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Jonah 1:1-3
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Because Jonah is about all of us. And the writer knows that if Jonah can get us to laugh at the absurdity of this story, perhaps he can get us to think about our stories in slightly new ways. 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. My name is Jeremy this week. Actually, every week, it's Jeremy. But, welcome to Commons today. And, we really do appreciate that you've joined us.
Speaker 1:We don't take that for granted that you're here. However, maybe particularly today, this is exciting because this is the first Sunday of Lent together. On Wednesday this week, we gathered here to mark each other with ash and enter into this Lenten season, but this is now the season that will take us and prepare us for Easter. Now, Lent is this very old, old tradition, but it's also this really beautiful pattern of preparation where we take the six weeks leading up to Easter every year and create space for that to shape us in new ways. And so even if you weren't able to join us on Ash Wednesday, we'd encourage you to think about Lent and how that season can begin to prepare you for this cycle of life and death and rebirth that brings us back to Easter every year.
Speaker 1:And by the way, Lent is also where I'm wearing this purple scarf today. This is called a Stole, and it just helps us to remember the season that we're in. It's something that we do every year. Trust me, I've been in the scarf game ten years, and if you're not a Raptors fan, then you can just ignore that joke, because surgeon OG got nothing on me. However, last Sunday, we wrapped up our series in Romans, and we were able to gather up all of these conversations and put them together.
Speaker 1:Now, if you missed every sermon in Romans, then just go back and listen to that last one. Because I really think a lot of the problem that we have with Romans at times is that it's really easy to preach verses without understanding how those verses fit into a larger argument. So last week was a lot of fun because we got to gather up all of these pieces of all of these conversations and lay them out in one big picture. And to understand Paul's argument. First, that God has decided to do something about all of our sin and suffering.
Speaker 1:Second, that the solution God has enacted is to send Jesus to overturn the story of Adam and enable a new humanity within us. Third, that this has always been the plan. It was predestined from the very beginning that the story of God's people would expand to include all peoples everywhere, and therefore, finally, that those of us in Christ, those of us transformed by the faithfulness of Jesus, ought to do our best to live out of the grace and peace that has been offered to us, to see all of this as one big unfolding narrative with purpose and intent and direction to it, it really helps to give context to some of those lines that we may be really familiar with but have trouble understanding in the past. And so I hope you sensed a bit of that in our Roman series. Maybe got a slightly new perspective on Paul and everything that he offers to us today, and hopefully even some of those more intimidating ideas have opened up for you in new ways.
Speaker 1:This realization that God slowly chooses all of us right from the very beginning. Now today, we are gonna shift gears because today we start a Lenten series in the book of Jonah. And Jonah might seem like a strange place to ground ourselves on the road to Easter, but I'm gonna suggest there's actually something very profound to be found in this short story. First though, let's pray together. God of grace, who opens up new worlds of possibility to us.
Speaker 1:Thank you for the way that you have invaded our lives with peace, showed us new ways to move forward together. Invite us to follow your steps, to turn toward each other in the way that you have come to us. As we enter this Lenten season, and we begin to prepare ourselves for resurrection, might we sink to the depths of our grief. To own and understand our pain, to come to see you with us in the midst of it. But then also to begin to see the heights of our joy.
Speaker 1:To embrace your resurrection as our life and to recognize your life in us raising us again every single day. Let the stories of your people inspire us. To see beauty where we least expect and to cultivate life even where we think there is none left. Be with us today in the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
Speaker 1:Okay. Today, we begin Jonah. And today, we are gonna talk about comedy, story, and and vacation destinations. But, first a little background here. The book of Jonah is part of a section in our Bibles called the Minor Prophets.
Speaker 1:There are 12 of these short prophetic books in the Bible and each of them speak truth to power in different ways. This is really important. The prophets in the bible are not fortune tellers. They do not see the future, what they see is the present. That's what prophets do in the biblical imagination.
Speaker 1:They see what is really real and then they name that for us. But the interesting thing about Jonah is that Jonah is not the prophet here. Unlike any of the other prophetic books, this book is named after the main character in the story, not after the author of the story. All the other prophets books are autobiographical. This one is a narrative.
