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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

14^th 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.