When the desert locust is around, there’s always the chance that something dangerous is going to happen. Locusts like being together and a desert swarm can pack 60 million locusts into less than half a square mile and then stretch to 460 square miles in size.
It’s every famer’s worst nightmare. Each locust can eat its weight in plant very quickly. So a full size locust swarm could devour 423 million pounds of grain each day. A whole year’s crop, a whole community’s livelihood, a nation’s survival gobbled up in minutes.
It looks like a horror movie. There is nothing to be done except to grab the shoulder of the person next to you, sink your fingernails into his or her forearm, and scream.
Joel this morning mentions a swarm of locusts, - the hopper, the destroyer, the cutter - and how they have ripped the heart out of the people.
All of us, at one time or another, have experienced sudden loss, or witnessed loss in others. One guy’s brother one night did a stupid prank that sent him to jail for years and years. Perhaps you know of folks who grow up with parents who for whatever reason become a danger to everyone. So much fear in the house that no one felt safe going to sleep at night. Families learn to adjust with mistrust and fear that often find their way into future generations. Fear becomes like a swarm of locusts, chewing up everything, and everybody.
Some kids living those years feel that they have disappeared into a hole. Some of you might feel that you have a chapter missing from your lives.
For Joel, I wonder if the swarm of locusts function metaphorically, bringing to mind the swarming armies that marched through Judah, laying waste to cities and plundering the countryside, leaving the people in utter despair.
For us the locust might be some pesky cancer cells that never leave you in peace. The locusts can represent so much as there is much that can suddenly destroy and devour life, and the lives of those we love.
And here is where the power of this metaphor really kicks in.
God visits every part of the suffering land and reawakens it, starting with the soil, and moving on to the animals of the field, and the trees, and finally the rain clouds in verses 19-24.
God delivers the dream that the people will eat in plenty and be satisfied; that God will dwell in the midst of them and that they will never again be put to shame. This is welcome news that the years of subjection to Babylon and Persia are coming to an end, and plenty for all, will be once more.
Well and good for back then, but what about us today. Your nightmare is over, and there may be a brighter day ahead. But where does it put those lost years? What joy does that bring to the time you struggled to put into words, the time you went through for which you cannot infuse with any meaning or purpose? What about those moments when an event triggers a wave of memories from that buried past, and you pray that no one asks, because you know if that happens you’ll crumple into sobbing?
Here is where God speaks right into the heart of your bewilderment and despair. “I will restore the years the swarming locust has eaten. Joel v: 25. Listen to that. Not just a promise about the future. Not just the cliché put the past behind you. This is something different. “I will restore the years the swarming locust has eaten.” Think of that young girl who grew up in a house of unpredictable and violent danger. Think of that young guy sent to jail for years over a stupid mistake. Think about your story or what parts of your story that is talking to Joel.
Hear God’s promise of abundant food, and an end to shame, and God dwelling smack in the middle of your life. Maybe you have stopped listening to such dreams. But we hear this word, I will restore the years. God knows which years. You know which years. Let yourself hear this dream, it’s beyond anything you had hoped.
This isn’t about blame, it’s not about anger, and it’s not a question of bitterness. There’s a time for anger, a time to name everyone and no longer hide. But talking about the locust takes away the distraction of culpability.
Swarming locusts aren’t evil. They’re just being locusts. They do terrible damage, but they are part of creation like the rest of us. The point is, finding who is to blame for those lost years isn’t the answer. The years are still lost, whoever is to blame.
This isn’t about vindication or getting even. This is about restoration. This is about something lost becoming found, something that was a burden and a curse now becoming a gift. How can the unspeakable bring hope? Restore can mean replace. On the surface it looks like maybe that’s what God means. God’s offering grain and wine and oil to replace what was taken by the locusts. But replacing is not restoring.
So if the years are not a replacement and if this is more than reimbursement, so how are they restored?
Well they can be reincorporated. That is to say, they can come to shape your future in unexpected and beautiful ways. Experience is often the name we give to our mistakes. But when experience is given time, and understanding, and discernment, and gentleness, and when later on you find yourself in a situation that calls for all the resources you can draw on, then experience can be distilled into wisdom.
We all like to think that that we walk into the future, but maybe we walk backward into our future, composing our reactions and behavior in unforeseen circumstances out of discarded elements in our own personal histories. If you say, I can’t imagine circumstances in which those locust years could come to offer any kind of blessing; the answer may be, perhaps not yet.
But there just might be a time in some tomorrow, where you’ll think differently. Where you’ll find yourself drawing on that troubling time in ways you could never have predicted. Just imagine you no longer had to try so hard to forget the past, artfully changing the subject every time a conversation got close to the locust country. Always wondering in every relationship what the other person might think if he or she really knew the truth about you.
Just imagine you were promised a future that just didn’t replace what the locusts had eaten, no longer calling them cursed, but now using them as wisdom and experience and compassion. Just imagine that you were given the gospel - the gospel that restores your past and opens up your future. That’s what the gospel does and at the heart of this gospel is the word resurrection.
More than replacement, more than reimbursement, more than reincorporation, more than restoration is the word resurrection. The locusts scorched the earth until there was no life in it. Jesus too was buried in that scorched earth and there was no life in him. But he was brought back into the story. He was restored, so that those years the locusts had eaten, the ministry in Nazareth and Galilee that seems obliterated by the cross, now are in the story.
Before that, God’s companionship with Israel over all the centuries where the glories and tragedies that seem obliterated by exile, all those locust years are now there to read. They are restored to us and we call them the Bible, our source of wisdom and compassion.
It is resurrection that finally heals the locust years, resurrection that gives back our past as gift, resurrection that begins to create our hopeful future out of the ruins of wasted histories. All dreams get born in resurrection. I will restore the years the locust has eaten. Think one last time about your wasted years, your locust years. Don’t let the locust have them.
As painful as it might be, begin to reclaim your lost memories. Know that you’re standing on more than enough love to face them, more than enough love to cherish them; you’re sitting on more than enough love to find them as wisdom, more than enough love to experience them and turn them into compassion for tomorrow.
God, who transformed the death of Jesus into new Life, let him have a go with your locust years because God can resurrect even you.