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What does it mean to be a “prophet”?  Are you called?  Have you ever tried to run from God?

This week the folks at Crafton Heights began a series considering the message of JONAH.  Our texts for the week were Jonah 1:1-16 and Romans 8:38-39

The plane hit the turbulence with violence, and the entire cabin was shaking.  Passengers looked around with fear in their eyes – except for one woman, who calmly reached into her bag and began reading through the Bible she pulled from it.  The man sitting next to her grabbed her arm and began to mock her, saying, “Are you for real?  We’re falling apart here in the sky and you’re looking at a book of fairy tales?”

The woman quietly replied, “This is the word of the Lord, and in it I gain great strength and courage.”

The man wouldn’t let it go.  “That’s nothing but myths!  Are you telling me you believe that?  Do you actually believe in a book that describes people coming back from the dead or walking on water?”

“I do,” she said.

“What about Jonah?  Do you believe a man could live inside a fish?  How could that even happen?”

“You know,” she replied, “that’s one I’m awfully curious about myself.  I suppose when I get to heaven, I’ll just ask him.”

The man looked sarcastic.  “Well, what if you get to heaven and you find Jonah isn’t even in heaven?”

The woman smiled and turned back to her book.  “Well, then I guess you can just ask him yourself!”

Jonah.  That’s the book that is loved by generations of Sunday School teachers and Bible School Directors.  It’s a great story – for kids.  Lots of adventure, imagination, and energy.  But when we grow up, we are confronted with “science” and “truth”.  We come to learn that by and large, people don’t survive underwater very long.  There aren’t many, if any, fish capable of swallowing a grown man.  There’s no evidence in the archeological record of a great religious revival sweeping through Nineveh.

Listen to me: the Bible is no more interested in trying to convince you that Jonah is historical fact than Shakespeare is trying to teach Danish history while writing Hamlet.  In the book of Jonah, the Bible is telling a story.  More than that, the Bible is telling the truth.  I am here to tell you that the author of Jonah is no less an artist than Shakespeare or Twain or Hemingway – using a story to tell us the truth.  Jonah is not just for Sunday School kids.  It’s for you and me.

So what happens in the story?

Well, for starters, the Word of God comes to Jonah.  That means that Jonah is a prophet.  Of all the people in the children of Israel, Jonah is called to listen to and to speak the Word of the Lord.  It is a singular honor and a profound responsibility.  It is a high office.  And he has no interest in serving in that office!

What is the call from the Lord?  “Arise” – that is to say, “Get up” – and “go to Nineveh.”

Nineveh?  Why would any right-thinking Hebrew want to go to Nineveh?  It was located in what we now know as Iraq, along the Tigris River.  It was the scene of tremendous brutality against the people of God.  We hate those guys!  Listen to what the prophet Nahum has to say about Nineveh:

1 Woe to the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, without victims!

2 The crack of whips, the clatter of wheels, galloping horses and jolting chariots!

3 Charging cavalry, flashing swords and glittering spears!

Many casualties, piles of dead, bodies without number, people stumbling over the corpses—

4 all because of the wanton lust of a prostitute, alluring, the mistress of sorceries, who enslaved nations by her prostitution and peoples by her witchcraft.

5 “I am against you,” declares the LORD Almighty. 9 “Nothing can heal you; your wound is fatal. 
All who hear the news about you clap their hands at your fall, 
for who has not felt your endless cruelty?” (Nahum 3, selected verses)

Oh, yeah…we really, really don’t like those guys.

Asking a Jew to go to Nineveh in the time when this story takes place would be like asking a survivor of 9/11 to take relief supplies to an Al Qaeda village in Pakistan, or asking a Holocaust survivor to lead a mission to Germany in 1949.

Yet oddly enough, that is the call of God – “Arise, and go to Nineveh”.  And what does Jonah do?

Well, he heard the Word, all right, but instead of “arising” and going to Nineveh, this is one long descent.  First, you need to know that Nineveh is North and East of Israel, over land.  Tarshish is West, and over water.  But even if you didn’t have a handy-dandy map to help you, the narrative is full of clues that Jonah has no interest in following the call of God.  Did you hear where Jonah, who was told to “arise” and go up to Nineveh, was going?

“Down” to Joppa (1:3), “down into the hold of the ship” (1:5) where he “laid down” (1:5).  Eventually he went down into the depths of the sea (1:15) where he went down into the belly of the fish and even down into Sheol, the underworld (2:2).  God says, “Arise, and go up” and Jonah spends all of chapter one and most of chapter two going down, down, down.  And yet God does not let Jonah go.  God chases Jonah.  God has a purpose for Jonah.

