Since the election results became clear, I have not been able to get Joel 2:12-17 out of my mind.
“Yet even now [Just that phrase alone, people, wells my eyes], return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.
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Who knows whether he will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind him, a grain-offering and a drink-offering for the Lord, your God?
Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the people.
Sanctify the congregation; assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the breast.
Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her canopy.
Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep. Let them say, “Spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your heritage a mockery, a byword among the nations. Why should it be said among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’”
How to Handle A Locust Infestation: Fast, Weep, and Mourn…
The context is this: locusts—it’s not clear whether they were actual locusts, or if the term were a derogatory, euphemistic reference to an advancing army, or both—but anyway “locusts” had swarmed Judah and annihilated the nation’s crops, and therefore everything and everyone else.
This was, of course, not Israel’s first locust rodeo: they knew of the locusts which had swarmed Egypt, and they knew who sent these locusts, and they knew what had happened to Egypt in the locusts’ wake.
But this time, the locusts descended upon Israel itself.
This time around, God was displeased with God’s very own people.
But Joel, well he showed up, and he showed up with an antidote: communal repentance.
Joel announced an invitation from the Holy One: “Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning: rend your hearts and not your clothing.”
Now, truth is, I’ve been rending most anything I can get my hands on since the election, so much so that the word, like an incessant water drip, finally moved me yesterday afternoon to rustle up this very text, and to be reminded about what it had to say to me and to this moment.
In this passage, we hear that we’re to return to God, but with specific instructions to boot: we are to fast, and weep, and mourn.
And after we’ve done that, we are to rend our hearts.
Now I’ve never been great at fasting, but it is a standard religious ritual: fasting reminds us that we’re dependent on God, and it forces us to focus on that dependence.
Fasting humbles us.
Weeping comes when one cannot escape the trauma of what has or what will come to pass.
It is more than a good cry: it is a wail from the soul.
And when we weep before the Lord, we’ve been aptly reduced to the devastating knowledge that we’ve incurred God’s wrath, and we have earned it.
And so we mourn.
Mourning and weeping tend to overlap, of course, but they aren’t interchangeable.
When one mourns, one grieves something that is no longer, something that’s caused irreparable separation, something that can not be reconstituted.
Worse, in this case, we ourselves are the source of the devastation.
It’s not like some random astronomical event obliterated our existence, or some incomprehensible fluke suddenly decimated all that we had held to be lovely and true.
Nope.
Joel’s community know that they destroyed something cherished and holy, and they did it all on their own.
…And Then Rend…
So after all that, then, after fasting and weeping and mourning, all that is left to do is to rend.
It’s an odd word, ‘rend,’ one that we rarely use on the daily in our 21st Century vernacular.
It’s most often used for the ripping of clothing, not to make rags, say, but to embody all-encompassing grief and regret.
Rending symbolizes the destruction of something that protects us, that provides us dignity and cover.
There is no hiding when we stand naked before God and everyone.
No leaf can cover our shame.
But, and this catches us off guard, here in Joel, God actually says, “Keep your clothes on.”
I’m not interested in your bare skin, says God.
I want your bared soul.
Rend your hearts, says God.
Rip them apart with the same ferocity you would a garment.
And why?
So that our hearts, the epicenter of our life, are finally open to God, the creator of all life.
Deep. Exhale.
…And Then Drop Everything and Gather
So at this point, there’s nothing of us left: we are hungry, we are spent, we are agonizingly aware of our guilt.
And we have flayed and filleted ourselves before God, so that God’s presence can enter us again.
And then, notice what occurs:
God asks us to assemble.
This is ‘us’ writ large: the old, the young, the children, even the infants; the bridegroom and the bride, who most certainly have other activities on their mind.
Doesn’t matter.
God wants us to assemble in worship, of all things.
And there, collectively, we are to confess.
We confess, and we remind God of who God is: a God of mercy.
Precisely at the point where we have come to realize that we deserve perpetual judgment, we remind God—and we remind ourselves—that God is rather a God of mercy.
It’s not, of course, that we get off scot-free.
Let’s recall that at this point we are famished, exhausted, emotionally raw, and spiritually exposed.
Judgement happens, as it should.
But our God is a God who brings new things out of death, a God of transformation and restoration.
Our God is a God who holds onto covenant promises way better than do we.
