January 23,
2000
OVER THE EDGE
RELUCTANCE!
(The Story of
Jonah)
Our reading from the Gospel of
Mark presents us a Jesus, early in his ministry,
strolling along the Lake of Galilee and recruiting his
first disciples. He asks Simon and his brother Andrew to
follow him and "IMMEDIATELY THEY LEFT THEIR NETS AND
FOLLOWED HIM." (Mark l:16-18). Then Jesus sees James and
his brother John, working from a boat, and similarly
invites them to follow him and "THEY LEFT THEIR FATHER
ZEBEDEE IN THE BOAT WITH THE HIRED MEN, AND FOLLOWED
HIM."
This is how we would like
discipleship and everything else in our lives to work -
simply, neatly, in a direct, linear march of cause and
effect. In this instance there is the cause - Jesus -and
then the immediate effect - someone follows. Jesus
himself is a superb example of this natural flow of cause
and effect. Jesus seems always to have had a direct
connection with His Heavenly Father and could walk a path
always clear and straightforward.
The only instance of any serious
reluctance on Jesus' part to follow his singular star of
destiny came late in his ministry, in the Garden of
Gethesame when he knew what was ahead of him. He was
reluctant for a few hours but then he got on with the
seemingly straight trajectory of his life right to the
cross!
The problem is that often our
connections are not so clear and our paths not so linear.
Often does not your life seem to go in circles more than
straight lines? Our Old Testament text of today gives us
another figure, Jonah, whose mixed up, back and forth
life, seems more typical of real human
biographies.
*****
Most people know that Jonah
resisted God's call and ended up in the stomach of a big
fish for three days. God wanted Jonah to go to the great
city of Nineveh and preach repentance to its people. The
Ninevites were a part of the great empire of Assyria
which had already conquered the northern kingdom of
Israel and threatened the southern kingdom of Judah. The
Assyrians were bad news to any Hebrew prophet and
especially one so reluctant as Jonah.
Asking Jonah to handle this
assignment is roughly comparable to asking a Christian
leader in Lambok, Indonesia, to go to the Muslim
stronghold of that island and preach repentance. I
haven't heard of any Christian prophets volunteering for
that assignment.
The natural response when asked
to do some serious work with people we despise is to lay
low or, in the case of Jonah, go the opposite direction.
At chapter 3, where we enter the story in today's
reading, Jonah has just been vomited out of the whale and
is sprawled forth on a beach in Palestine when God
repeats his demand to the reluctant prophet to go to
Nineveh and preach repentance:
The word of the Lord came to
Jonah a second time, saying, "Get up, go to Nineveh, that
great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell
you." So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to
the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly
large city, a three days' walk across. Jonah began to go
into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out,
"Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" And
the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a
fast, and everyone, (human beings and animals) great and
small, put on sackcloth."
Jonah goes, still reluctant and
grumpy, and in Nineveh he that one liner sermon, the
shorted on record: "FORTY DAYS MORE, AND NINEVEH SHALL BE
OVERTHROWN!" (Jonah 3:5).
The writer of this short story
of Jonah is playing with the prototype of the prophet.
Jonah is a typical prophet in his reluctance but an
extreme example. Amos and Ezekiel and Hosea were at first
reluctant to follow God but they merely stayed at home,
hoping that God would go away. Jonah is much more over
the edge. He flees in the opposite direction from
Nineveh, to the sea on the west, and, he thinks, from
God.
Jonah is an atypical prophet in
this way: Jonah is wildly successful. Most prophets
finally delivered their message of repentance but with
little positive effect. Jonah is asked by God to
undertake a more difficult task of going to alien people,
and he succeeds. During his first escape attempt, Jonah
converts pagan sailors to the God of the Jews by his
brave example and his teaching to them. In chapter 2 we
learn: "THEN THE MEN FEARED THE LORD EVEN MORE, AND THEY
OFFERED A SCRRIFICE TO THE LORD AND MADE VOWS." The
sailors did not throw Jonah overboard because they were
bad but only because Jonah insisted on it.
Again, when he hits Nineveh, his
one sentence sermon converts the king of the city and
everyone in it. These folks are not just sorry for their
wicked ways; they are ll0% sorry,. The king has every
citizen of the city and even the animals wear sackcloth,
or a simple, rough yardage, to witness to their
repentance.
Grumpy to the end, the prophet,
far from being pleased with God's mercy to the Ninevites
and his own success with them, sits outside the city,
pouting and arguing with God because the Lord is "A
GRACIOUS GOD AND MERCIFUL, SLOW TO ANGER, AND ABOUNDING
IN STEADAST LOVE, AND READY TO RELENT FROM PUNISHING"
(4:2). God is so kind to Nineveh that Jonah just wants to
die.
True to Jewish story telling,
God argues back with Jonah accusing him of keeping his
eye on petty things and missing the big picture of God's
mercy. AND SHOULD I NOT BE CONCERNED ABOUT NINEVEH, THAT
GREAT CITY, IN WHICH THERE ARE MORE THAN A HUNDRED AND
TWENTY THOUSAND PERSONS WHO DO NOT KNOW THEIR RIGHT HAND
FROM THEIR LEFT, AND ALSO MANY ANIMALS?
