B Epiphany 3 BFC
2015
Jonah 1:1-3; 3:1-5,
10; 4:1
January 25, 2015
Last week we read from I Samuel the
paradigmatic call of the prophet story.
God calls to the prophet, and the prophet responds by saying, “Here I
am,” as a way of saying I am fully present, I will show up, and it is time to
get to work. This statement always comes
with the prophet’s disqualifying
characteristic. The prophet is not a
good speaker, is too young, or too young and too female. God is unconcerned by these disqualifications. God is a non-anxious presence in the heart of
what will be inevitable conflict for the prophet and their mission. That story from I Samuel, the one we read
last week, is iconic as the call of the prophet myth.
As the
celebrated teacher, Joseph Campbell might tell us, myth constructs
worldview. And within myth are verbal,
visual, or auditory clues that open us up to a wider story of values, implicit
understandings, and behaviors. The cues
also develop expectations. Like a joke
might begin with, “A priest, a rabbi walk into a bar,” or “Knock, knock” we
have a hint how things are going to go when we hear or read certain words. We hear or read the words, “Here I am” and
we know that we are in the midst of a story about the call of a prophet.
Parable, on
the other hand, subverts worldview. It
takes the common story and upends expectations.
Jesus of Nazareth would teach with parables to upend worldview with the
hope that space might open up in the heart of the listener and transform what
the listener thought they already knew.
For example,
a son leaves a father with his inheritance and squanders it in loose
living. He returns home hoping to just
receive what is given to the hired hands.
Dad is not going to be happy. The
expectation is, the son will return with bowed head and broken spirit, and
receive the chastisement of his father, and maybe, just maybe the son will be
taken back into the familial fold.
Instead, the parable helps us to imagine the broad and wide heart of
God. The father runs from the house to
embrace him. He puts a ring on his son’s
finger and throws a party for him.
Wait. What? Dad? A
party? That’s what the oldest son said.
Within
parables are these absurdities, comedies that help us see the world wholly
different. After reading the call of the
prophet myth last week, today we have before us the call of the prophet parable. God calls the prophet Jonah, and Jonah does
not show up. Instead, Jonah hops on a
boat that takes him away from the furthest known point away from the holy land. Certainly, Jonah must reason, God’s presence
and activity will not be known in Tarshish.
In Jewish
mythology, the sea and the sea monster are part of the chaos that fall outside
the purview of God’s love, grace, and salvation. But here they are, the sea and the sea
monster, smack dab in the middle of this parable, as agents of God’s mercy and
salvation.
The prophet,
the one who is supposed to be the faithful messenger of God’s broad and wide
love and compassion is the one who chooses not to show up, not to be present,
and not to do the work given. God’s will
is not done through the prophet. God’s
will is done through the agents of chaos, the sea and the sea monster.
I think
Biblical stories seep into our culture in ways that we do not often see in the
modern world because we rarely engage the Bible like we once did. For good or ill, though, I see them
undergirding the stories we still tell in modern culture.
You may remember the TV show from the early
90s, “Northern Exposure.” The show was
about a Jewish doctor from New York who was sent, unwillingly, to the wilds of
Cicely, Alaska, to pay off his accumulated student loans. Ironically, my sister, Dr. Elizabeth
Mulberry, had to do the same thing to pay off her student loans.
“Northern
Exposure” told the story of Dr. Joel Fleischman and his grouching and grumbling
attempt to make sense of a place where he was exposed to an uncounted number of
quirky personalities and cultural clashes.
The show won almost every award possible for the way it loved all of its
characters, their diverse personalities and habits, and the resulting humor
from their interaction. Salvation could
be found in Cicely, Alaska—just not through Dr. Fleishcman, who came to Alaska
thinking he had a corner on salvation and healing. In the
show, he was often the one being taught and saved. In his critique of the personalities and
settings found in Alaska, the learned Dr. Fleischman was also often the subject
of satire.
That is
where comedy is often found. Not because
someone can tell a good joke, but because they take themselves so seriously
that they cannot see the panoply of color and beauty and goodness found within
their reach. In his inability to do so,
Dr. Fleischman always seemed to be the most miserable, god-forsaken person on
the show.
Much to my
Biblically geeky delight, in one of the episodes the writers placed the Jewish
Dr. Fleischman in the belly of a great whale, contemplating the meaning of his
life. Here he was, a doctor ready to
offer the small town of Cicely salvation with his gifts, and almost nobody
seemed beholden to the salvation he was offering.
Jesus says
in the gospels that the only sign this evil and adulterous nation shall receive
is the sign of Jonah. So we best be
figuring out what that sign is to know the meaning of Jesus.
