Last week, I mentioned the efforts of many, including me, to make it too expensive to be a racist, at least a public racist. This week, we saw that sort of thing, the cost of being a racist, play out over the course of several days, dominating the headlines for a whole 24 hours. Unfortunately, there were a lot of innocent victims, employees who lost their jobs, when ABC decided to stop purchasing a television program from the Carsey-Werner Company. While I agree with the Disney Corporation’s decision, I must admit that I am getting tired of it all. I want to see equal opportunity for people regardless of their ethnic origin or skin color, regardless of their gender or gender expression, regardless of who they love, but we’re getting nowhere with everyone yelling and tweeting at one another. Especially the tweeting. We, as followers of Jesus, are called to be agents of change, for he was an agent of change, but also to be agents of peace and love, swords into plowshares and all that. The Way of Jesus is about reconciliation and renewal, about refusing to throw the first stone, so much so that forgiving others is a pre-condition for being forgiven by God, and those who hold grudges heap the searing coals of sin upon themselves. That right there is about as close as I’m ever going to come to fire and brimstone.
In truth, sports and entertainment have never been completely isolated from larger national conversations, from politics, that dirty word for how we organize ourselves as a society, as least not as much as we might like in a time of anger and division, and both sports and entertainment are often instruments of political and religious agendas. We still use the phrase “bread and circuses†to describe the Roman emperor’s attempt to lull the citizens into complacency. We all need a safe space, and sports and entertainment ideally serve as a safe space, a point of catharsis, but we have to draw a line somewhere. Where we each choose to draw that line, what is acceptable on the screen, on the stage, on the playing field, has everything to do with how much privilege and power we have ourselves. Calling African-American women apes not once, but twice, should not be tolerable to anybody, regardless of power and privilege.
The production process for entertainment has been wrought for some time as classic works fall out of favor. In my study of Medieval to Renaissance British Literature, half of my undergraduate double major, and in my leadership of a community Shakespeare company, I took the controversial position that some plays by the bard can no longer be performed as entertainment, especially the anti-Semitic “Merchant of Venice†and the misogynist “Taming of the Shrew.†You can’t strip them of their core plots! Even shows that should be safe are a casting minefield. There is something incredibly wrong about the teenage Hamlet being played by a man old enough to have a teenage son. Colorblind casting is a great ideal, and we have moved pretty far from the blackface of a century ago or the red face of a half century ago, but I’m not sure Othello makes sense if the titular role is played by a white actor. Asian-Americans are still struggling to play their own race on television and in film, much less to be central characters rather than sidekicks. Unless, of course, the do kung-fu. Fortunately, we are finding room for creativity, like the amazing multi-racial cast of Hamilton, where we willingly suspend historical accuracy.
One tradition in opera casting is that the role of Brünhilde in Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the last part of his Ring cycle, is played by a woman who might be described as buxom, the tradition for this mythic figure. It was this casting that inspired Ralph Carpenter, sports information director at Texas Tech, to coin a phrase in 1976 that is still widely used, if not politically correct. In Carpenter’s words, “the opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings.†And boy does she sing. Her final scene lasts twenty minutes and leads directly to the climax of the 15-hour work. I love opera, tolerate Wagner, but boy, I’m not sure I want to give away 15 hours of my life like that.
As a valkyrie, a being responsible for choosing who lives and dies in battle, also for transporting heroes to Valhalla, Brünhilde is a pretty powerful figure. Still, I can’t blame the buxom ladies for being a little offended.
The sentiment the colloquialism aims at, also reflected in Yogi Berra’s “It ain’t over till it’s over,†is legit. Don’t assume you know how things are going to turn out.
Take that plague of locusts… this is the context for today’s reading. As we follow the ordering of the minor prophets in the Christian version of the Hebrew scriptures, we hopscotch back and forth through history. Last week, with Hosea, we were early in the prophetic age, when the Northern Kingdom of Israel still existed. We’ll be back there again next week. This week, we are several centuries later. The northern kingdom is long gone, the southern kingdom has been defeated, the Hebrew elite have been taken into exile in Babylon, and many have returned to Judea under the rule of the Persians, liberated by the messiah Cyrus, who defeated the Babylonians and allowed those in Babylonian captivity to go home to their respective nations. Today’s text mentions walls around Jerusalem, built about 440 BCE, and the city of Sidon, destroyed in 343 BCE, so we can date the text to about four centuries before Jesus.