Speaker 1:And that means that this book is unique among the prophets, but it also means that we have to read it in different ways. Because we want to understand what the author is trying to say to us, of course. But more than that, I think we have to understand how this author wants to teach us about how we read in new ways as well. See, there's a tendency at times to hear the story about a man in the belly of a whale and to dismiss this as a child's fable. And by the way, I don't think the fable is the problem there.
Speaker 1:I think fables can say a lot to us and I think Jonah fits into that category quite nicely. The problem I have with that formulation is the child part. Because Jonah has some very grown up themes to explore. I mean, this is after all a story about how much God loves those we hate, even those who have hurt us very deeply. And so it's not by any means a story that is easy to read or to process.
Speaker 1:It's definitely not an easy story to incorporate into our lives. And that's precisely why I think this story comes to us in the form that it does. Because you see this is a story that is meant to sneak past our guard. It's meant to bypass all of our objections. This is a story that is meant to trick us into listening.
Speaker 1:This week, my son and I went for a coffee. We do this a lot. It's not new, but our new daughter has just come home, and I wanted to make sure that Eaton and I had some time to hang out one on one. But on our way home from swimming lessons, on our way to the coffee shop, Eaton decided that he wanted to troll our barista. His words not mine.
Speaker 1:See we know the baristas at Sotton found pretty well. They know our order. And so he had planned out this gag meticulously. Dad he said, when we go in I will order a coffee and you can order a chocolate chip cookie. And they will think that it is so strange that a kid is drinking a coffee and a dad is eating a chocolate chip cookie, and it will be hilarious.
Speaker 1:Then he added, remember, when we sit down, we will switch so that actually I can have the chocolate chip cookie. He did not want me forgetting that very important part of the plan. We go in, we go up to the front, and we go to place our orders. I'll have a chocolate chip cookie, I say, and I'll have a traditional cappuccino, says my son. He knows the deal.
Speaker 1:But our barista plays along. He says, really? You're going to have a cappuccino? Wouldn't you rather have a chocolate chip cookie like your dad, and at this point, Eaton loses it? He thinks that this is just amazing.
Speaker 1:And so he blurts out, no, we were tricking you. The chocolate chip cookie is for me. The coffee was for my dad. I can't believe you fell for it. That was epic.
Speaker 1:Because everything is epic in our house right now. Now, I'm not saying that Jonah is gonna give it all up in the end like my son and admit everything he's been up to. He's not. The writer here is much better at playing the straight man than my son. I am saying though that the author here is trying to troll you.
Speaker 1:Because part of the agenda in Jonah is getting you to let your guard down. So that the writer can sneak some hard medicine past your lips. And he knows that what he wants to say is hard to swallow and he knows that you and I don't want to hear it. But he also knows that some of the best ways to get us to listen to things we don't want to hear is to be funny and to tell a good story. And the writer of Jonah knows how to do that.
Speaker 1:Now, maybe you've never thought of Jonah as a comedy before. Maybe you've never even thought about laughing at your bible before, but trust me, there is a lot to laugh about here, and all of it is intentional, and we'll see that together over the next few weeks. Think about this for a second. Who's your favorite stand up comedian? There are of course many good ones.
Speaker 1:One of my favorite happens to be Mike Berbiglia. And I got the chance to see him in Calgary when he was working on the material for his latest comedy special. And by the way, it is really neat to see the process of comedy in development. So much of what I do is public speaking, and so I can't help but pay attention to what people do when they're on the stage as much as what they're saying. But getting to see Berbiglia in the process of crafting his material and refining it, working out the kinks, and then later getting to see it all fully polished and perfected is a really neat experience.
Speaker 1:Because I could see all of these small tweaks that dramatically changed the impact of certain bits in his special. Which makes me think, I do most of my sermons four times every Sunday across all of our sermons and commons, but how good would they be if I just got like 400 chances at them? Who knows? Anyway, the reason I like Berbiglia is because he's funny, but also because he uses comedy to tell a story. One of his specials, his first one is all about falling in love with his wife.
