Monthly Archives: August 2024

And Also Many Cattle

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A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

14th Sunday After Pentecost/Year B • August 25, 2024

Jonah 4

Imagine something with me. It’s morning, a still, cool day like today, on the edge of fall. It’s quiet, no breeze, no sound. The sun is shining and you’re out for a walk through a little woods. You come to a pond and sit on a big rock that was there before this was Pennsylvania. On an impulse, you reach down and pick up a little stone, throw it out as far as you can into the pond, where it makes a splash and a little wave. The circle of the wave moves out, slowly, the only disturbance on the pond. Outward and outward, as far as you can see.

Now come back and let’s talk about Jonah and this funny last chapter. Last Sunday, we left things in a fine state. Jonah heard God’s call, repented, went to Ninevah preached the greatest one sentence sermon of all time judging from the reaction. Everyone in Ninevah repented—changed!—stopped doing evil. God repented too: decided not to destroy them. It seems like that’s a place to ring down the curtain, doesn’t it? Time to celebrate. But we have this last little bit and it may be the most important part of all. 

Jonah’s Story

Jonah knows God has repented and it makes him mad. Isn’t it annoying when you tell someone they’re going to be in trouble and then they somehow wiggle out? Jonah has had a hard time getting to this point, he had three days in the belly of the fish, he had the whole business of finding out after that he still had to go to Ninevah, he had the trip to Ninevah. He had looked forward to seeing the whole city destroyed. It’s what they deserved. Now, that’s gone; God has repented. Jonah knows God and suspected this might happen; he thought God just might change his mind and make the whole trip useless. So he’s pouting. Do you know what I mean by pouting?  He’s mad, but instead of letting it out, he gets dramatic. “…now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” [Jonah 4:3] It’s a hot day, that dry heat that is just unrelenting and God is trying to coax Jonah back like a mother pacifying a child. So God makes a tree grow up just to give him some shade and Jonah sits under it in a little shack he’s built.

Jonah Pouts

But the next day, right at dawn, a worm starts to chew on the tree; God sent it, like God sent the fish and the tree. There’s a scorching east wind that gets under the shelter. “The sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint.” [Jonah 4:7f] Once again, Jonah is angry and once again he pouts: “It would be better for me to die than to live”, he says. Do you know this feeling—the desperate sense that you just can’t take anymore? We speak of “the straw that breaks the camel’s back”, a proverb that picks up the experience we all have when just one small thing is too much to bear. When my son Jason was 12 or so and couldn’t have something he wanted, he would say, “I’m having a bad life.” This line was always delivered after great sighs; usually it was spoken in response to one of those parental inquiries, “What’s wrong Jason?”—“I’m having a bad life.” Jonah is having a bad life.

We have a bad life too, at times, so it’s important to see how God responds. First, God asks whether Jonah’s anger is appropriate: “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?”, God asks, and Jonah of course says, “I do…I’m angry enough to die.” This is God’s response: you didn’t grow this vine, you didn’t tend it, you didn’t do anything for it; the vine grew up overnight and now it’s gone. But here you are angry because I decided to save Ninevah’s 120,000 people. I love God’s description of these people: they can’t tell their right hand from their left. And many cattle too, God says. Now the word that we translate ‘cattle’ really means all the animals there. Stunning isn’t it? For a month we’ve been reading and thinking about this city, about its destruction and salvation, did you ever think about the cattle? Here’s Almighty God, not fooled at all by the repentance of the city, knowing there is trouble ahead—they don’t know their right from their left, they’re children morally!—and God still has time to care about the cattle. God cares about the dogs, the goats, the little creatures e don’t even see most days. God’s circle of care is bigger than we ever thought.

Whom do you care about? Who does God care about? Is your list looking more like God’s? That seems to be the heart of the story of Jonah. Remember what we said at the beginning? This story uses an ancient time as its setting, but it was written down for God’s people when they were feeling smug and distinct. They’d come back from exile and pushed out all the foreigners. What a scandalous story in that context: a good religious man does all the bad things and the bad Gentiles do all the good things. And God cares for them all, teaches them all, saves them all. It’s scandalous: it will never work. But it does. God is there, in the process of each day, stretching people, teaching, growing the circle of care.

