Sermon prepared for Messiah Lutheran Church, Auburn WA

For Thanksgiving Eve, 2003

By Gregory S. Kaurin, pastor

 

Texts: Joel 2:21-27, Matthew 6:25-33

Sermon:

After the Locusts

 

Grace and peace to you from Jesus Christ our Savior, Amen.

 

My wife informed me today that the average grown man is only supposed to take in 2500 calories in a full day, but the average American will eat over 3000 calories in a single Thanksgiving meal.  So, for those of you looking for a more healthy meal and something really different for your Thanksgiving dinner, let me offer this recipe I ran across:

 

½ c. chili sauce, pinch of salt, 2 cloves garlic, an onion, juice & zest of 1 lemon, 1c. guacamole [or diced avocado], fold in 1000 [pre-baked] grasshoppers or locusts (the younger the better), and serve wrapped in tortillas.

 

This was from the Food Insects Newsletter, which promised that later issues would feature some yummy recipes for crickets.  We are assured that such creatures as grasshoppers and crickets are quite high in proteins and low in fat, but—no matter how mouthwatering the recipe—I just don’t see myself joining John the Baptist as an orthoptarian, or “eater of hopping insects.”[1]

 

I’ve always kind of liked grasshoppers, and growing up in the middle of Montana provided many grasshopper experiences and stories.  I don’t have time to share all of them.  In the fifth grade, I remember vividly how I scared my teacher by placing one in her desk drawer.  It was perfect the way a number of kids were crowded up around her desk when she opened the drawer and out hopped my friend into the middle of her desk, and then… pandemonium, screams, and running around.  It was beautiful!  Very Tom Sawyer-ish of me, I know. 

After the screaming and hysterics, for punishment, she made me stay after school to draw a picture and write a short article about grasshoppers.  T’wasn’t much of a punishment for me; ended up being one of my fondest memories of the fifth grade! 

From that time on I discovered that (if you can put aside the ick-factor for a moment) one at a time, these are probably one of the most adapted, functional, varied and sometimes even kind of pretty insects…that spit icky brown juice.

The one difference between grasshoppers and locusts is that locusts are kinds of grasshoppers that will sometimes swarm together under conditions that are not entirely predictable.  When that happens, they lose all their individual beauty.  They become a cloud of destruction that either can cause horrible famine, or sometimes they follow on the heals of an already diseased and impoverished land.  A swarm of locust is a very real and incarnate vision of the power of evil, a physical cloud of death.

 

I counted eight different Hebrew words in the Old Testament that were used to refer to grasshoppers and locusts.  Joel used four of them.  That tells you that locusts played a big role in Joel’s day.

Joel wasn’t just using the locust as a metaphor in our lesson this evening.  He was clearly talking about a literal and horrible plague of locusts that swept through the Mideast, destroying all foods, leading to starvation of people, animals and the land.  It was a devastating time.

Joel recorded the assumption that the locusts were sent by God.  That was how they experienced it, and he used it as a time to preach to the people, “Turn back to God with all your heart,” he said, “Rend your hearts and not your clothes, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.  God will ease the disaster and leave a blessing behind.”

Again and again, Joel assured his people that the locusts would not be the last word of the land, but that God was reestablishing what was most important.  He would replenish as much and more than was taken, all as an example of the final days when nothing like this would ever happen again.  He even assured the soil and the animals, “Don’t be afraid, O soil; rejoice, you animals of the field!”

This passage in tonight’s lesson—that God will repay for all the years that the locusts have eaten—caught my attention.  I personally don’t believe that God sends plagues of locusts or diseases.  I am convinced that God is clearly on the side of life against death. 

On the other hand, I do believe God has the power and desire to use all things to eventually serve his will.  God will turn it around.  I do believe many people, after or even during suffering, come out more focused and prioritized, more mature and even spiritual in their faith.  They find that God is still on their side. 

That is what Job in another great book of the Bible discovered.  While he was in the midst of his worst suffering, he proclaimed, “My Redeemer lives, and God is on my side.  Let it be engraved in rock!”

 

Those of you who were here when we showed the Stephen Ministry video a couple months ago might remember that one of the Stephen Ministers used that passage from Joel to describe her past and present.  She said she went through some very hard times in her life and that the locusts did a number on her for a few years.  But now, she said, she felt God has helped her through it, and to use those harder times to help others.

Gifts will always follow the locusts.  It can give us a greater sense of priority and peace, and compassion for others.  That’s true.  The still greater thing we learn is that faith and hope and the love of God all endure.  People before us and after us have made it through incredible trials, and have discovered God and love and grace will go with them through it all to the other side.

When Jesus, in the gospel lesson was telling us to stop fussing constantly over food, drink and clothes—he wasn’t saying that believing in him would make these things suddenly appear from the thin air.  He wasn’t saying that you don’t need to plan for them.  He was saying that these things aren’t goals.

The Gentiles, or non-believers, without the physical presence of God to trust in, make these things—food, clothing, money, power—they make them the objects of their striving, instead of gifts from God that come and go. 

“Strive first,” he said, “for the Kingdom of God, and all these other things will fall into place.”  Suddenly, we learn that these things will indeed come and go.  Trials pass.  Food and clothes and years come and go.  There is joy, sadness, births, deaths, abundance and hard times.  And still God will repay many times over for all that the locust might eat.

 

As part of our council meeting devotions, we are just about to finish a year of reading and discussing John Ortberg’s book, The Life You’ve Always Wanted.  The last chapter talks about the discipline of enduring, the discipline of praying to and trusting God even when it might be the hardest. 

On those same lines, what Thanksgiving has always meant in this country—whether the meal of the Puritans and Native Americans shared or the holiday that President Lincoln set up near the end of the Civil War—what Thanksgiving is about is not physical abundance.  It is a celebration of the life and the kind of “abundance” that rises out of all the evidence to the contrary.  It is a meal that stubbornly thanks our God for providing what he has given.  More important, it is a meal that anticipates and believes that this meal is just the start and part of a greater feast to come.

In that day there will be no more locusts, no more doubt or tears.  Our Thanksgiving feasts are as big as they can be—only to symbolize the gigantic ability of God to give, to create and to save.  We will discover all this when we endure.

And we open our eyes, even beyond our own tables, bellies and personal needs.  See the stars, here the rolling thunder.  It’s even bigger than that.  Look beyond to see the day after all the locusts of life.  Jesus will see you coming to him on the road, and he will let out such a shout of joy, an acclamation, and he will welcome you to the greatest feast of all.

 

Let your prayers to God, and your trust endure, and may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds focused on Jesus Christ.  Amen.