Wasatch Prebyterian Church Sermons
January 22, 2012
Sermon: "God’s Second Thoughts and Our Own "
Scripture: Jonah 3: 1-5, 10
Preaching: Rev. Scott Dalgarno
GOD’S SECOND THOUGHTS, AND OUR OWN
A sermon delivered by The Rev. Scott Dalgarno on Jan. 22, 2012
Based on Jonah 3:1-5,10; Mark 3:19b-22,31-35
"Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one."
Joseph Campbell
The thing that makes the Bible the great collection of literature that it is, is that on nearly every page we can see our lives reflected. The Bible is a mirror and we can see ourselves in Adam’s excuses, in Esau’s pathetic jealousy of his more talented brother, Jacob, and in Jacob’s propensity to elbow his way up the ladder of financial success. We can see ourselves just as well in the two sisters, Mary and Martha, competing, apparently, for the love of their mother, long after she’s gone, and in Peter, who makes very sincere promises and breaks them minutes later.
And Jonah, the subject of today’s text, is no different. God says to Jonah, “Go to Ninevah, that great city, and cry against it for their wickedness has come up before me.” And Jonah packs his bags and buys a ticket for the farthest point away from the place God has in mind for him to go. Ninevah is just north and east of Israel; a short train ride. Tarshish, where Jonah wants to go to escape God is, well, no one knows exactly but some say may be as far away as present day Spain. It’s the end of the world. Think of Oshkosh, or maybe, Sierra Leon.
Jonah is not Isaiah, who says, “Here I am Lord, send me.” Is this about fear? Not in the least. It’s a more complicated matter than that, and the complication makes this a better story than it would be if Jonah was just afraid. No, Jonah will later explain that the reason he did not want to go to Ninevah had to do with his sneaking suspicion that the whole enterprise might, in fact, work. The Ninevites might listen and repent, and God might just do the unthinkable, and forgive the Assyrian capitol city, Israel’s greatest enemy. With Jonah, the world is divided between the good guys and the evil-doers, and he has no time for any subtlety.
So Jonah gets on a boat to go where he hopes God is not. Which leads to the only part of the story most people remember. The perfect storm -- the throwing of Jonah overboard, and this great fish, and the fact that Jonah works in the fish like a slow virus, taking three full days to so upset his stomach that the fish vomits him out on land.
God then comes to Jonah and says, “Okay, buddy, let’s go over this one more time.” So Jonah, weary from the whole ordeal, smelling like last years spaghetti, and worried that God might have him swallowed by something even worse, goes to Ninevah, and he delivers his five word
(in Hebrew) sermon. No illustrations, no poem, no jokes, just the words, “Forty more days and Ninevah will be overthrown.
The result of this very puny sermon is staggering. Everybody in this huge city repents, from the oldest to the youngest. They put on sackcloth; they roll in ashes. Even the king repents, and the cattle, and the dogs, the cats, and hamsters. They all do it.
As the preacher, Jon Walton has observed, “They close the massage parlors, the back room bars, and shut down the drug cartels. They stop the child abuse and end the domestic violence; they provide shelters for the homeless, and built affordable housing. They implement health care for all poor children. They come up with a pharmaceutical cost-reduction plan that people can actually understand. They put limits on arms production. They make peace with their neighbors and stop torturing prisoners in clandestine locations . . . In every respect they clean up their act.”
Everyone in Ninevah is hopeful, except for Jonah who appears depressed and angry. He had suspected God of being some weak-kneed, bleeding heart, and here was proof. The whole thing made Jonah want to do what the fish did with Jonah. Now, listen to the conclusion of the story:
Then Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east . . .: And the LORD God appointed a plant, and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant.
But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm which attacked the plant, so that it withered.
When the sun rose, God appointed a sultry east wind, and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah so that he was faint; and he asked that he might die, and said, "It is better for me to die than to live."
But God said to Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry for the plant?" And he said, "I do well to be angry, angry enough to die."
And the LORD said, "You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night.
And should not I pity Nin'eveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?" Jonah 5-11
In other words, God is saying, “If I can have second thoughts about destroying Ninevah, why can’t you? Why must you be so clannish???”
So, how does Jonah react to God’s sermon? We don’t know. It ends right there with God’s appeal.
Why end there? Are the last few chapters missing? No. It ends there because the writer of the story of Jonah isn’t interested in how Jonah reacts, he’s after bigger fish, so to speak?
You see, it’s not important whether Jonah changes his heart – what’s important is whether the millions of us who’ve heard the story since then change our hearts.
Allow me to go back to the place where I began this word. Most of us are more like Jonah than we might be ready to admit. We have our systems worked out as to who is favored by God, and who is not. We know the good guys from the bad guys -- just like Jonah. And that, according to God, is what’s essentially wrong with the world. That’s what the world needs to get over thinking.
As many of you know, I am find of quoting the Vietnamese Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh, who said: “We are here, on this earth for one purpose: to wake up from the illusion of our own separateness.” The fact is, I believe that as much as we like to judge others, we have in us an even greater instinct to connect and bond.
