Dionysus on a Bike

Joel 2:18-29 – 5/25/2026

Today’s reading from the Hebrew Prophet Joel contains the prophesy that Peter references on the first day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descends on the gathered believers. “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” (Joel 2:28). According to Peter, these words spoken by the prophet were fulfilled that day in the upper room, as the disciples all were given the power from God to make them prophetic voices in this new age of the church.

This prophecy’s original context was Israel’s being made a “mockery among the nations.” God’s sending the Spirit on “all flesh” is in contrast with and a correction of Israel’s lowly, humiliated state separated from the blessings of God. God will replace their subjugation with God’s direct imbued presence which will make everyone so close to God that all will prophecy. Notice however, that the promise of God’s Spirit for all flesh occurs at the end of this set of promises. Before God changes Israel spiritually, God feeds God’s people. Before Israel prophesies, they get to eat; they are fed “grain, wine, and oil” the most important fruits of the land, the staples around which all meals are made.

Christianity gets presented as a religion primarily concerned with the spiritual, with the moral, with things that are beyond our embodied, mortal state. This is to miss a key aspect of how God relates to human beings in Scripture. God does not just give God’s spiritual presence to God’s people. God also feeds them. Jesus fed people, ate with them, and instructed the disciples to pray for their daily bread before asking for their sins to be forgiven. Here in the writings of the Prophet Joel, granting prosperous crop yields so the people can eat their fill precedes pouring out God’s Spirit.

We are physically embodied; we are not a disembodied soul. A Creator of Love does not only care about the state of our souls and the well-being of our Spirit. God cares about the well being of our bodies and that our hunger, our literal need for sustenance is satisfied. Just as our needs are physical and spiritual; we need to be loved and have the presence of others in community, and we need food, shelter, and care for our physical bodies. God is a God of both. In the person of Jesus, God is a human being just like us with the same mix of spiritual and material needs and desires. The prophecy of Joel, just like so many parts of Scripture, points to the fact that we cannot disentangle the two. Our healing and salvation are for our whole person, body and spirit. God will give us words of prophecy through God’s indwelling presence, but God will also feed us. We need to be fed. Any faith or worldview that denigrates our bodily need denies a large part of who we are and so can neither affirm life, nor the creator of life.

To affirm life and the creator means accepting as a gift the fruits of the earth. Loving others means helping them receive those same gifts. Do not denigrate the body and so denegrate your own life. You are a body. Your Savior is a body.

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.