So, Because of Luther, We Have to Ask, What Does this Mean?
With that, a couple of post-election, Joel-inspired take-aways here.
First, Love Does Not Always Win, Actually, And In Fact It Lost Spectacularly On Tuesday Night
This election was not most about how well Trump ran a campaign or how badly Harris did.
This election was about the victory of raw racism, bigotry, and a permission to be crude and cruel that has saturated the ethos of our nation.
It is about the basest of human instincts winning out over compassion, kindness, integrity, community, and love.
It is about the preservation of the self over the well-being of all, and the reduction of ‘neighbor’ to one who looks like, eats like, lives like, believes like oneself, and particularly if white, straight, and a conservative Christian.
Conversely, the people of God are to make like Micah 6:8 (“What is it that the Lord requires but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God?”) or Matthew, in which we hear of the Least of These being served by those who fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, cared for the sick, and visited the prisoners.
For starters.
On Tuesday, this country voted less for Trump and more for the now-normed permission to hate, and divide, and oppress, or to feign ignorance that we cast our vote for exactly that.
The majority in our nation knew who Trump is, they know what his agenda is, and they went for it.
For this right here, they said, y’all just sign me and the rest of us up.
Second, The Dems and the Church Swung and Wow Did We Miss
This election was enabled by two things.
Dems Meant (Mostly) Well, But…
The first of those two was the Democrats’ collective incapacity to understand the intoxicating power of cultic behavior which draws lines and defines who is in and who is out.
Dems went with logic.
We went with statistics.
We went with joy.
But without tethering these otherwise noble approaches with a willingness to approach, appreciate, and strive to enter into Insular-and-Fear-Induced Group Think, we Dems done got Othered, and we therefore done got beat.
We abhor the values of those who voted for Trump, but we were perceived as abhorring the actual Trump supporters.
In this way, we were…are…no better than what we accuse MAGA of doing.
So while we figured out how to talk about Trump supporters, we never really figured out how to talk to and with them.
We never really sought to understand—which is different than condoning, to be clear—why they were drawn to the rhetoric of division that Trump espoused with such finesse.
And with no relationship, we had no basis for change.
The second matter is, in some ways, more to Joel’s point, and as a Lutheran public theologian, more to mine.
The ELCA Meant (Mostly) Well, But…
As I’ve been saying now for years (I’m here speaking most directly to my own people, though perhaps these words are transferable to other denominations), yesterday’s election was very much thanks to two elements of how the ELCA opts to do the Lord’s work:
* The structure of the ELCA;
* The well-intentioned but pastorally- and theologically-suspect culture that encourages rostered leaders to avoid calling out racism, homophobia, bigotry, and hate, all in the name of “meeting people where they are” and “being a pastor to all the people.”
Turns out, though, that you can’t both-sides the God of Joel.
I know, I know, I just spoke about relationship.
But you can’t have a relationship with anyone without having clarity of self, and conveying that self with clarity.
Anyone who has sought out a new job or a new friend or a new lover knows what I’m saying here: you can try to be who you think the other wants you to be, but then they are attracted to Not You.
Such relationships either don’t last, or last at the expense of one’s own integrity.
So, in terms of the pastoral relationship, avoiding proclaiming the Hard Things is not, actually, pastoral to the oppressors.
Silence about their distance from the radical, merciful, but difficult ways of God leaves these privileged people both uninformed about their heresy and their blasphemy, and therefore unable to repent of it.
We rob them of the Word and we rob them of restoration.
And I will say the quiet part out loud here:
That pastoral silence is driven not a little bit by fear of chasing those who hold MAGA principles dearer than Christian ones, and their sustaining dollars, out of the congregational pews and into someone else’s.
In the name of pastoral care, the privileged become nothing but budgetary tools.
For this reason, the Church needs to rend its heart rather than continue to render the wealthy into mere dollars for God rather than beloved Children of God.
Moreover, the Church’s silence is not in the least pastoral to those who are oppressed.
Look at Project 2025’s agenda, which will, in fact, be the Trump agenda (Matt Walsh admitted on Twitter yesterday, “Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol.”)
