Look up in Lockdown

What a dreadful day (Joel 1:15) Well, my day was anything but dreadful. Caleb is following the school timetable at home. His lessons include Humanities, in which he make flags to show to the Grandparents every evening on Zoom, Social Activities, in which he plants something in the garden, and PE. For PE yesterday we had swimming. Now we don't have a swimming pool, surprise, surprise, but we do have a trampoline. For 18 months this wonder of the modern world has been left untouched in the garden, but, given a choice between a walk and a session on the trampoline, Caleb chose the easy option. And rediscovered an old joy. When he was young we invented some trampoline games. 'Food' involves me chasing him around the trampoline on my knees, calling out a home made rhyme, "I like toes for breakfast, I like toes for tea, I like toes for supper, now bring those toes here to me". It's not going to win any prizes but never fails to produce squeals of laughter. And the...

Summon all the elders...and cry out to the Lord (Joel 1:14) I have just received a shock. It was a very minor thing that had gone wrong, but it got under my skin. I felt like crying. It didn't make sense until I came to ponder today's reading. Then I realised. For all the calmness of the present moment, the lack of rushing around from one meeting to another, the empty diary. For all that blankness in my schedule, I am very much on the edge. I want to summon all the elders and cry out to the Lord. 'Lord what are you doing? How can you allow such a thing to happen in our time? A disease that picks out the weak and vulnerable, that attacks the elderly and infirm, can never be your will, can it? Lord, where are you?' Yes, I know there are memes going around that remind us of all the good that is happening around us as a consequence of this crisis. CS Lewis words on the effect of the Second World War are particularly pertinent. And I know that even the greatest of evils o...

Put on sackcloth, O priests, and mourn (Joel 1:13) This morning I intend to go to church twice. Well, not really go, of course, but attend, remotely, via the internet and live feed. One service will be Holy Communion. Now, I'm not really sure how Holy Communion can work at a distance so I think it's worth pondering for a bit. It doesn't seem to me that there's a huge problem with the communion part. There are many different kinds of community, and, while virtual communities may not be quite as valuable to our health and wellbeing as physical ones, they are certainly real gatherings of people. The greater difficulty might come with the Holy part. By that I mean the sacramental element. There are of course Christians for whom Holy Communion, or the Lord's Supper, is purely about remembering the last supper and the death of Christ on a cross but I am certainly not one of them. Something happens when we bless and receive the bread and wine beyond remembering. Somehow ...

Surely the joy of the people is withered away (Joel 1:12) I wonder if you were clapping the NHS on Thursday evening. I had missed the memo and was alerted to the event when I heard the fireworks going off somewhere in the village. Such a simple, joyful moment. In one little close I know well the neighbours came out of their front doors and were, I believe, cheering as well as clapping. It seems that this disaster, while estranging some people, is bringing others together in ways they never thought possible. I was intrigued by the word 'surely' in today's text. Almost as if Joel can't believe that all the misery of this great disaster could leave any joy left. Then, when I looked it up, I found that it's not in the Hebrew. One word root, B-SH (if what's left of my Hebrew is working), is repeated 3 times: dried up, dried up, dried up. Vine, pomegranate, palm, apple and joy are all dried up. The fig tree, interestingly, is withered or enfeebled (which is as much ...

The harvest of the field is destroyed (Joel 1:11) I have been having mid-life crisis thoughts this morning. You know, those half awake ponderings, where you wonder what on earth you did with the last 20 years. Mine focussed on a choice I made many years ago to move from a job where I was happy and settled, to a job where I was stressed and uncomfortable. I, well we really, came to the conclusion that God was calling us to make the move and so we did. And it was tough. It is an occasional recurring concern but this morning I was bothered by two thoughts: had my unhappiness rubbed off on the children and had my choices been the cause of my unhappiness. If only I had done things differently everything would have been so much better, or so my sleep befuddled brain was telling me. I made my usual responses: a reminder that God does not always call us to easy things, and that there is as much, or even more, good in hard times as in easy and that God has his hand in all our choices for our ...

