The Open Question - Jonah 4:1-11

 

I most often don’t like tour guides. It’s not because I don’t value information or think that I don’t need help learning about something. It’s because they tend to get in the way – they stand in front of the beautiful thing I wish to look at, or make a dumb joke when all I want is silence, to pay attention, to listen to the voice inside of myself which has something to say. And yet here I am again, like every Sunday, acting as your lumbering tour guide, requiring you to follow me, and listen to me ramble. I have important things to say, I think, but don’t let me get in the way. Don’t let me get in the way between you, Jonah, and God, don’t fail to hear the open question that only you can answer for yourself. To honor this Biblical book which offers us such questions, I too will pause at times to ask questions of you. You can answer or not, that’s between you and God.

4 But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry.

This is rather free translation “seemed very wrong.” The Hebrew actually has Jonah thinking this was a “great evil” rather than very wrong. (NOTE: the NIV, which is most often the translation that I read, has unfortunate habit of sanitizing text to make them PG or G. The translators obviously struggle having the prophet refer to God’s activity as a “great evil” but, as we shall see, much is missed by softening his critique.) Why? Why would Jonah be so upset at a God who offers compassion and forgiveness, let alone account for such a response as “evil.” Here are some suggestions:

1.     Character flaw – “a mean and nasty prophet”

2.     Fear. This view has two parts which may or may not be connected: 1. That Jonah flees initially because he’s worried about being killed for preaching doom in Nineveh and lies about knowing what God was going to do (we do that all the time when we don’t know something). 2. Jonah worries that God’s compassion will make him look like a false prophet and thus place him in mortal jeopardy. Here’s riddle for you? If a prophet preaches “destruction” and the people repent and escape judgment, was the prophet wrong? According to Deuteronomy 18:22, we can tell a prophet is from God by whether or not what they say comes true. And the punishment for being found to be a false prophet is death. So some posit that what makes Jonah angry was that God’s compassion put his own life in jeopardy.

3.     Collective victim of trauma – currently this book is read every year on the festival of Yom Kippur, the festival of atonement. What’s it like to read this book in post-Holocaust world? Remember who the Assyrians are! Around 740 BC, the Assyrians defeated Israel and deported many of its citizens. In 701, it set its sights on Judah, hoping to take Jerusalem captive. This campaign was documented by the Assyrians in stone relief, called the Lachish relief, named after the town in Judah, which was set in the throne room of the Assyrian king. In it we get to see first-hand depictions of what the Assyrians did to their enemies. Etched in stone are pictures of people being flayed alive, their skin ripped from their legs, and then being hung in public. We see victims being impaled and left to die slowly out in the open. People are buried alive up to their necks and wasting away. They would cut off limbs, gouge out eyes, crucify people (they invented it). They were even known to have conquered peoples dig up their dead ancestors and then grind the bones into dust in order to effectively erase a people and their history from existence. These are the people that God is showing mercy to.

So yeah, Jonah is angry. It’s his wrath that we confront. I meet so many people who fear God’s wrath when perhaps what they should truly fear is the wrath of human beings who supposedly speak for God. It’s human beings who often long for death and destruction, not God. Or is it justice? I wonder, what’s the difference? (Pause)

² He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. ³ Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

Some prayer. I love it that the Bible keeps it. Jonah essentially prays his complaint and anger. Perhaps you should pray yours. Let’s stop and consider the power of this for a moment. In this chapter we have the prophet calling the actions of God a “great evil,” complaining to God, and asking to die BECAUSE of God’s display of mercy toward enemies. And God in response doesn’t censor him, harm him, but with a surprising gentleness asks him open-ended questions. The writer of Jonah is trying to reveal the love of grace in an interesting way by giving both Jonah and God the same amount of words – each character is given 47 words: Jonah has the first 39 words. YHWH replies with 3 words. Jonah has 3 words. YHWH uses 5 words. Jonah offers 5 words. YHWH ends with 39 words. And in those words, God never pulls rank, doesn’t tell Jonah to shut up, and doesn’t play the “I’m God” card. But he does asks troubling questions. Are you willing to be troubled? Are you willing to be troubled in church about God?

