A Fish Story of Repentence (Sermon)

The greatest miracle in the story of Jonah isn’t the big fish. It’s never been the fish. It’s not the fish for two reasons. Firstly, we’ve all heard fish stories before and we know how they go. Secondly, and more importantly, God has always done what God needed to do to get human attention. Bush on fire, but not consumed? Check. (Exodus 3) Fleece is wet, but the floor is dry? Check. (Judges 6) Donkey refuses to move until you listen to the angel visitor? Check. (Numbers 22)

God will get your attention, our attention, as needed. For most of us, no big fish needs to be involved. For Jonah, however, the Lord needed to engage a massive attention-getting device, such that Jonah would realize, as we all must:  you can run from your Creator, but you can’t hide. 

Why didn’t Jonah listen in the first place? For reasons that made good sense to him. Nineveh was a significant location for trading routes crossing the Tigris River on the great road between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. In this important location between east and west, Nineveh, as a major city and eventually the last capital of the Assyrian Empire, amassed wealth and power from many sources. The Assyrian Empire was the big man on the Mesopotamian campus, until it was overthrown. 

The overthrow of Assyria took concerted effort by the forces of Babylonians, Chaldeans, and Persians, along with other significant local players, with the Babylonians ending up as the new regional power. Remember, also, that Assyria was the nation that carried the 10 northern tribes, or the nation of Israel, off the map. Nineveh was a large city in the middle of a not-beloved region and God calls Jonah, a Hebrew prophet to them.

 

Jonah doesn’t want to go. How could he hold his head up with his people again if he was known as the prophet to Nineveh? If he survived and returned, how could he possibly tell anyone where he’d been sent and then what God did? 

 

And Jonah doesn’t want to go because he was aware of how God operated (and operates). Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love? For the Ninevites? For Assyrians? Absolutely not. 

 

When people talk to me about the “God of the Old Testament”, hardly anyone ever mentions this story and what Jonah knew about God’s reputation. We have here a prophet, one of God’s own chosen people, who knows that God’s reputation isn’t destruction, but mercy. Not rejection, but welcome. Not endless devastation, but relentless justice and restoration. Jonah may not be able to answer why bad things happen to good people, but he is refusing to be part of how good things happen to bad people (in his mind). 

 

So, he goes down to the docks and buys passage to Tarshish. To give you some perspective: Nineveh was located where we see Mosul, Iraq on a map, about 500 miles east of Jerusalem. Tarshish was on the southern coast of Spain, about 2000 miles in the other direction. For Big Timber, that’s close to if God told one of us to go to Bismarck, North Dakota and we went to Juneau, Alaska instead. 

Jonah flees. His disobedience endangers everyone aboard the same ship with him. Cargo is thrown overboard, and the boat is in distress. When the sailors narrow down that Jonah is the problem, they go wake him up from his nap to tell him. He says for them to throw him over the side, and they only reluctantly agree to do so. He’d still rather drown than tell God he’ll go to Nineveh. Enter the fish. 

Jonah spends three days giving the great fish indigestion, He seems repentant of his disobedience, so God has the fish vomit Jonah out on the beach. There, while he’s still covered in slime, the word of the Lord comes to Jonah for a second time. Any time the Bible makes it clear that God is repeating Godself, one should listen. Jonah trudges off. I say trudges because his behavior in the final chapter of this story makes it clear he still wasn’t joyful about this assignment, and he has no intention of preaching with any enthusiasm. 

Yet, after barely one day into a three-day journey, the Spirit has begun to move among the people of Nineveh. They’re repenting en masse. No one is saying “not all Assyrians”. No one is saying, “Well, I wasn’t part of the problem.” No one is starting a countermovement or trying to reframe the story about the sins of their ancestors or their neighbors, but definitely not them. Every single Assyrian realizes that there’s a societal problem and they all choose to be part of the solution, part of the hope, part of the repair. They all want better for Nineveh, for all their children, for the land, for every animal. 

