Rachel Landers Vaagenes Once Upon a Time in Nineveh The Georgetown Presbyterian Church The Book of Jonah January 25, 2015 3rd Sunday after Epiphany

Let us pray. Dear God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

If you were here for the Call to Worship, you just heard the entire book of Jonah, only slightly out of order. The book is only four chapters. 48 verses in all, and it only takes seven minutes and 22 seconds to read, so I hope you will forgive me this slight indulgence.

I did this for a few reasons. First, when was the last time you read a whole book in the bible? Well, now you have. The humor and complex literary structure are a delight. I thank Clerk Henwood for his admirable sailor voices. But more than entertainment or education, Jonah is a story of faith that is heard best as a whole. Take any of the chapters away from the others and you could get a wildly different picture of Jonah, God, and the meaning of repentance. But read together we can view them for what they are:

Jonah is a riot. Buster Keaton could have played him in a silent film. You can picture the scene: God appears in a flash of lightning and glory, with an angelic chorus all around him, looks at Jonah and points to Nineveh . . . Jonah smiles, nods, does his best to look pious, and then does an about-face and runs in the other direction . . . Jonah unsuccessfully tries to get himself killed at least once, and he accidentally causes repentance and conversion of the roughest sailors and most heathen sinners, even when he is trying his best not to.

When he was in the belly of the fish—Jonah’s most pious moment—he prayed declaring that “Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” and one verse later Jonah was delivered: vomited out onto a beach by a giant fish— which I can assure you violated at least seven Levitical purity laws.

Finally, when he is forced to bring the Word of the Lord to Nineveh, he does so covered in fish bile. Perhaps there is an ill-placed bit of seaweed clinging to his sandals and a starfish in his beard. And because he wasn’t swallowed with his luggage, he undoubtedly has to wear his stinking clothes on the long hot walk to the hated Assyrian capitol.

Jonah, waterlogged and broken, reaches the walls of Nineveh, and looks back over his shoulder: there he sees God, the angels and the lightning, urging him forward eagerly. He sighs, and barely steps foot into Nineveh. Then he mumbles five words in Hebrew, and immediately the whole city is sitting in sackcloth and ashes.

I can picture it now: Jonah, standing next to a bored goat-herder:

“Cough-cough.” … “ Forty Days More and Nineveh will be overthrown.”

“What?”

…

1 “Forty Days More and Nineveh will be overthrown.”

“Oh man! Thanks so much for telling us! We are so sorry and we’ll get right on this. Hey Zerubabel! Shaharazad! Guess what this wet little man told me!”

This bumbling prophet meets with success that major prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah could only dream of, but instead of being happy, he requests death. Apparently this is all too much for him. Sure, the folks of Nineveh have heard the word of God, but does anyone care about Jonah? Doesn’t anyone see what an ordeal he has been put through? And for what? God was going to save the city with or without him.

There is Jonah, sitting under a short-lived bean plant, on a first-name basis with the Lord, and he is still complaining.

In the end, God asks him if he is more concerned with a magical bush than with the city of Nineveh.

So who is Jonah?

Jonah is a phony. He hides it well, though. He is called a prophet, and according to 2 Kings, he gets good marks in bringing the Word of God to the “evil” Israelite King Jeroboam II. Point of fact he gets him to “reestablish the border of Israel from Le’bo-ha’math as far as the sea of Arabah.” He is, you might say, a career man—a career prophet. He maybe even got Prophet of the Month for that border thing. All the while a fake, hiding his faithlessness in religious respectability.

And who knows? Maybe Jonah thought he was doing pretty well. Maybe he had fooled even himself. I get the impression that Jonah had been very pleased with his station and was also very concerned with keeping himself comfortable and out of trouble.

And no one can blame him from running from Nineveh. It was the capital of the Assyrian empire—the same people who had laid waste to the Northern Kingdom of Israel. The city’s name would have burned in the ears of the earliest hearers of this story. To risk being anachronistic: Nineveh was hell on earth.

We can identify with Jonah. He is only trying to do his best. Just trying to keep it together in a harsh and crazy world. But if we can see ourselves in Jonah, we must also see the relentlessness with which God pursued him. God did not let this prophet languish in one obscure footnote of the holy story.

The midweek bible study is reading through the Psalms this season. I was talking with newly-minted-Elder Matt Taylor about the 23rd Psalm, so beloved in our tradition. The last verse, “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” is not translated as strongly as the Hebrew word might suggest, Matt said. Another translation could be “Surely goodness and mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life.” While still good news, this picture of goodness and mercy hunting us down lies in stark contrast with the idyllic Green Pastures gated community that we might usually think of.

