Joel 2:23-32

Luke 18:9-14

Our Old Testament reading from Joel and our gospel reading from Luke involve two spiritual and emotional troubles that can get our hearts, minds, and spirits out of joint. They are shame and pride.

We’ll start with shame. The verse that will get us started is verse 26 in the Old Testament book of Joel: ““And my people shall never be put to shame.” While the word from the Lord delivered through Joel is hopeful here, this implies that the people of God had experienced deep shame.

From what we know of the Old Testament prophet Joel, the people of Joel’s day were experiencing a plague of locusts and severe and unusual weather like drought and flooding. Things were really bad for them. Think about the sequence of events that happens when the weather becomes extreme. When drought and a plague of locusts come, crops fail. And when crops fail people become hungry and famine sets in. And when people become hungry and no one has food, desperation sets in. And when people are desperate, all sorts of bad things can happen. There was war. Governments fell. God was not happy with them and they felt it deep inside. They felt shame.

Shame is one of the more powerful emotions we experience as human beings. Shame can be many things. We can feel shame because we know we have done wrong and we’re sorry for it. I’m thinking here of when we’ve intentionally said something or done something that has hurt someone we care about and love. The guilt we feel for our actions is shame. Shame can also come from wanting or needing or having to do something and not being able to do it in spite of your best efforts. I’m thinking here of when people lose their job in layoffs or when jobs are shipped overseas. When you can’t find a job and you want one and you need to pay the mortgage and buy food for yourself and your family  – it’s a shameful feeling when you can’t even if you have tried everything in your power to do so. We can also feel shame when we’ve been humiliated or disgraced at the hands of another person and it’s uncalled for. I’m thinking here of the little kid who is picked on. They feel nothing but shame even though they hadn’t done anything wrong.

What’s the antidote, the spiritual medicine for shame? According to Joel, it’s prayer and repentance. Here’s a sample from Joel 2 that comes before our reading today:

“Blow the trump in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all other inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near, a day of darkness and gloom…”Yet even now,” says the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love…who knows whether he will not turn and repent.”

Did you catch that? What the word of the Lord that came to Joel seems to be saying is that if the people repent, God himself may repent. 

That might strike you as odd. Why would God need to repent? Part of it comes from the way you and I have grown up as Christians in America, particularly Protestants. We hear repentance, and most of the time our first thought goes to a dramatic conversion story. These stories usually go something like this: someone does something horrible or they make a mess of their lives with drugs or alcohol or greed or all of the above, but something happens that begins to work a change in their life. They hit rock bottom. A family has an intervention and says “it’s us or the bottle”. They begin to work some changes in their life. They join a twelve step group. Go to rehab. Whatever it might be, God works a miracle and their life begins turning around and going in a new direction. This of course, is an overgeneralization, but that is the kind of story we are used to hearing when we think of repentance and conversion.

But repentance doesn’t have to be that dramatic to still be real. At a very basic level, in the Bible, to repent means to change – to change direction, to change your mind, to change how you do things. Joel is saying that if the people repent, if they truly turn their hearts towards God, God will turn towards them and relieve them of the drought and famine and plague that has come upon them.

For the prophet Joel, the message from God was that God hadn’t forgotten about them or written them off. Instead his word for them was to “be glad”, to look for things to come as gifts from God – rain, food, and safety. But even more than those material needs (which are really important), God will also do something about their spiritual needs.

Yes – they have experienced humiliation and shame. Yes – they had done evil and been sinful. But the Lord hasn’t forgotten about them or let them go. If they ‘repent’, if they change their ways and change their hearts, God remains steadfast. God remains there for them.  And the sign of this promise is the coming of the Spirit to ordinary people. Hear again some of the words of the Lord:

“And I will pour out my spirit on all flesh on all flesh, your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.”

God’s answer to the people’s shame is to give them a new way of speaking and a new way of thinking. 