This goes all the way up to the king, who joins in the repentance movement and becomes its leader. He does not blame his opponents. He does not point fingers, call names, or reject responsibility. The king understands that the hope of Nineveh is for everyone and everything to turn from their current behaviors toward the expectations of Jonah’s God.

Does this turning toward orthopraxy- a right, holy practice- include monetary honesty, liberty for captives, equity among citizens, justice for all? Does it mean slowly transforming a stratified society, attention to the reasons behind poverty, care for the mentally and physically ill? Does it mean that the capital of Assyria must recognize that with great power comes great responsibility? We don’t know the specifics of the change of heart, but we do know that every single Assyrian- every adult, every child, every cow (representing all the domestic animals)- repents. 

Repentance here isn’t mere apology but is a clear turning of hearts and minds toward behavior that is pleasing to God.  They all do it. To a person and to a bovine. And that’s the great miracle in this Bible story- it is possible for an entire society to change its ways. God can do it. God has done it. God will do it. 

And Jonah, as the kids say, is SALTY about it. He is mad, mad, mad. God relents and chooses, as is the Divine prerogative, to show mercy to Nineveh. Jonah is angry. If God was going to be merciful anyway, why did Jonah have to risk life, limb, and reputation? Jonah goes out, east of Nineveh to pout. He sits down to see what’s going to happen. Maybe God will yet wipe Nineveh off the map, just as Assyria has done to others. 

The Scripture says, then, that God provided a bush for Jonah, to give the prophet a little shade. Jonah liked that very much. The next day, God sent a worm whose day’s work was to destroy the bush. God turned up the wind and the heat and Jonah was now extremely unhappy. 

And then comes the very best scene in the Bible outside of the gospels:

[Jonah] begged that he might die, saying, “It’s better for me to die than to live.”

⁹ But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” ¹⁰ Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. ¹¹ And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many animals?” (Jonah 4:9-11, NRSVUE)

 

Look, God is saying, you don’t have to like them, but the Ninevites are as much my people, part of my beloved creation, as you are. They may make bad choices, they may be caught in a web of their destructive ways, but I love them. I have compassion for them. I want better for them. I will not give up on them. 

 

And if I won’t, says the Lord in my holy imagination, then you don’t get to do so either. You don’t get to place laurels of righteousness on your own head if you refuse to be part of my desire for healing in creation. I’ve got bigger fish than you, Jonah, as you well know. You don’t have to like the Assyrians, but you have to love them. In this case, loving them means acting in their best interest- telling them that there is a way to avoid destruction and to live in hope and a just peace. 

 

In this story, perhaps you have imagined yourself as Jonah. Maybe you know the people or person to whom you have been called to share the good news of Jesus Christ- a message of hope and not condemnation, of justice and not rejection, of community action and not individual isolation. Are you listening to that call or are you in a boat in the other direction? Are we as a church listening to that call? To whom have we been directed to speak a word from God, but have kept silence? Have we hoped I, as pastor would do it alone- even though there’s no “I” in Christian community? (Well, technically there are three, but you know what I meant.) 

 

Or, in our own time, we may be the Assyrians, pre-repentance. We may well be stuck in denying our role in any societal failures or breakdowns. It wasn’t me or my parents, why should I repent? We look away from leaders whose personal choices are genuinely harmful because they, currently, aren’t harming us. Societal repair, in this situation, means making things smooth for me and the people I know, especially the ones who vote like me, spend like me, work like me, and make choices like I do. That way of thinking is destructive, rotting a society from the inside out. And it has no place among Christians who claim to have said yes to Jesus’ call. 

 

Fishing in Jesus’ day was a way of life- sustaining a community with food and financial resources. It involved everyone- netmakers, boat builders, market stall owners, traders, and others. A call to “fish for people” wasn’t about collecting souls, but an invitation into an equally important type of community sustenance- the care and thriving of the soul of a community. It is the call that comes to us all, through our baptisms, which draw us into work together. Work together, I said, not an individual silo of one saved person without other cares. 

