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Jonah 1:4-17
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Because this is the punch line, and this is the humor in the story. This is the tip of the spear that punches through your armor and gets you to ask a whole new set of questions of yourself. Welcome to the Commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week.
Speaker 1:Head to commons.church for more information. Great to have you here. If you and I haven't met in person, my name is Jeremy. I'm part of the team here. And we are in the season of Lent right now.
Speaker 1:Lent is also why I'm wearing purple today. It's part of what reminds us of this season as we prepare ourselves together for Easter. Last week, we began Lent by diving into the story of Jonah, pun fully intended, and we looked at the first three verses of this tale. Now, we didn't get very far, and that's because for a story like Jonah, understanding the genre is a lot to shape how we read. So, it's really important.
Speaker 1:Because as I argued last week, Jonah is at its heart a comedy. And, we didn't get into much of the funny stuff last week, although we will see some of it today, but we did talk a lot about comedians. And for my money, comedians are often some of the most prophetic voices in culture. Now don't get me wrong, some comedians are little more than crass and uncomfortable, and they attempt to make us laugh by saying the things we're not supposed to. But the best comedians, they do more than say what is impolite.
Speaker 1:They speak to what we are afraid to speak of. Because often when we are laughing, we find ourselves more open to seeing the world, talking about the world in new ways. I read this quote from Walter Brueggemann last week. It comes from his book, The Prophetic Imagination, but he writes, the key pathology of our time is the reduction of imagination so that we become too numbed, satiated, co opted to do serious imaginative work. And he argues here that one of the most important prophetic acts there is is that which spurs our creativity.
Speaker 1:Because we all know what is, the prophetic is what calls us to imagine what could be. Now, I live with a six year old in my house, all of you know this. One of the best parts of living with a six year old in your house is that nothing is ever out of reach. My son is the best dancer, the best swimmer, the best robot builder, the best reader and runner and story teller that he has ever met. And being around that kind of unbridled imaginative confidence in himself is that's kind of infectious.
Speaker 1:And I'm not saying that we shouldn't be realistic in our expectations for ourselves. It does not matter how much I admire Serge's scarves. I am not going to be able to dunk. And again, non Raptors fans, you can just ignore that joke. But there is something about facing into the world full of possibility.
Speaker 1:Last week, Eaton and I were playing a game that he invented. It was a board game with LEGO figures, and we had made this little spinner that we had to spin out of cardboard to let us know how many moves our characters could make. But as the game unfolded, my luck with the spinner began to outstrip his, and so he started to randomly interject new obstacles to impede my path and progress. And at one point, I got a little frustrated and said, but it seems like you're just making up these rules as we go. And he replied, yeah, dude.
Speaker 1:I made up the whole game. Obviously, I'm making it up as I go. Now, hot tip. Probably not the greatest way to make friends influence people and convince them to keep playing with you, but I do wonder if a lot of us are sometimes convinced the rules are fixed when everyone else is just waiting for someone to come along and change them. And that's what a story like Jonah is about.
Speaker 1:It's why a story like Jonah is so outside of the realm of what feels possible to us. Because once you're drawn into a story about a man in a whale, the writer can then talk to you about something even bigger, a more fundamental change to your world, the idea that even your worst enemies are infinitely valued by the divine. That is what takes real imagination. Now, we looked at two things in the opening verses last week. Let's recap them quickly, and then we're gonna finish chapter one today.
Speaker 1:But last week, we talked about the first word of this story, the word and. And the word of the Lord came to Jonah. And the significance of that is that the story starts mid sentence. It starts mid story. It starts by inviting us to wonder about what it is we're missing.
Speaker 1:What was happening when God spoke to Jonah? And the rabbis thought this was fascinating, but my favorite take is that the point of this mid sentence start is that it helps Jonah become a stand in for any of us. Ultimately, the story is about being human, not about being swallowed by whales. And you and I are meant to see a bit of ourselves in Jonah, but because this story starts mid sentence, in some sense, we are now invited to fill in the backstory with ours, and that's kind of wonderful. But then he leaves and he heads for Tarshish to avoid God.