Growing Our Circle of Care

I’ve had to grow my circle. Almost 30 years ago, when my kids, Jason and Amy were almost grown, I moved far from them. It was hard and I started making a daily practice of sitting in the church’s sanctuary and praying for both of them. I’d take a few minutes to picture them, think about what they were going through, and ask God to work in their day. After a while, Jacquelyn and I were married and I became a parent to May, so the prayer time had to grow to include them. Amy got married to Nick: now I had six to pray for each day. Jason married Jenelle, Amy and Nick had Maggie, the list kept getting longer. By then I’d added onto it whoever was sick in the church. Then I went to a conference and someone suggested praying for all the members of your church daily: reading their names from a list. Amy and Nick had Andrew and later Bridget. Jason and Jenelle had Jude and Jonah. The list just kept getting longer. I added parents: my mother, Jacquelyn’s mother and father. There’s no end and that’s what God let me discover: I can’t draw a little line and say, “These are it, the rest don’t belong.” The list was like the circle in the pond: it just kept growing and now it’s grown to include all of you.  

It’s not easy to grow your circle. It means thinking of what people want and need who aren’t like you. Sometimes we fail. For a few years, I attended a Presbyterian church in Milwaukee. A group of Hmong people had settled nearby after being refugees and they wanted to be part of the church. They liked their new church so much that the Hmong women made a banner to hang on the pulpit. Hmong banners are beautiful, full of intricate tiny stitches that make vibrant patterns and the cloth is dyed with saffron, so they are bright orange. The pastor hung the banner one Sunday. But the session met soon after and declared that since orange isn’t a liturgical color, the banner would have to come down. 

The people on the session, their version of a the consistory, weren’t bad people. They were faithful Christians, they loved their church. They had been brought up seeing green, red, white, blue and purple banners, the liturgical colors. That saffron colored banner with its bright orange? They just couldn’t stretch enough to take it in. Maybe they repented eentually; I moved away shortly after the banner controversy. Honestly? I don’t think God cared about liturgical colors. I think God loved that banner. I think God likes a rainbow of colors, after all that’s the sign God chose for a covenant after the flood. I wonder what would have happened if they had stretched their circle, seen that the banner was a glorious fabric of devotion, woven those folks into the heart of that church. 

God Is Shaping Us

God is shaping us, shaping our history, expanding the circle. To be the people of God is to consciously choose to be a part of this process. It means to understand we are not here on our own and our choices are not ours alone to make. We have a purpose, the same purpose we had from the beginning. At our creation, Genesis says God placed us in a garden and told us to keep each other company and take care of the garden. That’s still our purpose and God wants to stretch us to fit it. Of course we don’t always succeed. But look at the story of Jonah:  the only one who succeeds there is God. Jonah runs away and ends up back where he started. It doesn’t matter that we don’t always succeed; God has given us repentance as a tool so we can come back, come home, remember our purpose and start over. Wouldn’t today be a good day to begin? It takes some stretching: remember, there are all those cattle, all those people, all of creation. God means to stretch us out until we finally know our right from our left, until we know the big love of God is big enough for all, big enough even for each one.

I started with a pond. Genesis says God stilled the waters at creation: God is everywhere in the pond. And God drops us in, and the effect of what we do spreads like the waves farther and farther, far beyond what we know. We may never know how much a kind word, a prayer for someone, an invitation matters. There are all those people God cares about and means us to Care for. And then of course: also many cattle.

Amen.

Go!

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A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of Locust Grove, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

13th Sunday After Pentecost/B • August 18, 2024

Jonah 3

Today’s reading from Jonah is every preacher’s fantasy. We’ve seen Jonah hear God’s call, run away, be hurled into the sea, rescued by God’s hand. He’s changed by the experience. He learns, “Deliverance belongs to the Lord,” and when he’s left on the shore, God again calls him in just the same way to go to Nineveh and announce its destruction. 

The text tells us Nineveh was a great city that would take three days to walk across. Imagine Jonah coming into Nineveh, tired, thirsty after a long trip. He’s determined to finally do what God called him to do. He walks a third of the way into the great city and says, “‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ It’s a one sentence sermon. It doesn’t have an engaging introduction doesn’t have three points, it, it doesn’t have a focus on what the preacher hopes will happen. Just: “…he cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” What do you think he imagined would happen? 

