Third Sunday after the Epiphany
Jonah 3:1-5, 10 Mark I:14-20
“Congratulations, today's your day. You're off to great places. You're
off and away. You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You
can steer yourself any direction you choose.”
Dr. Seuss does a great job of introducing our
text this morning for at it’s simplest level the lessons this morning are
about the call, about being on the brink of adventure. Jesus says, “Follow
me.” God says to Jonah “Get up and go.” It’s the chance,
the opportunity, the moment of beginning. But along with the opportunity comes
risks.
"I'm sorry to say so, but sadly it's true that bangups and hangups can
happen to you. You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some
windows are lighted but mostly they're dark. A place you could sprain both your
elbow and chin. Do you stay out? Do you dare go in?"
In one lesson, four disciples answer the call.
They leave their nets, their boats, their families and follow little knowing
that they’ll end up as co-conspirators to a political and religious criminal.
In the other lesson, well, we have Jonah.
Jonah was one of the prophets in the Old Testament.
One day God comes to Jonah and tells him to go to the city of Nineveh, which
is the capital of Assyria. But the problem is that that’s about the last
thing in the world that Jonah wants to do. After all, the Assyrians are the
bad guys. They’re sort of the Iraq of the ancient world. The Assyrians
are known for being brutal and cruel. When they defeated you in battle, the
victory alone wasn't enough for them. No, the Assyrians went on to force you
to pack up your stuff and they carted you off to some strange and distant land
to live out the rest of your life. So when God told Jonah to go and preach to
the people of Nineveh, so they could repent and be saved, that wasn't a mission
that Jonah was interested in, the risks are too high.
So, as we all know, Jonah hopped on a boat and
headed the opposite direction. But God proceeded to whip up a fierce storm that
was just about to sink the ship. Finally, Jonah has himself thrown into the
sea because he knows that the storm is his fault, that it is God's way of punishing
Jonah for running away. But then, just as Jonah is about to drown, the Bible
says that a big fish swallows him. After keeping Jonah in his belly for three
days, the fish coughs Jonah up and leaves him on dry land. So for a second time,
God goes to Jonah and orders him to go to Nineveh. This time, Jonah goes. Clearly
his heart isn’t in this mission because he gives probably the shortest
sermon on record. Eight words. Eight lousy words, “Forty days more and
Ninevah shall be overthrown!” Wow, that a real barn burner sermon. The
sheer poetic force of it alone would cause people to, well to fall asleep. But
our lesson says a curious thing. It says that all of the people of Nineveh,
began to fast and pray and repent. And in the verses we don’t have in our
lesson, it even says they made their animals fast and the animals even put on
sackcloth—and the people didn’t even drink water. And the king, the
king himself put on sackcloth and sat in the ashes.
Then God does something that makes Jonah really
angry. Because what God does is he announces that he's going to forgive the
people of Nineveh. And that makes Jonah mad. That's why he didn't want to go
to Nineveh in the first place, because he was afraid that that was exactly what
God was going to end up doing. Didn't God realize how nasty and evil and rotten
those people in Nineveh were? Why did God have to forgive them? Why didn't God
just zap them and make them pay the price for what they'd done? But as Jonah
sits there, fit to be tied, God says to him, "Jonah, what right do you
have to be angry?" But we understand how Jonah felt. It's like when the
Prodigal Son comes home after he had wasted the family inheritance on wild living.
He comes home, and what does the father do? Instead of scolding him, the father
welcomes him back and throws him a party. We feel like the older brother in
the story, the one who has been there with the father the whole time, knocking
ourselves out doing what was right. We just can't understand how the father
could treat that scoundrel of a son with such love and mercy. It just doesn't
make sense.
It makes us angry. It makes us angry because it
is about us and about how we think even today so very many years after this
comedy was written. We like to divide the world up into “Us” and “them”.
And we expect that God will be with us.
Robert Frost, wrotes a short play, about Jonah
the Masque of Mercy. The figure of Jonah in this retelling of the Bible story,
repeatedly laments, "I can't trust God to be unmerciful." “I
can’t trust God to be unmerciful.” You have to Unravel the double
negative here to get to the meaning. It seems to mean we can’t deal with
a God who can't be trusted to join us in our hatred of our enemies. This God
will not honor the way we organize the world according to our sense of who deserves
mercy and who doesn't.
When I was in Isreal two springs ago we had a
speaker, a Jewish Israeli journalist,. He talked about the psychology of Israeli
relationships with other countries, particularly regarding their support for
the Palestinian people. He talked about how hard it was for some of his fellow
countrymen to understand that to to be pro Israel does not mean that we have
to hate the people she hates. We all have a piece of that in us. If you are
my friend then my enemies must be your enemies.
We think, If you love me you have to hate who
I hate! Ninevah is our enemy so you must hate them too. How would we look at
the world if we truly saw our enemies as God’s own children?
Soren Kierkegaard is a theologian who used stories
and parables in his attempts to speak of our relationship with God. One story
is titled Kernels and Shells. The title Kierkegaard originally gave to this
story was, "To what may the relation of God and the world be compared?"
In this tale, two men are seated across from each other at a small table, cracking
and eating nuts. It turns out that one man likes the shell while the other would
eat only the kernel. Kierkegaard instructs the reader to notice how well these
two suit each other. Then we are told that this is how God is related to the
world. What humans frequently despise, reject or cast away, God uses. In this
strange relationship, the mystery of salvation is somehow disclosed.
That which Jonah despises, like the hated city
Ninevah, God values and redeems. Held up as a comic mirror, we see in Jonah
our own relationship with God. Is it not possible to imagine a God who loves
all people? Is it not possible to accept that God desires all people to come
to him? And indeed to follow him. When Jesus called the disciples I don’t
only think he was asking the disciples to traipse around the countryside with
him. I think he meant that they should be of the same mind, have the same spirit;
Follow my example, follow my ways.
What would this kingdom that we are to proclaim
look like if we did indeed follow him in understanding God’s mercy for
all the world?
Today the children in Sunday School will be engaged
in considering just that. Their mission program is called “Stand with Africa.”
The children will learn that it is not about “us” helping “them”
but rather about how we can stand together, how we can come to know each other,
what we can come to learn from each other, How we can come to see that we are
all God’s children, all of us beneficiaries of God’s mercy and care.
Yes we can talk about the devastating AIDS crisis but we’ll also hear about
the fastest growing Chrisitan community in the world. Mission is not about charity,
about us giving money and things to others. It is about recognizing our mutuality,
unity.
Truly the story about Jonah is not about “us”
at all. It is about God, about God’s great mercy and care—and then
I guess we can talk about “us” following that example.
The preacher Barbara Brown Taylor says “As far as I’m concerned the book of Jonah has the best last line in the Bible, God says, “And should I not be concerned about Ninevah?”
Amen.