The Lord’s word came to Jonah, Amittai’s son: 2 “Get up and go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their evil has come to my attention.” 3 So Jonah got up—to flee to Tarshish from the Lord! He went down to Joppa and found a ship headed for Tarshish. He paid the fare and went aboard to go with them to Tarshish, away from the Lord. 4 But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, so that there was a great storm on the sea; the ship looked like it might be broken to pieces. 5 The sailors were terrified, and each one cried out to his god. They hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to make it lighter. Now Jonah had gone down into the hold of the vessel to lie down and was deep in sleep. 6 The ship’s officer came and said to him, “How can you possibly be sleeping so deeply? Get up! Call on your god! Perhaps the god will give some thought to us so that we won’t perish.” 7 Meanwhile, the sailors said to each other, “Come on, let’s cast lots so that we might learn who is to blame for this evil that’s happening to us.” They cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. 8 So they said to him, “Tell us, since you’re the cause of this evil happening to us: What do you do and where are you from? What’s your country and of what people are you?” 9 He said to them, “I’m a Hebrew. I worship the Lord, the God of heaven—who made the sea and the dry land.” 10 Then the men were terrified and said to him, “What have you done?” (The men knew that Jonah was fleeing from the Lord, because he had told them.) (Common English Bible)
“Friends Don’t Let Friends…A Lent
Alongside Jonah,” Week One
The
Reverend Adam Hamilton is the senior pastor of the largest United Methodist
congregation in the country, coincidentally in my hometown metropolitan area of
Kansas City. In his 2009 book Enough: Discovering Joy Through Simplicity
and Generosity, he recounts his experience with that dreaded home equity
loan market upon which a chunk of the blame of the Great Recession (and still
torpid job economy) was heaped. He
writes, in part:
The last few years have seen a boom in
home equity loans,, which allow us to withdraw the money from what is, for most
of us, our single largest savings account—removing the equity from our home and
spending it. So instead of paying down
the mortgages on our homes, many of us choose to withdraw the equity for home
improvements or other purchases.
Recently, I received an offer from my mortgage lender to loan me more
than I paid for my house eight years ago—and my house is not close to being
paid off. That’s a lot of extra cash I
could spend on anything I wanted. No new
appraisal. No closing costs. No need to show bank statements or verify
other assets. No paycheck stubs or proof
of income required. I was told I could
take out all the equity in my home—and quite a bit more. If I actually took out this loan, you would
have to visit me in jail because the amount of money they offered was more than
I could reasonably pay back.
It’s these kinds of offers that feed our
desire to have it now and pay later.
What
Pastor Adam is describing here really is another form of legalized gambling,
not unlike blackjack or roulette. You’re
pushing all-in on a bet that you may not be able to back up completely…which is
why you see so many people with gambling addictions lose everything. And this almost happens to Jonah because of
two great and terrible gambles he makes here now.
This
is a new sermon series for a new church season: traditionally, the forty days
prior to Easter Sunday make up a worship season called Lent, and those forty
days correspond to the forty days that Jesus spent fasting and being tempted in
the wilderness. Lent is a season whose
primary themes, then, are largely about denial of selfishness and repentance
from our own past selfishness. And really,
there is no better story about selfishness in Scripture than that of the
prophet Jonah. Sure, you have individual
stories about selfishness in Biblical heroes like Samson and David, but none of
their stories involved getting belched out of a giant future sushi roll. And really, selfishness is what defines
Jonah, even more so than any other Biblical character. He is the original prodigal, the original
heir who renounces his Father hundreds of years before Jesus tells us His
parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15.
So for Lent this year, we will be reading through, verse-by-verse, the
entirety of the Jonah narrative. It’s
only four chapters long, so going verse-by-verse is definitely doable in a
five-week series, and we’ll come out the other side all set for Palm Sunday and
the beginning of the Passion narrative.
We
open with Jonah, who, no matter what other kookyboots things happen to him, is
a historical figure—2 Kings 14:25 attests to a prophet named Jonah, son of
Amittai, from Gath-Hepher.
But
unlike every other prophetic book in the Old Testament—Isaiah, Jeremiah, you
name it—Jonah’s book is not primarily a compilation of prophesies and oracles, but
rather, it is a story, and a story that really is about much more than his
getting swallowed up by a giant fish (NOT a whale—as one of my commentators put
it, that was Pinocchio. Can you imagine
Jonah saying, “I want to be a real prophet?”).
No,
of course not, because right now, Jonah does not want to be a real prophet. He wants to be anything but a prophet if it
means avoiding having to go to Nineveh in Assyria. So he sets out in the complete opposite
direction—Tarshish was most likely in modern-day Spain, and Nineveh in Assyria
would have been in modern-day northern Iraq, on the Tigris River. And Israel sits in the middle. To try to put that in our context, it would
be as though Jonah lived here, in Longview, got the call from God to go preach
in New York City, and instead boarded Delta’s very next nonstop flight from
Portland to Tokyo. That is about the
size of Jonah’s disobedience here.
