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?
Big Circumstance 