Lessons from Nineveh

Jonah 3 (with focus on 3:6)

Ozarks@Worship

Munger Memorial Chapel

The University of the Ozarks

Clarksville, AR

September 19, 2012

It is my great pleasure to be in this pulpit today and to share in worship with the Ozarks community.  I bring you greetings from the congregations of First Presbyterian Church and Harmony Presbyterian Church. I hope you know how important each of you are to the Presbyterian ministries in Johnson County and we hope that, whatever your religious affiliation may be, that you will count on us in any way we might be of help to you while you are in Clarksville. 

Thank you Nancy for the gracious invitation and, as always it is good to be with Rick and Sheree and so many U of O friends as we gather to worship God. 

This week marks the celebration of the start of the Jewish New Year; Rosh Hashanah.  The celebration began at sundown on Sunday and is followed next week by Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  It is tradition to read the entirety of the book of Jonah on the occasion of Yom Kippur because at its heart is an act of repentance and God’s relenting in love.  I take as my text today a portion of the third chapter of Jonah we heard read a moment ago.  Hear again the sixth verse

When word of it reached the king of Nineveh, he got up from his throne, stripped himself of his robe, covered himself with mourning clothes, and sat in ashes.

 

 

 

            A few years ago I had the pleasant opportunity to spend an evening with friends at Duke University.  The dinner guests that night included Duke novelist Reynolds Price.  I love to read.  There are not many things in this world I would rather be doing than reading.  So having the chance to break bread with such a prolific and gifted writer, who happens to be one of my favorites, was quite a night for me.

            Sometime between the poached pear salad and the after dinner scotch, the conversation naturally turned to literature and Reynolds’ thoughts on his colleagues both dead and alive.  Of the many things that were said that night, one stuck out.  Someone asked simply, “what makes a good book?”  He did not have to think long.  He said, “a good book makes you work.”

            Although I imagine he had in mind something more along the lines of Anna Karenina or As I Lay Dying, I really believe that this short book of Jonah meets that criterion.  Jonah makes you work a little.  Now, it is certainly possible to just read Jonah through and skip the difficult bits.  The three year lectionary preaching cycle that most preachers follow only touches on Jonah and then it is the more accessible and less troubling parts.  When all you look for is the children’s book fare of Jonah and the whale, there is not much work expected of you as the reader.

            A close reading, however; one that looks beyond prophet and whales, beyond sinners and shrubs in the desert, reveals a story short on words but very long on theology and imagery and character.  To find those things, though, you have to work a little.

            I like it that Jonah makes me work.  Working and struggling with a biblical text is a good thing.  It is a holy thing.  Like Jacob with the angel of the Lord, we sometimes have to wrestle with the text a little if we hope to get anywhere near the bottom of the myriad layers of meaning. 

            Treating the bible as nothing but a simplistic storybook or a puritanical list of dos and don’ts disrespects the text and its place in the faith.

            Scripture is demanding, and Jonah is no exception.

            As I read this text over and over in preparation for preaching today, I found myself working very hard to answer a question that continued to pester me.  Why did the king do it?  Why did the king of Nineveh stop everything in its tracks, put on sack cloth and ashes and praise God?   In the field of this particular text, that is the row I was given to hoe.

            Why did the king do it?

            We really don’t know much about this king.  He is not named.  He is not described in any detail.  What we know about him is summed up in four verses in the book of Jonah when the king hears the prophet’s words and makes his decree of obedience and praise.

            Our whole expectation of the story is turned upside down.  The prophet, who is supposed to be the faithful one, ran as far and as fast as he could and only came back to deliver his prophecy after being swallowed and regurgitated by a great fish!  The king, who is supposed to be punished with his people for their persistent wickedness, is immediately repentant and faithful to God. 

            Now to be sure, the king new of the Hebrew God about whom Jonah spoke, but he was Assyrian.  They had their own gods.  He was certainly under no cultural or political obligation to heed the prophet’s words and praise God and seek God’s forgiveness.  In fact, his life would have been much easier if he had saved the sackcloth and ashes and dismissed the Hebrew prophet as a hack.

            So, why did the king do it?

            As with so many initial responses to scripture, as I worked and wrestled with this story I began to realize that my question was not quite the right one.  Rather than asking “why” the king does it, perhaps the question we should be asking is “what does it mean” that the king does it.  Beyond the king’s motives, what are the implications of stopping where you are, no questions asked, and taking on a posture of faith and hope in God’s forgiveness?

            One of my real challenges of ministry is balancing my vocational life with my personal relationships with people who live outside the Christian faith.  Most are not members of another religious community, they are just apathetically agnostic.  From time to time one will ask me about some particular point of theology.  I do my best to give an answer that reflects both what I know and what I believe.  The answers are usually more based in theological belief than pure analytical reasoning. 

When those questions come up, especially ones about sin and judgment, almost without exception, the answer I give is greeted with the same response. 

“Why is it so easy for you to believe?”

One part of me wants to grab people by the lapels and say, “easy! You think this is easy!  You think it is easy to believe in the resurrection and ascension and continuing rule in my life of a 33 year old Jewish carpenter who lived 2000 years ago and tries day and night to complicate my life with all that love your neighbor stuff!  You think that’s easy?  Really?”