Repent!

What actually happens according to the story is amazing. What happens is that everyone takes him seriously; everyone repents! The king makes repentance a legal duty. I’ve been preaching over 50 years, and I’ve never had a reaction like this. I’ve had people walk out, leave the church, get mad; I’ve had people tell me something I said inspired them or that it was a good sermon, I’ve even had people applaud. Never once in all that time did the whole place rise up and say, “Wow!! Jim is right! We need to change our ways right now!” What is going on here?

The key is the reaction to the sermon: repentance. Notice Jonah doesn’t preach repentance; he never says, “God’s going to destroy the city unless you repent.” He just says God’s going to knock it all down. But the response of the people is immediate. The outward signs of repentance are fasting and wearing plain clothes; the text calls it sack cloth. When the King hears about Jonah, he changes his clothes and fasts along with everyone else.

No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. 8Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. [Jonah 3:7bf]

Look how complete this is: not just the king, not just the nobility, not just the peasants, even the animals are going to repent. This is funny, isn’t it? We have a little dog named Ellie. She’s a good dog but once in a while she gets something she shouldn’t have. She likes paper towels; when she gets one, she runs away and hides, she knows she’s being bad. When you get it back, she looks up and is sincerely repentant.

‘Repent’ isn’t a word we commonly use except in cartoons about silly street preachers. What does it mean? At its heart, repentance means two things. One is recognizing you’re wrong; the other is changing your direction. Most of us have had this experience. Maybe you’re driving somewhere you’ve never been; you have directions, but it just doesn’t feel right. Eventually, you admit you’re wrong and stop and ask for directions, you turn and go the right way. The last time this happened to me, I was on the way here. I stopped at the Starbucks over off Market Street shortly after I started here; I knew Locust Grove Road went all the way there. I was feeling good about finding my way in this new place, turned left off Market, right on Locust Grove Road to that place where it splits, and happily followed the yellow line off to the left. Iit took me a few minutes to figure out I’d made a wrong turn, stop, go back and get on the right road.

Three Repentances

This story is all about repentance; it’s all about change. Remember where we started?—with Jonah running away. God said, “Go to Nineveh”. But he didn’t; he went to Joppa and got on a ship for Spain, the opposite way. It takes a great, life-threatening crisis to get Jonah to turn around; it takes being in the belly of the fish for three days to get Jonah to repent.

Now we come to a second story of repentance by the community of Nineveh. The text imagines people hearing the threat of destruction and immediately repenting. Wow! Furthermore, the King gives us the reason: “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.’ [Jonah 3:9] Just like Jonah, the impetus for change comes from a crisis that threatens their very lives. What’s going on here?

Jonah is pictured as a prophet from about the 700’s up in the north, in the kingdom of Israel. That was a time when Israel’s society had left the justice envisioned by God’s covenant and traded it for systems that produced a few rich people and many poor people. They had left faithful observance of God’s covenant and there are several prophets in the Bible who denounce this. They prophesy a coming judgement but unlike the Ninevites, no one does anything about it. Ultimately, Israel is conquered by people whose capital is Ninevah. What seems to be in the background here is a comedy with a serious thought: look, those awful Gentiles over in Ninevah repented but God’s own people did not.

Why don’t people repent? Why don’t we change? Of course there are institutional reasons: some people benefit and they don’t want to give that benefit up. But I think also the familiar, the customary, gives us a sense of comfort. We like things as they are. Change can feel threatening. One of my churches wanted, so they said, to grow. They called me as their pastor for that precise purpose. Yet one Sunday after church when I was new, one of the ladies in the church took me aside and said, “We hope you will get new people in the church but we hope you will get our sort of people.” I knew what she meant: don’t change anything. 

There’s a third repentance, a third change in Jonah’s story, although we don’t always see it that way. Remember Jonah’s whole message was “Forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed”. But at the very end of this part of the story we have this amazing result: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it”. [Jonah 3:10] God changes God’s mind! Is this a little bait and switch? “I’ll threaten them but if they behave, it’s all good.” As someone who grew up hearing, “Wait ’til your father gets home” as the ultimate threat, this surprises me.