 

The story of Jonah is a story of one prophet who represents a whole people, the people of Judah, during a time of nationalistic attitudes when most everyone wished to keep the country’s resources to themselves, including and especially their relationship with the Creator of All. That’s what was happening when Jonah was written and it’s that nationalistic, closed-in attitude that the book addresses in its own time and in ours. 

We don’t get to resist the call to serve others. We don’t get to flee from the Spirit’s urging to care. We don’t get to say it wasn’t me. If we’ve come to understand who God is and what God’s about, we ignore that work at our peril. And we better not pray, “Let thy will be done on earth as in heaven” if we’re not willing to participate. Like Jonah with the sailors, our refusal to listen, trust, and obey can and will endanger others. 

 

If God loves them, we are called to do the same- to the ends of justice and mercy and healing. The Lord said to Jonah, “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many animals?”

 

Insert for Nineveh any country, any political party, any ideology, any race, any creed, any social group, any person. And remember that someone, somewhere has had to have God say these same words about you to them. The greatest miracle in Jonah isn’t the fish. And it never has been. 

 

It’s that the Spirit of the merciful God can change the hearts of a whole nation, including the king and the livestock, and can use the most reluctant of followers to do it. 

 

Amen. 

A Ninevah Moment

Jonah 3:10- 4:11; Matthew 20:1-16

           

            The main points of today’s lessons can be summed up in about 3 minutes. Context for Jonah: the Hebrew prophets and the Hebrew people are not holding up their end of the covenant with God, in which they are blessed as the people who reveals God’s mercy to the world. Context for Matthew: Jewish Christians and early adopter-Gentile Christians are not happy when it turns out that those who are new to the faith receive the exact same level of blessing as they do. The modern upshot for us: God’s grace is not fair, earned, or distributed as expected. We are both the beneficiaries the expected and mandatory reporters of these facts.

            So, that’s it.

            Except that it’s not. That’s not actually enough. I am guessing that if I poll most of you hear, we would agree that God’s grace is open to all. We would acknowledge that we have some responsibility to spread that news. The truth is, though, that there are some people who are Ninevah to us. Just exactly who may vary from person to person. There are people whose latecomer status to church, to faith, to hope makes us frustrated when they seem to get the same “pay”- that is, they have equal voice, equal vote, and equal presence in the life of the congregation.

            The first wedding I did on my own was for two people who did not attend this church. They had difficulty finding someone to do an outdoor wedding because it was February. They were very young, 18 and 19. He was about to deploy as an MP (military police) with the Army and she was 11 weeks pregnant. I wanted them to wait, but I knew they were not going to listen to that. So, I felt that it was better for them to have a positive experience with church, in hopes that they would return if they ever had difficulties.

            I officiated their service, wearing my parka, in snow above my knees at Otter Lake on Ft. Richardson. I didn’t hear from them again. I did hear of them the next spring, when he had returned from his deployment. They struggled with reunion. In an unfortunate series of events, he shot her while she was holding the baby, killing them both. Then he tried to kill himself, but failed. At the trial, he was sentenced to more than sixty years in prison. He spent the first couple years in Spring Creek in Seward, but now he’s in Goose Creek outside Palmer.

            It’s a horrible story, but if you leave only remembering those details- you will miss the point that I am about to make. While he was awaiting trial, when he was found guilty, when he was sentenced, for the years he was in Spring Creek- I did nothing. I talked to the chaplain on the base. I knew that his unit was being reassigned to another state, so most of the people who knew him were leaving. He was not from Alaska, so he didn’t have family up here. There were only a few people with any kind of connection to him and I was one of them.

            Would he want to hear from the pastor who did his wedding? I tossed and turned over what I should do. I prayed about it. I talked about it. I tried to forget. I didn’t actually flee to Tarshish and I didn’t endanger any fishing charters, but my uncertainty became a whale in whose belly I sloshed around. This is what happens to many of us when we are confronted with a serious situation for which we feel unequipped.

