Epiphany 3, 2012 Immanuel Chapel, Jonah 3:1-5, 10
I was riding the bus home during my junior year of high school, when Ronnie Anderson commented, “You’re going to be a preacher.” “No, I’m not,” I desperately denied. “Oh, yes, you are,” Ronnie responded. I was taking Latin by correspondence and had brought my textbook along. The call to be the mouth of God is not easily accepted.
Jonah denied his call to be God’s mouth by going in the opposite direction than God wanted. Jonah, whose name means dove, took flight. Prof. Bruce Schuchard writes, “In fact, Jonah was most displeased, disillusioned, and determined not to be the instrument of the Lord’s mercy to that loathsome city, to the horrible inhabitants of Nineveh, who unquestionably deserved to get what was otherwise coming to them.” Today, we encounter Jonah on the Mediterranean shore, a bedraggled, sea weed-draped, vomit-stained, traumatized prophet.
We might want to ask, “How’s fleeing from God working for you, Jonah?” We are good at remembering all the wrongs and failures of people, real or imagined. We can download them from our mental document files to rebuke and remind others of their sins. It’s in the “I don’t forget” folder.
Jonah had downloaded his file of all the atrocities of Nineveh. He thought that the congregation of Nineveh, to whom God called him, deserved to be hurled into the depths of Sheol, hell. Instead, God hurled the prophet into the watery depths, into the tomb of a fish’s belly for three days. However, when God encountered Jonah on the Mediterranean shore, He didn’t rebuke or remind Jonah of being a flighty dove. Thank God, God forgets. Now having been drowned, buried in this baptism, God has given new life raising him from his gastrointestinal grave. He is a new man, called to walk in newness of the Life which God has given him. If that sounds familiar, then you are remembering St. Paul, “We were buried therefore with (Christ) by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” For Jonah, there is now no word of condemnation, just as there is no condemnation for you and me who are in Christ Jesus.
The God of all grace gives you and me and Jonah a new start every day. In our catechism Luther speaks of us as a new person emerging from the water of baptism daily. To Jonah, at the dawn of his new life, God simply reissues his call. “Arise, go…” Jonah sets a good example for us. He begins to walk as a newly created person according to the word of the Lord. Instead of catching a boat to Spain, he likely catches a camel ride to Nineveh. It will take him about forty days to cross the 500 mile distance of desert. He has 6 weeks to ponder his mission.
God gave Jonah something to think about in his second call. Originally, God asked Jonah to go and be His mouth of judgment against Nineveh. “Their evil has come up before me.” Nineveh is like the world before the flood, Nineveh is like Sodom and Gomorrah, Nineveh is like any great city the news of which greets us every morning when we turn on our TV.
Now God says to Jonah, “Call out to Nineveh.” There is a hint of grace here. It’s like the voice of Isaiah, calling to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God.” It’s the voice that says to Zion, “You God reigns.” It’s the voice that proclaims the year of the lord’s favor. It’s mouth of God speaking not only judgment, but peace and salvation. It’s the mouth of God saying to us this morning, “for the sake of Christ, God forgives you all your sins.” And as we leave the communion rail, “Go in peace.”
God now identifies Nineveh as “the great city to God.” Isn’t it adorable that God loves the loveless? Good for God. That God is the God of the forlorn is wonderful. But sometimes his steadfast love is unnerving, unsettling, and shocking. You mean he loves them all? You mean he loves even the ugliest of the ugly, the most reprehensible of them all? All of them? Really? Really. Listen to psalm 24, “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell in it.” We heard in the gospel lesson that after John the Baptizer was arrested Jesus came “proclaiming (not judgment and revenge) but “the gospel of God.” When Jesus invited the two sets of brothers Simon and Andrew and James and John, to leave their fishing nets behind and follow him, he said, “I will make you become fishers of men.” Including people like those who arrested and would behead John the Baptizer. Jesus did not send them to lead an uprising and overthrow Herod and the Romans. Jesus gave them a sermon they were to preach, “Repent and believe in the Gospel.”
So Jonah goes, according the word of the Lord, but the Lord hasn’t put his message in Jonah’s mouth yet. While Jonah jostles his way on camel back through 500 miles of desert, I imagine God crafting his message for Jonah’s mouth to speak. He writes and rewrites, edits, and hones until he gets it just right. As Jonah enters God downloads his message to Jonah via the Holy Spirit.
Remember, a couple of weeks ago when I said my sermon would be in a poetic form. I could tell that you were working hard to listen. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Then I said, “Amen.” I was done and you were stunned, “He’s done?” The sermon God had crafted for his mouth, Jonah, was five words in the Hebrew, the same length as the one Jesus gave to his disciples. The best we can do in English is, “Yet, forty days, Nineveh is about to be changed.” Up Maple Street Jonah walked, down Pine Street over to First Avenue, preaching over and over again his five word sermon. As the sound waves issuing from Jonah’s mouth went forth, change began to happen. “The people of Nineveh believed God.” From the least of the inhabitants to the king, the word from the mouth of the prophet caused the city to enter into forty days of Lent, with fasting, ashes and sackcloth. Even the animals sported the latest sackcloth attire. “Who knows,” declared the king, “God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.” An early church father wrote, “The city has truly been overturned, as it was proclaimed, but in its hearts and not its walls.” Such is the power of the Word that comes forth from the mouth of God’s servants. And a five word sermon did it.
How did the forty days of lent end in Nineveh? “God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he not do.” What god did not do to Nineveh, he does not do to you and me. Let us be exceedingly glad and rejoice. Be a big mouth for God. Are you ready for it? And all God’s people said, “Amen.”
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