Go Where? Do What? Are You Crazy?

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Go Where? Do What? Are You Crazy?

Scriptures: Jonah 3, Mark 1:14-20

I love the contrast displayed by our readings: Jesus calls Simon and Andrew, James and John who leave their boats and follow him; God calls Jonah and something dramatically different happens. You wouldn’t know it from today’s reading; all you can see is his success – the transformation of Nineveh.

But chapter one of the book of Jonah is where God calls Jonah, a man who didn’t normally have anything to do with boats, to go East and preach to Nineveh. Jonah promptly took off in the other direction – he booked passage on a boat West to Spain, at the far end of the Mediterranean, the other end of the world, as far as Jonah knew.

This is not someone obediently following the call of God. This is someone fleeing God’s call. To summarize the story: God makes a big storm, the sailors panic; Jonah is asleep in the boat, they wake him up, and throw the dice to figure out who to blame for the storm; Jonah confesses that he is fleeing from God; the sailors want to turn back to land; Jonah says, “No; throw me overboard”. He’s so desperate to avoid God’s call that he’d rather die by drowning! The sailors reluctantly pitch him into the sea and the water goes instantly calm; then the whale, or big fish, swallows Jonah to save him from drowning and three days later spits him up on the shores of Israel.

Has Jonah learned his lesson? Yes! In today’s reading we see that God called Jonah a second time and Jonah went East to Nineveh and preached as he was told. At the very least Jonah had learned that you can’t run away from God.

But he wasn’t happy with God. He didn’t like his assignment. He did like the message: Nineveh was the enemy; the capital city of the Assyrian empire which would one day destroy Israel and scatter 10 of the 12 tribes; he wanted to see them destroyed.

The final outcome is fascinating: the Ninevites listened to the warning and God repented: God changed direction and refused to destroy them. Chapter 4 is all about Jonah sulking because his prophesy worked and the people were saved.

I was thinking of Jonah when I wrote the sermon title: Go Where? Do What? Are You Crazy? His hatred for these enemies was so strong that he couldn’t face the idea that God might save them. He couldn’t handle God’s love for these people who were different. And their animals! In chapter 4 God specifically mentions being concerned for the animals.

God is forcing Jonah out of his comfort zone in making this reluctant prophet think about God possibly loving foreigners, even loving animals enough to save them from destruction. We should understand that reluctance because we still argue about the importance of animals today and we are seeing more and more examples of xenophobia (the hatred and fear of other people who are different) and violent acts used to hurt or terrorize folks, even in Canada, which we like to think of as so kind and welcoming.

It’s pretty black-and-white when we see this happening to Jonah and we can feel superior to him. We don’t share his parochial attitude.

The trick is, Jonah wasn’t dumb; he knew that following God’s call would challenge him. Simon and Andrew, James and John had very little idea of what they were in for. Their work with fish and nets didn’t prepare them for the profound changes they would experience. Jesus, in quite a short time, transformed them from people who caught fish to people who changed other people. If we read through the gospels we see how they stumbled, over and over when the lessons they faced seemed impossible or didn’t make sense to them and when Jesus’ teachings really challenged the way they understood the world.

Jonah was bright enough to know how God works and honest enough to act on it, even though running away didn’t work. Even there, Jonah had to change his understanding. Like most people of his age, he believed that gods were centred on geography and had a limited reach beyond their land and people. Boy was he wrong!

When God calls us, we’d better be prepared to discover that we’re wrong about some things, probably things we take for granted, things that have always seemed obvious, as they do to everyone, until God shows us a better way. We have to get past the old normal and learn to create a better, new normal.

Even this understanding is unsettling, in a way. The generation that came out of two world wars and a depression emphasized their desire for God to be dependable, steadfast, reliable, unchanging. You can see why. Psychologically, a traumatized world would want an unchanging God, but history shows us that God is very flexible and God calls us to change all the time.

We can rely on God to be unchanging in some ways: God’s love is constant; God’s care for us is never-ending. But part of God’s care for us includes encouraging us to grow and change; to become more mature and wise; to take that love that God gives us and to offer it more widely than we ever thought possible.

Parts of that will unsettle us; recognizing new truths will be uncomfortable at times and we may feel like arguing with God. It’s okay: God can handle it and so can we, if we remain open to God’s leading.

Jonah’s mistake was to try and run away. That never works. God doesn’t give up on us, another way that God is constant. So instead of trying to flee, let’s stay engaged, wrestle with God, and discover what new things are part of our calling. Amen.