Speaker 1: The main character in Jonah isn't Jonah or the people of Nineveh or the captain and his crew at sea. The main character in Jonah is God.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the service today. My name is Bobbie, and I'm one of the pastors here at Commons. I'm so glad that you are tuning in. It is no small thing to be with you in your living room, with your loved ones amidst everything that's going on in our city, in our country, and our world right now.
The COVID nineteen pandemic has changed our reality drastically this week. Here in Calgary, kids needed to stay home from school, people worked from home, the streets grew eerily quiet. Jonathan and I live on a very busy street around the downtown core of the city, and we've been calling the response to the COVID nineteen pandemic the great quieting. But maybe for you, it really isn't that quiet. The noise of kids at home, the noise of the news, the noise of your own mind just whirring, whirring, whirring.
Whatever the case, we are so glad to stay in touch in this creative livestream way. Know that you listen with others right now wherever you are. Welcome. Today is the fourth Sunday of Lent. And I know several people who made the joke this week that they really weren't planning on giving up so much during their Lenten fast this year.
Right? Giving up going out, giving up close contact and handshakes and hugs, giving up going to school and to the office and to visit parents and grandparents. The church year with the seasons of Lent and Holy Week and Easter reminds us that we are in a bigger story. The story that has not been disrupted for two thousand years. It's a story of a god who comes near.
Violence that does not prevail and the persistence of love in the face of fear. For Lent this year, we are tracking with the story of Jonah. And Jonah begins with the word of the Lord coming to Jonah, the son of Amatai, telling him to go warn the city of before it is destroyed on account of its evil. Jonah is not all that interested in the mission, so he runs the other way. Now I love a rebel, but it is hard to watch Jonah disobey.
Jonah's actions don't only affect him. His actions affect the people of Nineveh who go for some time without a message meant to deliver them from evil. And his actions affect a captain or crew stuck in a storm at sea. His actions affect this big fish with a human lodged in his belly for three days. Last week, Jeremy walked us through the prayer that Jonah prays in the belly of this whale.
And Jeremy made the case that in the crisis, Jonah's instinct is to fill his mouth and his mind with the prayers of his community. Jonah prays psalms. His people prayed for hundreds and hundreds of years. Prayers that carried people through hard times, brutal times, and celebratory times too. Sometimes it takes a long time to trace the answer to our prayers.
And we might pray the same prayer for days and days or years and years. This week, our team offered daily prayers through our Instagram stories and Facebook and Twitter. And I kept praying the words Larissa wrote. Lord, let your graceful spirit guide us to find you in new and comforting ways. Maybe it feels like we're in the belly of a big fish too.
We won't be here forever. The fish will spit us up onto dry land. But in the meantime, pray the prayers of your community. It helps. Today, we hear what Jonah has to say to the people in the great city of Nineveh.
And I'm calling this message c plus sermons and real world change, Jonah's sermon, not mine, I hope. Today, we will talk about God of second chances, the art of homiletics, when good news is bad news and love unstoppable. So please join me as we pray. God of all who feel alone in a crisis, God of children who worry, God of our anxious days and nights, God of local emergencies, God of decision makers, God of all who feels quarrel stuck at home, God of quiet streets and businesses. It can be hard to discern your nearness these days.
It is hard to think about anything else but a virus. It is hard to have hope when the news gets worse each day. And still, You have made us resourceful. You have made us compassionate. You have made us so beautiful.
So spirit, you are here. And for just a moment, we think of one thing that we are grateful for. And we say thank you. Amen. So I spend a lot of time thinking about things that mean a lot to me, but mean very little, if anything, to anyone around me.
Like, there is this song by the Canadian singer songwriter Matthew Barber that I have loved for a long time. It's track four on his 2008 album, Ghost Notes. And the song is called You and Me. And I love it. Like, I love it so much.
But whenever I play it for someone else, they're like, yeah, it's fine. But here's the deal. The song has extremes. It's either a song about the most amazing love a person could find or it's the song about love that is crashing and burning so bad. I mean, it starts out nice, Like the river and the sea, like the flower and the tree, there's you and then there's me.
But then we get something different in the fourth verse and it seems that the song has been strumming towards this shift all along. Matthew Barber sings like the wealthy and the poor, like the battle and the war. Oh, the one that asks for more is bound to end up sore. Like a bit of a punch. All of a sudden in this verse, we are less in the garden of love gone right and more on the battlefield of will they or won't they make it?