            Of course, we say, God’s grace is for everyone, but I don’t know how to visit someone in prison, I don’t know what to do when someone is dying, I’m not sure what to say when a marriage is breaking up, I am uncomfortable in hospitals. At a certain point, we fail to act as though grace is enough. We talk about manning up, womanning up, putting on big girl or big boy pants, but- in the end- it is the Holy Spirit who equips us to do the serious tasks that are absolutely, one-hundred percent the work of being a follower of Christ.

            So we either believe God has enough grace for every person AND every situation or we don’t. We either believe that the Holy Spirit equips and guides or we don’t. We either believe that we are being Christ to others and that Jesus is meeting us through them, or we don’t.

            Last December, I wrote out Christmas cards to some people who were not receiving our family Christmas cards. These were plain cards, with an Alaskan winter scene on the front. I looked up the I.D. number of a certain prisoner and wrote a brief card, “I want you to know that you are not forgotten. This is who I am. I pray for you often. You are remembered by me, by others, and by God. Merry Christmas.” I got a letter back, thanking me for sending one of the few personal cards he received. Ninevah, for me, looked like writing to a prisoner, a murderer, not because I thought God wouldn’t grant him grace, but because I didn’t trust grace enough to make up the difference in my best efforts.

            We all have Ninevahs. Furthermore, we are all likely someone else’s Ninevah or even a late-coming worker. Our age, our abilities, our gender, our occupation, our education level, our habits, our children’s habits, where we live, our vices, our struggles, our health… all of these things are likely to make someone around us uncomfortable. They are also the barriers that stop us from reaching out, because we are unsure, afraid, or just plain disgusted by the person in this situation.

            The end of Jonah shows God’s mercy- not only to the Ninevites, but also to the prophet. God doesn’t say, “You ungrateful son-of-a-gun, how about you die right here and right now and then I won’t have to listen to your whining anymore.” Instead, the God who sent a prophet to the Ninevites, to encourage them toward repentance and toward a right relationship with God… does the very SAME thing for Jonah.

            We worship that same God. We live in the grace of that same God as it has been revealed through Jesus. We live and move and have our being in that same God through the mysterious and on-going work of the Holy Spirit. All three persons of our one God work on us, through us, and for us repeatedly and on a daily basis, so that we may come to even a basic understanding of grace- not for ourselves, but so that we can carry that grace to the world. For we are both beneficiaries and mandatory reporters of the greatest unfairness in the world.

            God’s grace is not fair, earned, or distributed as expected. It is for all. It can and does help you. It is enough.

           

Thanks be to God.

Grace: Motivator or Excuse? (Sermon 11/11)

Jonah 1, 3-4

            I do not love the last line of the hymn “O Zion, Haste”: “Let known whom he has ransomed fail to greet him/ through your neglect, unfit to see his face.” That makes me itchy all over, in part because I think salvation is not my job. I don’t save people. Jesus has saved people. Isn’t that the point of grace? That it’s available to all people and we don’t work for it.

            Yet what is grace, saving grace, costly grace, grace that comes from death and resurrection, if I don’t know about it? What does it mean to me? Furthermore, what does it mean to the person who knows, but doesn’t think it is worth talking about every day? What does it mean to the person who knows about grace, who believes grace is amazing and true, but not quite amazing and true enough to risk anything for it? What does grace mean to the person who loves benefitting from it, but not enough to take a message of grace to people who ache for grace, people in a place like Ninevah?

            The story of Jonah has a very specific function in the Hebrew Scriptures. We tend to narrow it down to the part about the big fish, sometimes forgetting how Jonah ended up in that place anyway. A few people say the conversion of a whole city is a bigger miracle, especially with such a lousy sermon, “Forty days more and Ninevah shall be overthrown.” We could talk about resisting God’s call in our lives, but that’s not why the story of Jonah is important or why it lasted for years and years, even to us today.