I love the
story of Jonah because it reminds me of the fractured fairy tales I would watch
on Saturday morning TV when I was growing up.
As Callie Plunket Brown writes:
There
is much that is absurd in the book of Jonah:
a man gets swallowed by a fish; animals don sackcloth, and a prophet
gets so angry over the death of a bush that he wishes he were dead. But the questions the story provokes are
quite serious. Is God clueless or just
terribly irresponsible? How can justice
be served in the face of such mercy? How
on earth can human beings hope to make sense of such a deity.[1]
It is easy to make fun of Jonah in a
context so far removed from the big fish story.
For the Jewish people, however, there would have been a strong
identification with his plight—the fear and anger that had built over the years
of the Exile and toward the Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrian Empire In historical context, the humor of Jonah had
an edge.
Scholars date the book of Joan to the 6th
or 5th Century BCE when the people of Israel were still smarting
from the real pain of the Exile and its aftermath. In relating a metaphor for the Jewish
experience of Exile, the prophet Ezekiel has us envision a killing field full
of the dry bones of the Jewish people, a people laid waste. As I related in sermons during Advent, in
Exile many of the Jewish touchstones for faith were violently stripped from
them. The Temple—the habitation for God
and place for pilgrimage—razed to the ground.
Their leaders—the representative for God on earth—had been murdered or
carted off in chains to serve a foreign ruler.
The land—the place of covenantal promise and ancestral heritage—was no
longer their own and had become wasteland or desert. One of the responses to the Exile was to
circle the Jewish wagon of identity and close ranks around Jewish tradition so
that outside threats could not, would not eradicate all of what it meant to be
Jewish from the earth. In some quarters,
this gave rise to a nationalism that condemned close contact with people who
were not Jews, punched up part of the Jewish moral code that prohibited
intermarriage, and offered strong critique of anyone or anything that saw God
outside of Judaism. The book of Jonah
then is a parable, a satirical story, which unseats insular nationalism.
While the call of the prophet story
is certainly true, we also know this story of Jonah to be true. Jonah may run from God to avoid his call, but
there are times in our lives when God tracks us down, is on the hunt for
us. Representative John Lewis, one of
the people who marched without Dr. King on the first march to Selma and was the
first person beaten unconscious on the bridge leading into town said, that Dr.
King would talk about the feeling that God was tracking us down to do the
necessary work. Lewis said,
You
have been caught up. You have been led. You have been not necessarily forced,
but something caught up with you and said, "John Lewis, you too can do
something, you too can make a contribution, you too can get in the way, but if
you're going to do it, do it full and with love, peace, nonviolence, and that
element of faith.[2]
There are times when we are the
prophet that says, reluctantly, “Here I am,” but there are other times when we
try to run, seek to get away from the necessary work that has to be done, and
God tracks us, catches up with us, to let us know it is ours to do in full
love.
Not only does the Jonah story
diverge from the faithful story of the prophet but also from what happens when
the prophet speaks truth to power. Jesus
gives voice to it when he says to his own holy city, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you
who murder the prophets . . .” This is
the usual plight of the prophet—they are scoffed at, ridiculed, thrown in
prison, or murdered. In the book of
Jonah, miraculously, the prophet succeeds and the people of Nineveh
repent.
Again, we might think Jonah without
compassion to not want to go and preach a word of repentance to the capital of
the Assyrian Empire, Nineveh. Think
about what the Exile must have done to the Jewish psyche, how the violence
caused them to with withdraw as a people.
And Assyria was a byword for brutality in the ancient world. Hebrew Scripture scholar, Beth Tanner, states
that Assyria was, “[T]he nation that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel
and held the southern kingdom of Judah as a vassal for almost one hundred
years. Assyria was more than an enemy;
it was a brutal occupying force that forever changed Israel’s fortunes.”[3]
The Assyrian Chronicles describe
horrendous acts of torture which were employed to create fear and, thus,
submission in the enemies of the empire.[4] The text says that its pagan sinfulness was
legendary, as was its cruelty. “It was
the people which scorched its enemies alive to decorate its walls and pyramids
with their skin.”[5]
Here is the thing though. It is a part of every people that they seem
to be able to recount the horrors and cruelty of their enemy but are seemingly
unable to see even worse horror and cruelty among the citizens of their own
nation, among their friends, and among their family. It is one kind of love to wish love and mercy
for your own people and kin. It is a
strange and unusual kind of love that says love and mercy should be extended to
your enemies.
Dr. King
said, "At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel. … In spite of
the darkness of this hour, we must not lose faith in our white [sisters and]
brothers."[6] National historian, NPR contributor and
Montana State graduate, Sarah Vowell, once wrote in the New York Times about
this kind of love and Dr. King.