The priests are in mourning (Joel 1:9) Priests are listed as those affected by the tragedy only second after drunkards. And the reason? No one has anything to offer for sacrifice. Excuse me if I'm lacking in sensitivity, but this doesn't seem an obvious top priority for a country faced with such a great disaster. And that's talking as a priest myself. I had a phone call with one of my parishioners the other day understandably upset that the village churches had been closed by order of the government. Not just closed to public worship but locked and with a very official notice pinned to the door. I could see his point but responded with what I thought were sensible ideas: it wasn't really about village churches but those in towns and cities, which could easily become gathering points; you couldn't have one rule for urban and another for country; we need to let people see that you don't need to be in church for God to hear our prayers. As I say sensible points,...

Mourn like a virgin in sackcloth (Joel 1:8) Much is sometimes made of the word for virgin, for it can also mean young woman. The reason for this is simple. In earlier times the two were considered indistinguishable. A young woman, a very young woman by modern standards, would be a virgin. And as all got married, anyone who could no longer be described as a young woman would not be a virgin. Some seem to think that this means the gospel writers couldn't tell the difference, as if in the past people didn't know you couldn't both have a baby and still be a virgin. Clearly they realised that they were claiming something extraordinary when telling their readers that Jesus was born of a virgin. You can almost hear them say 'You won't believe it but...' Here the word has a different purpose. The young woman has had her new husband snatched away from her on the steps of the altar. It is not entirely clear whether she has just got married or is just about to get marrie...

It has stripped off their bark and thrown it away (Joel 1:7) It is the waste that strikes you. The bark is not merely stripped off the vines and fig trees but then thrown away. It is discarded as of no value, where once it had immense value. The bark that brought water and nutrients to the branches and fruit, and conveyed energy back to the roots has been discarded as worthless. I'm not sure if you have spotted it but hospitals have been issued with government guidelines on how to prioritise patients in need of emergency care when there is not enough to go around. When they are faced with 20 patients needing ventilation and only 12 ventilators, this guidance helps them to make that most awful of choices. As an ex-ethics teacher, I am fairly inured to these kinds of questions. Given a choice of someone who has a chance of survival and someone who doesn't, then there seems to be little actual choice and to have someone remove the responsibility for that decision from you is a ...

It has the teeth of a lion, the fangs of a lioness (Joel 1:6)You may have spotted that the Hebrew scriptures use repetition as a form of poetic emphasis. The most well known is the donkey on which the Messiah rides. He will enter on an 'ass, on a colt the foal of an ass'. I always slightly suspect that Matthew got confused when he read this and added a second donkey, as if Jesus could somehow sit astride two at the same time. In Joel, as in Zechariah, the repetition is not exact. He repeats the idea but in a slightly different form. Both male lion and female lioness feature as sharp fanged. These two are, I am told, quite different in their outlook. The male is inordinately lazy in normal life, hanging around for the next meal or the next opportunity to reproduce. Once he has fought and won his place, he will do very little until he is too old to fight and then he'll be driven out. The female, by contrast, is ever active. Hunting for food, defending the young, guiding the ...

A nation has invaded my land, powerful and without number (Joel 1:6) 'It's like it was in the War, George. Why don't you write about that?' My friend said. I gave my usual non-committal reply, 'Thanks, but I never decide in advance what I'm going to write about'. Then in today's reading up it pops. Joel describes the advance of the locusts as the invasion of a foreign power. While we must avoid dear Donald's suggestion that this is a 'Chinese virus' as if it had some distinctive national characteristics, it is undeniable that it has crossed our borders from nation to nation, flying on the wings of Boeing (or any of its rivals for airspace). It has invaded. Not only that but many nations have reacted by going on a War footing, marshalling resources for one purpose, restricting unnecessary movement, invoking emergency legislation, prioritising key workers, even a form of rationing. So it must come as no surprise that, to those who have lived ...

Wake up you drunkards and weep (Joel 1:5) When addressing those most affected by disaster, 'drunkards' seems a strange place to start . Why drunkards? And not just drunkards. Joel also includes all 'drinkers of wine'. 'Wail because of the wine for it has been snatched from your lips'. They are just on the point of enjoying a glass of their favourite tipple and it is whipped away. It is the suddenness that seems so hard, the lost expectation without any warning. Our close friends' daughter is getting married today. She is a meticulous planner almost to the point of pathology. Every detail of every moment organised. And then at the last it is snatched away. Years of joyful anticipation lost in a moment. It is hard not to feel tearful for them. Yet they are getting married. And I wondered if this isn't the point; possibly even why Joel starts with 'drunkard'. Someone addicted to alcohol cannot see beyond the drink and when it is taken away their ...

