“And it shall be after this that I pour out my Breath upon everything living. Your children will proclaim, your elders will dream dreams, those in the prime of their lives will see visions. Even upon the service workers among you, in that day I will pour my Breath upon them” (Joel 2.28-29).
Pray for revival.
I remember those words being said back in chapel in high school. We should be pleading with God for this outpouring of the Breath of God to fall upon Christians across America, this final movement before the world is judged and punished for its sins.
The vision presented here is very charismatic: people are overcome by the Spirit of God and begin to have visions and to speak the Divine Word from the street corners. They turn the hearts of daughters their mothers, sons to their fathers. It’s the last chance for salvation before the horrors of the Tribulation begin.
You can sort of picture it, can’t you? Perhaps it begins at some big outdoor worship event with Contemporary Christian bands and preachers who call people to repentance and a new piety and purity, which opens the window for the Spirit to flow upon those gathered who begin, like on Pentecost, speaking in strange tongues and then going out into the world to proclaim the judgment that is coming.
Thing is, that’s not what Joel’s talking about.
The key, I think, to these words comes in verse twenty-nine—one that has always been left out in my experience. Even, Joel tells us, the ones you normally don’t hear will be filled with the Breath of the Holy One and speak the Word from their lips.
Children, elderly, college students and teenagers. Grocery store cashiers, warehouse workers, stadium clean-up crews. None of these are the people from whom we typically take our theological guidance. If we peruse the top ten books, podcasts, downloads none of them have these people listed behind them. It’s the people in-between, isn’t it? The middle aged folk our society gives the greatest attention to—the mostly white, mostly male authors and speakers from thirty to sixty.
This outpouring is not upon those who normally have the microphone, it’s those whose voices we push off to the side. But why these? Why would God breathe upon these people in particular? Why let those to whom no one listens be the receiving the visions of God?
Maybe it’s because they are the least invested in how things are. Perhaps, unlike those who find the status quo comfortable and just, the elderly, the minimum-wage employees, the indebted college graduates are the ones who can see God’s dreams as they are, and speak of a world very different from the one they now know.
Perhaps its these voices that will turn hearts and change minds to recreate a world for those who are forgotten. Who knows, maybe the Spirit-driven voices of those seeking safe places to work and learn, who are dying for affordable health care have something to say that we’ve not yet heard.
Perhaps we really should pray for revival to come.
Speak, Holy One, through those whose voices we do not hear; so, we might hear you clearly.