Of Fish and Faith
John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church
January 22, 2006
Jonah
3:1-10
We are in the midst of a rather busy season, so let me draw
your attention to several activities. First, we have, we believe,
enough volunteers for next Saturday’s presbytery meeting
– thank you. You are welcome to come to the church, though,
to help out or to see what a presbytery meeting looks like.
It is an important transition time in the life of our presbytery,
and Third Church has an important role to play. So do come.
Two weeks from today, we will devote our Sunday to the important
issue of faith and its relationship to science, and more specifically
to maters of creation and “intelligent design” and
the attendant political debate. Professor Warren Allmon from
Cornell will be present with us for a lunch following the 10:45
service – sign-up details are in the bulletin.
And finally, the weekend following, on February 10 and 12,
we will enjoy our annual weekend with Temple B’rith Kodesh.
Dinner reservation information for Friday evening is also in
the bulletin, as is information for Sunday morning. This, too,
is an important and timely conversation – are there any
other kind – and so I hope you will be present.
***
We will do things a bit differently this morning. I would invite
you to turn, as you are willing and able, to page 859 in the
Old Testament portion of your pew Bibles. The book of Jonah
is brief, and we will walk thought the entire book briefly,
with relatively little comment, right now, with a focus on our
text for this morning, from chapter 3.
In verse 1 of chapter 1, it all begins as the word of the Lord
came to a man named Jonah. “Go to Nineveh," the word
said, the voice said, Nineveh, a great city beset by wickedness.
Jonah fled from that word, going to Tarshish rather than Nineveh.
On the boat, in verse 4, God hurls a great wind and a mighty
storm. The sailors try everything, including praying to their
god. They implore Jonah to pray to his God. Then they throw
dice, in verse 7, to determine the cause of the problem: it
is Jonah. Jonah confesses and offers to be tossed overboard
to save the men and the boat. They resist at first, and then
ultimately relent. Once Jonah is tossed overboard, the sea calms.
The men are impressed. In verse 17, God provides a large fish
(note that it’s not a whale) to save Jonah. Three days.
Chapter 2 serves as a kind of summary prayer from the mouth
and heart of Jonah. At the end of it, in verse 19, God, the
silent main character in all this, speaks to the fish and Jonah
is rather unceremoniously exited.
In chapter 3, God speaks to Jonah a second time, and Jonah
listens. Look at verse 3: “So Jonah set out and went to
Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord.” Verse 4:
And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall
be overthrown!’” Verse 5: “And the people
of Nineveh believed…” In verses 6-9, the king himself
repents, and in verse 10, God changes God’s mind and spares
the great and wicked city.
All’s well with everyone, except Jonah, who is angry
because God spares the city. He leaves the city and pitches
a tent, along with his fit, in the desert. God moves a bush
to give Jonah shade. The next day, in verse 7 of chapter 4,
God appoints a worm to destroy the bush, and then a hot desert
wind blows up. God uses the moment, in verses 10 and 11, to
tell Jonah that as much as he was agitated about the bush, how
much more should God care about this great city, and its residents,
who, in verse 11, do not even know their right hand from their
left. God explains. Jonah listens. The city is saved.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
***
There are many entry points to this story. One such entry point
would be a renewed call to urban ministry, to view Rochester,
for example, as our Nineveh and to speak with a prophetic voice
and a caring voice about its ills, and to work to heal them.
We do that on a regular basis, especially around hunger and
education, but we are certainly called to dig deeper, to challenge
the city and ourselves more radically for change.
This story also says much about the character of God. God provides
at opportune moments, it would seem. We view the big fish as
a kind of punishment, but actually, the big fish saves Jonah,
and then un-swallows him, deposits him in such a way so that
he can follow God’s voice. Later, God provides again in
the form of the bush. And more so – and in the face of
contemporary voices who insist that God is in the punishment
business – God acts with mercy toward a city that is both
great and wicked. And further, God changes God’s mind
here, a most intriguing theological point to consider.
All of this, in a few brief verses: the nature of humanity,
the nature of society, the nature of God.
It is all here, but what we also have today is a kind of unintended
continuation of last week’s conversation about calling
and vocation, and listening to and responding to, God’s
voice.
Last week, Jesus spoke very clearly to his would-be followers:
“follow me, come and see.” And they did. They responded
to the summons with a kind of reckless abandon. No credential
checking on Jesus’ part, no deep research on what they
were getting into on the disciples’ part.
Today it is a little bit different. We are in the liturgical
season that falls between the Advent season and the Lent season.
It is called football season. You will have to excuse me if
you are not a football fan, or more sadly, not a sports fan
in general.
Several interesting moments have unfolded over the past several
weeks. One happened in the Orange Bowl, where the main story
was not the fact that Penn State played Florida State, but that
the combined age of the coaches, Bobby Bowden at Florida State
and Joe Paterno at Penn State, totaled something like 155 years.