I think that's why I love the song so much. It's a simple melody, but it's a complex reality. And we know that the relationship described in the song, if it's going to make it at all, is going to need a second chance. Love worth fighting for. Now, let's step back into the Jonah narrative, a simple story with a complex reality.
And I gotta say, so many second chances. So we pick up in chapter three verse one. Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time. Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you. Jonah obeyed the word of the lord and went to Nineveh.
Now Nineveh was a very great city. It took three days to go through it. Now chapter three starts as this echo of chapter one. This is the second time the word of the lord comes to Jonah. He's got this second chance.
And it's a little like how the Harry Potter novels always start back at Number 4 Privet Drive. Every novel, we go on this adventure with Harry and his pals. And every time we start a new book, we're right back there on Privet Drive. And we wonder how has Harry's previous adventures set him up for what is ahead. And while Harry is a bit of a better hero, the same is true for Jonah.
Jonah runs from God's call. Jonah hides out in the storm and is thrown overboard at sea. Jonah is swallowed by a great big fish. And now he's back on dry land where his story started. It's his own Number 4 Privet Drive.
And when the word of the Lord is present to him there, we wonder, well, what adventure awaits Jonah after all that he's been through? So what does god say? Again, god says, go to Nineveh. Only this time, there's no mention of the city's wickedness. Instead, God calls Nineveh great.
And sure, that can mean Nineveh is massive in size. Some interpreters are really happy to go with Nineveh just being a big place for a small prophet. But I mean, why stop there? Thematically, it makes more sense that by dropping the description of wicked and replacing it with great, the narrator has more to say about the city. The word for great in Hebrew is Gadol, and it can certainly mean great in magnitude and intensity, but it can also mean great in importance and great because it belongs to God.
Phyllis Tribble, when talking about verse three, says that great extends far beyond its size. Tribble argues that the phrase suggests divine perspective on this place. So the greatness of Nineveh impresses even god and maybe god has ordained that greatness and more if it's so great, it's exactly where god can be found. We see that in the story of Jonah, the presence of god can be found in pagan sailors, stormy seas in the belly of a whale. So why not find god in a wicked city too?
God is imminent, and we encounter spirit in wild and unruly places. There are divine echoes and second chances meeting us every moment of every day. I mean, did you have this nine sense, you know, like two weeks ago that the pace of your life was just a bit too fast? That you had arranged for this scattered and stretched existence, that you needed to pause and evaluate what really matters to you. Well, here we are, every one of us, a global second chance.
And I am not saying that god whipped this virus together to get our attention or that the price of oil dropped so god could grab us by the scruff of our neck and say, listen up. No. I'm just saying that as soon as we woke up to the world as it is in this pandemic, in this economic moment, God was right here moving toward us all over again. The stripped down language of the text at the start of chapter three is that the word of God is. God's speech exists.
When Jonah is vomited onto dry land, God's speech moves towards him a second time. And Jonah seems ready to try again. So verse four reads, and Jonah began by going a day's journey into the city, proclaiming forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown. So let's stop right there. Jonah goes one day into a three day city.
So why is this important? There are all kinds of scholarly explanations to deal with the question about why Jonah would only go one day into a city that takes three days to cross before he speaks. And some say one day into the city is the symbol of Jonah's reluctance. Reluctance. And others say one day into the city is a sign that Jonah's heading for the city center.
And still others say Jonah is purposefully defying some kind of diplomatic protocol. Jewish scholar Jack Sasson makes the case that the numbers one in three are meant to show us that Jonah is in a hurry whether earnestly or enthusiastically or just to get the job done. And I think, sure, that sounds right. Jonah's kind of a get out of Dodge guy. Whatever is going on with this timeline, there's this hint that Jonah does the very basic of what is asked of him, but it doesn't mean that he likes it.
And here's the deal with Jonah trudging into the city to deliver a message. This kind of thing has happened before. In Genesis nineteen, two angels arrive in Sodom and Gomorrah to survey the wickedness that has reached God. And some scholars say right here, reluctantly doing what god wants, Jonah is dressed in the garb of angels. It's different cities, different outcomes.
