Many of the people come from lower castes. One consequence of this is they are often not well educated. Only menial jobs are available. But the outcomes from this church of just 33 members studying the Bible have been listed by their pastor:

‘We have seen financial development along with spiritual development.

‘We don’t only do church-based work, we also do various other things outside of the church. For example, we plant trees on behalf of the church. We also do awareness work about hygiene – not only in our congregation, but we also discuss these things in our community. We teach health awareness about toilet issues, such as having to wear sandals, what to do before going to the toilet, and having to use soap after coming back from the toilet.’

Their communication with the government has led to 24 new homes being built. With a water supply that contains toxic levels of arsenic and iron, they have built a water pump. They soon plan to campaign against child marriage.

All this is because they believe in a God who restores the land. God wants to make his creation new. If a small church of poor, uneducated people can make such a difference in their village, what can we do? By all means let us give our harvest gifts, but can we not be more ambitious than that?

Secondly, we have restoration of the people:

In verses 25-27 we hear that God will repay the people for the years the locusts have eaten. They will eat again and praise God. Twice he says, ‘never again will my people be shamed.’

There is a human toll to disasters: not just things like hunger, but also shame. Given that Israel had suffered the plague of locusts due to some unspecified sin, there will have been shame at the wrongdoing. The Gospel says that in Jesus God restores us from the shame of our sins. Those burdens we have carried are ones we can lay down at the foot of the Cross and find them burned up by the holy love of God. The blood of Jesus deals with them – for in the Old Testament blood symbolises life and Jesus replaces our shame with his life.

But shame is not limited to the guilty. Tragically, it is also felt by those who have been sinned against. If you have been following the news story about the monstrous abuse perpetrated by the late Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrod’s this week, and if you have heard the stories of women coming forward to say they were raped by him, then time and time again you will have heard those women say that one of the reasons they said nothing for years was their sense of shame. Abusers control their victims by seeking to transfer shame onto them.

And here the Gospel is again by definition Good News for the shamed. Jesus is as much in the business of healing the broken as he is of forgiving sinners. We know that from the Gospels, don’t we?

Many years ago, I read a book called ‘The Locust Years’. It is the story of a woman called Jacqui Williams who went travelling in the United States but became caught up in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church – the cult popularly known as the Moonies. They took over her life, reducing her to an existence of little more than selling flowers, sweets, and trinkets on the street to support the cult’s income. When she had to return to the UK to renew her visa, she thankfully found faith in Jesus and her new-found Christian faith was her liberation. The book is called ‘The Locust Years’ after this very passage in Joel with God’s promise to restore the years the locusts have eaten – in her case, her time with the Moonies.

The Christian Church is about the business of seeing people restored in Christ. And if we’re not about that, we barely deserve the name ‘church.’ What used to be called ‘the harvest of souls’ is the restoration of people through the love of God in Christ. It’s why John Wesley said we had no business except the saving of souls.

Thirdly and finally, we have the restoration of all things:

Here we’re moving to the famous verses at the end of the reading (28-32) about God pouring out his Spirit on all flesh – sons and daughters, old, young, and servants alike. And I hope you’re thinking, ‘I hear that every year on Pentecost Sunday, because Peter quotes it in his sermon.’

It’s set in the middle of language about ‘the great and dreadful day of the LORD’ and contains references to the sun being turned to darkness and the moon to blood. The nature of this language is clearly not literal. After references to the sun going dark and the moon turning to blood, do not expect someone like Carol Kirkwood or Elizabeth Rizzini or Tomasz Schafernaker to pop up and add, ‘These will be followed by sunny intervals and scattered showers.’

So we’re in ‘end times’ language here, but that doesn’t mean a short countdown to the Second Coming. We have been in the end times since the Resurrection, and that’s one reason this language occurs at Pentecost. God’s kingdom has come and is coming, but it’s overlapping with the old order of things.

Therefore, God’s goal of ‘making all things new’ with a new creation that includes new heavens, a new earth, and a new Jerusalem that we read about in Revelation 21 doesn’t just all pop up at the end of history as we know it. That stuff begins now. Salvation and deliverance in every form have begun.

Hence, even now God wants to bring restoration in every way. And we the church are his agents of transformation. You name it, God wants to do it. The restoring of relationships with him. The restoring of relationships between people. The restoring of our broken relationship with creation. The restoring of the body. The restoring of a just and peaceful society. All these (and probably more!) are the many and varied harvests of restoration which God desires.

Naturally, not all of these things will come in all their fulness before Jesus appears to wrap things up. Don’t we all have the agonised experience of unanswered prayer? But let’s go for as much as we can get. Let’s not give up in despair, because some things have gone wrong. Let’s set out on this wonderful ministry of restoration that we have been given as the people of God. With the help of the Holy Spirit who is poured out on us, as these verses from Joel say, let’s confront the brokenness of this old order with the ministry of restoration that Jesus began and entrusted to us.