A Lesson from Dad

Yet, I also remember one of my dad’s most effective lessons. I was 16, it was winter, and I had the car and had been explicitly told to do whatever errand I was sent on and not to go anywhere else because it was snowing. But I had a girlfriend. I had the car. So stopped at her house. When I left, the wheels spun, the car shifted, and I hit a sign with the back. Not enough to hurt anyone; too much damage to go unnoticed. It was my first accident and it scared me. 

My mother was furious when I got home; my dad was out. I was shaken up, and I went to bed, but not to sleep. I knew I was in serious trouble. I heard the door when my dad came home, felt the time when I knew my mother was telling him, heard him come upstairs. I knew I was in for it. The door opened, and I laid there and in a moment, my father, this stern man who had always been the ultimate threat, quietly said, “Your mother told me about the car. Are you ok?” I blubbered and said yes. He nodded and then he said, “That’s all that matters. Get some sleep.”, and closed the door. That moment of grace and care did more to change me, make me a more careful driver, than any punishment could have done.

Jonah’s story climaxes with three stories of repentance, three stories of change. Jonah has changed his view of God. He knows now that his own judgement is not enough. He’s answered God’s call. The people of Nineveh, facing a crisis, find the courage to change. Even the king sits in sackcloth, hoping God will repent. And God, whose children these are, whose beloved children, is so pleased, the disaster is averted. God repents. The forty days come and go; the disaster never occurs. Perhaps when our fears don’t happen, there is a lesson to be learned as well.

Years after the comment about bringing in “our sort of people”, that church did begin to grow. It wasn’t easy and it took changes, changes that weren’t always comfortable. But I remember smiling one day, looking at the back of the church, where that same lady was happily chatting with one of the new members, a woman who came to us in desperate straits, whom the church embraced, who had become, like the lady, a deacon, a sister in Christ in the covenant of that church.

Following Jesus

Change is hard. Repentance is hard. But what does Jesus say? At the beginning of his ministry, the very start, Mark tells us, “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ Repentance—change—is the gateway to the gospel. And isn’t our call, all of us, to share that good news, that God’s love, embodied in Jesus Christ, has changed us? Amen

The Deep End

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Exploring With Jonah – Part 2

A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA

by The Rev. James E. Eaton, Pastor ©2024

12th Sunday After Pentecost/B • August 11, 2024

Jonah 2:1-10

When I was seven or eight, our family belonged to the Hopewell Country Club, and we spent summer days at the pool. Everyone had a little rubbery circle worn on your wrist or, if you were cool, around your ankle. The band’s color defined what part of the pool you could use. But like all kids, we saw boundaries more as a challenge than a limit. So sometimes, we’d slip under the ropes and floats that marked our zone. There would be a few moments of stolen fun but inevitably your mother would yell, “Get out of the deep end! Get out of the deep end!” What my mother knew was that I needed to be near a wall. The deep end of the pool was a mysterious zone where danger lurked. Even later when I had passed the swimming tests and taken a diving class, the deep end always gave me a little shiver. 

Jonah in the Deep End

Life has deep ends. Sometimes there are boundaries and markers that warn of our approach to the deep end; sometimes we find ourselves in the deep end with no warning at all. Have you been to the deep end? Today’s reading is about Jonah in the depths, in the deep end. , but it is as much about what to do when you are in the deep end. Last week, we read how God called Jonah to go to Nineveh, a great and evil city and how Jonah ran away from God. He took a boat for a foreign shore, but God hurled a wind that threatened the boat and the sailors hurled Jonah into the water. There, drowning, he was swallowed by a big fish. That’s where we left him last week, in the belly of the fish. 

He says,

You cast me into the deep,
   into the heart of the seas,
   and the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and your billows
   passed over me.
Then I said, “I am driven away
   from your sight;
how shall I look again
   upon your holy temple?”
The waters closed in over me;
   the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped around my head
   at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
   whose bars closed upon me for ever;”
[Jonah 2:3-6a]

The deep end of life is the place where you feel yourself far from God’s care, distant from God’s presence, distant from God’s call. 

The Deep End

We arrive at the deep end in various ways. Sometimes an event overwhelms us and we feel God has deserted us. We go to the doctor and suddenly hear awful words that change the afternoon; a friend or a family member dies or is killed, and we cannot see the sense or find comfort, and we rage at God and feel deserted. 

