Sermon notes Jan. 22, Jonah 3:1-5

Jan.22 Jonah 3:1-5
Jonah may well be one of the first Bible stories we heard. We know that Jonah was swallowed by a great fish, but then the story gets a little vague in some of our memories. Too often, we have let this great story reside in our child’s memory bank, and not continue to let it breathe and grow as we have grown.Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh, the seat of the dreaded Assyrian empire that had destroyed the Northern kingdom, depopulated it and imported with alien cultures. He has the most successful short sermon imaginable. I picture him halfway hoping that Nineveh will be overthrown and punished. He may have hoped it was a look in to the future, not an opportunity for repentance. Instead, it stops everyone in their tracks, and all of these pagans repent.

Jesus Christ always enters enemy territory, the rough terrain of the human heart and mind. Barth called it the journey of the son into the far country.Indeed these early call stories do not seem to be planned tours as much as encounters. Put differently, Jesus has the goal of teaching and healing, as the situation itself will dictate. He plans to act but seems to lack a plan, as his call to join him seems pretty indiscriminate. Like Jonah, Jesus is called to preach, and some of his sermonic material seemed ot be in the short stories we call parables.

We may be involved in a place or situation where we seem to be thrown into out, outside of our desire or volition. We may well look at our lives and think we have been aiming for Jerusalem and here I am in Nineveh. Recall that Jonah was trying to flee to Tarshish, an ancient equivalent of Vega or Tahiti or Shangri-La. Oh, if we could only get away from it all. Instead Christ keeps calling us back into this world, filled with all of its irritants, annoyances, and troubles. we so want spiritual life to somehow be above the noise and the difficulty, for spiritual life to remove us from the fuss of life and into an ethereal realm. As people of the Incarnation, our spiritual progress is pursued in the muck and mire of the real world, with real people, of all things. Our paths may well move through difficult territory on the road to the celestial city. In Christian theology we are called people as well as choosing creatures. God guides, entices, pulls us toward finding a purpose, even a destiny, that we would not choose, be it Harry Potter, or Frodo, or Jonah. It’s been said by rabbis, “if you wish to make god smile, pray. If you wish to make God laugh, share you plans.”

One of the pulls for church is that we seek to escape the pressures of everyday life for an hour. Its danger is that we seek to build castle walls between the church and the community. In essence, we are tempted to make the church Tarshish and flee from the troubles of the world. Since God is everywhere, God is embedded in the troubles of the world as well as in the orderly safety of the sanctuary. Indeed, the belly of the beast was an unlikely sanctuary for Jonah,a place of silence where his prayer emerged, where his determination to finally follow the call of God emerged as well.

People my age remember the Simon and Garfunkel song, the sound of silence. Yes, we hear of God, but we also come into contact with the divine i within the cloud of silence.The spy spoof Get smart had a cone of silence where the speakers got garbled but those who were to be excluded could hear them perfectly.