(4:11).
While Jonah is over the top in
his reluctance, God seems over the top to me in his
concern about the cattle and sheep of ancient Nineveh.
God loves animals in this story and they are given the
same opportunity to repent and wear sackcloth as are
humans. But the theme of salvation for animals needs to
be deferred to another time and
interpretation!
The reference to the citizens
WHO DON'T KNOW THEIR RIGHT HAND FROM THEIR LEFT is
equally curious. In the literal sense, persons who don't
know their right hand from their left would seem to be
babies and very young children and the mentally
handicapped, who do not know reason. In a figurative
sense, the phrase may just mean everybody in Nineveh who
in their pagan ignorance lacked an understanding of right
from wrong.
And/or the phrase may be a
symbolic reference to that huge majority of the
population in that imperial city who were wholly lacking
in any power to influence events. For the poor it would
not have made the slightest difference if they did know
their right hand from their left because they could in no
way influence the course of events in the Assyrian city
and empire. No matter how we interpret the phrase it
points to a remarkably kind and inclusive God in contrast
with Jonah's desire to narrow and confine the mercy of
the Lord.
******
Now I don't know about you but I
more easily identify with Jonah who goes back and for in
attitude and commitment than with those early disciples
who so seamlessly and easily stopped their fishing jobs,
abandoned their status quo lives, and took up with
Jesus.
In the geographic sense the
travels of Jonah, going the opposite direction and
arriving at his true destiny only in the most roundabout
way, and after bizarre adventures, seems more true to my
life, than the easy, simple way of the first
disciples.
Try this exercise to see if that
isn't true for you: Imagine a big map of the world before
us this morning. You have in your hand a piece of string
l00 feet long. Pin that string to the place of your
birth; then carry the string through your early years of
education and growing up to each new place you lived and
visited. Perhaps you left your home city and jouneyed to
some Nineveh for education or for early work; put a pen
at those geographic places. Then, did you return to your
original home? If so, bring the string back to home base
and pin it. Or did you go to another city; continue with
your string there and wherever next you
landed.
I would imagine that for most of
us our life journeys are seldom straight lined. The
pattern is more back and forth, up and down, more
circular than linear. And yet we have arrived here and
how. There is a parallel application of this same
exercise. Try to map along your spiritual journey all the
times you heard the call of God, or didn't hear the call
of God but wanted it. I imagine that journey also has
been circular, in and out, much more like loops within
loops, circles within circles, than straight
lined.
Sometimes when helping to
straighten up the worship site after the service has
ended I come upon worship bulletins upon which children
have expressed their artistic inclinations during the
sermon. Their drawings are usually scrawlings which go in
every direction. Those childish loops within loops
represent not only what they thought of the sermon but
maybe their aspiration in life. Lives that go every which
way, which go over the top; of the page, are usually much
more interesting than lives which stick to the page and
draw only straight lines upon it.
******
The story of Jonah is a quite
funny tale; not just funny in the sense of strange
although this brief narrative contains delightfully
bizarre elements - the fish, the animals wearing
sackcloth, the bush and worm with which God alternately
blesses and irritates Jonah. It is also a funny story as
in being hilarious. Jonah is a parody of the prophet and
his reluctance toward God's commission pushes the
envelope toward the extreme. Jonah, in his over the edge
conduct, is a quite modern figure!
How are you doing at this point
in your story? Can you identify with Jonah? Are you
fighting God and seeking to carve out your own destiny?
Are you grumpy with what life is giving you? Are you only
moderately reluctant, or extremely reluctant, to let go
and let God lead you? Are you able to see the hilarity in
Jonah's predicament and laugh at your own predicament in
your life? Are you in the belly of a whale when all you
wanted was to escape from your destiny?
This is for sure: We modern
people are just as big characters as Jonah: We are
extreme in our independence, in our stubborness, in our
insistence on experience and adventure, and in the
exercise of our idiosyncratic character.
And life has not straightened
out and become simple and linear for us. Life is becoming
more circular, more convoluted, more loopy, and more
extreme. There must be meaning in the earth being round,
nor square; in the universe being always expanding and
not confinded. There must be meaning, including spiritual
significance, in the internet having replaced the machine
as the cultural icon of this millenniun. The word YAHOO
says a lot about where we are in our wanderings.
YAHOO!
Let's look at just a few of the
ways that modern life draws us into circles and loops of
experience rather than assigning us to march straight
lines toward our destiny.
…We are seeking adventures
and experiences largely, I think, because we want to be
able to tell great stories. Far from being a disaster we
want to end up in the belly of a big fish so we can come
out and tell others about it! Possessions and professions
drove our recent ancestors but we are more like Jonah,
and for that matter Simon and Andrew - we hunger for
great adventures and fantastic stories to share. What you
have is not so important as what you have experienced and
can tell about.