I also love it that Jonah complains about Scripture, particularly Exodus 34:6, and God’s supposed graciousness. Notice that a grace-filled, redeeming God IS the God of the Old Testament. The God who forgives wicked empires, which know neither his law nor his name, is the Father who sends the Son, Jesus, and that Jesus does nothing but what the God of Jonah has sent him to do. Notice also that Jonah’s quoting of Ex. 34:6 leaves off one word, “truth,” which follows immediately after loving-kindness. Perhaps this is because he feels cheated. His announcement of destruction didn’t come true. How can God be true if enemies don’t suffer? What he failed to notice, however, is that the word most often paired with hesed or loving-kindness in scripture is the word “truth.” This is so often the case in the Psalms that it becomes a cliché (see Ps. 25:10; 40:10-11; 85:10; 89:14; 115:1). In two Psalms (57:10 & 108:4) we find the amazing couplet: “Your loving-kindness is higher than the heavens, your truth reaches to the clouds.” What if, friends, the loving-kindness of God is what is most true about God, the world, our enemies?

⁴ But the Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?” ⁵ Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. ⁶ Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant^[a] and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. ⁷ But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. ⁸ When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.” ⁹ But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” “It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”

I want to make an exegetical point right off the bat that the NIV’s choice of “right” in vs., 4 is perfectly acceptable but mutes the powerful reality that the word is actually “good.” [In the same way that it translated the Hebrew word “evil” as “wrong” and “calamity”] God wants Jonah to wrestle with his goodness and wants to leave that word “good” echoing in our minds in sharp contrast to the word “evil” which Jonah has used for God (vs. 1 – “a great evil”; vs. 2 calamity/evil). Jonah’s anger places him outside of the city. His own anger and certitude of what God should do and who the Ninevites are becomes a self-imposed exile “east of the city.”

The use of the word “shelter” in vs. 4 would also have been picked up by any Jewish reader because it directly related to the festival of booths spoken of in Deut. 16:16. The festival was to be a renewal of the knowledge and obedience to the law of God but also a time when Israel was commanded to welcome, Gentiles, strangers, and foreigners within their gates (Deut. 16:14). This festival will gain a profound eschatological point later when Zechariah announces that the festival of booths will be the time when all of Israel’s enemies will “worship the King, the LORD Almighty” (14:16). In the sustained ironic fashion of the entire book – Jonah sits in exile, outside of the city, participating in a ritualized ceremony of law-keeping and welcome while he refuses to welcome. Who are you refusing to welcome, to believe that God loves, that currently places you in exile, outside of the city?

But even in that exile, Jonah finds deliverance. Shade, for all the reasons that should be obvious, means protection and functions as a symbol for deliverance (Isaiah 25:4-5) and the “shelter,” “shade,” and “plant” aim to point to obedience to the law, deliverance, and God’s promise to reestablish Jerusalem with a coming messiah (“the shelter of David,” (Amos 9:11) in order to save Israel and defeat her enemies. There is so much going on here I was tempted to either write another sermon or just start going bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb (finger on my lips.) All this talk about shelters, shade, plants aim to speak about Israel’s past and her destiny as God’s elect and her current political misfortunes that felt overwhelming, and mind-boggling, and cruel. And the last thing I would say is that that is seen by the fact that the worm didn’t chew the plant. Yep, that’s right. No, the Hebrew is very particular and once again falls prey to translators who choose to make things harmonize rather than catch the deep symbolism of the writer’s word choice. The actual word used for what the worm does to the plant is “struck.” It’s the word for a military attack which often gets translated by the King James version as “smite.” What dream, deep belief, core value, have you felt smited? What deliverance have you failed to experience? What loss has left you wanting to die?

¹⁰ But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. ¹¹ And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”

The book ends with a question that is left open for all of us to answer as the story continues beyond the text. It opens to a mountain top view where each of us will stand at some point and be asked, “Who is God and what does God want?”

The Lord’s gentle critique of Jonah’s anger and desire for death is that he fails to fully extend “pity,” which is the better translation for “concerned” or “concern” in vss. 10 and 11. This is even more important when one recognizes that throughout the law the Israelites are repeatedly commanded not to pity anyone who has acted unjustly (Deut. 7:16, 13:8, 19:13, 21, 25:12). Pity is presented as that which keeps justice from coming about. But God doesn’t rebuke Jonah for pitying Israel’s and Judah’s losses, though such losses occurred because they themselves acted unjustly repeatedly. No, God’s gentle rebuke is that Jonah’s pity doesn’t go far enough.

