The Change Will Do You Good - January 22, 2006
Mark 1: 14-20Jonah 3: 1-10
Today we get to visit one of the more fascinating stories from the prophets: Jonah. Didn't we all learn this story at some point in our growing up years? "Jonah and the Whale". I'll bet like me, you learned it that way, didn't you? "A big ol' fish story", "a whale of a tale" - yes, those are actual sermon titles I found when I started doing a little research on Jonah and what others have had to say about him.
Do any of you remember why Jonah ended up in the belly of a fish? I didn't remember hearing much about that part when I was a child, but I sure do remember a drawing of old Jonah standing upright in the middle of a whale, with the ribs over his head like some kind of canopy, and light mysteriously pouring in through the blowhole, so he could see the fish skeletons and other assorted remains of whale-food lying all around him on the floor of that whale belly. And it was surprisingly dry and roomy there in those drawings of the whale belly, wasn't it?
Although the innards of the whale are fascinating, and are what captures our imagination in this story, we don't really get the fish story today. The fish story is only important for us today in that the fish story helps us understand what is really going on in chapter 3. You see, the fish chapter in Jonah's story is really all about the lengths we will go to in order to avoid doing something God really wants us to do, but that we have decided we don't want to do.
Jonah had decided that God didn't know what God was doing. For God had decided to warn the city of Nineveh. We could substitute almost any thing or any place or any person we want to for Nineveh, because Nineveh's role in this story is to play the part of the evil outcast. Nineveh is "Snidely Whiplash" from the old cartoons of my childhood. The very word Nineveh, like Snidely, is meant to convey the evil-doer, no good, gonna-get-his arch enemy of Dudley Do-right.
God has clearly staked a claim on Nineveh. The whole purpose for Jonah in the book bearing his name is to go to Nineveh and warn them that God is not happy. But Jonah in chapter 1 does not want to do this. I don't really know what else a prophet does all day long, if a prophet has decided to not prophesy, but there you have it. Jonah seems to want Nineveh to suffer whatever consequences Ninevah has coming.
Perhaps Jonah knows a little something about God, after all. By chapter three Jonah has suffered his own consequence for his stubbornness, i.e. that time spent in the fish's belly, and has come to his senses. And since God has not given up on Nineveh, or on Jonah for that matter, God tells Jonah once again, "Go to Nineveh."
This time we don't hear Jonah protesting; we aren't privy to whatever internal argument Jonah has built up in his head. Jonah just goes. Jonah walks right into the heart of town - the person telling us this story took great pains to describe Nineveh so that we would understand this - and he starts his very simple five Hebrew word sermon: "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" And the story tells us that the people believed. A stranger comes into town, walks right in to the middle of the hustle and bustle of a huge city teeming with activity and proclaims God's anger, and the people believe.
We don't talk a lot about sin in our tradition. Sin makes us uncomfortable. In seminary there is an old joke that we students used to tell each other when the subject of sin came up; Question: I'm not sure how to preach about sin. How should I do it? Answer: Just say, "I'm against it." When I mentioned at the breakfast table this week that I was going to preach about sin, someone offered this line: "Sin - it's fun until God catches you."
The words used in the ancient Biblical languages to describe sin are also words and images used in archery. To sin is to miss the mark. We who are sinners - and that includes every single one of us - continually spend our days flinging our arrows at things and people that are not the target, and consistently missing the mark.
And even though it makes us all a bit uncomfortable to hear it, maybe we need to be consistently reminded of our sin - even in a way that makes us feel guilty. When I think of Nineveh, I can't help but think of a child caught with its hand in the cookie jar. It seems as if the Ninevites weren't unaware of their sin; and didn't think that what they were doing was okay in God's sight. Otherwise, don't you think that it would have taken more than a stranger's five words to make them change? Human nature hasn't changed that much down through the ages, after all.
I've been immersed in the Pentateuch of the Old Testament this past couple of weeks, in an effort to read through the Bible in 90 days - watch the newsletter for more information about that. The Pentateuch, or first five books of the Bible, contains a lot of rules. Many of these rules are known as case law to Biblical scholar types. If a man touches an unclean thing, this is what he must do to become clean again. If a man steals your ox, this is the consequence for stealing that ox. There are also a lot of very exacting rules about how and when one may enter the place of worship, on what days festivals are held, how sacrifices are made, how the temple and the priestly garments were to be constructed. It's easy to get caught up in the exacting nature of the rules. It's easy for us to read this and think, "What could this possibly have to do with the message of salvation?"
And the only sense I can make of it is that people were so eager to please God. So eager. And we can turn up our noses at the idea that the people wanted to please God to save their own skins; wanted to literally get their daily food and water from God, wanted the reality of a Promised Land so much that they were willing to put up with exacting rules on how to kill the animals that they burned on the altar, or what kind of wood the tent poles were to be made of, what color the priestly robes would be. We can even think of the Ninevites as gullible - that one day a stranger comes into town shouting a warning and the entire city changes its ways - even the politicians.
Because really, what does that have to do with the message of salvation? Don't we love grace? When I first heard that word, when I first knew in my soul that God's grace was sufficient for me, when I was first able to grasp that Christ died for me, what a sigh of relief! Guiltless forever! Only, forever didn't last very long.
In a beautiful symmetry of meaning, the words that are used in the ancient biblical languages for the idea of "repentance" are words that mean to change direction. If we are shooting off arrows in the wrong direction, and continually missing the mark, the solution for our bad aim is a change of direction. It might be as simple as changing our focus.
Perhaps Jonah's declaration of God's unhappiness was all the Ninevites needed to remember to change their focus - from themselves, back to pleasing God.
Even though we live in the age of amazing grace, we still need to change directions, don't we? We still need to be reminded to keep our focus on pleasing God - not in spite of grace, but because of it. The age of repentance didn't end on Christmas morning, or even on Easter morning. In our Gospel lesson for today, Jesus doesn't say to the ones he was calling to discipleship "Feel good about yourselves and bask in the grace that I bring you." He says "Repent. Change the direction of your life." And the fishermen who are within hearing do just that. Like Nineveh, the time was at hand, the conditions were right, and the call to repentance, and to life-long change was loud and clear.
I was reminded this week of something that one of my Old Testament Professors says, Bob Coote, says,
The expectation that we might repent, that we might change - since it is a command from a God who does not ask of us what we cannot do - the call to change is a most hopeful word, possibly the most hopeful word in the Bible: repent, change.1
A preacher friend of mine says it this way:
"Repentance is not a finger wagging in our faces, it's a finger beckoning to us, calling us into life and love. When God becomes flesh, when Love takes on human flesh in Christ, the possibilities for faith expressed in human flesh become incalculable, immeasurable. When God becomes flesh, the possibilities for faithful flesh become enormous. It becomes possible to enflesh love in human life. The finger of repentance beckons to us, saying, "You can do this!" In the birth, in the life of Jesus, God says, "Look at love - in flesh, in human life - real human life: You can do this! You can love. You can forgive. You can release others and yourself from your past. You can start anew. Even two hours later - even right after you forget your call to repentance, your call to breathe - you can remember to breathe again. Repentance is as close as that, as close as our very human breath. Come on, you can do this..."2
God may have been as tired as God could be of Nineveh and it's sinful ways, the same way God might get tired of us once in a while. But God hangs in there; God is faithful. There is always a chance to turn around, to change the course, to find the right direction, to hear Jesus calling us to follow a new course. We can do this. We can change. And the change is gonna do us good.
Thanks be to God
1 From Chandler Stokes' sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, CA on December 24, 2005.
2 Ibid.
