“The Minor Leagues: The “Minor” Prophets of the Bible,” Week Three
The one time I have gotten to participate in the creation of a time capsule, I was in sixth grade. My elementary school had a tradition of building time capsules, and that year we were all asked to bring something for it that reflected the technology of that time, which would have been around 1997-98.
With all sorts of ulterior motives, I tried to bring my alarm clock and was told in no uncertain terms by my parents to choose something else instead. So I eventually went with a handheld baseball video game, sort of like a Game Boy, except instead of interchangeable game cartridges, the only game you could play was baseball. I imagine some kids back in Kansas City will be very bored by it someday.
The Bible was composed over the course of a thousand years—imagine if we had a collection of sacred texts where the last book to be composed was written today and the first was written when William the Conqueror took England in 1066, and you can see the enormity of the Bible’s timeline. So I have found it helpful at times to imagine each individual book of the Bible as a sort of time capsule of its own time and place. Which is great until you come across a book like Joel’s, that we really have no good idea of its time or place. But that quality lends another quality, of timelessness.
This is a new sermon series to take us all the way through the summer, from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend, and truthfully, it is a series that I have wanted to give for a long time now, almost a decade, in fact. But it never quit fit into the arc of my ministry until now. Because I think that after all the work that we as a team put into resuming in-person worship services after fourteen months of online-only worship, a few months of a relatively simple series can help us catch our breath and focus on getting back into the weekly rhythm of worshiping in-person again. We have gotten off our couches and back to the gym, now we need to settle into a pace on the treadmill.
So, this sermon series was born. Each Sunday, we will hear from one of the twelve (or thirteen) minor prophets of the Tanakh (Old Testament), so-called because the books attributed to them are much shorter in length than those of the three “major” prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. As a group, I have found the minor prophets especially dear and compelling, but I acknowledge for some, maybe many, of you they may seem unfamiliar or even intimidating, and this series is meant to help chip away at that. The sermons are designed to be standalone, so that if you do some traveling this summer and miss a Sunday or three, I do not want you to feel like you have fallen behind everyone else. So I hope by the end of this series come Labor Day, we have discovered newfound affinity for these so-called minor prophets, and elevated them closer to major status in our faith.
To best facilitate everyone following along, we will read the prophets in the order they appear in the Protestant versions of the Tanakh. So, we began with Daniel, and last week moved on to the book of the prophet Hosea. Today, we arrive at the book of the prophet Joel, son of Pethuel.
As I preached on both Daniel and Hosea, you heard me use terms like “exilic” and preexilic” to describe each of them respectively, because Daniel’s career coincided with the exile into Babylon after the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II conquered Judah and sacked Jerusalem and Hosea’s career was before that exile into Babylon. The exile into Babylon was such a pivotal, traumatic event for ancient Israel that Bible scholars to this day divide the prophets into “preexilic,” “exilic,” and “postexilic” categories based on that singular moment in Israelite history.
Except for Joel. We have no real idea of when he prophesied or when his book was written! There are no references to Assyria, Babylon, or Persia, each of which would help us deduce a date of before the Babylonian exile, during it, or after it, respectively—Assyria was the primary regional power before Babylon, and Persia the primary regional power after Babylon. Joel has none of that.
Instead, what we have to go on is, of all things, a locust plague. Like the one that ravaged Egypt in the Exodus story. As Joel put it here, the year of the cutting locust, swarming locust, and so on. If you wonder how a locust plague led to the career and book of a prophet, I will just say that after a year of Alabama mosquitoes I empathize with a prophet who finds divine disfavor in such bugs.
Joel, then, is a time capsule like the other books of the Bible, but from what century we do not know—guesses abound from the 700 or 800s BCE to the 300s. We may never know for sure. Yet while we may lack clarity as to who Joel was and when he lived and prophesied, our lack of knowing has resulted in at least one silver lining: it gives Joel a sense of timelessness, that his words could have come from any number of centuries and can be heard and received in any number of centuries.
There is such a timeless quality to Joel that Peter the Apostle cites this passage from Joel as part of his famous Pentecost sermon in Acts 2 that results in three thousand people joining the embryonic Jesus movement in ancient Israel. And Peter himself is a fantastic example of the qualities of God that Joel expounds upon. In the Gospels, Peter is at best a bitter disappointment for a lead Apostle. He repeatedly gets it wrong when Jesus tries to instruct him, he resorts to senseless violence at Gethsemane, and he repeatedly denies Jesus immediately afterward. Peter, before the resurrection of Jesus Christ, was an example more of failed discipleship than of successful discipleship.
Yet something changes in him after the resurrection and ascension of Christ and the arrival of the Holy Spirit. Peter becomes not only an effective preacher, but an effective healer as Jesus was, so much so that Peter’s mere shadow becomes capable of healing the sick and injured.
For us as Christians, Peter is an illustrative example of Joel’s lesson, and a powerful reason for us to never say, “Well, we do not really need the Old Testament after all,” or “The New Testament cancels out the Old.” We do not get Peter without Joel, which also means that Joel stands alone on his own merit—we do not need Peter to justify Joel’s inclusion in the canon. Joel’s truth is illustrated by Peter, but not exclusively by Peter. Because Joel is so timeless, we can and should see Joel’s lesson of how prophecy functions throughout our own lived experience in addition to Scripture.
We hold the Bible as authoritative in our lives, but that does not mean God’s voice and presence in our lives is limited to the Bible. We do not get to put such limits on the voice of the God who made heaven and earth and all that is seen and unseen. Imagine the presumption needed to turn to such a God and say, “No, it can’t be you because it didn’t appear in this one book, or collection of books.”
God pours out God’s spirit wherever, whenever, however God chooses. At its sacred best, God’s Holy Spirit gives us the ability to be timeless, creative, profound, passionate voices for divine love, truth, justice, and equity. I think that is what Joel is describing here—that after the plague comes wonder, wonder at just how powerful God’s Spirit can be, and how widespread it can be, that it can be poured upon everyone when we say yes to it, and yes to God, instead of yes only to ourselves.
In the midst of hardship, God again chose to say yes to the people. And in the midst of hardship and celebration alike, it has always been incumbent upon us to answer God’s yes with our own.
It was so then. And it is so now.
How, then, do you choose to respond to God’s yes to you? How will you choose to say yes to God and not merely yes to ourselves? How are we to tell the difference?
This question, as much as anything else, is at the core of the collective purpose of the prophets. To a person, they each challenge us to discern the difference between what God wants and what we may want, knowing that the two are not always going to be aligned—and at times may be at total odds.
This was so even for Peter—in the Gospels, what he wanted and what God, through Jesus, wanted were very often at odds. If it could be so for the chief Apostle of the Lord, it can be so for all of us.
But God had said yes to Peter, and he finally arrives at his own yes to God and God’s will, finally, with this passage from Joel on Pentecost. He was ready, like Joel was, to choose the future God wanted for him, not the future he merely wanted for himself.
He knew that one day, God would repay the hardship.
He knew that one day, God would pour out God’s Spirit, not just over the elite or the elect, but over everyone, sons and daughters, young and old alike.
And he knew that nothing would ever be the same again.
These are the words and deeds of the Holy Spirit long before any of us, in all our imperfections and splendor, came to be.
They should move us, because they are so timeless, never
limited to one place or one moment in our story. No time capsule divinity is
the Holy Spirit. It, like its prophets, is timeless.
And may we be as open to its power today as the people were then, when locusts ruled the land.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
June 13, 2021