| Jonah 1:1-17 "The Courage of Jonah" |
|
| Written by Rev. Don Lee | |
| Saturday, 12 January 2008 | |
|
Prayer: MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen. -a prayer from the Journals of Thomas Merton. Time magazine’s Teddy Awards is a annual list of those who’ve demonstrated courage in the public arena. It gets its name from a quote by Theodore Roosevelt. It reads as follows: It is not the critic who counts: Not the [one] who points out how the strong man [or woman] stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the [one] who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again…who spends him [or herself] in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he [or she] fails, at least he [or she] fails while daring greatly. Of all the things that come to mind when I hear the story of Jonah, courage is not one of them. Jonah’s glaring character flaws seem too deep; too “in your face” to see it, but courage is there nonetheless. The courage to: • Do the right thing, • To honor your beliefs. • To follow your dreams. • To step outside your comfort zone & into the danger zone. • The absolute courage it takes to trust God for the things you cannot control and to believe that ultimately, it is in God we live and move and have our being! • The courage to say yes to God’s “go.” What is the story of Jonah in a nutshell? God tells Jonah to call Nineveh to repentance; instead Jonah heads in the opposite direction to Tarshish; • books passage on a ship, • encounters a violent storm; • is thrown into the water, • swallowed by a big fish, • burped on the shore of Nineveh, • Jonah preaches: “In 10 day you are all going to die” (note, there is no mention of repentance), • the people repent, • God forgives, • and Jonah mopes, “Take me now Lord!” Now suppose for a moment that Jonah believed he was doing the right thing by running away from God. Not that he thought of his actions in those terms. “Go to Nineveh.” Now that’s a crazy thought! Nineveh, a godless town of idolaters, liars, cheats, murderers, deviants, the unholy who prey on the innocent. Sworn enemy of Israel; how many of God’s people had they killed; hundreds, perhaps thousands, to earn them such hatred? Nineveh. A dangerous place for a Jew! “Go to Nineveh”…and do what? Ask the Ninevites to pray to his God for forgiveness. What would you say if in a dream, God told you to move to Bagdad and open a Marshall’s Texas BBQ? “Now that’s a crazy thought!” Nineveh, the last place in the world for God’s prophet. “Why there are lots of people who need a word from God,” Jonah must have reasoned, “especially those good-for-nothing Tarshins! There’s a thought! I’ll still be preaching repentance, just somewhere else.” No! I don’t think Jonah believed he was running from God. It was too easy to reason away the “change of venue.” How long it took God to convince Jonah otherwise is unclear. There is no timeline in the narrative. Weeks, perhaps months before he finally books passage on a fishing trawler out of Joppa. When the fishing trawler encounters a violent storm, the sailors, being a superstitious lot, pray to their gods. Things get so bad the sailors begin to ask, “What have we done to deserve a “burial at sea?” Reluctantly Jonah owns up that he might be the reason things are going south so quickly. And perhaps it is here that Jonah’s request fully realizes he’s been justifying his actions. If repentance is turning toward God, Jonah has done just the opposite. One could even make the case that Jonah’s request to the sailors to throw him overboard was simply a continuation of his ongoing defiance of God, a defiance epitomized in the last chapter of the story, when he prays, “Take me now Lord! Put me out of my misery!” I propose a different scenario. Jonah, seeing the fear of his fellow shipmates, humbled by their brave efforts to row to shore despite his pleas for them to toss him in the violent sea; knowing they had wives and children and hopes and dreams, did the one thing he believed might spare their lives. He mustered the courage to sacrifice himself. His selfless act of compassion for a crew of foreigners, idolaters reveals something easily missed in the narrative. Despite his flaws, deep down Jonah was a good hearted, compassionate person. Jonah, who had allowed his hate of his enemies, his prejudice against a people, his stubborn will to get in the way of doing the right thing (God’s thing), suddenly does the unexpected. He trusts God and plunges head first into the surging waters. And in so doing, surrenders to God’s will; gives in to God’s “whatever.” Listen to his prayer from the belly of the fish: (chapter 2, verse 2) I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me: out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice…The waters closed over me; the deep surrounded me….yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God…Deliverance belongs to the Lord.” In the Hasidic tradition, the sages say the sailors went to