I.N.I.
A sermon to be preached at St. Paul Lutheran Church, Columbia, PA on Ash Wednesday 2010, a.k.a. 17 February 2010, and based on the theme text for the evening, Jonah 1:1-3, as well as taken extensively from the sermon provided with the worship materials, one written by the Rev. Prof. Reed Lessing.
Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus our Lord.
[text is Jonah 1:1-3]
Dear Friends in Christ,
Jonah had a problem. At root, it was the same basic problem that each of us has: a problem with our relationship with the Lord. Our Lenten Wednesday evening services this year will draw much from the Old Testament book of Jonah, leading us from our problem to the Solution, that is, to our Savior. At least one part of the story of Jonah is probably familiar to us all: the business with him being swallowed by the whale, or 'big fish.' But there is good biblical material for us to work through both before and after the whale events. Tonight we're going to begin at the beginning.
The narrative of Jonah actually begins in 2 Kings 14:23-27. That passage gives us part of the historical setting for the more familiar events from the book with Jonah's name on it. In 2nd Kings we read: “In the fifteenth year of King Amaziah son of Joash of Judah, King Jereboam son of Joash of Israel began to reign in Samaria; he reigned forty-one years. He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord; he did not depart from all the sins of Jereboam son of Nebat, which he caused Israel to sin. He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher. For the Lord saw that the distress of Israel was very bitter; there was no one left, bond or free, and no one to help Israel. But the Lord had not said that he would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven, so he saved them by the hand of Jereboam son of Joash.”
From this passage, we find that even in Israel, a sinful nation in the sight of God – a nation under the reign of an unfaithful king, Jereboam, who (we just read) “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” -- the prophet Jonah was successful. God did not destroy unfaithful Israel while his prophet Jonah was speaking the word of God among them.
In the book bearing his name, Jonah was also a successful prophet. The people of Nineveh (once Jonah finally got there) heard and heeded the word of God. They repented.
Yet Jonah, son of Amittai (and his father's name means 'faithful' or 'true,' so Jonah was 'the son of faithfulness' or 'the child of truth') ...yet Jonah, while successful, proves to be anything but faithful. He turns tail and runs the other direction when God calls him to this particular mission. And then, as we'll hear in the weeks to come, even when Jonah does tell the truth, preaching the word of God in Nineveh, he does so begrudgingly, like a sulking teenager. Deep down Jonah doesn't seem to want those nasty outsiders to know God's truth. And even despite that kind of delivery, God's powerful word, His faithful and true word, succeeds there.
Jonah must have been successful as a prophet in his native Israel. That is, successful in more than the theological terms we heard from 2nd Kings. He had to have been earning a living at his work, because when the book of Jonah opens he was able to hire sailors and pay for the use of a ship to take him away from Nineveh. The opening sentences of Jonah have him not only paying his own fare, but in fact hiring the entire ship and crew, which meant he was spending a lot of money trying to get away from God.
Other Israelites had been called to go beyond their homeland. Abram was sent away from home. Jacob and his sons left their home to go to Egypt. Moses led God's people away from their home in Egypt to wander in the desert. Others were also called by God to go to and speak his Word to people outside the ranks of the chosen Israelites. But while Jonah surely knew his people's history, he didn't want to follow in their footsteps. Nineveh was known as a sinful place. Other prophets wrote about it. Pick the worst parts of the cities with the worst reputation you can think of, mix them together, and that would have been Nineveh.
And this was the place God was calling Jonah to go to. This was one call Jonah would rather have not gotten. Someone has likened it to asking a Jew in 1942 to move from New York to Berlin. Not the place he or she would want to go! It would be understandable for that person to head the other direction. And that's just what Jonah tried to do. He hung up on God, grabbed his hat, and darted out the back door, hoping he wasn't being watched.
So what kind of prophet would hang up on God? One like Jonah. While his father's name meant 'faithful' or 'true,' Jonah's own name meant 'dove.' To the ancient Hebrews, a 'dove' didn't mean 'peace' or 'Holy Spirit' like it does to us; to them it meant 'flighty, brainless, unreliable.' And that's just what our Jonah was when God called.
He chartered this ship and headed for Tarshish, a city that would years later be known as Tarsus and be the birthplace of St. Paul, but at that time was known for being a rich, pleasant place to be. Situated on important trade routes, Tarshish would have been able to hide Jonah in comfort had he gotten there. God had other plans.
Almost as soon as the ship set sail, it ran into problems. The weather turned against them. Winds and waves conspired to halt their progress and to bring the ship to the brink of sinking. Our text says that Jonah “went down to Joppa” to get his ship ... and down he continued to go. He continued to go down, down, down toward his death. Away from God, away from God's blessings.
That's a great picture of what happens when we run from God's call in our own lives. Our gracious God calls each of us to do particular things and be particular kinds of people. Using biblical language, the person who “runs away from the Lord” or “flees from the presence of the Lord” is the one who is refusing to serve God, even though he or she knows what God's Word says. As a prophet, Jonah should have longed to stand in the Lord's presence, but Jonah tried to hide from God's presence, going down into the bottom of the ship during the storm. Where we go and how we act both reveal something about our reaction to God's call on our lives.
God's Word eventually won the day in Jonah's life. Jonah was finally convinced to carry through with his missionary work in Nineveh. God's Word works toward that same end in our lives, no matter how long we try to head the other direction, heading down and away from God in our own ways.
God's Word is alive for us in Jesus, our Savior. He crossed ever so many boundaries to come down to us. Before His death He constantly went beyond the traditional and expected boundaries in meaningful ways. He met with a Samaritan woman at a well. He healed the son of a Roman soldier. He touched lepers. It shouldn't be any surprise that He did those things, considering that Jesus traveled past His boundaries in Heaven to be born, to live and die among us, a sinful and rebellious people. Jesus is not a Jonah, flighty and unreliable. Jesus is squarely focused on spreading His message of love, forgiveness, and salvation. He answered God's call because he IS the living Word of God.
And God is still calling. He is calling us to confess our sin. He is calling us to confess the name of Jesus. He is “calling young and old to rest, calling the souls of those distressed, longing for life everlasting.” (Built on the Rock, LW 291)
God is calling us to do the work He has appointed for us to do while it is day, before the night comes when no one can work. And God is calling us home to His side. We can take a lesson from the story of Jonah and invest in the journey there, rather than in a doomed voyage away from God. Jesus is our hope for survival during and at the end of that voyage.
S.D.G.