Who knows how much of a harvest we might see?

Mark 3:20-35

We hear so many stories of verbal abuse on social media these days. One story the week before last was about how the black English footballer Marcus Rashford suffered seventy cases of racist abuse following his team’s defeat on Wednesday night in the Europa League Final. I was pleased to read two days later that the people behind some of the anonymous accounts that sent the foul messages had been identified and the information passed to the police.

Religious people should be different. But too often we’re not. Today’s reading is a story of Jesus being on the end of abuse from his family and from religious leaders. His own family – the so-called ‘holy family’ – claim that ‘He is out of his mind’ (verse 21). Transfer the story into our society today and they’d be calling for the signature of two doctors so that he could be sectioned.

As for the religious leaders, well you can’t get much worse an insult than the one they dish out: ‘He has an impure spirit.’ Jesus calls this ‘blasphem[y] against the Holy Spirit’ (verse 29) – in other words, committing libel against God.

I’d love to tell you these problems don’t exist in today’s church, but they do. A school chaplain at a church school preaches a sermon in which he says you can dispute some teaching about LGBT issues, but you must love your gay neighbour as yourself. What happens to him? He is reported to the Government’s Prevent strategy by a member of staff as a potential terrorist and he loses his job.

I won’t give you any specifics for obvious reasons, but there has been the odd time when the vitriol against Debbie and me in the church has been so untrue and malicious that we would have been within our legal rights to sue people for libel.

So what do you do? Certainly there are times when it’s more dignified to say nothing, but on other occasions you still need to say something and keep on keeping on. Let’s look at the two things Jesus does here – one in respect to the religious leaders who libel him, and one in respect to his family who want him locked up in a secure unit.

Firstly, how does Jesus deal with the religious leaders? Put simply, he tells the truth. When he gives that spiel about how a house divided against itself cannot stand, he is following through some simple logic to show how ridiculous their claim is. It’s doing that which enables him to expose their real attitude of heart, which is that they might proclaim to be faithful to the religious traditions, but in reality they are enemies of God.

Sure, there are times to ignore your critics, as I said. On the Internet that’s often known as ‘not feeding the trolls’. And we know how Jesus kept silent through many of the interrogations when he was arrested.

But there are other times when we need to put these people right and expose them for who they are, because they are carrying out their nasty work in public and there is a risk of them influencing others for the worse. That’s what happens here – whereas when Jesus stays quiet at his trials it’s not in public.

This doesn’t guarantee that we shall be successful in persuading these people they are wrong. If they have hardened their hearts, they may remain intransigent as opponents and may continue to cause grief to us. We can’t force them to do otherwise.

But we can stay publicly faithful to the truth, so that onlookers who might not understand or who might run the risk of being deceived hear a clear testimony to God’s truth.

The example of Jesus here is that we have the courage to stand up for the Gospel and all its implications, and that we don’t let our enemies shut us up. Even those in the church.

Secondly, how does Jesus deal with his family? At first sight it’s not very charitable. When he’s told that his mother and brothers are outside looking for him (verse 32) he replies,

³³‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ he asked.
³⁴Then he looked at those seated in a circle round him and said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! ³⁵Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.’

Jesus redefines the family. He has a new family. It’s the family of God. Those who go in the way of the kingdom are themselves a family.

Jesus won’t let social conventions get in the way of him proclaiming and building the kingdom of God.

We know that later his brother James would lead the church in Jerusalem and his mother Mary would be revered in the church but these things didn’t happen because Jesus went home and played Happy Families. Instead, he stuck to his guns about the kingdom of God, even though at this stage they thought he was mad. But over a period of years they must have been persuaded. Had he given up on proclaiming the kingdom it wouldn’t have happened.

Sometimes we think that when we have a conflict or a misunderstanding with someone who doesn’t share our faith that the Christian thing to do is to compromise or to water down our faith. However, the example of Jesus here shows that’s the wrong thing to do. Stay faithful. Don’t be harsh or you’ll become like Jesus’ religious enemies. Live well for Christ.

So – these are the two strategies: speak the truth and live for the kingdom. There is no guarantee of success, as I said. Some of those religious leaders later plotted to have Jesus executed. I don’t know whether that school chaplain will get his job back.

But these are the right things to do when people defame our character because we are Christians. And if we don’t speak the truth and live for the kingdom we’ll sell Christianity and Jesus short.

Just remember that we believe in a God of justice who vindicates those who are unjustly treated. He may do that in this life, or it may wait for the Resurrection of the Dead and the Last Judgement.

Let’s make sure with the help of the Holy Spirit that we don’t let Jesus down when people unfairly target us.

Tag: abuse

Harvest Festival: A Harvest of Restoration, Joel 2:21-32

Video Teaching – Dealing with Unwarranted Abuse (Mark 3:20-35)

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