Scripture: Jonah 1 and Psalm 42
This is the first of what will be probably three sermons based on the book of Jonah. As many of you know, I like to do this from time to time—summer often seems like a good time—I like to take a Biblical character or a series of stories and spend some time with them. I’ve done this in the past with the Genesis stories involving Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Rachel and Leah. I’ve done it with the cycle of stories about David and about Elijah and probably some others and this year I said to myself…How about Jonah? It’s a well known story, a story that is referred to by Jesus in the gospels, a story with some contemporary referents and relevance, and it’s short. All of 2 two and a half pages. If you want to actually read it for yourselves, it is to be found between Obadiah and Micah. You can probably read it in five or ten minutes, though figuring out what to make of it may take somewhat longer.
Because, of course, this is not just a children’s story, though it has been treated that way. It’s not just a fanciful story about some cute little fellow who ended up in the belly of a whale and lived to tell the tale. The reading for this morning, chapter one, reminded us of why Jonah ended up in the belly of what most translations actually call a large fish. Jonah was invited by God to go to Nineveh and “cry out” against it, whatever that means. Jonah treated it as an invitation anyway. We’ll see as the story goes along that it was more like a summons. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, hostile territory to Jonah. Nineveh was located in what today is the country of Iraq. That’s the contemporary referent I was mentioning. If we wanted to give the story a modern flavor, we could just substitute Baghdad. God wanted Jonah to go to Baghdad and to cry out against it because it had come to God’s attention that there were some wicked things going on there.
So Jonah set out…for Tarshish. If you have a Bible with notes, you find out that Tarshish was a city on the far coast of Spain. It was at the edge of the known world. Baghdad/Nineveh was one direction. Tarshish was in exactly the opposite direction, just about as far as you could go in the opposite direction. Jonah was pretty clear in his own mind that he was not going to Nineveh. He didn’t bother to send regrets to God, just got on a boat as fast as he could that would take him as far away as he could get from Nineveh. But actually it was not Nineveh that Jonah was trying to get away from. The story makes it quite clear that Jonah was trying to get away not from Nineveh but from God. “Jonah set out to flee,” it says, “to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish, so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.” The phrase is repeated twice within a few lines: away from the presence of the Lord.
We’ll get to Nineveh later, next week or the week after. The story does eventually deal with God, and Jonah, and the people of Nineveh—everyone’s respective attitudes and actions and the lessons that may be involved in it all—we’ll get to all of that. For now, for this morning, I’m not so concerned about the specifics. What I see and respond to first of all when I read the story of Jonah is just this image of Jonah trying to escape from God, trying desperately to get away from the presence of the Lord. I believe this is a story that at its most basic level is about that. It is a story about a person who is trying to run away from God. Could be Jonah. Looking more closely, could be you or me.
Or could it? Is Jonah a person who could be any one of us? Is he holding up a mirror, so that we can see ourselves more clearly, see that running away from God is exactly what we are prone to do, are in fact doing in all likelihood, like Jonah? In a way it’s sort of counterintuitive to think so, at least it is for me. Because the way I usually think about myself, the way I try to understand myself and everyone else for that matter, is exactly the opposite. I tend to think that I am, that we all are, in some way involved in a kind of lifelong search to find God, to draw nearer to God, to know God more fully. Isn’t it the case that pretty much everything we do of any significance is at its core an attempt to find God? Whatever the specific things we may devote ourselves to, isn’t it underneath it all a seeking after God, not trying to get away from the presence of the Lord but trying somehow to gain a fuller, deeper, more sure and abiding sense of the presence of the Lord. I would argue that the answer to that is yes. Well, I don’t want to argue the point, but I want to say that this is how I feel my own life, and it is an assumption I have when I try to feel my way into the lives of others. It is one of the things I presume I have in common with all other human beings. However different we are, however different the specifics of our lives may be, I look at another person and I see someone who, like me, is engaged in trying to find her or his way to God.