The God who is compassionate is the God who makes and tends, vs. 10. Why “animals”? Because it once again asserts that there is one created community that needs redemption and that God cares for all that God has made.

And it’s fascinating to hear God define Nineveh’s wickedness as ignorance – “people who cannot tell their right hand from their left.” The LORD gave the law to his people so that they might the way of life and not turn from it “either to the right hand or to the left” Deut. 5:32, 28:14).But the people of Nineveh don’t know the way and therefore wander far from it, destroying all that is around them, including themselves.

There is a sense of deep intimacy in which God has numbered the people of Nineveh. Almost every time God numbers anything it aims to speak of a deep compassion and knowing. It’s the intimacy of seeing in which he watches a father in Nineveh pick up his young daughter and gently place her on his shoulders while he walks to the market. It’s the intimacy of seeing where God spies a middle-aged daughter, weeping, kissing her mother good-bye as she passes a way. It’s the deep knowing where a family cries over a beloved cow – a pet – that gave them milk and companionship. That’s what God sees – the God who creates fathers, and holds weeping daughters, and even tends to cows or chickens or cats.

There is a sense of deep longing and pain in Jonah. All he can see is blood. It’s the trauma of seeing Ninevite soldiers peel the skin off of young men who will never be fathers. It’s the horror of hearing of a young woman be abused by soldiers, forced to watch as her elderly mother is slaughtered. It’s the pain of watching animals, crops, grain, and comforts destroyed leaving nothing to eat. That’s what Jonah sees –people who were horribly, terribly, mercilessly harmed and the people who did it, with mere repentance, discovering mercy.

Last week I asked you how you might respond to Jonah given all that transpires, and the fact that God loves the very killers who sought to wipe his people off of the map – who would actually try and erase people groups by making them grind the bones of their ancestors into dust. And while God ends stating unequivocally that he loves such people, he neither commands nor condemns Jonah for his refusal. I talked to my wife about this and she told me that she would have responded to Jonah in a number of ways. But, even more dramatically, she shared with me that she felt as if God’s open ended question to Jonah was God saying to the traumatized prophet, “I love them. You don’t have to love them, not yet - not yet.” Who is it, that you are unwilling to love yet?

A Topsy-Turvy God ~ Jonah 3:1-10

 Jonah is a topsy-turvy theological story. It wants to subvert, to challenge, to up-set, and so to read it rightly and well – as people in the present – is to read it in a topsy-turvy way with a topsy-turvy God. And, in case it isn’t obvious, while topsy-turvy can sound like a cute word, a nice word, a silly word. It isn’t. In fact, the origin of the word “turvy” means to be thrown down, to dash. No wonder Jonah wasn’t happy about it. But to ease your pain, I’m going to do something I generally don’t do. I’m going to work verse by verse through our passage. Expository preaching – See! Topsy-turvy!

¹Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time: ² “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.” ³ Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it.

The book of Jonah is divided into symmetrical halves – Jonah’s flight from God and then of his mission to Nineveh. Each part has three sections – God’s word to Jonah, then his encounter with the Gentile pagans, and finally Jonah talking to God. We’re going to see then that Jonah – twice – finds himself in a close encounter with people who are ethnically and religiously different. In both cases, the prophet is sullen and struggling, while the pagans act responsibly and admirably. Topsy-turvy.

Vs. 1 of chapter 3 begins exactly as vs. 1 of chapter 1. And Jonah is given a second chance And this time, Jonah obeys and goes. Two things are worth noting at this juncture. First, it is no small feat that Jonah obeys and goes. He is a Jewish prophet, far from home, walking the city of an incredibly powerful foreign empire with harsh news. So regardless that he’s begrudging, his decision at least deserves our respect. We need to constantly remind ourselves that Jonah is the weaker party, the more marginal voice, and one of the oppressed minority. So we must question any interpretation that would suggest that Jonah is a “mean and nasty prophet.” Of course, we should also question the all too easy interpretive lens that Jonah is us. Second, the fact that God comes to him again is probably even more important. God offers Jonah a second chance. By the way, never forget that God is the main character of this story and gets the last word. And that even though Jonah is disobedient, belligerent, moody – God still wants to partner with him. Topsy-turvy.

