Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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     When the Pharisees asked for a miracle (to prove Jesus was the Messiah), it sent our Lord up the wall.  He had heard it too many times before: do this and then we'll believe, show us a sign and then we'll follow!  It was a stall, and he knew it, one more evasion of God's truth.  So he told them, in anger, that the only sign for them would be "the sign of the Prophet Jonah….You will see me spend three days in the depths of the earth," he said, "just as Jonah spent three days in the belly of a whale, and I will survive, just as he did.  But you, you are worse even than the citizens of Nineveh (who did, after all, repent when Jonah warned them) -- you will not repent even now, when one far greater than Jonah walks among you."

    The Book of Jonah is only four chapters long but is a gem of world literature.  Jonah is also a deeply spiritual book.  (It's a mistake to waste even a minute debating whether Jonah really could have lived three days in a fish.  If we do that, we will miss the meaning of the book for us.  Another evasion.  Another way to dodge the truth.)  The story of Jonah teaches that we must go to Nineveh, to the gentiles, to the bad people -- no running away -- we must take our faith to people of no faith, even if we don't want to, even if we're afraid.  We can't be isolated in our religion.  But it also teaches that we must go to Nineveh in love.

    The first half of Jonah, the famous half (with the whale and all), is about obedience, and it might be sub-titled, "You can run but you can't hide."  God has his will and we have ours.  ("My thoughts are not your thoughts, saith the Lord, neither are my ways your ways.")  And, as Jonah discovered, God's will prevails.  If God has called us, we will obey, whether we want to or not.  The second half tells how Jonah finally did go  to Nineveh, but went in the wrong spirit.  He preached the word of judgement against Nineveh, in her very streets.  "Forty more days and this place will be destroyed," he shouted, expecting at any moment to be seized by the evil Ninevites and put to death.  But, much to Jonah's surprise, the people of Nineveh repent -- every one, from the king on down.  And God forgives them, decides  not to destroy their city, and leaves Jonah to eat his words.  Jonah, spoiled and selfish as ever, stomps into the desert, outside the city walls, and shakes his fist at God.  "I knew it.  I knew it.  I knew you would chicken out.  You are pitifully soft hearted.  I knew you would relent and leave me looking like an idiot!  They will mock me.  They will say, 'Well, Jonah, you said we were going to be destroyed in forty days, and now it's been forty-one, so looks like you were wrong.'"  How could you do this to me?

    God gives Jonah a plant to sit under while he sulks, and in the desert its shade is good.  But the next day God destroys the plant.  Jonah is beside himself with anger.  But God asks him, "How is it that you can pity this plant, and wish it wouldn't die, but I can't pity all the poor souls who live in Nineveh?"  Jonah reminds us of the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son.  "Dad, how could you!  This worthless bum, your son my brother, has done nothing but use you all his life.  Now he runs out of money (your money!) and it looks as if he will finally have to pay the price for his wickedness, and you rescue him!  You fall for his little ruse!  How could you?  And what about me?"

    Why did Jesus speak of Jonah to the Pharisees?  Because they reminded him of Jonah.  Why did he tell that parable about the Father and the son and the older brother?  Because some people (most notably the Pharisees, in Jesus' day) -- some people love judgmental religion.  They bask in their own supposed goodness and wait eagerly for God to punish the bad people.  "Let 'em have it, Lord."  But, like Jonah, they don't know what to do when God is merciful.  There is no place in their world for forgiveness.  Things are either right or wrong.  People are either good or bad.  They are not troubled with love.

    We live in a secular world, our Nineveh.  And our religion, too often, is tailored to fit the practices of that world: to culture, family, nation.  Therefore, many things seem like religion which are not.  A little girl came home from school one day obviously confused, and told her mother that one of her schoolmates didn't believe in God.  "Well, yes honey," her mother said, "some people don't believe in God."  The little girl thought a long time and said, "Well, if they don't believe in God I guess they don't go to brunch.”  If we get religion and culture mixed up like that, if we get in bed with the world, how can we speak the truth when it needs to be spoken?  We can't.  When we hear God calling us to speak, we can try to run away as Jonah did, or (more commonly) we can try to hide from him by blending in with the world around us, being "one of the guys."  Another way of running away.  But, if we are Christians, that won't work.  We can't be inconspicuous for long.  Because God calls us to be missionaries…and not always to underdeveloped countries and primitive peoples, but often to our neighbors and friends whose souls are underdeveloped and whose understanding of God is primitive indeed.
 T.S. Eliot, the greatest English poet of our time (who, they never tell you, was a devout Roman Catholic), is buried under the floor of Westminster Abbey, in Poet's Corner --T.S. Eliot said something I have always found intriguing:  

In a world of fugitives,
The person taking the opposite direction
Will appear to run away.

Most people who live in our Nineveh (in the world to which we are called as missionaries) -- most people there are fugitives -- from God and from the truth, yet they will turn on people of faith and accuse us of being the ones running away.  I had a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland, Dr. Thelma Levine, who was an atheist and proud of it.  She said one day in class that anyone who believed in God was either ignorant or uneducated.  I asked her about Albert Schwitzer.  Did she think he was ignorant or uneducated?  "All I can say," she said, "is that Albert Schweitzer must have some deep psychological problem which makes him need to believe in God."  I told my minister what she had said, and he suggested, "or perhaps Dr. Levine has some deep psychological problem which makes her need not to believe in God."

In a world of fugitives,
The person taking the opposite direction
Will appear to run away.

    God calls us to be missionaries to the fugitives, to our faithless neighbors, and to be confident that it is they who are running from the truth and not us.  We really don't want to be missionaries.  Why can't we hide down in the hold of the ship, as Jonah tried to do, and let the world sail on by?  Why can't we hide behind black-and-white religion and abandon ourselves to determinism, and heartlessness, like Jonah: Nineveh is sinful, it must be destroyed.  Our neighbors aren't living right, let them go to hell, serves them right.  Live by the sword, die by the sword.  But we must not only be missionaries, we must do it in love, with the clear hope that our neighbors will repent and turn to God.  We can't be smug in our faith, like those Pharisees.
 One key is to remember that God's judgement is always tempered with mercy, and that he will never condemn if he can save.  The Bible reminds us that Jesus "came not into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved."   Why didn't God wipe out those Ninevites, as he said he would?  Because he created them, and he loved them.  How love does get in the way!  And thank God it does, for our sakes!     That is the other key: that when we approach our neighbors and friends as missionaries representing Jesus (Paul said we go as "ambassadors for Christ."), we also go mindful of our own sinfulness.  We cannot go in judgement, for in judgment we would all die.  We go, instead, as imperfect people to others who are imperfect but who have not yet found a way of overcoming their imperfections, who are still drowning in their sin.  We go believing that they will hear God's word and lay aside their burdens.  (For it is they who are running away, not us.  And it is a terrible burden to deny the truth.)  And when they do, when they turn their lives around, we (unlike Jonah) will be happy for them.  Jesus said there is great joy in heaven when a lost sheep is found.

    It is good to have a personal relationship with God, but it is not enough.  It is not enough to have a good church family.  We must put on the whole armor of God and go out, go to Nineveh, go into an evil world, a world that is running away.  And speak the truth in love.