On Nov. 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church, King concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the
“loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into your
eyes and into the eyes of all of my brothers [and sisters] in Alabama and all
over America and over the world, I say to you: ‘I love you. I would rather die
than hate you.’ ”
Go ahead and re-read that, [Vowell writes.] That is hands down the most beautiful,
strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And
it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all
radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in
Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you,
do good to them that hate you.”[7]
That
is the character of the God who calls Jonah.
That even when we might be the enemies of God or the enemies of God’s
people, God still has faith in us.
Jonah does not want to go, and the
first half of the book is a humorous account of his attempt to run away from
his task. After arranging for Jonah to
set up his cot in the belly of the sea monster, God gives Jonah a second chance
as a way of relating God’s character of love and mercy. Does Jonah understand this? Does he get that
as love and mercy are extended to him why would God not extend love and mercy
to the people of Nineveh? Appearances
can be deceiving.
Initially, Jonah gives his message
to the people of Nineveh, and, again, unlike most prophets, he is heard and the
people repent. Lord livin’, the people
of Nineveh repent so that God decides not to destroy them. Happy ending, right?
Not so. Jonah rails against God for forgiving the
Ninevites. Jonah sees God’s gracious and
merciful nature, the extended width and breadth of God’s love, as a character
flaw. Probably echoing the sentiment of
the vast majority of Jewish people in his time, Jonah does not want God’s grace
and love to extend beyond Israel’s borders.
Jonah turns to God after the people of Nineveh repent and says, “I knew
this is who you were. I knew you were
too full of compassion. I would rather
die than have compassion.”
God, in turn, challenges Jonah’s
limited understanding. The book ends
with God’s question, “Is it not in my nature to be kind to all creatures? Is it not in my nature? My character?”
The book of Jonah unseats the
conventional wisdom, the myth of its time, with a parable that challenges a
nationalism seeking to limit God’s love to one’s countryfolk and kin. It is still a challenge to those who would
define God’s grace by their own parochial boundaries.
An interesting footnote? The ancient city of Nineveh is just across
from the modern city of Mosul, Iraq. My
hope is that that footnote gives us all a little pause, makes us ask whether
the kindness and mercy and love of God stops only at our borders or extends
beyond to include even our worst enemy, no matter how brutal they are or how
brutal we make them out to be. In a
blessed and fortunate way, Dr. King had faith in white people as many of them
ignored, or hurled epiteths, or brutalized the African American community.
Do we have a faith that shares in
the broad and wide expanse of God’s love and mercy? Do we have faith in the Muslim community? In the evangelical Christian community? God is tracking us. And the sign of Jonah is that God’s love is
far broader and wider than even the prophet can imagine.
Maybe the Bible is this antiquated
book that really holds nothing for us.
But maybe, just maybe in a story like this, we can see the struggle of
communities to figure out a God who was tracking them. In each age, would we rather die than hate or
die than have compassion? The choice is
sometimes that stark and sometimes being asked of us by a God who is still on
the move.
Forever there are those who are
trying to limit the love of God and suggest that anything that contradicts our
love for our country and our country alone, should be seen as taking side and
limiting our patriotic fervor. Or that
we are the only people of faith who have the right and good answers and so
certainly God is on our side. Whether a
fractured fairy tale or “Northern Exposure”, maybe the story of Jonah
recognizes that there are those in each age who will try to chain God to their
particular people. And the wild and free
God, the God full of compassion, in each age, will be tracking us, catching up
with us, leading us to something bigger and wider. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Callie Plunket-Brewton, Instructor, University of
North Alabama, “Third Sunday after Epiphany:
First Reading: Lectionary for
January 22, 2012,” http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=1/22/2012&tab=1.
[2] “Transcript for John Lewis—The Art
& Discipline of Nonviolence,” OnBeing
with Krista Tippett,January 15, 2015. http://www.onbeing.org/program/john-lewis-the-art-discipline-of-nonviolence/transcript/7229#main_content.
[3] Beth Tanner, Assistant Professor of Old Testament,
New Brunswick Theological Seminary, “Third Sunday after Epiphany: First Reading: Lectionary for January 25, 2009,” WorkingPreacher.org http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.saspx?lect_date=1/25/2009&tab=1.
[4] Plunket-Brewton, “Third Sunday.”
[5] Russell Rathbun, “Prophet and Loss: The Ninevites Repent, but Jonah does not,
what is the point of this story?” the hardest question http://thehardestquestion.org/uncategorized/epiphany3ot.
[6] “Transcript for John Lewis.”
[7] Sarah Vowell, “Radical Love Gets a Holiday,” New York Times, January 21, 2008.
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