So how is repentance spiritual medicine for shame? If we think of repentance as changing the direction you are going or changing the way you think, then its healing power for shame becomes clearer. To repent means to turn away from what is not good towards what is good, to change your ways or your thinking from what is unhelpful to what is good and lovely. For the person who has done wrong, confessing that wrong to God and to another person and hearing God’s forgiveness is liberating. To the person who’s been laid off and feels deep shame over not being able to provide, confessing our need for each other brings community. The old word for this is solidarity. It doesn’t fix the problem, but the problem gets shared, a we’re in this together sense. That’s changing from an individual, consumer mindset. For the kid who is picked on and feels deep shame, to repent, to change could be change how they seem themself and their bully. It might mean seeing themself as a son or daughter of God, loved and full of joy and the bully of someone who on the outside has a lot of power, but on the inside is deeply insecure and afraid. To repent, to confess, to change means that you are making room in your heart, mind, and spirit for God’s forgiveness and God’s mercy. That is how shame is healed. It doesn’t mean that all of the things that happened in the past are erased. They still happened. They are true history. But it does mean that they are forgiven, they are healed, there is a way forward. 

The other spiritual and emotional trouble that can get our hearts, minds, and spirits out of joint is pride and its cousin, arrogance. Jesus deals with pride in our reading from the gospel of Luke. He does so using his favorite teaching device, a parable. Here’s a very modern paraphrase of it:

Jesus [He] told his next story to some who were complacently pleased with themselves over their moral performance and looked down their noses at the common people:

The stage is already set for what is to come, a warning against pride and arrogance. But what is striking about the parable are the characters.

 “Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax man. The Pharisee posed and prayed like this: ‘Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax man. I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.

The Pharisee is a religious leader. He’s like a priest or pastor. He’s supposed to know God, the Scriptures, and himself. He’s supposed to have learned and allowed the great virtues of faith, hope, and love to take hold in his heart, mind, and soul. And yet, he’s clearly far from God.

“Meanwhile the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look up, said, ‘God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.’”

Jesus commented, “This tax man, not the other, went home made right with God. If you walk around with your nose in the air, you’re going to end up flat on your face, but if you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.”

This parable is about the great reversal that happens in the kingdom of God. The very person who should understand God and God’s ways of love and mercy – the Pharisee – is far from God. But the tax collector, who outwardly should be seen as far from God – understands that each and every human being needs mercy from God and extended through other people showing mercy. 

Here’s one way I’ve seen this play out in modern life. Over the past few decades, we Christians have gotten a reputation for being mean. Politics, social issues – whatever the root cause, most people at least in America sometimes have a hard time finding the love of Christ in the body of Christ at times. It can be disorienting because the one place where joy and peace and dignity and love and faithfulness are real things – the church – are seemingly absent. And it’s especially disorienting when you experience those things more in a secular place like a workplace, or the hospital, or a school than you do in church.

There are many reasons for this, but Jesus’ parable is a reminder for all of us Christians here and in other churches to not let arrogance and pride and needing or wanting to be right get in the way of mercy. 

The spiritual medicine for pride and arrogance is humility. Humility is not thinking less of yourself. You can be proud of who you are and what you have accomplished and still be humble. Instead, humility is thinking of yourself less. It is a selflessness that allows us to not always have to be right, in control, or in power.

We’ve been talking about spiritual medicine a bit. To close, that’s what I’d like to define. Spiritual medicine are the ways we practice our Christian faith and grow in holiness. They are the things Jesus did and taught us – prayer, worship, reading Scripture, serving others, selflessness, trusting God, fellowship, and communion. They are simple. There is nothing fancy about being a Christian (we’re huddled here without heat). But our faith is that in each of these things Jesus Christ comes to us. When we read the Bible, Jesus Christ comes alive. When we pray, God is with us and hears our prayers. When we take communion, we are taking part in the body and blood of Christ. When we serve others and selflessly give of ourselves, we are following in the way of Christ who himself selflessly gave of himself for us and the world. In all of these things, he becomes our spiritual medicine and heals our shame and reorders our pride.

Amen.