…That adjective "extreme",
once a negative word, has entered into many phases of our
lives and has been converted to a much desired
experience. We seek extreme adventures as in bungy
jumping, hang gliding, deep water diving, sheer vertical
rock climbing.
The Christian writer Leonard
Sweet points out in his new book SOULTSUNAMI that the
word extreme is suddenly appearing everywhere:
.FedEx sends packages that are
"extremely urgent."
.NASA sends up a new satellite
called "Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer" (EUVE)
.At Taco Bell you order an
"Extreme Combo Meal."
.The car manufacturer Pontiac
announces that it's "taking it to the
extreme."
.Toy maker Mattel's successor to
the "Street Sharks" series is "Extreme
Dinosaurs."
.Fortune magazine has a cover
article on "eXtreme investing" and INC. magazine the same
week does a cover article on "Extreme
Managing."
There is even a movement afoot
in the modern church for Christians to be extreme
Christians. And why not!
I love the poet W.H. Auden's
invitation to extreme Christian discipleship:
"He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of
Unlikeliness;
You will see rare beasts (like
cattle in sackcloth and the insides of
whales!)
and have unique adventures.
(Jesus said: Come and follow me!)
One way to get extreme with
Christ is to recover the power of symbols and metaphors
in our lives and when we do we discover that our lives
are not linear, not simple, not sharp edged. The back and
forth biographical journeys each of us can chart in our
souls, as across the globe, are metaphor for God who
calls us, chases us, and finds us.
While at the outset I said that
Jesus seemed to follow a straight path in his calling,
that doesn't quite measure the man Jesus. His primary way
of relating and teaching to folks was not straight lined
logic. It was in parables. Jesus was the greatest user of
images, metaphor and jokes, of any teacher in history.
Jesus taught analogies, figures of speech and startling,
extreme illustrations to stir the sediment of people's
hearts and open their eyes to the deep meanings of life.
For Jesus, his anecdotes were much more than images: They
were the healing antidotes of insight, humor and
perspective that helped people understand their journeys,
themselves, and their God. Jesus would surely have loved
and laughed with Jonah because of the extreme
predicaments he got into.
I would guess that Jesus found
life to be much more loopy than straight lined. Someone
has said that life is an inflated balloon which
richochets in loops through complex systems: All the
phenomena that affect us are more circular and convoluted
than linear: Think of the weather, the economy, the stock
market, the universe, the molecular structures. All of
them are, like our life journeys, much more loopy, back
and forth, in and out, than straight lined.
Like Jonah we may go west to end
up east; we flee from God only to bump into God. The
fantastic loopiness of the internet is the supreme
parable for our life stories now. We humans are as wired
and interconnected and looping upon one another as is the
internet.
Your being at worship this hour
is more likely an example of the loopyness of your life
than of some straightforward exercise of duty or
intention. Quite a few of you are here, protesting like
Jonah, and wishing you were elsewhere. But you are
here.
Why? Because you want the
experience of God! Because you know that God is tracking
you and you want that connection. You want to have a
bigger experience of God.
And that is quite okay. I
believe we worship because we all want to pass, if only
briefly, from this life into the next, that is we want
some of the divine in the temporal. We want to move
beyond our constrained, straight-jacketed selves into the
next life where we can put on flowy robes and become, if
only for a while, divine/human transvestites. That
connection with God is wondrously mystical and mysterious
and transcendent.
It is a divine circle which
wraps around us and not a box which confines
us.
And, of course, we are changed.
Transcendence in our earthly lives does change us. And
why come to church unless you're ready for change! You
want to get real which means you want to get spiritual!
To "get real" in this new millennium is going to mean
less and less "Show me the Money" and more and more "Show
me the way"; less of "help me make more money": and much
more of "help me make a life!"
We all want a relationship with
God. The story of Jonah evidences that God wants a
relationship with us, even the most truculent of his
children, and God is interested in even the most wicked
of peoples. The story of Jesus shows us how to get a life
by finding the Way.
And the glad ending of that
story is that we shall one day, maybe now, or tomorrow,
or at eternity, hear the happiest words any human could
ever here: They are spoken to Jesus at Mark l:11 just
before today's reading: "WELCOME! WELL DONE! YOUR LIFE
BROUGHT ME GREAT PLEASURE! That is the Holy Spirit
speaking to Jesus at the beginning of his real life. That
is the promise of God to us now. YOUR LIFE BROUGHT ME
GREAT PLEASURE!
Just this final point: If you
really want to get a life with God you need to become
more extreme, more over the edge. You need to become in
your spiritual journey participatory, experiential and
inter-active. You need to do what you are not inclined to
do. It's not enough merely to hit the web site branded
"God and Worship" and show up here when you feel like it.
You need to experience more of God and that comes when
you participate and become inter-active with others who
are also on the spiritual internet.
That's why being at worship is
the first step; the second is participating with a small
group. We have several beginning this week. Get
participatory, become inter-active, and you will
experience God. Be an extreme seeker. Go all the way like
Jonah over the edge and end up in the arms of
Jesus.
Pastor Gene
Preston
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