Speaker 1:It's one big story. His newest one is all about having his first child. And there's just so much heart and tenderness and vulnerability that's woven between the jokes that the funny and the heartwarming all come across with that much more impact. I really do think that stand up comedians are often some of the most prophetic voices in our culture. Because once they get us to laugh, they can hit us with truth that we would otherwise avoid.
Speaker 1:If you've ever seen the special Nanette on Netflix, this comedic tour de force by the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, you know exactly what I'm talking about here. Over the course of sixty minutes, Gadsby weaves together her experience as a queer woman on the autistic spectrum. Her palpable anger at the way that she and people like her have been treated with hilarious wit and observation. And the result is this deeply unsettling experience that is both funny and challenging all at the same time. Well, the writer of Jonah is aiming for something like that.
Speaker 1:A story that would help us see past what is. Walter Brueggemann writes, that the key pathology of our time is the reduction of imagination so that we become too numbed, satiated and co opted to do serious imaginative work. He goes on to say, and I'll paraphrase here, that the prophetic must have a story to it because it calls us to what is not or perhaps better what could be. This is why stories like Jonah and his whale are commonplace because they are meant to wake us up from what merely is. See the point of Jonah is that it's funny.
Speaker 1:The point of Jonah is that it's absurd because the point of Jonah is that forces you to step outside of what you already think you know about the world. Into an imagination of reality that is completely foreign to you. Because what this author knows is that if he can get you to take seriously a story about a man swallowed by a whale, then maybe you can take seriously a story about loving your enemies at least as seriously as that. That's what the prophetic does. It tricks us into taking seriously ideas that are too big for us.
Speaker 1:And if loving your enemy feels too big for you today, that's okay. Because good stories have a way of finding their way into us. So, let's look at these opening verses of this story. Jonah one one, and the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai. Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because its wickedness has come up before me.
Speaker 1:Already a lot here, but let's start at the start. The word of the Lord came to Jonah. In some ways, this is the standard opening of any prophetic book. If you flip over to Joel or Micah or Hosea or Zephaniah, all of these will start with the same sentence. In fact, in Jeremiah and in Haggai, we read the same sentence.
Speaker 1:It just comes a couple verses into those books except it's actually not quite exactly the same. In all of those other texts what we read is The word of the Lord which came to the prophet. In Jonah, we have exactly the same meaning in a slightly different construction. Because here what we read is Now those are basically the same Hebrew words in a slightly different order. Except that we get this little letter on the front of it.
Speaker 1:It's called a vav. It's the vav in vayahi and it means and. And what that means is that this story starts mid sentence, mid story. See, the construction here implies a missing first half of the story. And this goes deeper than just what you learned in grade school about never starting a sentence with an and, because in Hebrew this construction is called volve consecutive.
Speaker 1:It's actually part of their tense structure. Hebrew narratives rely on the first verb in the story to set the placement of the story in either the past or the future. And even though we can tell from the rest of the context here that this story is meant to be written in the past tense, In Hebrew that's called the perfect aspect. They actually don't have a past, present and future like we do in English. But the Vav consecutive construction is missing its grounding verb in the story.
Speaker 1:For the rabbis, this was fascinating because it doesn't seem to be a mistake. There doesn't seem to be anything missing here. It seems to be intentional. And so the question became, well, what was happening when the word of the Lord came to Jonah? Given who Jonah is and given the character of Jonah that we're about to meet, someone who doesn't even want to hear the word of the Lord.
Speaker 1:What was he up to when this unwelcome word came to him? And I think at least part of the intent here is to disassociate the voice of God from the usual suspects. Now we might not consciously think of God being in specific places the way that they did in the ancient world. And we have churches but we don't really believe that God inhabits them in particular ways except we kind of do don't we? I mean if the divine comes to you you're probably gonna be in church.
Speaker 1:Or if you encounter the spirit you're probably going to be in the mountains and if God speaks to you well then you probably were listening for that. Except Jonah isn't doing any of that. In fact, he could have been doing anything and that's the point. She was sitting in church one morning and a divine word came to her. He was nodding off at work one day and the spirit broke into that moment unexpected.