Joel’s work is somewhat different than that of many prophets. He is not predicting calamity, for the calamity has already happened. “They have the appearance of horses,†declares the prophet, “and like war-horses they charge. As with the rumbling of chariots, they leap on the tops of the mountains, like the crackling of a flame of fire devouring the stubble, like a powerful army drawn up for battle. Before them peoples are in anguish, all faces grow pale. Like warriors they charge, like soldiers they scale the wall.â€
Though prophet after prophet dealt with actual invading armies, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, this invading army from the north is a plague of locusts. Today, we would not need to scramble for explanations, for crop science and pest control are understood, though there are countless other calamities that, while they can be explained, feel just a little like some twisted sort of divine punishment. And that is exactly how Joel sees the plague of locusts. There is a developing theology of a compassionate parent God, but Joel is still a little mired in the old transactional theology, the same wretched mess found in today’s prosperity heresy. This is the idea that earthly success is based on earthly faith and obedience. Those who are pure and holy and saved by the blood get rich, and those who are poor surely deserve to be poor, for surely they are sinners, since God rewards the righteous.
Except that isn’t how it works, and you have to be deluded to believe it does. Evil people get rich, get power, and get pardons, while the good work hard all their lives only to have a catastrophic illness take it all away.
If the plague of locusts is not divine punishment for some unknown transgression, then we could easily ignore Joel’s call to repentance. But maybe we shouldn’t. Locusts are going to happen, drought and earthquake and flood. But all too often, these disasters are compounded by our own poor decisions, failure to maintain a damn or a levy, shoddy construction and greed, our willingness to exchange infrastructure for tax cuts. And that’s just the half of it. Never mind the pain of natural disaster. We bring pain into one another’s lives every day, even the best of us. Repentance, forgiveness, love, humility, these are at the heart of the Way of Jesus, a way that grew out of the prophetic tradition, for a reason. We have no hope of building a just and caring society if we are not willing to own our own sins. Maybe, in focusing on getting ourselves right, we set the state for restoration, burning off the stubble and turning over the soil.
Just as sin didn’t cause the locusts, repentance isn’t going to restore the crops, even if we prepare the field. God is not going to strike down Phoenicia or Philistia, despite what the prophet says. The Day of the Lord may well happen someday, but prophets have been predicting it at least two and a half millennia and so far no divine judgment and reversal. But that doesn’t mean we are alone down here on our own.
We have plenty to repent and mourn and work to do and tweets to ignore and racists to call out and our own part in those systems to own. And a ball game to watch where we might be able to put all of that on hold for a little while. And a fifty year-old playing Hamlet. Really?
Life happens. Renewal and restoration is going to happen and a bountiful harvest if we can stop whining, get up, and prepare the field. Joel is right that the people had something to repent, and Joel is right that there would be restoration, sweet wine and milk. Because the power of God is not in punishment and judgment. It is relationship and it is in this mysterious and serendipitous creativity that springs up even in the dead places. Even in human hearts that feel dry and hardened. God is there pushing up through the most inhospitable of places. It ain’t over… there is life yet to be found.
Ideas like a hell below and a heaven above were developed before they knew the earth was round, before they knew about a heliocentric solar system, much less about galaxies and the Big Bang, dark matter and quarks. I don’t need that punitive, petty, and egotistical notion of God anyway. I’ll take my powerful force for love and life and creativity, thank you very much.
I know that almost all of the stories about near death experiences and prophetic dreams and reincarnation and ghosts can be explained. Almost all. But there is just enough compelling weirdness in this world for me to believe that is ain’t over when it looks like it is over, even when we shake off this mortal coil. I have no idea what that means. And compelling weirdness, life where life should not be, is not limited to the metaphysical and paranormal. You have had rare and inexplicable experiences, no doubt, but for physicists, the inexplicable is their daily.
Joel is doing his best to explain a disaster and offer some sort of hope with all of the knowledge he had at his disposal two and a half millennia ago. Today we’d come up with different explanations. But when a plague of locusts has entered my life, and the fields are bare, and wine has dried up, I want someone like Joel reminding me to get myself right, but also reminding me that life will once again appear in those barren fields, that life wins, that love wins, that God’s vitality knows no bounds, is an unstoppable force more powerful than a locomotive or a plague of locusts.
It may be over for a sitcom, but the nation is still here. The faith is still here. This church is still here. You are still here and so am I. She ain’t anywhere near singing yet, and even when she does, there will still be a bit more to go, compelling weirdness included.
Preach it Joel. Tell me that even in this time of crisis, there is life just waiting to happen. Give me something to believe in. And when I doubt, I will pray like the father of the epileptic boy in Mark’s gospel: “I believe; help my unbelief!â€
Help our unbelief. Amen.