And
so that is the first major gamble (of two) that Jonah takes in these opening
ten verses. He gambles, essentially,
that he can outrun God. After all, if
YHWH is really only the God of Israel, once you’re far away from Israel, you
should be golden, right?
Of
course it does not work out that way.
And there was no possible way for it to, since YHWH is, in turn, God not
only of the Israelites but of the Gentiles as well. But these Gentile sailors do not realize it
yet, so when a storm hits, they each prayed out to their own God. And I love what Yale University’s John Collins
says about the sailors: “Ecumenical to a fault, they urge Jonah also to pray to
his god.” I would say that “urge” is a
bit of an understatement, because somehow Jonah has managed to conk out during
this storm, and the sailors have to go and wake him…and as the ship’s captain
points out, if Jonah is sleeping through something like this, you know it has
to be a pretty deep sleep. So the task
of waking Jonah up was probably a serious team effort.
Once
Jonah is awake, though, he takes his second major gamble. None of the ecumenical sailors can figure out
what is causing the storm (after all, meteorology had not yet been studied, and
if it was storming, it was because some Ba’al or Asherath up there was ticked
off at you…or, as Collins delightfully puts it once more, “this cacophony of
prayer fails to produce the desired result!”), so they decide to cast lots to
decide whose fault it is. Essentially,
they play the lottery, except instead of winning millions of dollars, you get
to become the scapegoat.
Of
course, Jonah “wins” the lottery. And
the gambles he made—trying to escape God, doing so by hopping aboard a ship
during a time when seafaring was still very much a dangerous occupation—all come
back to bite him. The sailors demand of
him, “What have you done?!”
Now,
if you ever think of anyone who has lost everything in a gamble—maybe gambling
as we think of it today in a casino, but also in a boneheaded business venture
or in some sort of a scam, you are liable to react the exact same way to them
when they—and you—discover that everything has been lost: What have you done?! How have you put yourself at risk like this?!
That
is why friends don’t—or shouldn’t, at any rate—let friends play the
lottery. It is almost always a losing
proposition. And here, Jonah, only ten
verses in, is already taking it on the chin.
But
that is not the only takeaway from this initial exposition of Jonah’s story,
or, at least, it is only the surface-level takeaway. Jonah has put himself at risk because of
something that should be very familiar to all of us: his selfishness. He does not want to do what God asks—in fact,
he decides to do the exact opposite of what God asks because, as we’ll come to
discover, he simply does not want to do it.
At all.
And
if you think of God, sitting in His throne in Heaven and looking down on earth,
the first words out of His mouth are probably something along the lines of, “Story
of my life, mate.”
Adam
and Eve do not want to do what God tells them to do—to not eat of the fruit of
the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
So they end up doing it anyways.
Cain
does not want to do what God tells him to do—to not be envious of his brother Abel. He murders Abel anyways.
Lot’s
wife does not want to do what God tells her to do—to not look back on Sodom and
Gomorrah being destroyed. She does, and
she gets turned into a giant pile of table seasoning.
And
that’s just the first half of the book of Genesis. The entirety of Scripture is, in many ways,
written on a timeline of us selfishly only doing what we want to do, not what
God calls us to do.
Part
of the whole purpose of Lent’s existence, of marking and celebrating Jesus’
time in the wilderness, is precisely to try to jolt us out of the rut of what
we want to do as opposed to what God calls us to do. Like us, Jonah hasn’t gotten the memo
yet. But he will, if you tune back in
for next week, and the week after! But
we still can hold out hope for getting the memo too (If I just could insert
Office Space joke about TPS reports here…That would be greaaaaaaat).
Our
selfishness is what can cause us to take those gambles, like Jonah’s, that are
ultimately and epically self-destructive.
We either hoard our wealth or gamble it away. We decide that the equity in our homes would
be better off as cash in our pockets. We
throw away so much that is still usable and salvageable, and then complain
about how we are out of resources.
And
then, to top it all off, we—again, just like Jonah— in another gamble, run away
from the consequences of actions. Or, at
least, we try to. But they still have a
way of catching up to us.
The
thing this…God has a way of always catching up to us as well. No matter how far down the path of the
prodigal we follow—and for Jonah, as perhaps the original prodigal, that is
quite a ways—God will still make His presence known. God will still hurl the winds, God will still
throw the waves, God will still move the mountains and seas that He created in
order to get our attention, because no matter our messes, no matter our
mistakes, to God, we are still salvageable.
Such
are the ways of a God who absolutely refuses to fully give up on us.
May it be so.
Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
March
9, 2014
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