The Nation of the Locust

Sermon delivered on October 26th at Calvary City on a Hill Church in Provo, UT:

It’s easy to ask yourself – why do I matter?

It can almost feel like everything that happens – everything that truly happens, everything that is impactful and serious – happens without us, on the other side of a screen.

Your life, your story, can feel crude and uneven.

You were made for the margins, it can feel like – while there, on the other side of the screen, there is the true canvas; there are the politicians, and the protests, and the wars, but your life – you – you are being sort of scribbled onto a napkin. Not even forgotten, because – from the perspective of the screen, or the headlines – you were never known; you’re reduced to an observing shadow, maybe.

We can be so convinced of this lie, we start rushing to our screen to participate in ‘what matters’ as if ‘what matters’ only exists elsewhere – as if ‘what matters’ or ‘what is real’ is in the screen.

‘What matters’ is what was on the news today. ‘What matters’ is what your favorite political figure achieved. ‘What matters’ is always ‘somewhere over there’ posted by someone else about something else.

We can think – purpose, true purpose, can’t be here.

Not in my small home. Not in my small community. Not on my small side of the screen.

I am the field mouse; or maybe I’m less than that.

I am the whisper of the gnat in a dream someone else forgot.

And it’s in this – that I can hear disorder.

In this – I can hear the locust.

The locust is essentially a type of grasshopper, but what’s interesting about the locust – is once it enters what’s called the ‘gregarious phase’, a mode activated once it’s in a big enough network of other locusts – a swarm – the locust literally grows in size. Hormones are released – and their bodies respond – their brains, even, grow larger. And like readying with war-paint for a massacre; they change colors – from green – to sometimes shades of black and yellow. So along with the millions of others in the hoard – together, they get bigger and more aggressive – and in these massive swarms – they can consume 100 tons of wheat in a single day.

We are the wheat.

And our locust is consuming us in this same way.

Our swarm of locusts is buzzing from our phones, it’s buzzing from our TVs, it’s buzzing from whatever we turn to – to behold ‘what’s important’. These locusts are ripping millions of people from the urgency and purpose in their own life, into what has become – virtually – within the screen, a kind of theater that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in your pocket.

It drags us from the reality of our story, and into someone else’s. It diminishes our crucible – whether that be an addiction to be conquered, a broken relationship to heal, a painting to finish, a meal to make with our son, a hike to go on with our daughter, a business to build, health goals – or a combination of these things – it eclipses those, your crucible, with a kind of voyeurism. All of the sudden the mountain I’m watching someone else climb in the screen isn’t inspiring me to climb my mountain – their mountain has become mine – while the locust consumes who I’m meant to be, what I’m meant to do, and all the love I’m meant to give and receive.

In my travels across the United States as a nomad, I have seen a kind of obvious civic epidemic: homeless people screaming in the streets in every state, along with – drugs, decaying city infrastructure, prostitutes, gang violence – and yet – hidden behind our civic issues – the epidemic I’ve seen most sits behind the eyes of the average man.

I have met people who have more passion for what they just heard on the news over the state of their own marriage. I have met people with more – zeal – for showing each other TikToks over what problems plague their own home. I have heard a man tell me – due to fears of the end of the world – he was encouraging his daughters not to have children; fears promulgated by the screen.

It seems to me – if this second epidemic – this epidemic of the heart – was inoculated – it would, in turn, over time, inoculate the first. I can imagine what fathers would reach out to their lost sons. I can imagine what mothers would – teach – their lost daughters.

By and large, the locust has turned us into, instead, a witness, an audience, to the screen – while our immediate world – our real world – our side of the screen – is eaten.

Maybe Isaiah said it best:

‘Is not that this thing in my right hand a lie?’

[Isaiah 44:19-20]

Except this thing in our right hands – our modern idol – can morph into whatever it need be to keep our attention.

I can imagine every vibration – from every notification, from every call, from every text – from every phone across the United States – humming in unison – as the unending, relentless sound, of the ever-consuming hoard.

Joel said it himself:

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.

[Joel 1:4]

We are not being consumed, we have been consumed.

We are Jonah – in the whale.

We have become The Nation of The Locust.

In ancient Israel there were also two sides of the screen. On one side, there was Augustus Caesar. There was King Herod. There was the glory of Rome. There was ‘what mattered’.

We can imagine the prominent philosophers of the ancient world telling us what to think about the recent Roman loss against the Germans. We can imagine whispering in the alleys of Athens, our fellow citizens gossiping about whether or not Caesar Augustus still held divine favor.

Unknown to Caesar, however, and unknown to everyone whose lives were absorbed by the grand stage; on the small side of the screen – off of the cultural canvas, in the shadows of the known world, an event was unfolding – enacted by a single man – that would echo through time.

