Scripture: Acts 3:1-10
The question for this morning is: What does the reading from the book of Acts that we have heard have to do with the book of Jonah that I have just spent three weeks’ worth of sermons on. There is an answer to that question, but to get to the answer I need to ask you to follow the trail of what I have been thinking about, not so much to focus on a thought or a topic or a few thoughts I have had at the end of the trail, but on thoughts that have led me in a certain direction, one thought leading to another, until I end up somewhere quite different from where I started.
I actually do this fairly often in sermons, I think, but whether I do or not, I do believe that all of our spiritual lives consist not so much of beliefs that we may finally have arrived at, but of story lines that have led us, and continue to lead us from one place to another. It’s important for us to pay attention, not so much to where we are at any given moment, the conclusions we have arrived at, as though they were the end point, but to pay attention to the story, whether it is our own or someone else’s. If it is our own, it helps us to be flexible and open. We have to say this is where I am right now. It’s not where I have been and it’s not likely to be where I will be. It’s where my spiritual life has come to so far. If the story is someone else’s, it helps us to understand, as we say, where people are coming from, and it might suggest that there is truth to be found in the story, even if we disagree with the conclusions someone has arrived at…temporarily. Well, this is just sort of a side point to the sermon this morning, and I’m not sure you even know what I’m talking about, so let me get on with describing this little tiny piece of a story I have to tell this morning.
It turns out that I wasn’t quite finished with Jonah after all. I knew I wasn’t when I finished with the sermon last week. I knew I had some unfinished business still with Jonah, some thoughts the book inspired that I hadn’t talked about yet, but I figured I would just let them go, come back to them some other time in some other context. But as it turns out the “some other time” turns out to be today.
What I didn’t talk about directly in connection with the story of Jonah is how throughout the story God gets God’s way. The will of God will be done, and in the story it was done, regardless of whether Jonah agreed or cooperated or not. God says, “Jonah, I want you to go to Nineveh and tell them to shape up. Jonah does his best to escape, but God says, “No, no Jonah. You didn’t understand. I wasn’t asking you if you would like to go to Nineveh. I hear you. You wouldn’t like. I knew that before. When I said I want you to go to Nineveh, I wasn’t making a proposal. It was just a point of information. I want you to go to Nineveh means you will go to Nineveh. And then once there Jonah proclaims to the Ninevites that they will be destroyed, or at least punished, whereas God proclaims upon further reflection that they will not be punished, and you know whose proclamation carries the most weight. What God wants to have happen will happen regardless of what Jonah wants to happen, thinks will happen, or thinks God wants to have happen, or thinks God should want to have happen. And then, of course, there is the tree that God commands to come into being and then just like that commands to go away, just so God could illustrate a point to Jonah. Throughout the story there is no doubt about who’s calling the shots. Things happen according to God’s decree.
And in all of this Jonah is essentially irrelevant. God is the actor and Jonah is the acted upon. Of course Jonah can decide whether to be happy or sad about what is going on, but even whether Jonah is happy or sad is essentially irrelevant. God is going to do what God is going to do. God’s will will be done.
I said last week that I didn’t want to see Jonah just as a kind of straw man, small-minded, judgmental, begrudging of God’s mercy on the Assyrians, an example of what God is not and we should not be. I found some kinship with Jonah as I came to see him as someone who had trouble not only with God’s care for the Ninevites, but also had trouble believing in God’s care for him, Jonah. At that level I could have both sympathy and empathy for Jonah. And I can have sympathy and empathy for him from the perspective I’m raising today as well. And from the perspective that I’m raising today, I dare say it is God who doesn’t come off very well. At least it’s a god who I have to say I feel distant from.
The sort of up front image of God we are presented with in Jonah is of a God who is merciful, who doesn’t want to punish people, and who will refrain from doing so if given the least excuse. I do think that’s the sort of main thrust of the story of Jonah. But there are lots of other things to think about in the story too. And from the perspective I’m bringing today, the image of God that is presented in the story is not only of a merciful God but of a God who acts as a sort of a grand puppeteer with Jonah, with human beings in other words, as the marionettes and God as the one who pulls the strings.
I could easily imagine the character Jonah in this story toward the end saying something to God like: You know, God, I just don’t feel like I matter very much. It’s clear to me now that you were going to get your way one way or the other. You sent this whale to bring me back to shore so I can go to Nineveh, but you could have just beamed me over there in the first place. You were just playing with me, letting me think that I could get away when you knew that I couldn’t. It was all just an amusement to you. And then you know you ended up being merciful to the Ninevites and that’s nice but honestly I don’t feel very good about the whole thing. It’s not really because I want the Ninevites to suffer but because I’m feeling like I’m just a tool or a toy in your hands. You tell me where to go and what to say and then you decide whether to spare the Ninevites or not. It was your decision wasn’t it? Your whim really. And finally at the end you asked me if it was not your right to show mercy if you wanted to, but really you were saying too that it was none of my business, and that I should stop trying to tell you how to be God. You were telling me to just go be a nice obedient little prophet weren’t you?
