Easter 4 A Jonah 2 May 3, 2020 I feel like Jonah. Frequently. The biblical story of this small prophet is my own story, in so many, many ways. Do you know the story of Jonah? You might. You probably know that he was swallowed by a whale. When I was a child, I used to get Jonah and Pinocchio mixed up because the cartoon images of Pinocchio and Gepetto in the belly of Monstro the whale from the Walt Disney movie were really scary and intense. I didn’t want to be anything like Jonah or Pinocchio or anyone who was ever swallowed by a whale. But who would? Even if you know the science of it, that whales only eat tiny plankton and they can’t actually swallow people, it’s still a frightening thought. Even if you know the Bible doesn’t say the word “whale” either, it says God provided a “large fish”. Who would want to be swallowed by a large fish, to spend three days and three nights in a dark fish belly at the bottom of the sea? But Jonah did. Get swallowed. Spend three days and three nights in the fish’s belly. And then got vomited up on the beach to start again. What a strange story this is. The book of Jonah is worth reading. It’s only four short chapters. It tells the story of Jonah the son of Amittai, who was told by God to go preach repentance to the people of Nineveh. And Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh. He was from Galilee and he was Jewish. Nineveh was in Assyria, what is now Iraq, and it was located where the city of Mosul is now. Those people were pagans, they lived a long way away from Jonah and he didn’t see why God should want to bother about whether a bunch of pagans repented or not. So Jonah decided to run from God. He found a ship at Joppa and sailed toward the farthest, westernmost end of the Mediterranean Sea. But God doesn’t like it when people run away from tasks that God wants them to perform. So God caused a great storm to rise, and the sailors knew that someone on the boat was bad luck and had brought the storm upon them. They were going to cast lots to find a victim to blame and toss overboard to appease the sea. Well, Jonah didn’t want an innocent person to die, so he confessed that he was the one angering God. He volunteered to be tossed overboard, to save the lives of the rest of the crew. So they threw Jonah into the sea. And the storm stopped. And Jonah sank, down, down, down, praying for his life. And in the nick of time, God appointed a fish to swallow Jonah. There, in the belly of the fish, Jonah had nothing to do but pray. Pray and sing a beautiful song of hope and redemption. This psalm of Jonah’s never makes it into our regular schedule of Bible readings. It never got into the lectionary. We hear from Jonah every three years or so in the readings, but never this part. We get the part after the fish vomits him out, after he takes God’s orders seriously and goes to Nineveh and walks across it for three days saying, “Repent, or Nineveh will be destroyed.” We get to hear that the Ninevites repented and God did not destroy them, and that even though Jonah is ENRAGED that God will not punish them, in the end, God’s all-encompassing love covers everything--Jonah, all the people of Nineveh, a strange little tree that springs up and dies in a day, and also … as the King James version of the story puts it, also “much cattle.” But we don’t get this chapter, chapter two. The song of Jonah. I called to the Lord out of my distress and he answered me. We don’t hear this beautiful poetry. All your waves and your billows passed over me. The waters closed in over me, the deep surrounded me, weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. We don’t learn of Jonah’s cry of despair and then his deliverance. As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the Lord and my prayer came to you. Deliverance belongs to the Lord! This past week, I felt like we have really been in the belly of the fish. This week, I felt like Jonah’s voice could easily be our voice. That Jonah’s song could become our song. Of all the Sundays since COVID-19 upended our lives, this particular Sunday felt like it was coming on dark, like we all might be drowning, like we had been held in the hot, wet belly of a creepy sea monster for long enough. So I put the second chapter of Jonah in our readings for today. Because desperate spiritual times call for desperate spiritual measures. And I think our times cry out for this song of Jonah, as he was quarantined and sequestered in the fish, unable to move, to get out, to get away. Our times need this psalm of praise and hope that comes out of a state of sinking, out of a state of drowning, out of a flood of circumstance that Jonah cannot escape. Yesterday was forty days of the stay at home order. Forty days. As long as Jesus fasted in the wilderness. A lockdown, literally, of Biblical proportions. And we are trapped in this weird state of being. Because on the one hand, we really are fine. As far as I know, NO ONE at All Saints has had COVID-19, or lost a loved one to the virus. But we still have to stay home and mask up, and at any moment, it seems, any of us might catch it. Most people I know are still employed. But 1 in 6 Americans have filed for unemployment. And it’s not clear who will stay employed as the ripples of this pandemic roll through the economy. And that is a lurking sort of dread over many of us. Most people I know have decent housing. Lights, heat, water, internet are not even in question for most of us. And yet being forced to stay in our nice, safe homes has its own stresses…for some the stress of loneliness and isolation, for others the stress of too many family members on top of one another, all with competing demands of work and schooling and socializing. Most of us are just fine. And yet we watch the news and we are on the internet and we know that many people are not fine. Some people are sick, others are caring for the sick. Some are dying. Some are out of work. Some are angry and believe that standing in the rotunda of our state Capitol screaming into the faces of police officers will send everything back to normal. Around the world, the virus spreads and it has not been conquered, not yet. And to figure out what the future is really going to be like, we might as well have a Magic 8 ball for all the good any of our predictions will do. And so we are restless, betwixt and between. And it’s not over. Forty days of this and more to come. And the hope of re-entry and the fear of re-entry push us and pull us with competing desires, to get out and live life, to stay inside and stay safe. Do we want to go to Nineveh, do we want to run away and hide out? What does God want from us? And if we figure out what God wants from us, do we really even want to do it? It’s the belly of the fish. At least it feels like that to me. A time between that former world and the world to come, between life as we knew it and life as it is going to be. A liminal space. Disorienting. Destabilizing. And it makes us impatient, impatient for it to finish up, to be done already. This week, I read a message written by a cancer survivor named Sheryl Fullerton. She wrote about her cancer journey as a liminal time, a strange space between the life before cancer and her life after. And parts of that time were awful, but parts of it were filled with new possibility, with the promise of transformation, and with the power of the Holy Spirit. She wrote: What if we can choose to experience this liminal space and time, this uncomfortable now, as a place and state of creativity, of construction and deconstruction, choice and transformation? Is it then, also the realm of the Holy Spirit, our comforter, who does not take away the vastness and possibility of this opened-up threshold time, but invites us to lay down our fears and discomfort to see what else is there, hard as that may be? In the belly of the fish, Jonah made that choice. He chose to pray. He chose to sing. In the belly of the fish, Jonah opened himself up to the truth of his life, that he was drowning, he was sinking, he was trapped…and yet God was present. In the silence, he found his voice, and it was a voice of thanksgiving. My friends, Jonah finally accepted his reality.