Several years ago, I read of an incident where a police car was speeding across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, responding to a call about someone threatening suicide. The officers stopped suddenly beside a young man poised to jump from the bridge. In a moment the officer riding on the passenger side was upon him. The young man, in the act of jumping, was carrying the officer with him when the other officer grabbed his companion and with the help of several passersby, pulled them both to safety.
"What in the world were you thinking, grabbing him like that?" said the officer to the other, "You were going over with him!"
"I wasn't thinking anything," said his partner. "I couldn't help myself."
Let me ask you, is there something extra special about that policeman that made him do what he did? Do you suppose that he was an heroic personality waiting for fate to expose him as such, or could there be something in each one of us that might lead us to imperil ourselves in order to save another; perhaps even to our own surprise?
Joseph Campbell, philosopher of religion, man of letters, great all-around human being has said the following: "Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one." When one person goes over the railing
of the Golden Gate there is a sense in which each of us goes with him.
I think that is the key to something odd Jesus is talking about in the third chapter of Mark's gospel. The crowds have gathered at his house. He has so attracted the multitudes that the living room is full and there is not even room for them to eat together. Word is going out that Jesus is endangering his own life. He is saying things that are getting him into deep trouble with the religious authorities.
It is clear that his days are numbered and yet he continues to say things openly that incite some among the Pharisees. Therefore, people conclude that he must be mad. Oddly, even his family seems to believe this report. His mother and his brothers come looking for him.
A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, 'Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.' And he replied, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?
I wonder if perhaps his family might have overheard those words, windows being what they were in the first century. How painful those words must have been to them.
And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and my sister and my mother.
You see, Jesus had been breaking down one social barrier after another in his ministry; that between what was considered clean and unclean, that between males and females, and now the ultimate bond, that of family -- a bond that people in Middle Eastern societies hold as dearly as life -- even more dearly than we who tout "family values."
"Here are my mother and my brothers." Can you imagine his family cringing outside with their hands over their ears? Jesus who was never iconoclastic merely to shock is here saying something about the value of the human family for those who might have ears to hear it.
In his splendid memoir, Telling Secrets, Fredrick Buechner tells of a time years ago when he learned something about the crucial nature of relationships. One evening he was to have dinner with his mother. Just as the two of them were about to sit down to eat the telephone rang. It was an old friend Buechner had taught with long before.
The friend, grief stricken, was calling from the local airport. He had just learned that his father, mother and pregnant sister had been in an automobile accident on the West Coast. It was uncertain whether any of them would survive. He wondered if Buechner could come down to the airport and wait with him before his departure. Buechner's mother thought the idea of postponing their dinner was preposterous. The man was old enough to take care of himself.
Buechner says, "For a moment I was horrified to find myself thinking that maybe she was right. Then the next moment I saw more clearly than I ever have before that it is on just such outwardly trivial decisions as this -- should I go or should I stay -- that human souls are saved or lost.
I also saw for what was maybe the first time in my life that we are called to love our neighbors not just for our neighbors' sake but for our own sake, and that when John wrote, "He who does not love remains in death" he was stating a fact of nature as incontrovertible as gravity."
There is the family, and then there is the human family.
I remember a story told by William Haddad, an advisor of President John Kennedy. He spoke of visit he paid to Mrs. Kennedy just a month after the president's assassination. He said while they were visiting little John John came up and pulled on his pant leg and asked, "Are you a daddy?" Haddad confessed that he was. And John John said, "Then will you please throw me up in the air."
Who are my mother and my brothers? Who, indeed?
There is a reputed saying of Jesus in what is known as the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. It is not found in our Bibles but a number of scholars agree that it is very likely from Jesus himself. Whatever its source, I find it most compelling: "Love your neighbor like your soul; guard your neighbor like the pupil of your eye."
You know what the most important lesson of the economic crisis we are still trying to pull ourselves out of is? It’s different from the one in 1929. The lesson is simply that no nation on this God’s earth is independent. We all rise and fall together.
So, who are you willing to call brother or sister? Or, more to the point, who are you not willing to call brother or sister?
In this day when the Republicans are sorting out a possible candidate for president I’m going to tell you something you may not know about our inter-dependency. It took Richard Nixon, a Republican president, to go down to New Orleans in 1970 and use his political capital to open the schools in seven Southern states to black children.
Few people know that part of the civil rights story. Nixon, a very complicated character, and the original “food stamp president,” did some important things for the civil rights movement that, apparently, only a Republican could do. It took Nixon, a Republican, to open the door to China, and it took a Republican to open the doors of those schools. Consider this, Barack Obama may not have been elected without him.
We are all of us, black or white, liberal or conservative, dependent on one other.
Here is how Barack Obama put it in his inaugural address –
We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
I think the Jonah deep inside all of us would really like to believe that.
A certain spiritual teacher once asked his disciples, "How can you tell when the night has ended and the day has begun?"
One said, "When you can see an animal in the distance and tell if it is a cow or a horse."
"No," said the teacher.
A second disciple piped up saying, "When you see an evergreen tree in the distance and can tell whether it is a pine or a fir."
"No again," said the teacher.
"Well then, how can one tell," asked the disciples?
"It is when you can look into the face of any man and recognize in him the face of your brother, or when you can look into the face of any woman and see in her the face of your sister. If you cannot do this, no matter what time it is by the sun, it is still night."
Amen.