Speaker 1:And we talked about Tarshish in ancient literature. Tarshish was almost certainly at one point a real place, but here in Jonah by the time of Jonah and frequently throughout the bible Tarshish is an idea. By the way last week I made a joke about Tarshish and Tom Cruise and Kokomo and the movie Cocktail, and not nearly enough of you laughed at my hilarious eighties humor. But Tarshish in ancient literature was a stand in for the idea of paradise. And that means that when Jonah runs away from God, he does that by going on vacation and that is kind of funny.
Speaker 1:I mean, if you're going to run away from God, you don't go to Hawaii. You don't head for the mountains. You hide under a rock or you check into some shady motel or you get discount tickets to a Nickelback concert. I don't know what you do, but you certainly don't go to Tarshish. And this is both the humor and the brilliance of the story.
Speaker 1:Because it's absurd, but it's also quite insightful, isn't it? All of us know all kinds of ways that we amuse and we distract and we keep ourselves away from the changes we know we need to make. That's what the writer is highlighting here. Our tendency to avoid the things we need to face by going to the things that amuse us. Now, that was our introduction to Jonah.
Speaker 1:Today, we are gonna power through the rest of the first chapter together. First though, let's pray. God who calls us to do big things, who believes in us, who trusts us, who invites us to participate in your story, your kingdom, your commonwealth. May we begin to believe that we are as filled with potential as you do. May we face our challenges with courage.
Speaker 1:May we find support and encouragement in each other. May we begin to offer grace and truth to each other. May your spirit come near to us. Help us and lift us and remind us of how deeply loved we are today in this moment. And in that, may we slowly begin to see you all around us always.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Okay. Today on the agenda, we have big spenders, time travel, surprise storms, and unexpected heroes. But, we are going to pick up where we left off last week.
Speaker 1:In chapter one verse four we read, then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. All of the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own God. They threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. But Jonah had gone down below deck where he laid down and fell into a deep sleep. The captain went to him and said, how can you sleep?
Speaker 1:Get up and call on your God. Maybe he will take notice of us so that we will not perish. Now, couple notes here. There's an interesting dynamic here in the story where Jonah seems to be the only person on this ship besides the sailors. Everyone else is a sailor.
Speaker 1:Jonah alone is left to slumber in the hull while everyone else works hard. That's interesting because last week we read that Jonah went down to Joppa where he found a ship bound for the port of Tarshish, and after paying the fare went aboard and sailed there. I'm not sure I like that. Because when the NIV says that Jonah paid the fare to sail to Tarshish, that makes it sound like he bought a ticket. And I would argue that a better translation of verse three would be something more like going down to Joppa, he found a ship from Tarshish and so he paid the wages and went in to go with them to Tarshish away from the presence of the Lord.
Speaker 1:Now, the difference there is subtle, but it comes from the verb sakar, which doesn't mean fair, it means salary or wage. In other words, Jonah isn't buying a ticket, Jonah is chartering a ship. And that does a couple things for our story. First, it makes some sense of why Jonah is the only passenger. Second, it probably indicates that when the sailors began to throw cargo overboard, they were likely tossing Jonah's stuff into the sea.
Speaker 1:Rude. Third, it means that Jonah has a lot of stuff he's brought with him. And fourth, all of this together probably means that Jonah has means. In other words, Jonah is quite wealthy. And that intrigues me for its relationship to the only other thing that we know about Jonah.
Speaker 1:Last week, I mentioned that Jonah appears only once outside this story in the bible. And, it's a small little reference that comes in second kings chapter 14. It's one line and there we read that Jonah sides with the wicked king Jeroboam the second who quote did evil in the eyes of the Lord and did not turn away from any of the sins of Jeroboam son of Nabat. Now, by the way, there's another book in your bible called Amos that's all about Jeroboam the second. And Amos is the prophet who opposes Jeroboam.
Speaker 1:Bobby actually taught a series on Amos. It was called truth to power and you can find it on our YouTube channel or our podcast if you're interested in learning more. But what's interesting here is that if you read Amos, it's all about how wealthy and prosperous the Northern Kingdom Of Israel is becoming under Jeroboam the second and how rich the king's friends are becoming by serving him, including all of his court prophets who spoke highly of him. And how the vulnerable in the nation were being forgotten and left behind by these elites. And Amos says that God is very unhappy with all of this and it's a warning that if they don't change their ways, God is going to do something about all of this.
