The Night and the Day are Both Alike

All week Matt kept up a steady stream of bizarre and crazy news articles flowing into our marital facebook chat. Troubles in Rome, transgender follies, accusations of racism, political insanity, and, to top it all off, on a Saturday night, which is never a good time, a long sickening article about abuse in boarding schools. I try not to read real news at night—not that the morning is any better—lest I find myself unable to sleep. The night is a querulous and troubling time. You are meant to rest, but that is when every evil thing rises up to greet you, to demand your attention, to call forth the anxiety you had tucked away during the day.

In the spirit of continuing on with the Sunday lections, as I have been doing the last few weeks, this morning, though for me it is still as dark as night outside my window, we find the Lord sidling up to Gideon, interrupting him in the heady work of threshing out his grain in the family wine press, lest the Midianites swoop down and steal it all. Gideon has to stop and push the sweat off his brow and deal with this remarkable, and not particularly restful, interruption.

Still they, the Israelites, had been praying. They had asked for help. The way I do—accusations first, asking after. ‘Why don’t you ever do anything, God,’ I say, and then I go back and enumerate all the problems and explain why it is unfair and bad that God hasn’t already done anything about them, even though I could have asked several days ago, and even though now I am not asking nicely. They, the Midianites, were in habit of devouring the substance of the land of Israel, like locusts. They would hover, wait for an opportune moment, and then rush in and take everything, leaving the hard working Israelite bereft and hungry. This had been going on for seven years. And the Israelites finally had enough of it. Why doesn’t God do anything, they began to cry.

Except that the chapter did open this way, “The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord…” the sort of verse one easily passes over in the rush to get to the more relevant stuff of fleeces and drinking styles and clay pots and winning. The irritable Gideon himself, threshing out his grain, is full of self-pity when the Lord, I mean The Angel of the Lord, comes with the good news that God is prepared to deal with the Midian problem. ‘Where have you been all this time?’ mutters Gideon, thwacking away at the grain. ‘What about all those great things of days gone by, when God saved us with mighty deeds and outstretched arm. ‘The Lord,’ he says, just to drive the point home, ‘has forsaken us.’

But what of Israel forsaking the Lord? That never seems quite as troubling. There are so many ways to do that though—to ‘forsake,’ to turn your back on, to wander away and do some things that are wrong and bad without thinking too much about it. The bad wrong thing sits there and you don’t notice it after a while.

The Angel of the Lord proves to Gideon that he really is the real thing, at the expense of a young goat, and then goes on his way. Except that then the Lord sticks around and goes on talking. This ‘mighty man of valor,’ young Gideon has first to cope with the little matter of the altar to Baal squatting there in the ancestral courtyard, and the Ashera pole propped up next to it.

You remember Baal, and Ashera, those two allurments of the dweller in Israel. When the wrecking force of Midian swept down to steal all your food, it never occurred to you where the problem might lie—or rather, stand, fixed up on some fertility pole. Anyway, never mind, why doesn’t God do something.

It’s the mixture of wrath and helplessness that makes daily life so discouraging, I think. You read the news—the terrible things that are happening, some of them really ghastly, all of them told in tragic and lurid detail, and then you sit by helpless, angry. It’s like the Midianites are always eating up everything. Coming in and thoughtlessly destroying whatever it is that you need, that you’ve worked for, that you relied on. You go on trying to cope, and you pray sometimes, but mostly its just the helpless rage. And also, why doesn’t God just do something.

But then, when he does come, he has so many things to say. I don’t get the feeling that Gideon is enjoying himself. The protracted conversation with the Angel of the Lord, who regularly drops the angel bit and just goes on speaking, doesn’t seem to be that fun. If you were looking for ‘more of God’ which I hear is the latest fad, you might want to reconsider. Because the Midianites aren’t Gideon’s first problem. The first problem is the massive altar sitting there like it’s no big deal.

But night follows day like regularly clock work, and so Gideon does what he’s told, though with plenty of fear and trembling. And in the morning the whole town wants to kill him. Because they hate having all their grain stolen, but the one thing they absolutely cannot abide is having their idols destroyed. That is a bridge too far.

Cue long childhood sermon about working on eradicating all the idols from your life. What are yours? Let me see, mine are…but that’s the trouble, they’re right there, right in the center of everything, too close to even notice. You trip as you go around them, but what’s really making you angry and frustrated are all the impending Midianites. You can only see some of the problem, you there in the middle of the night, threshing out your anxious grain. It takes God himself sidling up to you and pointing out the huge horror right there in your living room, or in your mind, or in your habits of life, for you to even know there’s a problem.

Isn’t it strange how Jesus is raised right up there on a pole, but not at night—though such a great darkness falls that it might as well have been—in the very middle of the day. Because, for us, the night and the day are both alike—confusing, confounding, filled with idolatry, anxiety, enemies inside and out. It doesn’t matter when we have to face down God’s will for us, whether in the morning, or the evening, or at noon day. Blind cowardice is for every moment.

But the night and the day are alike for God also. He is the strengthening and enlightening person who makes all the difference. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t see your little altar to Baal sitting there, blinking out at you from your phone. The Lord, who is an everlasting glory, when you pray, however you pray, whether accusingly or plaintively, will show it to you. And, when you ask, will help you to break it down and grind it into the dust.

Oh look! There’s the dawn. Time to go to church.