Well, of course things like that are not in the book of Jonah. But what I’m telling you is that they were in my head as I was reading the book of Jonah. And whether or not that’s a fair reading of the book of Jonah, it’s a train of thought that stayed with me even after I thought I was done with Jonah. It’s true that Jonah gives us an image of a God who is merciful and whose love is universal, in contrast to some other images we may find in some of the scriptures. But it also leaves us, or leaves me anyway, with a lingering image of a God who is in charge, who pulls the strings of life on earth, makes things happen so that we are left with the idea that whatever happens here is the will of God and nothing happens here unless it is the will of God.
Maybe that is a comforting image to you, that God is in charge in that way. I think it is to many people. It is not to me. And I believe this image of a God whose power controls human life, that image of the omnipotent God is very much part of our theology, our thinking, our praying, our singing. And that image leaves us for instance with the unanswerable question of why, if God is in charge and if God is good, why so many awful things happen, some of our own doing, some not. Why doesn’t God just pull the strings that prevent anything bad from happening?
Now, I recognize that it is also not comforting to think that God’s not in charge if that means that we are left, to continue the metaphor, like marionettes without a puppeteer, just sort of lifeless blobs with no spirit, no guiding force, no direction, just sort of a random, purposeless existence. That’s hardly a comforting image either, or one that is helpful in any way. So I’m left with the need to imagine God in a different way.
As I thought about whether there are other scriptural images of God that we might draw on, I easily thought of many stories in the gospels and others such as the one we heard from Acts that do give us a different way of thinking about God and God’’s power and God’s relation to us. The gospels are filled with stories of healing: the blind see, the lame walk. It’s a hallmark of Jesus’ ministry. And the point of it all, for me, has always been not that Jesus is able to do these miraculous things and therefore prove that he is godlike, but rather that God’s power is not a power over us but a power that works in and through us, that God is not some power who calls the shots but is a power who works through us to make something of significance, something whole out of these body parts of ours, that God does not so much demand our obedience as make possible our empowerment.
That’s for me one of the main themes of the healing stories in the gospels. It’s one of the main themes, I think, of the story of Peter and John and the healing of the man at the gate, which for several reasons is one of my favorite Biblical stories. One of the reasons it’s one of my favorites is because Peter and John don’t just dismiss the man by treating him as a charity case, which would have been the case whether they chose to give him a few coins or not give him the few coins. At the gate of the temple is a man asking for money. He is lame, the scripture says, has been all his life, and therefore he has never seen the inside of the temple because people who are physically impaired are not allowed inside the temple. But every day his friends bring him to the temple at prayer time so he can appeal to the people going inside. It’s probably a pretty good spot to ask for money, since at least some people might feel a little extra embarrassment, or guilt, or hypocrisy if they turn a cold shoulder to someone in need just as they are going into church. In any case, there he was. And most people probably were just walking on by, some of them paying no attention, and some of them pausing just long enough to find a few coins and drop them in the coffee can, and then moving on.
Peter and John, on the other hand, the story says, stopped, looked intently at the man, and asked him to look at them, in the eye. When he did this, Peter said, “You know, I don’t have any money, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” And, of course, as we know, the man did. Not only walked. Ran and jumped and shouted and took himself right into that temple, because nobody now could tell him he didn’t belong there.
As I say this is one of my favorities stories. It has seemed to me to be a story not so much about miracles being done in Jesus’ name, not so much about how we are supposed to deal with people who ask us for money, but about empowerment. It’s significant to me that the first thing Peter and John do with this man, before they even say a word to him, much less do any miraculous healings, the first thing they do is just look at him. Intently. Really see him, and ask him to look back into their eyes, not to be looking down in shame and cooperating in not being seen. So, the first thing they do is treat this person as a human being rather than as an object of charity. They approach him instead as a person, not as a beggar, recognize him as a human being with multi-layered needs of a material, physical, emotional, and spiritual nature. It’s a story not of the need to be kind or to have pity, though of course there is a place for such things, but a story of empowerment. And that is the way God’s power works, the story says to me. That’s the nature of God’s power, very different from the way frankly that I see it being portrayed in Jonah. God not as someone who dictates what will happen or not happen, but God whose power works in us and through us for wholeness.
I like the story too because it’s not just the man at the gate who is empowered. It’s also Peter and John. We don’t have everything you need, they say. We don’t have what you’re asking for. What we have, we give you. For them, the focus is not on all the things they cannot do, which are many, as they are for all of us. They are empowered because they act not out of a sense of inadequacy, which we all have, and if we don’t we ought to, but out of an awareness that there is something they do have to offer, and that is God’s power working not only in the man at the gate but in Peter and John, working for their healing.
A quick story and then I need to stop. After worship once upon a time a man came up to me—there had been something in the service to bring this up for him—and he told me about a devastating loss he had experienced quite a long time ago, the death of someone very close to him. He told me that many years later that loss still hurt, and not very much less than it had all those years ago. But one way he had dealt with it was to resolve that whenever he knew someone who had experienced a similar loss, he tried to make contact, not because he had magic advice to give, but just so that both he and the other person would be a little less alone. That is what he had to give. It was not much, he said. But he was wrong.
If there is pain inside us, it is not that god willed it or caused it or made to happen what caused it. That would be more the image of God’s power that I have left over from reflecting on the book of Jonah. But God’s power is something different, something different from that display of force or control. It is a power than empowers us. And so it came to be that I went from focusing on God’s power at the beginning of the week to focusing on the question of what it is I, for all my inadequacies, have to give. That is a shift in focus that I believe God would approve of. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 30, 2006