This morning
is a rare opportunity for me as a preacher: in fact, it’s
a rare opportunity for anyone who uses the Revised Common Lectionary.
For those of you who don’t use the Revised Common Lectionary,
here’s what I’m talking about: centuries ago, the church
came up with a cycle of Bible readings for each Sunday of the year.
It’s a three-year cycle, and each Sunday includes at least
4 readings: an Old Testament reading, a psalm, a reading from one
of the gospels -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John -- and a reading
from one of the letters of the New Testament. Often, but not always,
these are grouped around a theme for the Sunday. For instance, the
fourth Sunday after Easter is always Good Shepherd Sunday and includes
Psalm 23 and a gospel reading where Jesus identifies himself as
the good shepherd. Part of the purpose of this cycle of readings
is to insure that over a three-year period, each part of the Bible
is read or used in some way in public worship. Of course, preachers
and worship planners -- at least in the Church of the Brethren --
aren’t required to use the RCL, and often we choose only one
or two of the readings instead of all four of them.
But today is
a special day. We are at the beginning of Year B, the second year
of the lectionary cycle, the only year in which a reading shows
up from the book of Jonah. Jonah, as you’ll recall, is a prophet
from the Old Testament, best remembered for getting himself swallowed
by a huge fish. He spends three days in the fish’s belly before
the fish spews him out on the shore and the story continues. The
book of Jonah is not lengthy -- it’s only four chapters long
-- you might skip right over it following Obadiah, tucked in with
the other minor prophets, because Jonah is a minor prophet in every
sense of that term. But the book of Jonah is one of my favorite
books in the Bible. The early church saw Jonah and his three-day
metaphorical death and subsequent return to life as a pre-figuring
of Jesus’ death and resurrection: Jonah as a symbol of Christ.
I like the book of Jonah because it’s so wacky, because Jonah
is so utterly human. He does all the things that I would do and
have done when confronted with a call from God. This book is named
after Jonah, but it’s not so much a story of Jonah’s
faithfulness as it is the story of God’s tolerance. We’re
going to look beyond the third chapter of Jonah to get the beginning
of the story, and then see how this Old Testament story might relate
to the New Testament reading from the gospel of Mark.
One of the delightful
things about the story of Jonah is the over-the-top quality of the
narrative. According to one Old Testament scholar, it’s a
kind of verbal cartoon with a register and energy of language which
makes you feel like the characters are going POW! BAM! The big fish
doesn’t just spit Jonah out on the beach, it spews him out,
or vomits him out. I’m not even going to try to make that
noise. It makes for some great comedic material. I found some good
cartoons in the course of my research. My favorite is Jonah is sitting
inside the whale with Pinocchio, and Jonah shakes his head and says,
“You know, we both need to do a better job of listening to
our fathers.” The plot line is over-the-top, too. In chapter
1, Jonah gets a call from God to go to Nineveh. [SLIDE 1 Map of
Mediterranean] This is a ridiculous place to ask a Jew to go. Not
only is it a long trek away across the desert, but Nineveh is the
capitol city of the Assyrian Empire, the mortal enemies of the kingdom
of Israel. If you’re looking for an arch nemesis for this
comic book story, the Assyrians are the folks you want. They have
a long and horrible record of mistreating their enemies and torturing
and killing prisoners of war in imaginative and grisly ways. The
idea of one man marching into Nineveh and sticking it to the Assyrian
Empire -- telling them to Repent! Or else!-- is just ludicrous.
Any Jewish audience would know this.
Jonah certainly
knows it. He does what any self-respecting Jew who values his life
would do: he runs the other way. Not just away from Nineveh, he
runs to the other side of the earth -- or at least as far as anyone
in the Mediterranean could imagine 3,000 years ago. Nineveh is up
here, across the desert, and Jonah heads out this way, over the
ocean toward Tarshish, on the coast of Spain -- the edge of the
known world. Jonah doesn’t make it Tarshish: by the end of
Chapter 1, he has been thrown overboard and is swallowed by a large
fish. ]SLIDE 2 Cartoon]
At the beginning
of Chapter 3 Jonah is finally on the way to Nineveh, according to
the word of the Lord. [SLIDE 3 Map of Nineveh] Nineveh is a huge
city: 120,000 people live there, more than the city of South Bend,
and it takes three days just to walk from one end of the city to
the other. Jonah grudgingly gives it the shortest prophesy in the
entire Bible. I can imagine him trudging through the city, not wasting
any sympathy on the Assyrian people, but delivering this message
because God said he had to: “Forty days more and Nineveh shall
be overthrown!” (Ha!) And a truly remarkable thing happens.