Speaker 1:Now, the thing that God eventually does about this is that in July, the Assyrians march from their capital city of Nineveh. They invade Israel. They take over and the lineage of Jeroboam is extinguished just as Amos warned. However, back in second Kings, in his one appearance outside of this book, Jonah is the court prophet who tells Jeroboam, no, everything is great. God is on your side.
Speaker 1:Don't worry about a thing. Well now here in this story, Jonah is called to go to Nineveh and let them know how much God loves them, but instead he uses his considerable wealth, which Amos points out as problematic, and he charters a ship to paradise in the other direction. Now, in this story, God is going to get Jonah to Nineveh one way or the other, and the Ninevites are going to respond to God with comical enthusiasm. Every single one of them is going to repent. The king is going to repent.
Speaker 1:The animals in Nineveh are going to repent. It's part of the absurd humor in this story. We'll get there in a couple weeks. But in actual history, it was Nineveh, the capital of Assyria that instead opposed the people of God, invaded their lands, and took control of Israel from the line of Jeroboam. And all of that, because the powerful looked after themselves and those that should have spoken prophetically to the king traded their calling for luxury.
Speaker 1:And, when you put all this together, you start to realize that in a lot of ways the story of Jonah almost seems to function like an alternate history. Where instead of siding with the evil king Jeroboam leading to the destruction of Israel, Jonah spoke love to his enemies leading to the repentance of Azaria. You know that moment in endgame where the Avengers go back in time to change the past and fix every evil thing that Thanos ever did? Come on. It's too late to complain about spoilers now.
Speaker 1:In a lot of ways Jonah is kind of like that. It's a what if story asking the question, what if Jonah had spoken truth to king Jeroboam? What if Jonah had spoken love to Nineveh? What if we had done one thing differently? What if we had chosen love even when it was the hardest thing in front of us?
Speaker 1:And what if that decision had changed everything for us? And maybe that's a story that connects for you. Now look, I don't want you ever to feel shame over past mistakes. It's not healthy. And it won't actually help you change yourself moving forward, but every single one of us has something somewhere in our past where we could have chosen love and we didn't, and it cost us something dear.
Speaker 1:Well, guilt and shame and wishing the past was different won't change any of that. But what can is a prophetic imagination that begins to believe that when we offer hope and when we point to the divine all around us, when we believe that things can change and people can change, that even our worst moments can be redeemed. Well then, even our past doesn't need to define us anymore. We can still write new stories for ourselves. See Jonah is about the fact that no one is beyond redemption, not even our enemies, maybe not even us.
Speaker 1:And all of that begins with the imagination to believe that big, powerful, unexpected things really do happen in the world. Which is precisely why sometimes we need stories about whales. So, we read that the Lord sent a great wind. Or again, the English here in the NIV just doesn't quite cut it for me. And I'm gonna translate this, but the Lord hurled a great wind at the sea, which caused a great storm on the sea, and the ship began to think it would break up.
Speaker 1:So first of all, the Lord didn't send a great wind, the Lord hurled a great wind. That's what we read here in Hebrew. And the reason that we change this in English is because we like to think of God a little more passively. I mean, if there's a storm, we might say God allows it, but we don't think God hurls storms at people. And I think theologically that's true.
Speaker 1:I don't imagine God getting up in the morning and deciding the weather for the day. Like you get a storm and you get a storm and you get sunny with a high of 25. It's not really how things work. But then again, this passage isn't about the theology of weather, it's a story and the story is better when sometimes God hurls storms. And this is one of my pet peeves with biblical translation because frequently we are far too theologically correct in our translations.
Speaker 1:What I mean by that is we tend to change things when they fit our theology because we want our bible to be consistent and hint, it's not always. The bible is not a book, it's a library of books. Some of them that tell stories, and some of them that record history, and some of them that teach us, and some of them that speak in poetry to us. Every time you change that genre, the rules of communication, the language game changes because that's how writing works. So yes, Jonah says that God hurled a storm at people, but no, you and I should not think that God actively goes around pitching bad weather at bad people.
Speaker 1:It's the same thing when the writer says that the storm was so intense, the ship began to think that it might break up. You and I know that ships don't actually think things, but it's a story and it's fun so we go with it. And unfortunately, sometimes we sanitize these stories into the ground, and that makes me a little bit sad. Regardless, Jonah is down in the belly of the ship. And, yes, this is absolutely foreshadowing for what is about to come.