great lengths to avoid tossing Jonah into the water. First the sailors dipped Jonah in up to his knees and the storm stopped. They breathed a sigh of relief and pulled him out again. The storm began again full force as soon as Jonah’s feet cleared the water. The sailors kept dipping him; to his waist, his shoulders, his neck, and then finally, his nose. Each ti1me the storm would stop as long as Jonah was in the water but began again as soon as he was taken out. Finally, there was nothing to do but throw him in. Sometimes you have to be “in over your head” before you’re truly committed; stripped of all security, humbled, left only with raw, unadulterated need before you can trust God enough to say “yes.” And then, the most remarkable thing happens. God comes in the guise of a fish, the mostly unlikely of saviors, and swallows Jonah. And in the womb of God, Jonah is reborn. Granted, his repentance doesn’t seem to go too deep or last too long…but it is there nonetheless and God will take whatever we can give. It would be easy to point our fingers at Jonah and not see or recognize ourselves in this reluctant prophet: • who condemned his enemies instead of loving them; • who when told to do the right thing, ran in the opposite direction; • who tried to justify his actions before God; • who allowed his prejudice to affect his judgment; • who tried to manipulate God • and threw tantrums when he didn’t get his way. While the story is about God’s great love for all people including our enemies, ultimately this is a story about courage; the courage to share in God’s dreams; the courage to take the plunge and slip into God’s “holy” whatever; the courage to say “yes” to God’s dream of a better world. And God is pursuing us that we might inhabit this dream of a better world. Let me give you one example of this: As individuals, as a nation we need to be much more concerned about the root causes of poverty. Why? Because the Bible tells us so! Blessed are the poor. (Luke 6:20). Jesus’ words are not an affirmation of poverty but rather proclaim God cares for the poor. And Jesus repeats those words in some form or fashion time after time throughout the gospels! “Lord, when did we not feed you or clothe you or visit you? And the Lord shall say, “whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me.” Matthew 25:44-45 We need is a passion for the poor; not as faceless statistics, but as the person mowing the yard down the street, the young family living in a trailer on the edge of town stuck in the cycle of generational poverty, the teen who lives in a low rent apartment and had to join a gang just to survive. Did you know that for every adolescent saved from a life of crime it saves an estimated that 1.7 million dollars of public and private funds? What is one life worth? Its priceless! I’ve asked Bunny Summerlin, Executive Director of Metrocrest Social Services to come be with us on January 27th to talk about ways you and I can combine our efforts to make the most profound impact on poverty and its causes. Its just my opinion (and that and 75 cents will get you a cup of coffee and Lubys) but I believe that addressing the root cause of poverty will do more to fix the immigration issue then all the laws and walls we throw up. In this election year, we need to be in prayer, seeking God’s guidance about what kind of leadership we need and who will best help make this world (not just this nation but this world) a more just, peaceful, and loving place and not just vote along party lines or who will think will put more money in our pockets. Your vote is your voice!….And I am convinced that someday our children’s children will thank us for exercising that vote. God’s dream of a better world! “Tell me the weight of a snowflake,” a coal mouse asked a wild dove. “Nothing more than nothing,” was the answer. “In that case I must tell you a marvelous story,” the coal mouse said. “I sat on a branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow-not heavily, not in a giant blizzard, no, just like in a dream, without any violence. Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the next snowflake dropped on to the branch-nothing more than nothing (as you say), the branch broke off.” After having said that, the coal mouse scurried away. The dove, since Noah’s time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for a while and finally said to herself, “Perhaps there is only one person’s voice lacking for peace to come into the world.” Today marks the day in the church year we remember Christ’s baptism. Baptism is one way we say “yes” to God. The reaffirmation of our baptismal vow is a renewal of that promise. As we sing Down to the River to Pray you’re invited to come up to the altar, remove a shell, (the symbol of baptism), dip your hand in the water, touch your head or draw a cross on your forehead as a renewal of your baptismal vows. Remember your baptism and be thankful! |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