One city burns, another city will turn. So let's hear the words Jonah has to say. Jonah's sermon is five Hebrew words long. It's like an ancient tweet. In addition, the message is missing a typical prophetic phrase where the prophets before Jonah say, thus says the lord or hear the word of the lord.
Those phrases are not in Jonah's message. Now the Hebrew verb at the end of the sermon is Hafak and it's critical to the plot. And once again, there are few options of what the word means. Some say it means that Nineveh will be undone. Others say it means Nineveh will turn over or be reformed.
And still others say the verb is meant to be ambiguous. That even as Jonah says, Nineveh will turn, he doesn't even know what it means. Will Nineveh turn toward the good or will it be overturned by its evil? An ancient take shared by Philo and Augustine is that god isn't interested in turning over the city, but turning hearts toward god's self. And I like that.
Still, there's no evidence that Nineveh made any kind of turn toward Yahweh, Jonah's god in real life and this is part of why it may be that the story of Jonah is an ancient reimagining of Israel's history. Verse five reads, the Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed. And all of them from the greatest to the least put on sackcloth. The verse says, Nineveh believed god.
And even if it's fantasy, that doesn't mean it isn't true. Decades after the story of Jonah was supposed to have taken place, the empire of Nineveh destroyed the Northern kingdom of Israel. And from their place in exile, the writer of Jonah draws his people back to this tough part of their own story with this imaginative retelling. The narrator said to his people who have been beat down and exiled time and time again, hey. What would this have looked like if we would have loved our enemies instead of being so afraid?
And what would our lives be like if we were a part of Nineveh's great turning? And what if all it took to change the hearts of our enemies were Jonah's simple words? And now we're talking about the art of homiletics, how a sermon can change a life. Homiletics is a term drawn from the Greek word homilia, meaning conversation or discussion. And the Latin cognate of which is sermo, which we get sermon.
And at its best, even as they have changed across the centuries, sermons speak directly into our situations, into our motivations, into our hearts, and our minds. Pomalytics, sermons, preachers in sneakers are transformative when they reconstruct the world so that we can see ourselves and all creation at its very best. And upon hearing a sermon is artful drama, we can do what Walter Bruggemann says, come out from behind our desks, our stethoscopes, our uniforms, our credentials to meet life a little more boldly, I might add, while keeping safe social distance. Jonah may not like it, but at the heart of his message, he says, Nineveh, I need you. If I'm going to live, I need you to live too.
So what happens after the sermon? Well, the king of Nineveh is so stunned when Jonah's message reaches him that he gets up off his throne, takes off his royal robes, covers himself with sackcloth as a sign of mourning and humiliation, and he sits down in the dust alone. And then the king issues a proclamation. Do not let people or animals or herds or flocks taste anything. Do not let them eat or drink or purchase too much toilet paper at the store.
Create a phrasal edition by yours truly. Now just in case you forgot, we are in an absurd story. And while scholars have debated the sincerity of the Ninevites' contrition for centuries, how true their repentance is just isn't the point. The story says that Jonah's sermon explodes with meaning for the people of Nineveh. From the king to the cattle in the corral, everyone is touched by this moment.
But how much of this good news is good news for Jonah? Jonah, our reluctant promoter of grace. Jonah, our runaway prophet. Well, guess what? Right here, Jonah isn't even in the scene.
The camera doesn't include him in the shot. And so all we see is the enemy becoming good right before our very eyes. Sometimes good news is good news. Other times, good news feels so much more like bad news. It's looking at the hard truth about yourself you didn't wanna face.
It's owning the mistakes that you made that you can never erase. It's opting for feeling what you feel when you're afraid. What the character of the king and the captain before him have to say is this, good news will find you while you are doing anything but looking for it. Good news is coming for you on your ship in the dark stormy sea. Good news includes every part of God's creation from viruses to smelly puppy dogs to neighbors who yell in the night.
This persistent good news is everything we need right now. We may not like it. It may feel like bad news to stay inside, to keep our distance, to worry about our loved ones, those who are vulnerable. But Jonah shapes a theology of hope. The story says over and over again that the worst person you can imagine is worthy of the love of God.
So who are you to stop it? The final verse we look at today are the words of the king and his nobility's proclamation. But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. And this is where I wanna talk about what's sad. When Jonathan was leaving for work on Thursday and I was staying home alone all day to write this sermon for you, he knew that I would struggle.
