Walking Through Covid with the Book of Joel (Part 1): Awake!

Every year in the fall, I spend some time in prayerful reflection over the Scriptures, asking God for guidance and inspiration in putting together my preaching calendar for the coming year. Every pastor is different, of course, but my practice is to lay out the whole year at a time, so that I can be sure that the church is getting a balanced diet when it comes to the pulpit ministry. My preference is for verse-by-verse studies through specific books of the Bible, and I always make sure we do at least one from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament over the course of the year. No one's ever gonna accuse me of being a Marcionite.

One of the advantages to putting together a preaching calendar so far in advance, is that it prevents you from giving knee-jerk reactions to whatever issue happens to be most prominent in the news at any given time. If the next passage in the book of 1 Corinthians happens to be about eating food sacrificed to idols, then it must be that God wants us to talk today about food sacrificed to idols, regardless the 1001 issues that are vying for attention on our social media accounts, our newsfeeds, or our Google searches. It allows the Bible to set the agenda, in other words, not the CBC; and it allows the Bible to speak to world events on its terms, rather then letting world events dictate how we read the Bible.

All that to say I was truly amazed this year, when the Covid-19 Pandemic hit right as I was coming back from a three-month Sabbatical, and it "just so happened" that the first series I had planned was a verse-by-verse study through the Book of Joel. I put that phrase in scare-quotes just now because, I had no idea that the pandemic was coming, of course, but God surely did. And God must have known, too, how beautifully and directly a book like the Book of Joel-- of all the books of the Bible-- would speak to what was happening as the world went into shut down and everyone wondered what was coming next.  I was tempted at first to switch gears and preach a series that spoke directly to the pandemic, but as I started digging into the book of Joel, this ancient prophetic oracle about a time when all of Israel was shut down because of a locust plague, I realized that there was no better place for my preaching ministry to go, in responding to Covid, than to the Book of Joel.

Eight sermons later, we were still in the midst of the pandemic, but I was deeply encouraged to see how directly God's ancient, holy word, speaks to our modern, secular world. As we move into our sixth month of Covid, with no clear end in sight, I thought it might be worth revisiting that preaching series here on my blog. The handy thing about the lockdown is that we were doing entirely pre-recorded messages back then, which, though they were far more work to do than a simple sermon, resulted in a relatively-well-produced series of videos on the Book of Joel.

So over the next few weeks on my blog, I will be re-posting the sermon series that I preached back in the spring, walking through Covid with the Book of Joel.  I hope it will be an encouragement to you as we all continue to walk.

Here's the first sermon in the series:  Joel 1:1-12: Awake!