Walking Toward Nineveh
Trinity Episcopal Church in Torrington, CT
Epiphany 3 RCL Year B
When my family and I visit the Mystic Marinelife Aquarium, I am drawn to the Beluga whale habitat. Visitors to the museum can watch the whales from the perimeter of the display, or my particular favorite viewing area is down a flight of stairs and under an outcropping of stone. From this vantage point, with a bit of patience, one can come nose to nose with a whale – separated by only a few inches of transparent glass.
No matter how many times the whales return to this meeting spot, it continues to be exciting and the highpoint of a visit. Perhaps because of the way it makes my son squeal with excitement just like I did when I was his age, but also because each time I am reminded of the biblical story of Jonah and the belly of the whale.
Today is the day to tell the story of Jonah, the whole story of Jonah, complete with the whale even if it isn’t mentioned in our portion of the book of Jonah selected for this Sunday, because this is its only appearance in the regular lectionary cycle.
Many of us think of Jonah as a children's story, probably because of the whale. Perhaps we remember Sunday school lessons about the days Jonah spent in the belly of the whale. Some of us might remember the Disneyesque cartoon, with Jonah riding the whale’s tongue like a surf board.
But the real message of Jonah is a very adult message that provides for us an opportunity to explore and stretch our understanding of God and the salvation offered to us in relationship to God. The focus of our text today is God’s second call to Jonah and his less than enthusiastic response. However, the story of Jonah is a whole piece, a coherent story, and needs to be told from beginning to end.
As one who has stood nose to nose with a whale and wondered just how exactly it would be to be swallowed by one, I have to warn you not to get to tied up in the details of the whale story or even perhaps in debating the historical place of this story. It doesn’t really matter whether or not Jonah was a “real” historical person, whether he was actually swallowed by a whale much larger than the ones in Mystic, or why he wasn’t chewed up in the process. This is a story about history.
The story of Jonah is a moral tale, a cautionary fable, and it was told and retold and eventually preserved in writing to teach others something about themselves.
You might not have noticed that the lesson we heard this morning started,
The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, "Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.
This is the second time Jonah has received a calling from God to go to Nineveh. When Jonah attempted to avoid answering the call the first time, he ran away and hid from God. He escaped to a ship, ended up in a storm at sea, and was cast into the water by his fellow shipmates. He spent three days in the belly of the whale and was spat up on shore. He lived through all of this, only to get the call to return to go to Nineveh all over again.
God's instruction at both calls, in both 1:1 and 3:1, is "to go to Nineveh, the great city." Yes, Nineveh was a great city, but it was also a great city which was a feared enemy of Israel. Being asked to go to Nineveh in biblical times, would be something like an American being asked to walk into a Taliban training camp in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran or Iraq.
Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, and biblical history tells us that Assyria was the nation that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, and also dominated and subjugated the southern kingdom of Judah for a hundred years.
Assyria was an enemy. It was a brutal regime that worked to crush Israel.
Jonah wasn’t called to speak to his people, his fellow Israelites, He was not called to visit people who shared his God and his faith. Jonah was called by God to go and prophesy to the enemy.
If we are truly going to understand this story, we must know just how daunting a calling Jonah received. We need to understand, or at least consider, why Jonah would chose to run, rather than to take a long walk and say the words,
"Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"
That’s what God asked him to do and say, wasn’t it?
Jonah was told to go into the enemy city and announce God's judgment.We are not told why Jonah runs. Maybe he was afraid he would be attacked or killed. Maybe he hated the Assyrians so much that he thought they didn’t deserve to be offered a chance to repent. No matter the reason, Jonah left town on the first boat out. We all know that Jonah ends up in the fish, and it is only here that Jonah finally does something. He calls out to God:
“I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. 3You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me.”