The jokes were many, including the suggestion that instead of
halftime the game would need a naptime.
But Paterno and Bowden seemed like veritable spring chickens
when the Buffalo Bills hired 80-year-old Marv Levy to come back
and run the team as its general manager. Marv apparently even
briefly flirted with the idea of coaching the team as well,
but he will not.
Some eight or nine coaches resigned or have been fired in the
NFL. It’s a rough business. This time around, teams are
hiring younger coaches, some with little experience. They are
cheaper, and, apparently easier to fire.
Even if you are not a sports fan, it is an interesting process
to watch, because it so mirrors the process that we all live
through. Ours is not so public – millions of people will
not know when we do well or when we do not do so well, or in
what manner we are following our call.
But recently hired coaches express unbridled enthusiasm for
their new jobs, many saying something like “I’ve
waited my whole life for this moment.” That is an awfully
big investment, emotional, physical, in a job—any job.
What we noted last week – the tension of defining who
you are with what you do – is on full display. Who knows
what they must feel when the glory of that moment fades, for
some sooner rather than later.
Jonah clearly did not say that he had been waiting for this
moment all his life. His reluctance is palpable. He clearly
wanted to follow God’s voice, but not where that voice
was leading him in this particular instant.
What do we want to do when we grow up, what do we want to do
with our lives, is a complex enough question. It shouldn’t
be made more complicated when the answer seems so clear –a
voice from God, even – and yet the recipient is so reluctant.
One of the points of the football references is just that –
a vision of how things are meant to be coming face-to-face with
reality. Only one team wins the Super Bowl each year –
in a sense the rest fail. But God does not automatically call
us to success, Jonah’s story seems to be telling us. God
calls us to the adventure, to the journey, to do what needs
to be done in order to advance God’s work and God’s
vision.
One intriguing feature of all this is that God does not seems
to know how this all will turn out. God needs Jonah’s
participation as a full partner in Nineveh’s redemption.
God could have chosen, it would seem, to act on God’s
own, to save the city even if it did not have the opportunity
to hear Jonah’s voice. But God chose this man, this reluctant,
cut-and-run, risk adverse man, to deliver the message. Without
that message’s deliverance, the city was doomed.
Without us, so the trajectory would go, God’s story of
redemption and reconciliation could not be told, and God’s
saving activity could not be realized. That is a rather large
responsibility to place upon our feeble selves. But the story
would insist that God does provide, even in the face of our
reluctance and hesitancy. God provides – a fish, a bush,
a voice, gifts, friends, co-journeyers.
Jonah’s resistance is not unique, scholar Phyllis Trible
reminds us. (The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume VII,
pages 463 and forward) Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah all shrank away.
But Jonah runs away. He is not just resisting. He is disobeying.
And it’s a very real problem.
Some prophets, perhaps some of us, will resist because we fear
we will not succeed. Jonah resists because he fears he will
succeed. His disagreement with God is deep – a disagreement
that suggests that God is wrong in wanting to save the city.
Jonah protests God’s love, God’s mercy, as if there
were some dichotomy between the love of God and the justice
of God. Jonah resists because he believed that God should destroy
Nineveh because of its evil ways. God acts to redeem the city
for the very same reason.
Phyllis Trible reminds us that Jonah's reasoning for resistance
does not appear until the end of the story – he runs away
at the beginning but we are not precisely sure why. The question
of what we will do with our lives takes on an added poignancy,
does it not, at the moment when the human vision, our vision,
creeps up alongside God’s vision and does not quite fit.
We’ve had many stories recently about the baby boomer
generation, and how it is turning sixty. Former President Clinton
and current President Bush are in this group, as are many celebrities
and public figures. They’ve lived a full life, so it seems.
Some have earned great riches and others great accolades. And
they face the “now what?” question, as if all of
the previous successes did not matter. Only the present moment,
and the future ones, will. Whatever Jonah’s past, and
there seems to be some indication that his has been successful
– it is only the present, and the future, that will matter.
In the 1800’s, theologian Horace Bushnell was as popular
as any public figure, traveling and preaching and writing. He
spent a great deal of time thinking about this question of vocation
and purpose and what we are to do with our lives and how we
are to respond to God’s call. “God has a definite
purpose in our lives,” Bushnell asserts, “a life
plan.” And we are blessed when we find it.
That is true, I believe as well, but its truth does not mean
that the plan is always clear, or the journey is not always
a successful one, or that any of this is defined in a way that
we can easily comprehend or the culture could quantify.
God calls. Jonah resists and even runs away. God persists,
both in the call and in the effort to rescue the fugitive from
drowning, literally in the water and figuratively in his own
fear. And by persisting, God redeems both the person and the
city, for what we can only imagine is an ongoing and ever-unfolding
journey of faithfulness and joy.
We should be so blessed – and so we are. Amen.