Other times, the deep end is a place we have gone on our own. Our society has a pervasive amount of information about dangers. We know how dangerous heroin and cocaine are. We know how dangerous smoking is. We could list hundreds of other things we know are bad for us. We see glittering commercials about casinos; we hear next to nothing about the toll of those addicted to gambling whose desperation becomes a deep end that destroys. Every year, every day, people voluntarily take the first steps into the deep end. Once there, they discover it is a one way journey that not only destroys them physically but often spiritually as well. The deep end is the place where we cannot feel God’s presence, where we feel alone and desperate. 

Have you been to this place? The fish gets all the attention when we remember this story: we like happy endings and the fish is the happy ending. But before that there is real terror here. There is real fear. People in recovery from alcoholism or other addictions often speak of hitting bottom. Jonah speaks of “the pit”: it’s the same place. Many experiences have a pit. A woman said, “I think I hit rock bottom about 3 weeks after my husband left, and now I’m slowly swimming back up. But I’m a wounded swimmer.” 

Jonah is a wounded swimmer when the fish swallows him. Most of us are wounded as well at one time or another. So Jonah’s experience is ours. We have been to the pit: we have been to the deep end. But there is hope in the deep end. Joseph Hart, writing about the impact of trauma and crisis, notes,

When an accident or disaster strikes, to say nothing of a deliberate act like torture, the old ways in which we saw the world no longer make sense. We ask, “How could this happen?” and “Where was God?” And by slowly struggling to answer such questions, we develop a new and deeper understanding. We grow.

Hart goes on to describe a doctor who had built a successful practice and earned many honors. At 62, he suffered a heart attack followed by a stroke. He lost the ability to drive or practice and he lost his purpose. Eventually he had to be hospitalized under a suicide watch. But with his purpose gone, he found a spiritual core and rediscovered his religious faith. Eventually he found a new purpose and new meaning in life.

Jonah Finds a Purpose

This is what happens to Jonah. Jonah finds purpose when he responds to God’s call. He starts up when he starts back, back to God, back to God’s hope for him. 

7 As my life was ebbing away,
   I remembered the Lord;
and my prayer came to you,
   into your holy temple.
8 Those who worship vain idols
   forsake their true loyalty. [Jonah 2:7f]

Here is the key to purpose and to a way back from the deep end: to rediscover God’s hope for your life, to hear God’s call to you, to put God’s purpose at the center of your own life and make that purpose the guide to every day. 

We often try to fight the deep on our own. We avoid admitting we’re in the deep end. “I can handle it,” we say. We try to cope, moving faster and faster until we can’t see where we are from the frantic spin. Surely in the midst of the storm Jonah swam like crazy, but the answer wasn’t to swim harder, it was to go where God wanted him to go. Swimming harder won’t help if you’re going in the wrong direction. 

Every Sunday we pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” Temptation is an experience when we are seduced into believing we are enough, we can set our own course, live from our own purpose. That path leads to the deep end. One of the reasons for a church is to help us avoid the deep end if we can. But the good news, the truly great news, is that even in the deep end, even when we think we are lost forever to the love of God, we are not. God is waiting, even in the deep end to hear us, to lead us, to rescue us. What Jonah learns in the deep end is that God has heard him. And knowing that God has heard him, he finally is ready to live from God’s call. 

Are You In the Deep End?

Have you been to the deep end? Are you there now? There are many who are. I said last week and I say again, this is a church in transition. Saying that brings to mind the pastoral search, but it’s not just about a new pastor. It’s also about sharpening and sharing our understanding of God’s call and purpose for this church. Surely part of that call is to help people come back from the deep end. After all, the church is meant to be a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for the saved. 

We left Jonah last week in the deep end, in the belly of the great fish. Today we heard him say, “Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”  [Jonah 2:9b] The fish leaves him on the shore, but he’s not the same Jonah that left. When we have been to the deep end and learned that indeed, “Deliverance belongs to the Lord”, neither are we, neither is anyone. What do you imagine Jonah thought there, wet, sea weed tangled around him, maybe bruised from his landing? I wonder if he remembered God’s call? I wonder if he was just happy to be alive? He’s back where he started; no progress made at all. But perhaps God has made some progress, for Jonah is not tv he same person he was when he ran away. We’ll leave him there on the beach today, and come back next week. 