Speaker 1:Hebrews says, Jonah went down into the deepest extremities of the ship and lay down to lay sleeping. So, is deep down. He is fully asleep. And then, we read, the captain went to him and said, how can you sleep? Get up and call on your God.
Speaker 1:Maybe he will take notice of us so that we will not perish. Then the sailors said to each other, come let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity. They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. So they asked him, tell us who is responsible for making all of this trouble for us. Again, language here, not great.
Speaker 1:It's a little more evocative than this. This starts with what is called an imperative injection in Hebrew which basically just means they yelled at him. Now tell us whose fault this evil is. What kind of work do you do? Where do you come from?
Speaker 1:What is your country? From what people are you? Essentially, they just grill this guy who has chartered the ship and got them caught in this storm. And he answers, well, I'm a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land. This terrified them and they asked, what have you done?
Speaker 1:And the key here to unlocking this whole section is this interaction between the sailors faith and Jonah's response. See, they have already prayed to their gods and that didn't work. So now they ask Jonah about his God and he says, I worship the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land. And what's important here to understand is that this means something very different to Jonah than it does to the sailors. See Jonah is a Hebrew.
Speaker 1:He's a monotheist. He's expressing that when he says the God who made the sea and the dry land. He means the God. Or the only God. The one who made everything.
Speaker 1:Except the sailors, they are polytheists. They have a different view of the world. They each have their own gods. Remember, they're not from around here. They're from Tarshish and Jonah has just hired them.
Speaker 1:So when they hear the God who made the sea and the dry land, what they are thinking is the God who made this sea and this dry land. Which means that they think they are on a boat with someone who has offended the local deity who controls this particular body of water. Which means they think they are at the mercy of a God they know nothing about, which means they are terrified. This is really important because the writer here is drawing a distinction between Jonah and the sailors conceptions of the divine. And that is going to be really important to his punchline in just a moment.
Speaker 1:But first, we get a little moment from Jonah. He says, pick me up, throw me into the sea and it will become calm. For I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you. And if we are at all even a little vaguely familiar with this story, we have known this was coming for some point. I mean, after all, Jonah has to get into a whale somehow.
Speaker 1:Think about this for a second. God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh. Jonah thinks to himself, Nineveh, those are the bad guys. I don't want anything to do with them. I'm not doing that.
Speaker 1:So he hops on a ship and he goes on vacation. God sends a storm suggesting possibly that he should turn back, head for shore, and Jonah's first thought here is, well, you know, I'd rather die. Now, I don't want it all to minimize mental health or depression or the myriad of challenges that all of us face, but it seems to me that the writer here wants us to pick up on the fact that Jonah is not thinking rationally right now. This is that pathology Walter Brueggemann talked about, our inability to think imaginatively. When Jonah is faced with something difficult, the only thing he can think about is running away.
Speaker 1:When Jonah is faced with an obstacle, the only thing he can think about is giving up. And yes, the story is absurd. Of course, the stakes are raged, but the question is the same one that faces all of us at some point. When plan a falls apart, do we have the creative capacity to imagine plan b? When one relationship ends, do we have the ability to believe that love will ever find us again?
Speaker 1:When one opportunity falls apart, do we have the ability to imagine that another one will come along? When we fall or we fail or maybe maybe it is that we try really, really hard and we do our best and something completely outside of our ability to control steps in and messes it all up, are we able in that moment to muster the prophetic imagination to believe that our story is not done yet? That our final chapter is not yet written, that there is still goodness and sunshine and warmth somewhere to be found on the other side of this present struggle. And the phrase that I've used for this in the past is that we tend to universalize the particular. We start to believe that this particular moment is the only moment that we will ever have.
Speaker 1:That's the trap that Jonah finds himself in here. Things aren't going his way and he is struggling to imagine how anything ever will ever again. And maybe that rings uncomfortably true for you. Because often I think we tend to hang on a little too tight to pain and disappointment and hatred than is healthy for us. And sometimes we have to learn to let it go so we can begin to imagine something new.
Speaker 1:But instead, the men did their best to row back to the land and they could not. But the sea grew even wilder than before. So they cried out to the Lord, please Lord, do not let us die for taking this man's life. Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man for you, Lord, have done as you pleased. Now, couple things here as we close.