God does not let us go. God hunts us down. This doesn’t mean that God helps us back on our path when we stumble. It means that God knocks us off our own path, chases us to the ends of the earth, and drags us back so that God’s will might be done. This can be inconvenient for us.

This book teaches us that, yes, we are very precious to God, but it also teaches us that God does not care very much about our own agendas. Again and again these verses make it clear that it is not our insider status that is important. It is not our membership in the right church or our ability to recite orthodox theology that

2 matters to God. Jonah knows about God. He says, “I am a Hebrew. I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who created the sea and the dry land.” He says, “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to repent from punishing.” In the belly of the fish he knows that “Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”

He talks the talk, but walking it is another matter.

It is a gift that we have the story of Jonah in the Bible, because in him we can recognize ourselves and know that God loves and accepts reluctant prophets. But God will not let us go at that.

As with Jonah, God pursues us, God delivers us, God will not let us go. If we fight, God is patient. If we run, God is persistent.

By the end of the fourth chapter, the Lord seems to be directly questioning us: And should I not care for Nineveh? That great city? God dares us to answer.

God dared Jonah to answer. He called Jonah’s bluff. Jonah the prophet. Jonah the Hebrew, who could quote the theology, who claimed to worship and know the Lord. But when God said go, Jonah chose his own way.

His own way wasn’t easy, nor was it cheap and convenient. I can imagine the ship’s crew at Joppa raising their eyebrows at a king’s prophet hurriedly demanding passage with a bag full of gold.

I can’t preach on Jonah without thinking of the sermon in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Father Mapple, a former seaman-turned-preacher speaks of Jonah:

“As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his willful disobedience of the command of God—never mind now what that command was or how it was conveyed—which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.”

To follow God is to place God at the center of our lives. Jesus, when heading towards the cross, said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?”

Jonah tried to buy his life by purchasing passage on a boat in Joppa. He tried to put the whole world between him and God by sailing to the farthest point of the Mediterranean. Jonah tried to exchange the truth of God for a lie. And in doing so, his life lost its moorings.

People have been trying to go their own way since the beginning. In Genesis we read that Adam and Eve tried to hide, and were just as unsuccessful as Jonah. Cain, King David, the disciples . . . the whole story of God is a testament to the faith of God in the face of our faithlessness.

3 Paraphrasing theologian Karl Barth: In Jesus Christ, God accomplished . . . the reconciliation of the world to God . . . No one and nothing can undo or reverse this free act of free grace of the free God . . .This good news is the truth. But [because this truth exposes our own sins] we [recoil] from it as it comes to us.” “And because [sinful man] is startled by it, he must try to evade it, to keep it from his ears and mind, to reject it.”1

In Eden, after Adam and Eve have eaten of the fruit, they try to hide. When God asks them, “Where are you?” It is a rhetorical question.

It seems stupid to hide from God. Even Jonah knows that there is no escape. But we try to do it all the time. We try to live our lives as if Christ has changed nothing. We go on trusting in money, gravity, death, and our own flawed efforts more than we trust in the God of heaven. Even our religion can become a way of keeping God at arms’ length.

It is foolish for us to try to fake it. The world looks at the church and sees hypocrisy and sin. We exchange the truth for a lie. Fortunately, we “worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” God is just as capable of calling us in the storm as he is calling us on the shore.

Our lie is just that, a lie, nothing more. We do not create an alternate reality alongside the truth and purposes of God. Barth again writes, “The falsehood of man has no power to alter or even to set aside the reality of God. We can stand on our heads, but that doesn’t flip the world upside down . . . [we have] not slipped out of the grasp of the divine power and mercy.”2

The sailors and the Ninevites recognized that the only thing that should be expected is God’s wrath and judgment, and that second chances are gifts. But with the Ninevite King we can ask, “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”

We do not get to hear the end of Jonah’s story. The book ends with the question of God’s mercy and grace ringing in his ears. We get no guarantee that Jonah has a change of heart and repents. But neither do we see the axe of judgment fall. Who knows how God’s story ends? All we can do is be thankful that God has been patient with us so far.

We are God’s. In our faithful moments that is a strong comfort, but in our faithless moments it can be heard as a threat. Jonah knew that better than he knew God’s mercy. Thanks be to God that Jonah got a second chance.

Thanks be to God for the grace which has allowed us this new morning.

Amen.

1 KB CD, IV.3.1, p 463. 2 Ibid 468-9, emph mine

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