Tell me that these following communities—immigrants threatened with deportation [plans for mass deportation are reportedly already in the works]; women threatened with reduced access to birth control, forced pregnancies, and promised digital surveillance; children threatened with a stripped education and education defined by conservative Christian values; hungry people stripped nutrition funding; low-income parents stripped of access to Head Start; ill or disabled people stripped access to health care; any number of groups dependent on Civil Rights Laws, which are now promised to be eliminated or replaced with white supremacist and hetero-centric bias; political opponents to Trump who are threatened with prosecution and even assassination; media who will be punished for publishing news or takes critical of Trump; 2SLGBTQIA+ people facing reduced rights defined by conservative Christian theologies, including a return to outlawed gay marriage and legal denial of service because of sexuality and self-defined gender; the general public who will now have reduced or eliminated vaccine mandates; the environment because of reduced protections; and those who enjoy public land, now slated to be open for fracking and drilling—tell me that they are feeling the pastoral care of clerical silence today.
(Here is but one source detailing the above: do your own additional research to learn how substantiated these threats are. https://www.bigtentusa.org/project-2025-threats/)
There is nothing of the above list which reflects the generous love of the God of whom Joel wrote and Jesus revealed and we leaders in the Church ostensibly, anyway, preach.
Now, I get it: colleagues of mine, I understand how bound you are.
I have written blogs and presented extensively about it (8 years ago I got myself in a mess of trouble by calling upon Amos: read about that here Time to Out-Amos Even Amos and here The Spent Dandelion Theological Retreat Center and Truth Mattering, and here’s another long blog about how the structure of the ELCA inhibits the leaders called to preach and teach the gospel from doing exactly that).
If you need more citations you just let me know.
This is a systemic problem.
We are simply trapped in a denominational system which pays obeisance to capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy rather than to the Gospel.
So to some degree, we are all the victims of a system and it is never good to blame the victim.
But.
But our boundedness is a systemic problem that itself is perpetuated by our silence and by our refusal to appreciate how dire and dangerous our quietude has been and now will be for the most vulnerable among us.
We have had the power to change it and we have not.
Now, these vulnerable people are the very people about whom God cares the very most and whom we in the name of God are most to protect, and we have abandoned them in the name of our denominational and vocational safety and in the name of pastoral care.
I am not sure which is worse here.
We. Are. Culpable. Directly for these election results.
Look at the post-election stats if you don’t believe me.
White religious people more than any other bloc voted for Trump.
Again.
Undefined Love Is Quite a Drug
Now, I’ve noticed that there are some leaders who as of yet see no need to fast, to weep, to mourn, let alone rend anything, least of all our individual or institutional hearts.
They seem to have missed this line from Joel: “Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.”
These folks are still trying to appease the powerful in their pews, still trying to minimize the consequences and erase the divisions, still trying to offer pastoral care that avoids Calling a Thing What It Is and instead they quickly revert to an announcement of mass and bland forgiveness.
If anything close to an admonition is extended, it’s to all get along, to remember that we are all loved by God, that we can still be friends even if we voted differently.
In effect, these religious leaders jump to the latter part of this passage from Joel while conveniently skipping over the meat of it.
(I’ve written a book, as an aside, about the toxicity—flagrantly displayed with this election—of our Lutheran fixation on justification to the expense of justice: “I Can Do No Other: The Church’s Here I Stand Moment,” Fortress Press, 2019)
Yeah, so Joel would like a word, and so would God.
And both would like our rent hearts instead.
We’re To Have No Other God (And yes, we just opted for one of the false ones)
Lest we forget, though, this passage from Joel does not end with fasting, weeping, mourning, or rending.
Instead, it ends with a call to worship.
Worship God, that is.
With the hearts that are now open.
To God.
For some time, I have been of the public mind that the structure of our ELCA can’t bear the weight of our theology.
Our theology is vibrant.
Our structure kills it.
And our structure-based silence may well contribute to the killing of others, and if you think I’m being hyperbolic than you are not paying attention to the stakes.
A little apropos hidden nugget in this text:
Many of us will read these words “Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,” and sing them with a familiar Lenten melody. They are so familiar to us.
But what might not be known is that they first surface in Exodus 34:6, in which God gives Moses the tablets, establishing a new Covenant, and says these very words.
And why is God asking for the return of the people?
Because they had bowed down before a Golden Calf.
And that is exactly, exactly, what our nation just did.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/golden-trump-statue-cpac-implies-he-s-king-gop-his-ncna1259362
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