Speaker 1:First, the storm is going to get too big, and they are eventually going to have to toss Jonah overboard. And God is going to calm the storm and save everyone on this boat including Jonah by means of a whale's belly. So you see it's a story, but ultimately this is a story about grace not judgment and it's important to understand that. But also, look at how these sailors address God here. Notice those capital letters l o r d in your bible.
Speaker 1:This means that these sailors are now using the personal name for Jonah's God, Yahweh, which out of respect would always be pronounced Adonai by Hebrew readers. And granted, it's probably motivated by fear, but I think that's a fair assumption in the story. But at least part of what we're seeing here is this theme in Jonah that people are more open to the divine than we give them credit for. These sailors, the Ninevites that we will meet, everyone in this story who encounters God, every one of them walks away changed except Jonah who should know God. And that's the big punch line here.
Speaker 1:Because these are pagan sailors who started the day with their own gods, The types of men that Jonah wants nothing to do with. Persons he thinks do not deserve the love of his God and yet here they are, praying to God using the divine name, doing everything they can to avoid throwing an ungrateful Hebrew prophet over board, risking their lives to save his. And think about that. The Hebrew prophet who refuses to save Nineveh, now has pagan sailors doing their best to save him. And I recognize that might not strike you as particularly funny.
Speaker 1:We tend to build our humor on different constructs today, but in the ancient world, this type of irony where the literal meaning of the story was the opposite of the actual meaning of the story, particularly where the main character was oblivious to everything the writer could see clearly in front of them, this was the height of hilarity. And look, I know, you're not exactly rolling in the aisle right now, but trust me, ancient audiences would have been because the moment where pagan sailors begin desperately rowing back to shore to save the life of a Hebrew prophet, this is the moment where the curb your enthusiasm music kicks in. It's supposed to be funny because this is the punch line, and this is the humor in the story. This is the tip of the spear that punches through your armor and gets you to ask a whole new set of questions of yourself. And at least part of the point here seems to be the same thing that we saw last week, the same thing we're going to see over and over again in this story, that if Jonah goes to Tarshish to avoid God, that must mean God is already in Nineveh.
Speaker 1:And now we see that if God's goodness and grace can't be found in Jonah, well, maybe they are waiting to be discovered in hired hands that we would have never known to associate with the divine. This is what the story of Jonah is about, That God is waiting exactly where we least expect for us to simply notice. And perhaps for you, this means that you will begin to look again at relationships where you missed God in your life. People where once you saw nothing divine, and maybe now you look again. Perhaps for you what this means is that you will look again at your own life to recognize God.
Speaker 1:Moments where you missed God walking with you, moments where you overlooked your own sacred contributions to those around you, moments where God was present to someone else through you and they knew it, but you didn't. Because this is the truth. God is with us always. The only question is when we notice. And often the true beauty of God's story is not simply that God comes to us, but all of the hidden spaces from where divine grace appears in our lives.
Speaker 1:In Nineveh, with sailors, in all the spaces we have been trained not to look for God. May you notice God in your Nineveh this week. May you uncover God in pagan sailors today. May your eyes be open to the divine that is all around you all the time, Trusting that God is waiting to be discovered, encountering grace in new faces and places this week and every week. Because that's what this story is about.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. We offer all of those spaces where we have missed your presence, faces and encounters, relationships where we have thought there was nothing divine to be uncovered. May we come back to see your beauty, your peace, your grace embodied in everyone who breathes. And sometimes that's hard, and sometimes people have hurt us. Sometimes those relationships are strained, but by your spirit, might you be there helping us to recognize the divine image that exists within all.
Speaker 1:God, in those moments where we have missed you in our lives. May we begin to look back and see alternate stories. Alternate histories where you were there walking with us. We didn't see you, but now we do. And we recognize that choosing love today sets us up to see you well tomorrow.
Speaker 1:God, may our job in the world be simply to move into a room, to step into an encounter, and to look for you. And when we do, to draw attention to your presence. To point out the grace and peace that surrounds us always. To help others see the love that is invading their lives right now. God, we do this, as we participate in your kingdom and your commonwealth, may everything that you imagine for this world be born starting in us.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.