Vs. 3, however, might be one of the more significant verses of this passage. Most translators omit the Hebrew phrase that “to God” in vs. 3. The literal rendering of the Hebrew is something like this: “Now Nineveh was a great city to God, a journey of three days.” Most translators leave off “to God” because they believe that its use aims to signal enormity of size, that Nineveh was a big city. And there is certainly plenty of warrant for understanding it in that way. However, if we choose to read Jonah in a topsy-turvy way, it’s also possible to read “to God” being a more discombobulating remark about God’s relationship to Nineveh. When we do that, we see that that there are 29 instances where that phrase means “belongs to God.” (c.f. Jeremiah 7:23, 11:4, 30:22, 31:1, 31:33, 32:38; Ezekiel 11:20, 14:11, 34:24, 36:28, 37:23, 37:27). When we accept a topsy-turvy God we see a people who respond God more quickly than Jonah. When we listen to a topsy-turvy story, we are reminded once again that in the heart of God and with an empire known for excessive cruelty, violence, and wickedness, there still is no “us vs. them.” What would it be like to go through life saying of everyone you meet – “A great person to God.” Topsy-turvy

One final remark. We have this interesting use of a “three day” journey. Archaeological surveys of the region question the notion that Nineveh was large enough to require a three-day walk. Why else give us this detail? In such a short book, details matter. The literary real estate is scarce making every word count. I’ve already spoken to you about this notion of three days, which we also encountered in chapter two, that in the ancient Mediterranean world, across different cultures and religions, it was commonplace to understand the journey to the underworld as a three-day journey. It would seem then that rather than being once again a question of size, we have a clever, topsy-turvy rendering that tells us that Jonah is on another journey toward rock bottom, as he encounters a Nineveh-loving God. And friends, everyone must go, will go, on this journey. The spiritual journey is always a three-day journey and there you will encounter God.  But, it turns out this time, Jonah is the fish – the vehicle for Nineveh’s salvation. Topsy-turvy.

⁴ Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”

Jonah wins the prize for shortest sermon – 5 words in Hebrew. And the topsy-turvy continues. The Hebrew word haphak could be translated either “overthrown” or “changed or transformed.” Interestingly, both also have the potential to be true. And both are emblematic of God’s judgment and wrath, even though those words are never mentioned. But, always remember, judgment is God taking what has lain destructively in the dark and bringing it to the light.

The writer of Jonah and prophets like Isaiah held a complicated and nuanced vision of what God’s wrath was and how it functioned in the world. They did not simply assert wrath to be human anger on divine steroids: “Well, you done messed up and now God’s gonna git ya!” For example, Isaiah prophesies: “Through the wrath of the Lord of hosts the land is scorched, and the people are like fuel for the fire; no one spares another . . . they devour . . . but are not satisfied . . . Manasseh devours Ephraim, and Ephraim devours Manasseh . . .” (Isaiah 9:19-21). Likewise, Ezekiel understands that sin generates a snowballing effect with its own internal consequences. God declares, “I have consumed them with the fire of my wrath,” and immediately states what that entails: “I have returned their conduct upon their heads.” (Ezekiel 22:31).

Jewish writers through powerful symbol and metaphor carefully attribute the misery and social unraveling perpetrated by a group of people (which Isaiah expresses as metaphorical cannibalism) as the outworking of God’s wrath. The point is not so much to suggest that God stomps around heaven raging at this and that but to argue that in a world created by a good God, evil and injustice are inherently self-destructive. Social disintegration or political upheaval are not so much God pulling the levers of destruction but a cause and effect process clothed in the religious language of Yahweh’s sovereignty and might that essentially express God’s responsibility of creating and sustaining the world.  Such a process also aims to bring people to their knees, to make people aware of what is actually killing them. You can’t eat yourself and survive, is the point. And God, well God doesn’t want to eat you either. Either way – you will be overthrown or changed – both are always true. Topsy-turvy.

