September 20, 2020 | Worship

I know I don’t have to explain to this crowd what a challenging couple of weeks it has been, on top of a challenging couple of months, nested with in a challenging year like one of those matryoshka dolls. The year 2020 in the US has become the punchline to one long, unfunny joke. Collectively, we’re all feeling it. Add that this is an intense election year, so intense people aren’t just passively putting political lawn signs out, but they’re tacking threats to the back of them in case someone tries to steal or deface them. And people are totally stealing and defacing them. Political apathy is at an all time low, but at the expense of relationship and community. There’s a sense that there is nothing that “the other side” could do to redeem themselves in our eyes—whichever side it is we’re on! And if they succeed… oh boy.

            Through the lens of our 2020 polarization, we approach our text from Jonah this morning. I know—going off-gospel this week! But It was this reading that jumped out at me as I was studying and praying the readings. And when’s the last time you really spent any time with Jonah? If you’re like me, it’s been a while. We all know about the whale, but there are so many outlandish things that happen in this short book that the giant fish is almost unsurprising when read in context. In a time when an asteroid on track to make contact with the earth the day before election day doesn’t even cause us to bat an eyelash, the exaggerated nature of the book of Jonah feels like home, and there are some lessons we can take from it.

            Today’s reading picks up when most of the fun stuff has already taken place. If you wanted to pause this and read the book of Jonah, you’re more than welcome to, it’s four chapters and can be read in ten minutes. Here’s the synopsis, though. Jonah is not your typical prophet. While it is common for most of the prophets we read about to resist God’s call a bit, none of them handle it quite the way that Jonah does. When God tasks Jonah with speaking out against the way the people of Ninevah are living, Jonah basically takes off and starts running from God. None of the “Oh, why me? I’m definitely not good enough for this job” stuff that we hear from other prophets before they reluctantly take up the call and pass God’s message along. Nope, Jonah just gets going so he can hop on a ship to Tarshish where God won’t find him.

Jonah’s view of God is fairly limited at first here, he thinks that God can only reach him if he’s at home, he doesn’t expect that God is beyond his own city walls. What Jonah is about to discover, is that God is everywhere. The ship sets sail and once they’re out of swimming distance from the shore, God sets a massive storm on them. Somehow, Jonah is asleep through this, as the rest of the ship is frantically bailing their cargo out over the sides of ship hoping to stabilize it on the choppy water. The sailors figure out that it was Jonah’s fault. You know how they figure it out? It says this, “For the men knew that he was fleeing from the Lord because he told them so.” Jonah was up front, basically saying “Look, im just trying to get away from this, but also my God is the one who made the sea and the dry land, so God isn’t too happy with me right now.” Jonah is thrown into the sea. Not because the sailors wanted to, but because Jonah was ready to get away from God in whatever way he could. Ocean depths should do the trick, right?

And it worked to calm the storm. All the sailors on the boat were completely stunned and scared. I mean, they just basically threw a man to death off the boat to save themselves…and it worked. That’s unsettling. (Un)luckily for Jonah, who discovered that he couldn’t escape God even in the ocean, a massive fish swallowed him up. This is the part we all remember from Sunday school. Jonah spends 3 days and 3 nights in the belly of a fish thanking God for being so good to him. What a strange setting for a prayer of thanksgiving, but what else is there to do in the fishy, damp dark? Jonah agrees he’s do what is asked of him, and the fish vomits him up on dry land.

The word of God comes to Jonah again, tasking him with bringing a message to Ninevah.

Ninevah is a big city—it would take three days to walk across it. He got a third of the way in, said “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” and people listened. Everyone, including the king, started to repent, they even got their animals repenting for their wickedness! They weren’t certain that God would forgive them, but they gave it a valiant effort in hope that they might not feel the wrath of an angry God.

Where we join in the story in today’s reading, we find Jonah sulking. Straight up sulking outside the city, all abuzz with repentance and getting into their sackcloth and ashes and preparing for a fast. He’s left the city, and is sitting up on a hill, moodily glaring at whatever might transpire. Jonah wasn’t mad because they hadn’t listened to him, to God, but he was made because they HAD. Jonah had been running from God because he had no desire to have any dealings with Ninevah. This was not a fun visit to beloved neighbors, but instead God was sending him to a city that represented a foreign power that threatened Israel. Jonah would rather die than to see this Assyrian city not be smashed to pieces by the wrath of God. Jonah also knew that God is full of mercy, and that the demise of a city he hated wouldn’t happen. Instead he’d have to be forever linked as the guy who helped them not to fall. So yeah, pouting and sulking on a hill, mad that Nice God extended grace and didn’t bring calamity down on Ninevah after all. He’s saved his worst enemy, and now he doesn’t want to have to live it down. God replies, “Is it right for you to be angry?”

This is a profound question. We are in the middle of a time where lots of groups of people potentially are like the people of Ninevah to us. We would rather die than watch them win in elections, we would rather sulk on a hillside than see them succeed, even if they do all the things we ask of them.

Jonah was successful as a prophet, wildly successful. While most prophets are ignored until it’s too late, thus proving that they are prophets in the first place because the doom that was predicted comes to pass, Jonah just kinda stumbled into town, said to whoever was nearby that they had 40 days til their city perished, and probably not with the most impassioned speech ever, and then he left to mope and watch from a distance.

Jonah was stubbornly mad. It was hot, and so God grew a large bush to protect Jonah from the elements, which helped Jonah soften a bit. He wasn’t as mad if he had nice shade to sit under. But the next day, God “appointed a worm” to attack the bush, causing it to wither and wilt. I love that image, a God-appointed worm. God further added to Jonah’s cranky misery by adding a sultry wind and an unrelenting sun. Jonah was not only mopey and angry, he probably wasn’t too far from heat stroke. Jonah, again, asks God for death.

God asks the question again, “Is it right for you to be angry?” Jonah, who was still thinking about how pleasant that bush was, and how hot it was without it responds. “Yes, angry enough to die.”

Angry enough to die, folks! Over a dead and withered plant! Jonah is so beyond upset about the course of events with Ninevah, that he’s latched onto the dead bush withered at his feet as his literal hill to die on.

This is where it gets good, and where we need to take a long hard look at the ways we are stubborn, dramatic Jonah in this story! God points out that the bush was there for like, 24 hours, and he didn’t do anything to create it, he had no hand in making it happen. And yet, while Jonah sits on that hill mad because the unearned privilege of a bush for shade was gone, he was still wishing that God would just lay crummy Ninevah to ruin. God, who created each and every person and animal in that city, and even though the people don’t know their right from their left, should God not care about this creation?

The book of Jonah ends on a question. The question is there to make us think about it. To make us consider the times when we’ve cared more about personal comfort than we did about people—even the ones who don’t know up from down. It’s easy to care for those we love, or those that advance our personal agendas. It’s less easy to look a person in the eye who we know has views that are counter to ours and see in them a person created by God and in the image of God. God’s mercy is wider and greater than we can imagine.

Whatever the remaining months of 2020 bring our way, however polarizing the political election becomes, whatever the next iteration of murder hornets may be, we must keep in our minds, “is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” Are we hoping for demise and destruction of the other side while wishing God would withhold from them the same mercy that is promised to us? Would we be able to forgive as God does if our enemies were to repent successfully? How can we accept the challenge to not dehumanize the Nenevites in our lives, even when we’re emotionally and mentally depleted and heartbroken? May God bless our pondering and understanding of this wild, outlandish, and all too familiar in 2020 story.