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.