What the locust swarm has left the great locusts have eaten; what the great locusts have left, the young locusts have eaten; what the young locusts have left other locusts have eaten (Joel 1:4) I love the way the translators ran out of different words for kinds of locust and fell back on the rather feeble 'other locusts'. In truth, no one knows what any of the words used here for locusts mean. The key purpose is to show the progressive affects of the destruction. What was left over by one was eaten by the next. It is a slamming of door after door, as each brief candle of hope is snuffed out by the next wind of destruction. It certainly rings a loud bell now. Our hope for containment in Wuhan was quickly dashed. Our expectation that it might not be as serious as first thought blown away by the news from the hospitals in northern Italy. Our vague sense that the channel might again be a barrier to invasion quashed. And now as each day succeeds each day, we are put into deeper an...

Tell it to your children (Joel 1:3) My middle son has had some very good news. His school is shut and he won't have to take his A-Levels. I'm not sure this is good news for everyone. My older two would have been horrified, I suspect. All that work gone to waste. But for him it's the perfect outcome. He can now train full time and start thinking about how to set up his own business. The only down side is that races are also cancelled. But, hey, an extra year's training season! It struck me how much character affects how we experience things. For my Dad, his forced isolation is quite galling. He's the Peter Pan of the ageing population, ever young and eager to be active. For my Mum it's the human contact she misses, but she loves reading, they have a large garden and a sunny patio (or The Terrace as he insists on calling it). I expect she'll rather enjoy it after a while. So what message should we pass on to our children? Well they'll all finally learn ...

Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your fathers? (Joel 1:2) As I listened to the radio, it struck me that there are two economies at work in our society. There is the one I have spent my whole adult life in, where I get paid monthly and my income depends very little on the whims of the spending public: teacher, vicar, medic, retired. The money comes in and if people stop spending it'll be years before it affects me. Then there is the economy where every day, sometimes every hour or every minute, the readiness of consumers, users, travellers, holidaymakers and so on, to part with their cash, directly and immediately affects income. For many of these businesses, pubs, shops, cafés, airline ticket sales, their income has collapsed while their outgoings have remained much the same. In the Irish potato famine, the subsistence crop was devastated by blight. Cash crops continued to be exported and the merchants and landowners were relatively unaffected b...

Has anything like this ever happened in your days or in the days of your fathers? (Joel 1:2) As I scrolled through the endless news on the coronavirus, as I expect we all do, I came across a comparison with measles. According to The New Statesman, measles is far more infectious. Each person with measles passes it on to an average of 10 others. With the coronavirus the number is about 2.5. Then it struck me. Before vaccination, before antibiotics, our 'fathers' must have regularly experienced such infections sweeping across the world. The speed of spread would have been slower and the depth of cover less, but the effects must have been the same: anxiety and isolation. In Eyam in The Peak District, the villagers found the plague in their midst. Instead of fleeing the village and taking the disease to the city, the rector, William Mompesson, persuaded them to go into self-isolation. Food was left for them at the boundary stone by the villages around, paid for with coins disinfect...

The Word of the Lord came to Joel (Joel 1:1) I often wonder what this might have felt like. Did Joel fall into a trance? Did he have a dream? Or was it more a kind of waking certainty that God had something important he wanted Joel to pass on? I rather suspect the latter. He knew as he looked at the tragedy unfolding around him, that God had no desire to stay silent. His God had an important message to share and Joel was going to be the means to share it. Now, I am not convinced by those today who claim some divine hotline into the meaning of current events. It's usually hard to see why God would pass such vital information on to them. But I am convinced that God does not leave us without a witness, without some meaning to the affairs that have such an impact on our lives. God wants us to hear his voice in the big things as well as the little, in the global as well as the everyday. So as we ponder the spread of a new and virulent virus for which we have no immunity, what might ...