God’s Call

We need a week to think about our call as well. Sometimes when we imagine a calling, we think it’s big and important, and we know that we are neither. But God’s call comes into our lives in many ways. Mother Teresa said, “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.” May what you do this week indeed be full of great love.

Amen.

Meet Mr. Jonah

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Exploring the Book of Jonah #1

A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA

By The Rev. James E. Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

11th Sunday After Pentecost/B • August 4, 2024

Scripture Jonah Chapter 1

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s Superman! We all know who Superman is; we know at least part of his story, we know he has a cape, most of us know he passes the day working as mild-mannered Clark Kent. Whether we watch an old 1950s episode of Superman or the latest movie, all individual Superman stories have the same plot: something happens, Superman appears and saves the day, an evil genius arises and finds a way to weaken Superman who is temporarily out of action. During that time, the evil genius creates mayhem, but Superman eventually triumphs and saves the world. But we go; we watch.

From the days of our ancestors gathered around fires, stories have intrigued us and the best ones are always old. Think of the story of a special man with a single flaw: his pride, his anger. When he gets angry, he does something shameful that ultimately proves his undoing. You’ve seen this story a hundred times in various forms, but the amazing thing is that it was already old in Jesus’ time: it’s the plot line of Homer’s Iliad, which is actually titled, The Wrath of Achilles. We love stories and this summer we are going to try an experiment: we are going to spend this month exploring Jonah. Why Jonah? Because Jonah is a book with you and me in it: it is a story that invites us to share our own stories of God’s call in our lives.

Meet Mr. Jonah

I know as soon as I said Jonah, a lot of us raced ahead to the whale. Actually, there is no whale, it’s a big fish, and we’ll get to that along the way. Don’t be in such a rush! Even Superman movies start by introducing him before they get to all the gee whiz stuff and introducing Jonah is just what I have in mind today. Today, we’ll meet Mr. Jonah and make it clear how we can use his story to help us understand what God is doing right here, right now. In the next few weeks, we’ll see him struggle with God’s call, just as we often do. 

Was there a real, historical Jonah? The answer is: possibly—and the real one may have nothing to do with our story. How can that be? Think of our own stories. Do you remember Davy Crockett? Some I suspect are already humming the Davy Crockett theme song in their heads. Davy Crockett wrote a brief story about some of his adventures, but others expanded on them, and he became a legend in his own time. In our imagination, he’s a courageous warrior and a man of simple but true homespun wisdom he finally gave his life in a fight for freedom at the Alamo. The facts of his life are quite different. Crockett abandoned his family to go hunting and the fight at the Alamo was actually an insurrection. What interests us about Davy Crockett is not his biography but his legend and the story of a man making a way in the wilderness.

Even if we don’t know much about the historical Jonah, we do know enough to imagine him. Just like us, he has what I call the Daily Problem. He needs to eat every day, he needs something to drink every day. He has a to-do list. He gets annoyed with his neighbors sometimes. He has a father—remember, Jonah son of Amittai?— who probably gives advice he doesn’t want sometimes. He is associated with a little village up in the north of Israel with a name that translates something like “wine press place”, so I like to think of him living in wine country, just like we do. He’s described in 2 Kings as a prophet, so his job is preaching and healing there. I imagine he has the same set of aches and pains we all have at times. 

Jonah’s Call

Jonah’s story was told among a group of people wrestling with what it meant to be chosen by God. That had always been Israel’s faith: God’s special care for them. But eventually, Israel was conquered, her people deported, and they had to ask how it could be that God would desert them. If you have ever felt deserted by God, if you have ever felt alone and afraid, you know just how they felt. Why were they defeated? Why had God abandoned them? Would God ever change and take them back? They asked these questions, and they began to tell this story of a man just like them who heard God’s call and how he acted.

Jonah’s story begins with God’s call.

Go to the great city of Ninevah and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me. [Jonah 1:2] 

Have you ever been to Nineveh? I thought not. But maybe you have in a way. Nineveh is the place you fear, the place where you are a stranger and everyone is your enemy. To this day, Israel remembers how the Assyrians, whose capital was Nineveh, conquered the northern tribes 700 years before Christ and deported them. The whole ancient world knew Nineveh as an emblem of torture and cruelty and irresistible violence. It brought to mind the same darkness the word ‘Auschwitz’ does for us. 