He knew I would miss the friends that I normally spend a lot of time with every week. Kevin, Yelena, Jeremy, Jeanie, Scott. I would miss my freedom to go wherever I want to go, whenever I want to go there. If you don't know this about me, I love my independence. Like, I love it so much.
Jonathan also knew that I would have trouble staying energized because I'm an extrovert, and I love to connect with friends and strangers. Give me all of it. I will take it. So when Jonathan left our place on Thursday, he said, maybe call Emory today. I'm worried about you.
Emory being my four year old niece. Now, I should have taken his advice, but instead, I picked a fight with an innocent event organizer who was trying her very best to postpone an event I was no longer interested in attending. Thank you, world pandemic. It turns out I'm not as nice as I seem. Guys, it's hard, but we are doing it.
We are staying in. We are keeping our distance. We are checking up on each other with Zoom meetings and FaceTime. And please remember that all of this is big change, and change feels like loss, and loss is felt as grief. We have lost our rhythms, Our outlets, some have lost incomes.
We are changing our lives saying no to the things that bring us life and sanity and joy so that we can keep people healthy, especially those who keep us healthy in our medical system. Such a big shout out to you. And especially those who are vulnerable. If you are older and your body doesn't work like it used to, we want you to be around for as long as you can be. You matter.
We owe you a great deal of respect simply because you are here. So these Ninevites, they hear the truth about their lives, and they know that they need to change, and that change is so hard. They are humbled as we are humbled. That's our shared human story. Now for some of us, the heightened anxiety that we feel is traumatic, And the effects of this moment are going to work their way out in our bodies for a long time.
My heartbeat was irregular this week and my hands had this slight tremble. And it's important to notice these things in the moment and in the future. Take a page out of the king's notebook here and sit down and face yourself and feel what you feel. I'm not saying that you need to repent or wear sackcloth because you're sorry. Unless, of course, you were very rude to a stranger in an email more than once when you were trying to get your money back because I'm very guilty of that.
Therapist Resma Menachem says that when we are under intense pressure, we should accept the discomfort. He says, remind yourself that any discomfort you feel is a protective response, not a defective one. Accepting, experiencing, and moving through that discomfort is the foundation of healing. This moment we are in is scratchy like sackcloth. It feels so uncomfortable to wear.
But there's something that we need to remember. The main character in Jonah isn't Jonah or the people of Nineveh or the captain and his crew at sea. The main character in Jonah is God. God who calls Jonah. God who opens the mouth of a big fish.
God at the heart of a king who likely wasn't a very good dude. Can we just pause right now? Wherever we are, on couches, in kitchens, in our cozy beds, and can we see God at the center of our story too? No pandemic is going to take away the rhythm of the church season that we are in. It is lent, everybody.
A time to prepare for love that reaches across wickedness. Love that pursues our wounded selves so that we might be healed. Love that will be here long after we are gone. Even hated Nineveh is the focus of God's true love. You know God is with you right now.
Right? God is. I think what I love so much about that Matthew Barber song, You and Me, is that it seems so simple, but it is wonderfully complex. Like the river and the sea, like the flower and the tree, like the birds and the bees, there's you and then there's me. But the song ends with unsettling words, Like the river and the sea, like the flower and the tree, like hell and heavenly, like hell and heavenly, like hell and heavenly.
The love he's fighting for is beautiful and it is brutal. And maybe the fact that love is hard makes it worth every effort. The beauty of Jonah and the simple sermon he preaches in Nineveh is that even a little love can cause real world change. Sure. The story is just a neat story, but stories are the most important thing about us.
This week, may you remember that Jonah preached five simple words and it transformed the heart of a city. And may you be open to the sacred word that brings you life too. And when you hear words ring out in a song, in a sermon, in the quiet of your own heart, may you sit down and take them in. And may Christ, the word, bring life to you all over again. Let us pray.
Loving God, of all our days and nights, we live and move and have our being in you. Sometimes we are speechless, shocked, worried. Sometimes we can feel thankful and spot beauty and exercise creativity. And through it all, you are here. In our vulnerability, in our shared humanity, in our voiced, and our silent prayers.
Christ who serves us speak and we will listen. And spirit of the living God present with us now enter the places of our worry and our uncertainty and heal us of all that harms us. Amen.