⁵ The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. ⁶ When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. ⁷ This is the proclamation he issued in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. ⁸ But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. ⁹ Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”

It's interesting that the sermon of Jonah did not call for the Ninevites to believe and respond, they believed and responded anyway.  What exactly are the Ninevites repenting from? Vs. 8 says, “their evil ways and violence.” The most common Hebrew word for violence is used almost exclusively for human violence and is almost always condemned. The prophets will constantly call out violence: “do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan and the widow” (Jer. 22:3); put away violence and oppression” (Ezekiel 45:9); and do not do “violence to the earth” (Hab. 2:8, 17, Zeph. 1:9). Moreover, violence isn’t simply physical but also exercised through words as well as social and environmental concerns. Even the reality of poverty is conceived of as a product of violence.  Micah 6:12 puts it without qualification: “Your wealthy people are full of violence.” The prophets will repeatedly declare that God wants to bring an end to violence (Isaiah 2:4; Hosea 2:18; Micah 4:3)

What’s interesting about the repentance is that while Jonah will reference the group as a whole, the Assyrians themselves will also acknowledge personal responsibility. There is an interesting reality that, even before the king decrees it, people from all levels of society “from the greatest to the least” repent. But there is also a sense in which individuals are each to “call on God” and give up their own evil and violence (it’s worship and justice; spirituality and social concern). And the community that is invited to repent is all of creation. Topsy-turvy.

¹⁰ When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.

Jonah gleefully preached certain destruction - didn’t offer an invitation, didn’t ask for a response. And this wicked, destructive, pagan, violent city – people – empire was shown mercy. And God saw. Crisis averted. And the prophet? Well the prophet was mad. Are you mad at God’s mercy or are you perplexed by Jonah’s anger? I want to invite you into a topsy-turvy reality of joining Jonah, to getting in touch with your anger at love in the face of torturous killers, at recognizing that love is not syrupy or romantic or sweet. I want you to wrestle with real evil and real forgiveness and remember that if you live real love – God’s love, Jesus reminds us – it very well could get you killed.

Listen, Learn, & Locate God with Pagans ~ Jonah 1

 

When I was a kid we had protestors at church for a couple of months. They weren’t protesting our faith or commitment to following Jesus but the growth of the church which was buying up properties all around the neighborhood, tearing down homes for parking lots, and, in ways that I didn’t understand at the time, destroying the property values of their homes. Every Sunday after church a group of neighbors would stand outside the sanctuary often silently critiquing these changes or passing out fliers telling of their plight. In a moment that is sadly burned into my memory, I remember as a high school student taking a hand-full of fliers from an elderly woman and making a big show of throwing them in the trash. We were on God’s side, right? I didn’t need to listen to nonbelievers. This type of thinking lingered in me until I did a Ph.D. at a secular state university where I encountered amazing people, upright people, devoted people – to others, the plight of the poor, the problems in our world and yet who did not believe. And I began to learn, sometimes painfully, that I had much to learn from nonbelievers. Sometimes we learn the truths of God through Bible study. At other times we learn the truths of God in the world and later find them confirmed in the church and in reading Scripture. This sermon is the latter and for my friends who don’t believe and for that elderly lady who I should have listened to. The first thing that Jonah invites us to is to . . .

Listen to pagans . . .

The famous French Protestant Jacques Ellul in a discussion of Jonah famously declared: “Pagans can rebuke the church.” And the story of Jonah bears witness to the utter inadequacies of the binary vision that I had in my youth. The story of Jonah reminds us that non-believers can . . .

speak for God. When the captain finds Jonah sleeping in the hull of the ship he says, “Arise, call . . . !” [Hebrew qum lek, vs. 6] the same words God used when calling Jonah to arise, go, and call the Ninevites to repentance. So Jonah is awakened by a Gentile sailor with God’s very words in his mouth. The pagan is preaching to the prophet.

wish the common good. The sailors are in peril and have used the technology and religious resources they have but it’s not enough. They understand that they need Jonah’s help as well, but he is doing nothing to save them. The captain’s question and cry is a direct criticism of Jonah’s lack of concern for the common good of all who are aboard. The captain is saying, “How can you sleep? Can’t you see we’re about to die? Jonah’s indifference to their plight might be the most revealing illustration of his running from God. Friends, our world has much to say about the church right now and while it might not always be a fair critique we are not given the right to not listen, to not respond, to not believe that within that critique is a naming of our own indifference, our failure to love our neighbor. Jesus’ placement of love of neighbor directly with love of God will allow for no indifference to the common good.

