“Called out of the Whale’s Belly, Now.”

Sean Weston

January 22, 2012, Epiphany 3B

Central Congregational UCC, Topeka KS

Jonah 3:1-10

Psalm 62:5-8

1 Corinthians 7:29-31

Mark 1: 14-20

 

           The famous story of Jonah, and it is a story, starts in Chapter 1 verse 1 with a call from God: “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” Jonah, instead of facing this calling, promptly ignores it – hopping on the first boat out of town. But he can’t flee God – God causes a storm that threatened to break the ship. After some drama, Jonah confesses to the ship’s crew that he is fleeing from God, and the storm is probably because of that. He then offered to be thrown into the sea, and the crew happily obliges, after which God provides a large fish, often assumed to be a whale, to swallow him up. He spends three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, probably in the depths of depression and desperation.          Jonah finally decides to heed God’s call, and from within the fish he utters a soul-wrenching psalm of thanksgiving, symbolizing his agreement to go to the city of Nineveh and proclaim God’s word there.           This is where today’s text comes in: “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 will tell you.” So Jonah did that. He cried out “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” That’s all he said. But “the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.” The King led the whole city to repentance, saying that “All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands.” The chapter ends with this oh-so-important verse: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed [God’s] mind about the calamity that [God] had said [God] would bring upon them; and [God] did not do it.” This however, isn’t the end of the story.This, however, made Jonah very angry with God, because Jonah wanted to see Nineveh destroyed. I’ll get to why later, but for now it’s important to realize how distressed Jonah was. Also, he wouldn’t have any credibility if his prophesy didn’t come true! And it angers him, as he says to God’s very self, that “you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” He asks for God to take his life from him. But God doesn’t oblige him, so Jonah goes east, make a booth for himself, and licked his wounds in self-pity there. What follows is a humorous ending: God made a bush grow to give Jonah shade, and that made Jonah very happy. But then God “appointed a worm” to attack the bush, and “the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die.” Jonah has a penchant for the dramatic. But God simply said to Jonah: How can you be concerned about this little bush that you didn’t even create, and not understand my deep love and concern for Nineveh, a city full of people created in my image as well as many animals? The story ends there, but we don’t know whether Jonah remained bitter or changed his views.Contrast this story of God’s call with this one:“The Kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news.”

 

“Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

 