This single act, from this single person, on the small side of the screen, would inspire William Wilberforce, centuries later, to lead the movement that ultimately abolished slavery. This single act would inspire poor Roman peasants to pick up abandoned infants from the gutters, saving them from the post-birth abortions that were common at the time. This act would inspire Dietrich Bonhoeffer to say – before being hung for opposing Nazi Germany – “This is the end, but for me – the beginning of life.”

This act was the crucifixion of a man named Jesus from a town called Nazareth; and though this crucifixion is arguably the single most impactful event in human history, when it happened, virtually no one cared.

Jesus Christ said I will call all nations to myself, and he said it standing in dust, in a nowhere town, among a crowd of nobodies, and though in his time – no one cared – except for the backwater folks from cities with names no one even remembers – it was those small moments that shaped history.

A nowhere man – to the eye of Caesar – said I will conquer this world through my death – and now the entire world does not count the years starting from the birth of Caesar. The entire world counts years starting from the birth of Jesus.

This happened without applause, without accolades, without awards, without headlines – it happened on the small side of the screen – observed by his mother and a few friends.

He told Rome – in essence – I want you to hit me as hard as you can – and in response, I will conquer Rome, and I will conquer the world, and I will conquer death.

Alexander The Great needed an entire nation’s army at his disposal to conquer other nations.

Jesus Christ did it by himself in his sandals.

And he did this on our side of the screen.

It is in the spaces that the world ignores that God sculpts eternity.

From the homes that the world ignores, from the hearts that the world ignores. From the families of farmers and shepherds and carpenters, God raises His kings.

It is with us – on our small side of the screen – that God, the stonemason, does His work.

So if we ask ourselves – when we are deceived by the locust – why do I matter – how could I matter – on this small side of the screen, in this small home, in this small heart of mine? It’s because that is exactly where God threads purpose.

When I saw my niece, Lucy take her first steps and fall, and her sister said, “I will hold her hand,” and I saw them walk off together – in that – in Lucy’s perseverance and her 3-year old sister’s encouragement – I saw victory, and I saw the glory of God – as great and as bright as the sun.

When I met a man named Nic in Fargo, North Dakota, three months sober, describe his drive to give up his addiction for the sake of his daughter – in that conviction – I could hear a song; a melody – slipping through the cracks of this world – from the Kingdom of Heaven.

Though no one saw it, and no one filmed it, in my early twenties when I turned from – drinking to feel joy, when I turned from revisiting over and over again thoughts of hanging myself from a doorknob, when I turned from a mind full of thorns, when I stepped onto another road – one paved with light – I can taste the dew on the morning grass of the New Jerusalem.

It is in the quiet language of unseen redemption that Christ blooms in the world.

It is with the collective whisper of the field mice that the lion is tamed.

I think of Zachariah:

‘Who dare despise the day of small things?’

[Zechariah 4:10]

Yet some of us can feel like – I am too far gone: I have a lifetime behind me spent, squandered. I have a heart too submerged in the deep. I am made for my desk. I am made for my couch. I am made – to observe, and to sink, and to wither. My crucible is hopelessness – if it exists at all.

However, we’re told by God:

‘I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten.’

[Joel 2:25]

And if we finally turn to our crucible – and with that turn comes fear of the path ahead – I can hear him say:

‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I will fear no evil. For thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.’

[Psalm 23]

So if upon each of us there is the consuming locust, and this locust has been keeping us blind to our path – maybe for years – maybe for decades – and maybe, as a culture, for centuries – if this locust has been keeping us paralyzed, laying by the pool of Bethesda, hoping for a miracle – then to each of us, Christ says: pick up your mat and walk.

When we ask ourselves – once more – why do I matter?

We can answer:

Because within me there blooms the hand of God, and from that hand of God in what work he has set before me, there, too, blooms hope, and light; His Glory. And with that glory this world is being made the footstool for truth, and for goodness, and for beauty – the footstool for Christ – and that glory is as luminous, and as powerful, in the unseen joy of an infant as it is in a supernova; it is as profound and as infinite in the breadth of the cosmos, as it is in the man setting down the needle.

And keep in mind – even the cosmos would not be possible without the atom, a building-block so small – there are more on the tip of your finger than there are stars in the observable universe.

So when you think – this small next step of mine does not matter, remind yourself: It was His good pleasure, to use what is small to dictate what is large; he made what is insignificant, fallen, and in the dirt – the acorn – to grow what is mighty – the oak tree.

In His world the lions are the field mice.

Or to quote Christ himself:

The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

Forever.

“O’ dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.”

“I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.”

[Ezekiel 37:4-5]

Amen.