When in the belly of the fish, without a way to save himself, Jonah prays the words of a psalm and God answers his prayer and directs the whale to not only spit him out, but to deposit him safely on shore.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Our God is a persistent God, and commands Jonah yet again to go to Nineveh. This time, Jonah goes, but his message is less than compelling:
"Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"
The response of the people of Nineveh is as unbelievable as the story of the whale.
5And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast,
and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
6When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.
7Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh:
“By the decree of the king and his nobles:
No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything.
They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water.
8Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth,
and they shall cry mightily to God.
All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands.
9Who knows? God may relent and change his mind;
he may turn from his fierce anger ,so that we do not perish.”
Imagine it: people and animals in sackcloth. It is almost as amazing as man-shallowing, but not man eating whales! Listening to the call of God changed the people of Nineveh and the change was more than Jonah could imagine. The people of Nineveh repented on their evil ways and became a nation looking to God for guidance and forgiveness.
Transformation happened in that place to the people of Nineveh in a very big way, and that change was called into being by the most unlikely and tentative of prophets. Jonah hid again and again from God, but in the end by saying “Yes” to the will of God, he was given enough to do the work he was given to do.
We don’t listen to stories like this for their comic or entertainment value. We as a church don’t listen again and again to these words because we like fantastic stories about supernatural feats. We tell these stories because we too are asked to do what Jonah was called to do.
We are called to:
· renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God
· renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt & destroy the creatures of God
· renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God
We are called to:
· persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord
· proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ
· seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself
This is the shared calling that each of us baptized into this community.
This is a huge calling that takes a lifetime to understand and to undertake. Many of us we enter into this calling with fear and trepidation. Other times we are strong in faith and filled with the knowledge and love of God. Either way, God will be forgiving because that is the very heart of God.
Sometimes we rise to the occasion and walk toward our own Nineveh’s and share the word of God. Other times, we hide or keep silent, and find ourselves in the belly of the whale.
The answer is the same for us as it was for Jonah, to speak the word of God in this time and place. In this parish, in this community, and in the world we share. Like Jonah, we worship “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and ready to relent from punishing." (4:2).
Epiphany 3 RCL Year B
When my family and I visit the Mystic Marinelife Aquarium, I am drawn to the Beluga whale habitat. Visitors to the museum can watch the whales from the perimeter of the display, or my particular favorite viewing area is down a flight of stairs and under an outcropping of stone. From this vantage point, with a bit of patience, one can come nose to nose with a whale – separated by only a few inches of transparent glass.
No matter how many times the whales return to this meeting spot, it continues to be exciting and the highpoint of a visit. Perhaps because of the way it makes my son squeal with excitement just like I did when I was his age, but also because each time I am reminded of the biblical story of Jonah and the belly of the whale.
Today is the day to tell the story of Jonah, the whole story of Jonah, complete with the whale even if it isn’t mentioned in our portion of the book of Jonah selected for this Sunday, because this is its only appearance in the regular lectionary cycle.
Many of us think of Jonah as a children's story, probably because of the whale. Perhaps we remember Sunday school lessons about the days Jonah spent in the belly of the whale. Some of us might remember the Disneyesque cartoon, with Jonah riding the whale’s tongue like a surf board.
But the real message of Jonah is a very adult message that provides for us an opportunity to explore and stretch our understanding of God and the salvation offered to us in relationship to God. The focus of our text today is God’s second call to Jonah and his less than enthusiastic response. However, the story of Jonah is a whole piece, a coherent story, and needs to be told from beginning to end.
As one who has stood nose to nose with a whale and wondered just how exactly it would be to be swallowed by one, I have to warn you not to get to tied up in the details of the whale story or even perhaps in debating the historical place of this story. It doesn’t really matter whether or not Jonah was a “real” historical person, whether he was actually swallowed by a whale much larger than the ones in Mystic, or why he wasn’t chewed up in the process. This is a story about history.
The story of Jonah is a moral tale, a cautionary fable, and it was told and retold and eventually preserved in writing to teach others something about themselves.