Thankfully, my calmer side usually wins out in those moments and I answer sagely, “well, like so many things, faith is a gift of the spirit and it does come easier to some people than to others.  I wish it was as easy for me as it seems to be for some people.”

I don’t set out to tell a lie to my friends, but that is the thing I end up saying to them and I am not entirely sure that it is true.  Is it really just a matter of faith coming easier for some people than others?  Does it really boil down to some people just having it easier than others?

Jonah has it as easy as possible!  He hears directly from the mouth of God, yet Jonah never seems to live into the fullness of God.  The Ninevites, the embodiment of sinful ignorance in the beginning of the story, are able to rejoice in their forgiveness after they take on the practices of repentance.   To be sure, Jonah believed in God, but that belief was a dead letter in his life.  It was a dead letter because he refuses to live it.  He fails to engage in spiritual practices that help us narrow the gap between belief and unbelief; those practices that draw us out of ourselves and into common life with our brothers and sisters in Christ.  He talks the talk, but when it comes down to it, he cannot walk the walk. 

Doing those things and being the person who does those things seems to come naturally to the king.

Perhaps some of it is just an innate ability to believe and keep the faith.  If that is you, if you are someone for whom it is easy to keep the faith come what may, I say God bless, because it is not me. 

I struggle.

I struggle mightily sometimes to believe, to keep the faith.  I struggle.  I struggle, but I manage to keep muddling on because in my life I have been surrounded by a lot of kings of Nineveh; imperfect people who, through their witness and lives, have shown me the spiritual exercises necessary to maintain a healthy soul.   They have shown me that the life of faith is more than a life of belief in God, it is a life of trust lived in God.  It is a life of spiritual practice that lasts from the cradle to the grave and encompasses all of who we are in every moment and with every breath.

Christian spiritual practices are those things we do in our lives that strengthen our souls the same way that 30 minutes of cardio strengthens your heart.  Spiritual practices build healthy souls.  They are, in truth, about life.  They are about training ourselves to become the kinds of people who have eyes and actually see and who have ears and actually hear, and so experience not just survival, but life.

Jonah sat in the desert worried about survival.  The Ninevites, celebrated and rejoiced because to them life had been restored.

Why is it, then, that we have trained ourselves to want to have Jonah experiences- hearing the voice of God speak in our ear- when what we should be doing is following the example of the Ninevite king who, with his people, found new life in the word of God’s forgiveness?  The answer, I think is a simple one. 

Ease.

It is easier to sit in the desert and pout than it is to walk through the streets in sackcloth and ashes. 

It is easier to be angry with God than acknowledge our absolute dependence on the grace and love of God. 

It is easier to be Jonah on our own terms than Ninevites on God’s.

Yet we who profess to be followers of Jesus Christ have been called not to a life like the prophets but a life of faithful response like the king’s.   It is not mere acknowledgement of God in our belief but the bearing out of God’s word in our very lives that is the call of the Christian disciple.

One Saturday many years ago that great preacher of a previous generation George Butrick was flying home from a speaking engagement and after the plane had taken off, Butrick had lowered his tray table and gotten out his notepad and his bible and begun working on the next day’s sermon.  The man next to him kept looking at him out of the corner of his eye and after a while the man’s curiosity got the best of him and he said, “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but your are working awfully hard on that.  What is it that you do for a living?” 

Butrick replied, “well, I am a pastor and this is my sermon for tomorrow.”

“Ah,” the man said. “Religion.  I never had much use for religion.  Love your neighbor as yourself, that’s all the religion I ever needed.”

“Oh really,” Butrick replied.  “what is it that?”

“I teach astronomy.”

“Ah, astronomy.  Twinkle, twinkle little star, that’s all the astronomy I’ve ever needed.”

Faith in the God of history cannot be reduced to a bumper sticker any more than the complexity of the universe can be reduced to a nursery song.

Faith in the God of history is not about having some sort of vague, ill-defined, generalized belief in goodness. 

Imagine if all the Ninevites did was look to the sky and say, “we acknowledge the existence of the general sense of a deity.”  We would, I imagine, have a very different story before us.

A life lived in faith is not one defined by amorphous belief but one of embodied believing; of doing, and being.

It is a life that builds Christian character through Christian spiritual practice.  And in that life what we do forms who we are and who we are bears witness to the world to whose we are.  Like the Ninevites who wore their repentance on their backs and on their brows, we are called to wear our faith on our sleeves for all the world to see.

And we know, from the witness of history, that our faith is not misplaced if it is placed in the promises of God.

In the climactic scene of Jean Anouilh’s brilliant play, Thomas Becket who has been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by his good friend and drinking buddy Henry II on the assumption that he would do Henry’s bidding, meets the king on the beach in northern France.  Becket has defied the king’s wishes and stood up to his policies and in anger Henry bellows to him, “damn you Becket, have you started to love God?”  Thinking for a moment Becket replies, “I have started to love the honor of God.”

The honor of God.

At the fountainhead of faith is the honor of God; it is the promise of the God who is as good as his word.  If the king of Nineveh was able to live so fully into the promise on the word of a wayward prophet, how much more so might we who live in the light of Christ, live into the promise of the honor of God?

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  AMEN