            Jonah is written down in this very critical time period in the Hebrew scripture history, when things are going okay for the Israelites. With a righteous leader and the exile far off enough into the future as to be unpredicted, the Hebrew people can live for a moment into what it feels like to be “chosen people”.

Basking in God’s favor, as they see it, however, they are doing nothing to communicate the message of one God- creator and redeemer of all- to the people around them. They have forgotten that this is for what they have been chosen: to carry the message of Adonai to the world. They love the idea of a gracious and merciful God, as long as the grace and mercy are for them. Not the others nearby and certainly not the others far away.

Jonah has no interest in taking a message of grace to Ninevah, a city full of non-Hebrews, a city of infamous iniquity. Why should they get the grace he knows God will provide? So he goes in the opposite direction to Tarshish and, when that plan seems foiled, he’d rather die by drowning than go to Ninevah.

Why should Jonah go? If God will be gracious in the end anyway, why does it matter if Jonah goes or not? Why are you here this morning? At some point, we all have to decide if grace is an excuse or an motivator? Are we using the grace of God, the grace we believe that applies to all, to relieve us of responsibility? Are we skipping the third verse because we know that people will still get to see Jesus- no matter what we do?

Or is grace our motivator? Are we motivated by joy in our salvation? Are we stirred up in knowing that God intends something better for the world now, as well as the world to come? Not only that, but God chooses to use us in the bringing about of those improvements? Are we moved enough by the idea of grace to embrace a call to good works?

By hearing the story of Jonah, the Hebrew people of the time were reminded that God’s gift of grace to them was not to set them above others, but to bring them into the midst of a world that truly needed to hear about the one God- maker and redeemer of all.

The last couple sentences of Jonah are my favorite in the whole of the Bible. Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

They reveal God’s sense of humor and God’s boundless love for all. Furthermore, Jonah’s whole story reveals God’s intention to use each of us to share that love and the message of repentance and grace. For me, I have to consider these lines with the last line of that hymn. Even if I believe that people receive grace through the faithfulness of Christ, there is still work for me to do… for you to do… so that people may see a face of Christ in this life.

Are you moved enough by the gift of grace to go to Ninevah? To do the very last thing that you want to do? Grace is not simply for heaven later, it is to prevent feeling like hell is on earth now. Each of us has a call and gifts to help people experience the presence of Christ with them today.  That’s why we’re here, not to simply see friends, have communion, and check off church for a week. We gather to be recharged so that we can go out and publish glad tidings… tidings of peace… tidings of Jesus… redemption and release. 

Five Fave Verses

The Friday Five is to list five of my favorite Bible verses.

In no particular order and feeling limited:

1. But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’ (Jonah 4:9-11)

This verse always tells me that God has a sense of humor, that God loves and intends all creation for salvation and that God is very, very, very patient. I know someone who likes to point out that the greatest miracle in the book of Jonah isn’t the whale, it’s a whole city repenting. Indeed.

2. When they told Mordecai what Esther had said, Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, “Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.” (Esther 4:12-14)

I don’t tend to believe in that God has orchestrated all the details of our lives, but I do believe that God’s hands are always at work in us and around us and sometimes we just look up and, um, suddenly the world’s need and our skills and passions meet. (Buechner’s definition of vocation) Sometimes you are where you are for reason and God goes before you and the Spirit pushes behind you. And you try not to screw it up in your bold sinning.

3. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. (Ecclesiastes 3:12-13)

I think we should beware verses that get plaque-ified, ubiquitious and impotent. But I don’t see why we don’t see THIS verse a lot more.

4. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. (Revelation 21:3-6)

I know the author is citing Isaiah, but I like it summed up in this post-resurrection, end-time way. God makes all things new, not all new things. I can’t say anything more since I can’t think over the sound of “Blessed Assurance” in my head.

5. Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. (John 8:34-36)

Every Reformation Day I think, “This text, again?” Then I read, gulp down the lump that forms in my throat and think, “Thank God for this text. Again.”