You might not have noticed that the lesson we heard this morning started,
The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, "Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.
This is the second time Jonah has received a calling from God to go to Nineveh. When Jonah attempted to avoid answering the call the first time, he ran away and hid from God. He escaped to a ship, ended up in a storm at sea, and was cast into the water by his fellow shipmates. He spent three days in the belly of the whale and was spat up on shore. He lived through all of this, only to get the call to return to go to Nineveh all over again.
God's instruction at both calls, in both 1:1 and 3:1, is "to go to Nineveh, the great city." Yes, Nineveh was a great city, but it was also a great city which was a feared enemy of Israel. Being asked to go to Nineveh in biblical times, would be something like an American being asked to walk into a Taliban training camp in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran or Iraq.
Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, and biblical history tells us that Assyria was the nation that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, and also dominated and subjugated the southern kingdom of Judah for a hundred years.
Assyria was an enemy. It was a brutal regime that worked to crush Israel.
Jonah wasn’t called to speak to his people, his fellow Israelites, He was not called to visit people who shared his God and his faith. Jonah was called by God to go and prophesy to the enemy.
If we are truly going to understand this story, we must know just how daunting a calling Jonah received. We need to understand, or at least consider, why Jonah would chose to run, rather than to take a long walk and say the words,
"Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"
That’s what God asked him to do and say, wasn’t it?
Jonah was told to go into the enemy city and announce God's judgment.We are not told why Jonah runs. Maybe he was afraid he would be attacked or killed. Maybe he hated the Assyrians so much that he thought they didn’t deserve to be offered a chance to repent. No matter the reason, Jonah left town on the first boat out. We all know that Jonah ends up in the fish, and it is only here that Jonah finally does something. He calls out to God:
“I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. 3You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me.”
When in the belly of the fish, without a way to save himself, Jonah prays the words of a psalm and God answers his prayer and directs the whale to not only spit him out, but to deposit him safely on shore.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Our God is a persistent God, and commands Jonah yet again to go to Nineveh. This time, Jonah goes, but his message is less than compelling:
"Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"
The response of the people of Nineveh is as unbelievable as the story of the whale.
5And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast,
and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
6When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.
7Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh:
“By the decree of the king and his nobles:
No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything.
They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water.
8Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth,
and they shall cry mightily to God.
All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands.
9Who knows? God may relent and change his mind;
he may turn from his fierce anger ,so that we do not perish.”
Imagine it: people and animals in sackcloth. It is almost as amazing as man-shallowing, but not man eating whales! Listening to the call of God changed the people of Nineveh and the change was more than Jonah could imagine. The people of Nineveh repented on their evil ways and became a nation looking to God for guidance and forgiveness.
Transformation happened in that place to the people of Nineveh in a very big way, and that change was called into being by the most unlikely and tentative of prophets. Jonah hid again and again from God, but in the end by saying “Yes” to the will of God, he was given enough to do the work he was given to do.
We don’t listen to stories like this for their comic or entertainment value. We as a church don’t listen again and again to these words because we like fantastic stories about supernatural feats. We tell these stories because we too are asked to do what Jonah was called to do.
We are called to:
· renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God
· renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt & destroy the creatures of God
· renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God
We are called to:
· persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord
· proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ
· seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself
This is the shared calling that each of us baptized into this community.
This is a huge calling that takes a lifetime to understand and to undertake. Many of us we enter into this calling with fear and trepidation. Other times we are strong in faith and filled with the knowledge and love of God. Either way, God will be forgiving because that is the very heart of God.
Sometimes we rise to the occasion and walk toward our own Nineveh’s and share the word of God. Other times, we hide or keep silent, and find ourselves in the belly of the whale.
The answer is the same for us as it was for Jonah, to speak the word of God in this time and place. In this parish, in this community, and in the world we share. Like Jonah, we worship “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and ready to relent from punishing." (4:2).
posted by AnglicanWoman | 12:07 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home