          It is these words and these words alone recorded at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark that caused Simon, Andrew, James, son of Zebedee and his brother John to immediately leave their nets and follow Jesus. These words are signs of a calling from God; one so quickly recognized by these to-be-disciples that they left their livelihood and their families immediately in service to it.These are two wildly different stories of the way people respond to God’s call. I probably don’t need to tell you that, while the story in Mark is beautiful, it doesn’t represent the way most of us respond to God’s call in our lives. And it has its own problems: What about the families left behind? Do these men have wives and children? If so, do they join them or are they left behind? The feminist theologian in me cries out: To leave wives and children behind would have caused economic devastation in their society – and Jesus certainly wouldn’t want that! Why are all of the characters in this story men? We know that Jesus, in his ministry, treated women in countercultural ways, teaching them, working with them, speaking with them as peers. But we also know that the culture of Jesus’ time, much like our own culture, was one built on male supremacy, and that works its way into the Christian story in ugly ways with repercussions for today. Scripture itself is not without sin. When we free God from the limits of culture we find that God does not discriminate on the basis of sex or gender. And we have to be able to authoritatively proclaim this in a world where many of the major Christian communions still consign women to second-class status. This is an outrage to the liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ, because God calls people of all genders equally. Approaching the text this way, while important, carries with it a certain limitation, one that Americans are especially vulnerable to - the idolatry of the self. We look at a text like this one or the story of Jonah and we immediately look to the disciples, or to Jonah. We start wondering how we can live up to the disciples’ example – giving up everything in service to the life God intends for them. Or maybe we see ourselves in Jonah, feeling a call from God but scared to follow it, depressed and despairing, angry and confused beyond measure. We start feeling inadequate beyond measure, knowing that few of us, have encountered and responded to God in such a way. But it’s not just about us. It’s about God, too! It’s good to identify with people in the stories. Of course, we aren’t Simon, Andrew, James, John, or Jonah. But we share with them that we seek to be followers of God’s ways and work out what that means in our lives and our life together. And that’s no small thing. We have to identify with the human characters in these stories, through all of the differences between them and us. Scripture loses its meaning otherwise.But we can’t fully understand our calling without grasping at the depths of God through stories like this. To fully understand these stories, we have to remember that they are also about God. They say a lot about God. And today’s stories offer a tremendously powerful and challenging image of God – an image of a God that we can join to turn the world upside-down. We’ll start with Jonah.It’s a distinct story – it’s not like the other prophetic books in the Bible. Those books include brutal messages of judgment, painful indictments and words of hope, calling a wayward people back to God’s ways with powerful words that ring through the ages. These prophets, such as Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, and many more are at the core of the Church’s calling and quest for social justice. But the prophesy in the entire book of Jonah is one verse: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Not particularly detailed or informative. Instead, the story is God’s call to Jonah, and Jonah avoiding and resenting it.The prophesy is for Nineveh, which tells us some important things. Nineveh was in Assyria. This, for one, was not Israel or Judah – the people that prophetic messages were usually intended for. God wants Jonah to break down the political boundaries that human society creates. But Assyria was dreaded; known for its history of oppressing and destroying Israel and other nations. Assyria was, in UCC Minister Todd Weir’s words, “a by-word for brutality in the ancient world. The Assyrian Chronicles describe horrendous acts of torture which were employed to create fear and, thus, submission in the enemies of the empire.” Clearly, the author’s choice of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, matters. Why would God want to save Nineveh? In the end, God decides not to destroy Nineveh, after Jonah’s one-verse prophesy, which makes Jonah so very angry. How could God use him be merciful to such an unjust empire? Does God have any clue what God is doing? Sure, we believe in non-violence, but we might just say God should have swept Nineveh away and said “good riddance.”But maybe this all become more biting if we ask these questions of the American Empire. The reality is that we are the closest contemporaries of Assyria in today’s world. We torture, we lynch, we make war, we have a military base in 130 countries, we detain people indefinitely, we consign people to extreme poverty amidst staggering wealth, especially people of color and women. We kill people to show that killing is wrong. We watch silently while young people who commit suicide because of their God-given sexual orientation or gender identity. We indoctrinate new generations into an immoral system of individualistic capitalism that says you only care about yourself, don’t worry about anyone else. State universities are becoming the playground of the wealthy and privileged. Our border patrol agents slash water tanks that humanitarian group put on the border. Our flag causes many, even within our borders, to tremble in fear, rather than well up with pride. Maybe, now, we understand the need for mercy before justice.Let’s say that God is calling us, like Jonah, to preach a message of repentance, of radical change, to America. We’re from the middle of nowhere. We have no power or credentials. God tells us to convince the country to change its ways; to be agents of divine mercy and justice. “Yeah, right, that’s impossible” we think with Jonah. Is such a corrupt nation even worth the trouble?“The world conspires to make Jonahs out of all of us,” Weir says. “The world beats us down and tells us that you can’t change the big picture, so just fall in line and make the best living for yourself and your family. Our values may tell us we need to head East to Nineveh, but we turn around and walk west and get on the boat with Jonah, because it is just too hard. We spend some of our precious time in the belly of the whale, out of touch with our calling, our sense of meaning and purpose…selfishness and materialism prevails…we may not be able to bring about racial reconciliation…but individualism tells us that we can pursue our own happiness and carve out our own little niche for peace of mind. Ironically, these attitudes give us less freedom and power. Selfishness and materialism erode community and make it less possible to live the life we want. It puts us more out of purpose. Jonah’s way seems easier at first, but in the end we will get thrown overboard and end up in the belly of the whale.”It seems that much of the mainline, moderate-to-progressive, whatever-you-want-to-call-it Church in this country finds itself in the belly of the whale today because we have allowed the world to make Jonahs out of us. Central to Jesus’ ministry is the proclamation of the Kingdom of God. And lest we forget, Kingdom is a political word, and the Kingdom of God is a radical contrast to the Kingdoms of this world. In the Kingdom of God there is justice, peace, and mercy; all people can know the love of God; hate is no more. This is the vision of the prophets, and of the apostle Paul, who’s broad theme in today’s text from 1 Corinthians was that the present form of this world is passing away. The last chapters of Revelation, at the end of the bible, proclaim hope, hope made real in each of us: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed way….[God] will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more…I am making all things new.” But this vision, this call from God has been scandalized in the Church because we’ve allowed the world to make Jonahs out of us. We retreat to a pietistic and individualist faith that says that the only thing Christianity is about is your personal relationship with God, or whether you’ve taken Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. And it’s not just the fundamentalists. This mentality, which says that the church should stay in its little corner, is at every level of the Church, and it cripples us. If Moses had gone to Pharaoh and asked for worship space, Pharaoh would likely say yes just to keep them happy. But God was demanding through Moses that the oppressed be set free. If Jesus hadn’t radically challenged the foundations of an oppressive society the Roman Empire would not have hung him from a cross.Friends, it is time for the Church to live up to its calling. It is time to stop allowing the world to make Jonahs out of us. Fear is not an option. Cynicism is not an option. Because we know above all through the resurrection that the forces of death in this world have no teeth. They have no power. There is no power but the power of God. So what does this look like for a church like Central? How can Central embody and proclaim the Kingdom of God in Topeka?You know you better than I know you – so feel free to disregard what I’m saying. But because of KEM work, I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time in this building, and I spend a lot of time with churches. You’ve got to do something about that building! Open a community center, run an after-school program with another church, something. If a church’s physical plan is not being used to embody the Kingdom of God; we must free ourselves from it one way or another.The other one is perhaps more difficult. Topeka is the center of one of the most dangerous and selfish state governments Kansas has ever seen, one seeking to systematically dismantle any policy that does not pad the pocket of the already-rich in this state. Take a look at the new tax plan – steal from the poor, give to the rich! Despite what they may claim, the people in charge over there are implementing policies right and left that are directly antithetical to the liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ.  What would it mean for the Church to work to speak prophetically to that government? What might it look like to witness Christ’s justice in this city? I may be off with these suggestions, but I do know that this church does have a calling.          But we must listen and we must respond. It took three chapters to get Jonah to Nineveh but it took four verses to get the four fishermen to leave everything to follow Jesus. If that were me, I would want time to weigh the decision. But Jesus would have moved on to the next town by then. Mark’s Gospel says that the disciples immediately followed Jesus. The phrase “and immediately” is the most common in Mark’s Gospel. There are times in our lives and in our life together that we are best able to respond to God’s call, and I believe we have been called for a time such as this. But opportunities don’t last forever. Churches die. We may respond to the calling too late – the moment may have passed.          The call isn’t complicated. It’s quite simple. “Love your neighbor as yourself. Feed the hungry, house the homeless and you have done it to me. Abide in my love and I will abide in you. You are the light of the world, so let your light shine before all that they may see the glory of God. The reign of God is among you, within you. If you have faith, the mountain shall be moved for you.” And, perhaps most important, in the resurrection we know that the forces of death in this world will never have the last word.          “The Kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the good news.” “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

          The response is up to us. Amen.