The people actually listen to Jonah. Even though he didn’t
tell them to do anything -- remember, he just said they were going
to be overthrown in forty days -- they believe in God and repent,
and everybody -- I mean everybody, even the animals -- puts on sackcloth
(chickens in sackcloth, who knew?) and turns from their evil ways.
That’s where the lectionary reading leaves us. There’s
more to the story of Jonah, and it’s good stuff; I encourage
you to read chapter 4 unless you want to wait three more years to
hear the ending. [END OF SLIDES]
But I want to
move to the gospel reading for today, which comes from Mark, chapter
1. Mark is writing centuries later in Greek instead of Hebrew. Mark
begins with John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus, and our reading
begins with Jesus proclaiming a message of repentance; remember
that the early church saw Jonah as prefiguring Jesus. However, Jesus
is coming to his own people, not to an arch-enemy, and Jesus’
message is one of fulfillment, not judgment. It’s good news,
not condemnation. The fishermen who hear Jesus’ message, like
the people of Nineveh, respond immediately and dramatically. They
leave their livelihood and their family and they follow Jesus, no
questions asked.
Let me point
out that there’s a lot of calling going on in these two stories:
God calls Jonah, Jonah calls the people of Nineveh to repentance,
God calls Jesus to ministry through baptism, Jesus calls the fisherman
to be disciples. The calls are similar, but not exactly the same,
and the responses are very different: Jonah tries to run away from
God -- big mistake. The Ninevites repent and they and their animals
are saved. The fisherman/disciples get off to a great start, but
fade at the end of the story when the going gets tough. Only Jesus
faithfully and perfectly fulfills God’s call to ministry from
beginning to end. I think there are a couple lessons to be learned
from these stories:
First: God’s
call happens in different ways for different people. Maybe that
call comes directly from God, but maybe it comes through someone
else. Maybe it comes through someone unexpected: like an enemy who
is outrageously outnumbered but has the guts to tell you you’re
wrong.
Second: We each
respond to God’s call in different ways. I grew up as a theologian’s
kid -- kind of like a preacher’s kid, but even weirder. Despite
the fact that people told me as a youth and as a college student
and as a young adult that I should consider ministry as a vocation,
there was no way I was ever going to be a pastor. I said this into
my 40’s, even as I was enrolling in seminary classes. God
has not stopped calling me, and I have not stopped trying to pretend
like I don’t hear. Even here at Creekside there have been
some times and situations where I sense God calling me to be, and
my response is, “Here I am Lord, send Janet.” Part of
the reason our responses are so varied is that God doesn’t
call us to easy stuff. God doesn’t call us to be comfortable,
to be complacent, to be well-intentioned -- all the things we would
be anyway if God would just leave us alone. God calls us to scary
places, places where we don’t know what is going to happen.
Places like Nineveh, or to Christian Peacemaker Teams, or to Brethren
Volunteer Service.
Finally, no
one takes a straight path to God. The beauty of God’s call
is that it is unconditional. It doesn’t depend on our immediate
and faithful response. Although we are called to come closer to
God, God is also in the detours. Not every detour is a healthy one;
I don’t believe that God leads us into choices which are self-destructive,
but God is there to catch us when we fall and to forgive us when
we are ready to forgive ourselves. Our failures teach us much more
about God than our triumphs do. Before I entered the ministry I
was an aspiring English teacher, an artist, a musician, a parent
-- many of these at the same time. Being a pastor is no more important
than any of these other roles: being a good parent is as least as
important as anything else which God could call me to do, but I
am a better parent when I honor the calling to be a pastor, and
a better pastor because of my experience as a parent.
When I was wrestling
with my call to ministry, a wise woman told me, “In the economy
of God, nothing is wasted.” It is not that God makes something
out of nothing; but because God calls human beings, God uses everything.
Not just our talents, but our flaws; not just the things we’re
proud of, but the things we’re ashamed of. God knows these
things, because God knows and loves us. Jesus comes to the lakeshore
seeking us, and God understands that sometimes we’re going
to run the other way.
Have you ever
wondered why a book like Jonah is in the Bible? I have. Jonah --
what a loser, doing all the wrong things, trying to run from God.
I believe that’s why the story is in the Bible, and in such
vivid language: the story isn’t about Jonah, or the big fish,
or the people of Nineveh; the story shows us that God can take a
wacky collection of things like a Jewish prophet, a whale, and city
of people, a couple of fisherman -- and make them part of God’s
story. God calls each of us and the wacky experiences and detours
that are who we are to be part of the story. As our closing song
says, God is looking neither for wealthy nor wise ones. That’s
me. That’s you. That’s us. Praise God.
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