We don’t necessarily think about it in those terms. We think we are looking for rewarding work, for meaningful worship, for friendship, for happiness, for contentment. And we surely are looking for all those things, whatever they may be for each of us, the things that we think will bring us some measure of fulfillment. But I am suggesting that what we are also looking for at some deeper level is God. I am suggesting that one way to describe God is to say that God is that mysterious quality or presence that makes who we are and what we do “true”. That may not be a good word. I can’t think of another right now. I am suggesting that whether any of those things we think will contribute to our sense of fulfillment, whether they really do, depends on God being in them, and that what we are really looking for is just about anything in which God is present. I am suggesting that what makes a job more than a job is God, that the difference between an acquaintance and a companion is God, that what keeps contentment from being complacency and happiness from being superficial is God, that what makes a relationship blessed is God. I’m not trying to be pious about this. I fully recognize that this is not language any of us would ordinarily use to describe what we are about day by day. I don’t necessarily expect that others will think of it this way. But I’m testifying this morning. I do. I think of it this way. I think that whatever else I want in life, what I also want fundamentally is for God to be in it.
But if that’s so, what do I make of Jonah, this character who is trying his very best to escape from the presence of God? Is he just someone who is acting in a way that human beings do not typically act and are not supposed to act, or is it more complicated than that? Guess what my answer is: more complicated. I have two thoughts.
One thought is that there is certain attractiveness in the way Jonah acts. God, after all, in this story is not offering Jonah a kind of benign, calm and comforting presence that would just give a kind of a glow to all the different parts of Jonah’s life. Jonah probably wouldn’t run away from that. God had something God wanted Jonah to do. God wanted Jonah to “cry out” against the Ninevites. God wanted Jonah to be God’s messenger, to speak some words of judgment or warning to the Ninevites. And Jonah was reluctant, and well he might be. To me that is an attractive thing about Jonah. He was a reluctant messenger, a reluctant prophet. People who have no trouble thinking of themselves as God’s messenger are at the worst dangerous and at the best less dangerous. People who think they know what God wants them to say and are eager or more than willing to say it earn my suspicion more than my admiration. It is understandable why Jonah was reluctant to accept God’s invitation, or respond to the summons. I’m glad he was reluctant. In my book it was the right thing to do.
OK, Jonah took his reluctance to the extreme. He went overboard with it. Literally he went overboard, but also as a figure of speech he went overboard. Also, I don’t want to say that there is no such thing as God speaking to us at any time in any way shape or form. I don’t want to say that God makes no claims on our lives. If we really thought that, I guess many of us would not be here. Many of us are here because we want to be open to what God might have to say to us and what kind of calling we might discern. But I also suspect that we are here, at Sojourners, some of us, partly because we believe that this discernment is not such a simple process and that it is healthy not to think we are in easy possession of God’s word or God’s will for us or for anyone else. I relate pretty well to this Jonah who, when God wants him to be his personal messenger, doesn’t just salute and head off to Nineveh. I understand him and appreciate him.
At the same time, there is a part of Jonah that is, well, not so attractive. I stop short of being really negative about it because I do think it is part not just of Jonah but of you and me. And it’s not that this part of Jonah and you and me is so awful. It’s just not so attractive, this part of us that does, I think, want to get away from God, away from the presence of the Lord. And I do think we do both things. We do spend our lives seeking God, even if we can say that we have encountered God in significant ways along the way, we still spend our lives in search of God. We also at the same time spend our lives in other ways avoiding God. And if that sounds like a contradiction that on the one hand God is our heart’s desire as Psalm 42 says—“As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God”—but that we also tend to go to some lengths, sometimes desperate lengths, to avoid God—if that sounds like a contradiction, it is, but it is a contradiction that is embedded in our lives.
I believe what Psalm 42 says about us and what Jonah really says about us, I believe both things are true that we want nothing more than to be in communion with God and we sometimes act as though we want nothing more than not to have to deal with God at all. We can all too easily do our own version of boarding a ship bound for Tarshish, find some place even on the ship that is as far out of the way as possible, go to sleep, and hope that when we wake up God won’t be there. We do that too. We all too easily can lose ourselves in precisely the same things where we hope God will be present, in our work, in our activities, in the ways we recreate or re-create ourselves, in our homes and families and important relationships. We can hope to find God in such places and we can try to escape God by losing ourselves in exactly the same places.
I don’t think Jonah, the book of Jonah, is moralistic about this. It doesn’t say exactly that we should be ashamed of such behavior. It doesn’t tell us what we should be doing differently. It just asks us to consider whether this isn’t true for us. I can’t tell you whether it is true for you. I have to confess that I believe it is true for me. And Jonah asks me, asks all of us, to consider the possibility that there are some significant ways in which we try to avoid God. It’s not trying to shame us at this point, nor prescribe remedies, just consider the possibility. For that I am grateful. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 9, 2006