Speaker 1:They were walking down the street and out of nowhere they found themselves speaking directly to God. I mean, you are meant, you are invited to imagine yourself here because this story is meant to begin wherever you are. Jonah is a blank slate for any of us to imagine ourselves in this story in his shoes. In fact, one of the things we have to understand here is that Jonah is actually a bit character from second Kings, and he gets plucked from obscurity by this writer for this story. He's literally mentioned in one line outside this book, And, the only thing that we know about him is that he is the son of someone with the name my truth and that he was a prophet who endorsed the Northern Kingdom Israel as they broke away from Judah.
Speaker 1:It's all we know about him. The son of my truth who is a northern loyalist who is now called to preach to the Ninevites. And that's important because Nineveh is the capital of Assyria and Assyria was the nation that conquered the Northern Kingdom Of Israel. So when this book opens, we don't know anything about Jonah or what he was doing. The only thing that we know is that God wants him to talk to the people he hates.
Speaker 1:In other words, you can map whatever contentious, difficult, painful relationship you have in your life onto the story and that is the point of it. Because Jonah is about all of us. And the writer knows that if Jonah can get us to laugh at the absurdity of this story, perhaps he can get us to think about our stories in slightly new ways. Now, that's only the first word of the story and we haven't even gotten to any of the English words, so let's take a look at one more thing today. The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai.
Speaker 1:Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because its wickedness has come up before me. Really evocative language here. The image is the stench of Nineveh coming up before the nostrils of God. That's literally what we read here in Hebrew. But given the relationship between Nineveh, Assyria, Israel, Jonah's response here makes some sense.
Speaker 1:He runs away from the Lord and he heads to Tarshish. Jonah went down to Joppa where he found a ship abound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. Now, that's as far as we're gonna get today. We'll look at the storm and the man overboard story next week, but there's some stuff to pay attention to here.
Speaker 1:Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. Tarshish is really interesting because there's a lot of debate about exactly where Tarshish was. It's a city that appears in the Bible and in ancient literature a few times. Strangely however, it's not a city that appears on any maps. Now some scholars would place it in modern day Spain.
Speaker 1:Others suggest it may have been in Northern Africa near Carthage. But what's really interesting is that for a city that's described in a lot of literature in such grand strokes, there's not a lot of archaeological evidence for it. In fact, of the literary references to Tarshish in the Bible have a peculiar vibe to them that seems to suggest maybe we're not even talking about a real place at all. In first Kings, we read that the fleets of Solomon sailed to Tarshish to bring back gold and silver, ivory, monkeys and peacocks. Apparently monkeys and peacocks were just as popular back then as they are now.
Speaker 1:In Isaiah, the term ships of Tarshish is used, but it's actually not referring to a place or a city or a nation at all. It's actually just used as an adjective to describe really big boats. In Ezekiel, we get Tarshish used to describe shady business partners for the nation of Israel. And so what some scholars think is that even if Tarshish was at one point a real place, and it probably was, Over time, it slowly became a literary device to talk about a place of great wealth and great comfort. It functions like Shambhala in Tibetan culture.
Speaker 1:Wherever you took your last vacation in your culture, this is just like Kokomo in Tom Cruise culture. In other words, Jonah wants to avoid God, and so he goes to a five star resort on the Mexican Riviera. And there's two things important about this for me. One is this recognition that often when God wants to get my attention about something, my response is to distract myself. Now, may not be a vacation, although it could be.
Speaker 1:But just as easily, this could be a video game or a movie or another drink. Any of the myriad of options that all of us have available to us today to move our mind away from what is immediately in front of us. Toward what can amuse us. And you've heard that word amuse, we know that. You ever thought about this?
Speaker 1:You hear the term muse, something that makes you think or reflect or meditate, something you muse or chew on, well the prefix a there simply means not. As in not thinking or not reflecting or not engaging with. Look, I'm not saying there's no place for amusement in our lives. I find my son incredibly amusing, and I love him. But often when I am challenged, and when I'm pushed, and when I'm confronted with something that I know I need to change in myself, or about myself, or around myself, my instinct is to amuse myself so that I can shut that down fast.
