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.
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