Deacon Susan Erickson

Titanic swarms of desert locusts resembling dark storm clouds are descending ravenously on the Horn of Africa. They're roving through croplands and flattening farms in a devastating salvo experts are calling an unprecedented threat to food security. On the ground, subsistence planters can do nothing but watch — staring up with horror and at their fields in dismay.

Locusts have been around since at least the time of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, 3200 B.C., despoiling some of the world's weakest regions, multiplying to billions and then vanishing, in irregular booms and busts.

If the 2020 version of these marauders stays steady on its warpath, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says desert locusts can pose a threat to the livelihoods of 10% of the world's population. See the NPR link.

Dear Friend,

The prophet Joel, whose life scholars place sometime between the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE, seems to have lived through a terrible plague of locusts like the one that recently devastated the Horn of Africa.

In our passage from Joel, the prophet depicts the utter devastation wrought by the swarming “armies”: “What the cutting locust left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten, and what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust has eaten…It has laid waste my vines, and splintered my fig trees; it has stripped off their bark and thrown it down; their branches have turned white.” (Joel 1:3, 7).

At the same time as real locusts endanger the livelihoods of thousands of people, I have to admit that I feel as if the world I know is being stripped down to its bare branches by metaphorical ones: swarms of social media posts, digital news articles, epidemiologists’ warnings, pundits’ commentaries and the angry buzzing of thousands of my fellow citizens. “Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old ….” (Joel 2:2)

Joel seems to have perceived the locusts as God’s judgment on the people of Israel. Yet in the end God takes pity on his people. Joel prophesies that He will send away the swarms. “Do not fear, you animals of the field, for the pastures of the wilderness are green; the tree bears its fruit ….” (Joel 2:22)

What could turn God’s countenance toward us again, to use the Psalmist’s phrase? Perhaps it’s the very stripping away of our certainties and comforts, of those things that give us excuses to refuse God’s invitation, as in the parable Jesus tells in today’s reading from Luke.

When we’re comfortable, we tend to think we have something better to do. That’s not the case with the “poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind.” So, they are the ones invited to the banquet. Jesus not only exhorts us to invite the disinherited to our tables; I think he is also suggesting that unless we in some way resemble them by suffering with them, we won’t find God’s Kingdom.

In other words, after the locusts’ devastation, and perhaps only because of it, Israel returns to God.

We need to reclaim our common humanity with those in Africa plagued, still, by real armies of locusts, as well as with those closer to home suffering from the plagues of COVID, poverty and injustice. And we need to recognize our creaturely bond with the suffering earth around and beneath us, its plants and animals, maimed by habitat encroachment and a warming climate. If we open our hearts and our tables to all of Creation, we also will find a seat in God’s presence.

Deacon Susan Erickson