Speaker 1:What happens when I think about the injustice in the world? What happens when I think about how I could reduce my carbon footprint? What happens when I think about all of the ways that I could shuttly shift my spending or my language or my politics in ways to benefit someone other than me, well, that's what Instagram is for. So that I can look at pictures of friendly golden retrievers, and I can see if there are any new likes on my page, and I can distract myself from all the places that I might be hearing a divine voice talking to me about change. That's what's going on here.
Speaker 1:Jonah is self medicating. He's taking a vacation, but it's not from work. It's from the voice that he knows comes from somewhere deep inside his being. And the writer here is inviting us to notice that, to identify that by using a literary device like Tarshish that should be a big red flag for all of us. Now, second part of this flight that I find fascinating is where Jonah avoids.
Speaker 1:Because the text tells us that Jonah sails to Tarshish to flee from the Lord. But if God isn't in Tarshish, if God isn't in paradise, then where is God exactly? And the implication here in the background of the story is that God is already in Nineveh. You see, the whole setup for the story is that the writer is playing with the absurd idea that you can physically run away from God and of course you can't. But if Jonah thinks that he can go in one direction to avoid God, then that must mean that he knows that God is in the other direction already.
Speaker 1:That God is active and working exactly where the evil is. This is one of the central ideas that the book of Jonah explores. The idea that God is already at work in the spaces where we least expect. This past fall, we began this new teaching cycle by looking at the sermon on the mount. And there Jesus begins by saying, blessed are the poor in spirit.
Speaker 1:Blessed are those without a wisp of religion, those who can't make heads or tails of the divine. Blessed are those who don't have a clue because God has come to you. And here, hundreds of years before Jesus, the prophet affirms that same imagination. This sense that we all have somewhere deep in our soul that the divine is everywhere. That the point isn't east or west.
Speaker 1:The point isn't Tarshish or Nineveh. The point is that wherever you find yourself, whether that is exactly where you think you want to be, or whether it is struggling with your faith and your belief right now, God is there with you even now waiting for you to notice. And maybe you can think of a moment somewhere where you sat with someone who was grieving. You loved someone who had lost a job or maybe gone through some kind of a significant breakout. Maybe all that you could do was sit there with them and experience that pain, and you weren't sure how because it was heavy and it was dark, but you knew somehow it was holy to do.
Speaker 1:This is what these opening verses are inviting us to recognize. Sometimes, God is waiting to be discovered, to be found where we least expect, where we last want to go in the opposite direction of all of our instincts. And that sometimes, even when we find ourselves completely and utterly spiritually bankrupt, this is somehow precisely where we find ourselves strangely blessed. Look, I certainly do not believe that you will ever find yourself in the belly of a whale. That's not the point of this story.
Speaker 1:But maybe you have been running away from God. Maybe you have been desperately trying to avoid the divine in your life. Maybe you thought you really could outrun the reach of grace and peace. And maybe you found your Tarshish, that place where you thought you could turn God off, and maybe Jonah is about recognizing that God has always actually been there nearer than your breath regardless of where you go, and maybe that's not something to be afraid of. Because maybe that is grace itself.
Speaker 1:That no matter how far we run, no matter how fast we go, no matter how deep into the dark we tread, God is always there waiting for us with open arms to notice. May your story start today wherever you find yourself. May all of those places of rest and repair, your tarshish actually be healing for you. But may the spaces that feel dark and unwelcoming right now, might they open up with divine light for you this day. May you stop running and start your journey so that God can meet you along the way.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. God, for all of these times that we have thought we could run away from you, that we could distract ourselves, we could amuse ourselves, we could head to paradise to be away from everything that you are doing in us and through us. We pray that even those spaces would be filled with your presence. That when we need to get away, you would be there. That when we need rest and relaxation and healing, you would be there, but then also that those spaces that feel very dark right now, Those relationships where we are really not sure if there is anything divine left.
Speaker 1:Those moments of our lives, the struggles, those fears, those anxieties that we want to push down in a way, might we recognize that you are there as well, waiting for us, ready for us, open to walk with us through whatever it is that we face. And God, as we recognize this, as it becomes our story, might we realize that our job now is simply to point you out wherever you already are, that we never need to bring you with us. Our job is simply to point to you, to celebrate goodness, to find the divine wherever we find ourselves. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray, amen.