But here is God saying, as if it were nothing, go to this foreign, fearsome, place and tell them to repent. Now that can only have two results. Either they will laugh at you—or believe you and take it out on you. Imagine God calling you to go to New York, the financial capital of a great worldwide empire, to announce its destruction. Maybe you would be laughed out of town; maybe you would be jailed as a threat. Neither choice is good. 

That’s what Jonah thought too. Maybe he thought God made a mistake; maybe he just didn’t like the odds. What he does about the call is run the other way. He goes to Joppa, a busy port, and buys passage to Tarshish, The writer assumes you know the geography but just in case you don’t, let me explain. Nineveh was a city in what’s now Iraq; the ruins are still there. It’s about 550 miles east of Israel. Tarshish, on the other hand, is about 2,500 miles west, somewhere in southern Spain. It was famous as a Phoenician city that exported tin and other metals.

Running Away from God’s Call

Jonah runs away. He thought Tarshish would be beyond the presence of the Lord. How far do you have to go to get away from God? Jonah thinks Spain but he’s mistaken. The Psalmist asks “Where can I go from your Spirit?” [Ps 139:7] God is everywhere. Jonah sails off west, but the sea can be ferocious. It’s an image the Bible frequently uses for chaos. Creation, according to Genesis 1, begins with a primordial dark tossing sea called in Hebrew, “Tohu Bohu”. God’s power is controlling the sea, and that theme is repeated over and over again. In the midst of the storm, the sailors want to lighten ship. They throw Jonah overboard, a sad necessity to them, perhaps to him the end of the voyage. 

The Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. [Jonah 1;17]

But God isn’t finished with Jonah. He’s swallowed by a big fish.

See?—no whale. Sorry, I didn’t write the story, I just preach it.  

We Are God’s Tools

There’s a lot to think and pray about here. First is the whole idea of a call. What is your call? What is our call as a church? Most of us have tools of some sort. I don’t mean just the screwdrivers in the garage, I mean things we use to get things done: the broom, the vacuum, the flipper for your eggs. Every single one has a purpose and if we don’t use the right tool, we do a poor job. I have a hammer, just a regular old carpenter’s hammer. But it lives down in my basement, two flights of stairs away from where Jacquelyn is asking me to put a nail in the wall to hang a picture sometimes. And you know, I’m just lazy enough that often I look around for something to hit that nail with: maybe the flat side of a wrench or the handle of a screwdriver. It doesn’t work very well. Every task has an appropriate tool and caring in creation is the main task God has set humanity. We are the tools God uses and calling is simply being the right tool for a purpose of God’s. We look around and say, “Oh, that’s a Phillips head screw, I need the Phillips head screwdriver,” or “I need the big sauce pan that has a lid.” God looks around and finds one of us and knows we are the right tool for God’s purpose.

But a hammer doesn’t have a will of its own; we do. So we get to choose. Jonah chose to run away and in all honesty, so do we sometimes. But God’s purpose doesn’t change; it doesn’t in this story, it doesn’t in history. What changes is our willingness to say yes to God’s call, yes to God’s purpose, yes to living from God’s purpose. 

Your Call

What is your call? Maybe you know already; maybe you haven’t felt that movement of the heart. Hearing God’s call takes some listening. Often when we think of prayer, we think of what we say. But prayer can also be simply listening, being still. God’s call is there if we are quiet enough to see it, hear it, feel it. Moses was a middle-aged fugitive who’d made a new life in a foreign country. He worked as a herdsman, married the boss’s daughter. One day he was out with the flocks, and he noticed a bush burning without being consumed. Now the rabbis say hundreds of people had seen this and passed it by. But Moses turned aside. Moses went and listened and God called him to an incredible, amazing life leading his people out of slavery. What part of God’s purpose are you uniquely, wonderfully made to accomplish? And what is the call of this church? What purpose of God’s is it meant to serve, meant to accomplish?

I’m going to end with that question and I hope this week you’ll think about and pray about your call. I hope this week you’ll think about and pray about the call of this church. We’ll leave Mr. Jonah there in the belly of the fish for now and see what happens next week. What happens when you run away from God’s call? What happens when you embrace it?

Amen.