discern spiritual realities. The sailors discern that there is a divine connection to the storm and determine to cast lots. Casting lots in order to discern the divine will was quite common in ancient times, even amongst Jewish and Christian believers. It’s possible that each man’s name was put on a stick and Jonah’s name was chosen. And yet even then they so restraint, and carefully take evidence and testimony before doing anything rash.

offer integrity, justice, and hope. Even when they learn that Jonah is at fault and hear him prescribe throwing him overboard in order to save them – they initially refuse seeking rather to try and save all of their lives. “Instead,” we are told, they “did their best to row back to land. But they could not, for the sea grew even wilder than before.” And before they throw him overboard, they pray to God declaring their true wish to not harm Jonah. The irony couldn’t be thicker. Jonah fled because he did not want to work for the good of pagans. And these non-Jewish sailors do everything they can to do good to him. Faced with a problem not of their own making, they seek to solve it for the good of all. So listen to pagan sailors, learn from pagan sailors, receive from pagan sailors – because God is ever-present and always at work.

Learn your identity.

When the sailors recognize that Jonah is the reason for the storm they ask him essentially three things: his purpose (what is your mission?); his place (from where do you come? What is your country?), and his ethnicity (who are your people?). Though the question of ethnicity or race comes last in their list, Jonah answers it first. “I am a Hebrew,” he says before anything else. In a text so sparing with words, it is significant that he reverses the order and puts his ethnicity and national identity as the most important feature of who he is. And that identity is fundamentally exclusionary in nature. Not too distant from the origins of Jonah, it was common for Jewish males to pray daily, “Blessed are You, Eternal our God, who has not made me a gentile. Blessed are You, Eternal our God, who has not made me a woman.” Jonah’s exclusionary identity helps make more sense of why it was that he fled from God and opposed calling Nineveh to repentance in the first place. Because Jonah defines his worship of God as secondary he fails to find a posture of openness that can care for others. His first identity is essentially “othering” which will always lead to rationales of exclusion and violence. Worship of God, however, when understood rightly reminds us that all people are made in the image of God, and, as we have already seen, that God (who is neither Hebrew, nor male, nor white) is at work with all and cares for all. I’m not suggesting that secondary identities are not important. I’m not arguing that you must despise elements of yourself, your heritage, your ethnicity, as if they are meaningless. But Jonah reminds us, that it is those identities that can supersede our created identity that create indifference, neglect, and storms. This is why you won’t find an American flag prominently in our church. This is not because I hate America or that such an identity is wrong. No, the reason you won’t find an American flag is because the temptation is to imagine that it, rather than worship of the God of the sea and land, the God who made all people, the God revealed in Jesus Christ, is what truly gathers us. It’s the temptation that leads one to say, “I am an American” before “I am a worshipper of the One who made everything.” “I am a worshipper of the One in whose image we were all created.”

Locate yourself and God.

I’ve got good news and bad news and they turn out to be the same news – you can’t run from God. Jonah chose Tarshish as his destination as a means of escaping Yahweh. He thought he could use Isaiah’s announcement to his advantage that Tarshish was part of “distant islands that have not heard of [Yahweh’s] fame or glory.” (Isaiah 66:19).

Yet Jonah will discover that “The God of heaven,” is the One, “who made the sea and the dry land.” Where else can you go? The spiritual life at its core is always surrender. It’s recognizing what the little bunny discovers – that the only way of finding contentment and purpose is to surrender to God. And that God will connect you with others. That God will always judge your spirituality by how much you love your neighbor. But there’s even a greater grace then that you can’t run from God.  The story of Jonah also asserts that you can’t find a place where your disobedience is more powerful than God’s will. The profoundly comic element of Jonah’s disobedience is that it still leads to non-Jews surrendering to God. So to locate God is to locate yourself and that’s what will summarize today’s sermon.

Why should we listen to pagans and cultivate an identity as worshippers of God whom we cannot escape? When we do so we will recognize where we are located. We’re all in the same boat!

Friends, the gospel message on one level is all about location – the move from storm, to boat, to worship. The gospel message reveals to us that God can’t be outrun and that – surprise – God in Jesus Christ got in the boat and identified with us and for us. Jesus himself will speak of what he is doing as the “sign of Jonah” – let’s watch closely, listen well, locate God, and worship the Lord together.