The sailors on the ship are unaware of this, of course.  All they know is that ever since they met this Jew, their lives are a lot more difficult. I want to say that again, because there’s a lesson there – that innocent bystanders find that their own survival is imperiled because one of God’s own people was walking away from the call of God.

It’s important to remember that there is precious little that is actually simply between me and the Lord.  Oh, I love to “come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses”.  I hope he walks and talks with me.  But the truth is that my ability and willingness to listen to and follow the call of Jesus – or my unwillingness to do the same – will have huge consequences not just for me, but for the people around me.  This is especially important for anyone in a position of leadership to remember!  The sailors are paying the price for Jonah’s disobedience.  Who pays for it when you run from God?  Who pays for it when I ignore God’s call?

The sailors, who are my favorite characters in this part of the story, respond to the problem just about like I would.  They don’t want to face it.  Their solution is to keep on doing what they’ve always done.  When they discover that this entire storm is Jonah’s fault, what do they do?  They row harder.  They try to sail better.

Isn’t that human nature? We find ourselves in a difficult situation, and we simply do what we’ve always done a little more frantically, a little faster, a little harder.

This image of Jonah being thrown into the sea is found in the Catacomb of Saint Peter and Saint Marcellino in Rome, Italy and dates from about the 4th century

But finally, it dawns on them that this is business between God and his prophet, and so they pray for forgiveness and then toss Jonah overboard.  Did you hear that?  In the book of Jonah, who prays first?  The prophet, who is called by God and given the Word of the Lord?  Nope.  We see that it is the pagan sailors who actually talk TO the Lord.  So far, Jonah is only willing to talk ABOUT the Lord.  It’s the sailors who wind up doing the worshiping in chapter 1.

This morning, we stand on the brink of a New Year in several ways.  It’s January.  We are ordaining and installing leadership for the congregation and inaugurating a new ministry.  Is there anything for us in Jonah chapter 1?

Let me tell you that you, no less than Jonah, have received the call from God.

“Oh, no, Pastor, I wish!  But you see, I’ve never heard the voice.  God has never spoken to me.  Uh-uh.  No call for me…”

Listen: Jonah, or Moses, or Abraham, or David, or Ruth, or Esther would love to sit where you are sitting!  They would love to have the resources that you have.  You have the Bible – a written record of God’s movements in and call to his people.  You have the sacraments – signs and seals of God’s presence with and grace for his people.  You have the gift of the community, the body of Christ – a flawed and imperfect people, perhaps, but nevertheless shaped by thousands of years of relationship with the Lord.  You have more access to the Word and call of God than most humans who have ever lived.

You have the call!  Listen for it.  And Act on it.

“Oh, no, Pastor, I wish!  I used to think that.  I would like to think that, but you see, it’s complicated.  I can’t.  Not anymore.  You see, I got divorced.  The baby died.  There was trouble at work.  I got to drinking.  Something happened, Pastor, and now I’m disqualified. I’m not good enough.  I can’t speak for God.  Sheesh.  It’s about all I can do to speak with God.

Really?  Seriously?  You want to look Jonah in the eye and say that your flight from God is worse than his?  You want to say that somehow, you’ve managed to screw things up more royally than he did?  I doubt that.

But even if that were somehow the case, we have the testimony of another gigantic screw-up – a follower of Jesus named Paul, who wrote to his friends in Romans that there was nothing – nothing – that could separate us from God’s intentions for us.  The God who pursued the reluctant prophet, Jonah, out to the middle of the ocean and who finally got him where he could hear him is the same God who will go anywhere, everywhere, any time, all the time to get to you.  Nothing will stop him.  Not even you, I don’t think.

There’s a word here for those who would step forward as leaders in our ministry.  You may or may not have ever felt like a prophet before, but the reality is that you have the Word of the Lord.  And like Jonah, you are charged, first and foremost, to listen for that Word.  And after you’ve heard it and reflected on it, to follow where that Word takes you.  And today you are accepting the added responsibility to lead the rest of this bunch into a place where we’ll be better able to hear and to follow for ourselves.

But this is not only a word for leaders.  The rest of us are also called to pay attention to where God is.  Like the sailors helped Jonah to hear and respond to God’s movement in his life, we are called to remind those around us of the presence of God in every place.  And just as the sailors had to give up striving to do the same thing faster and better, there may be something in your life that you need to change in order to find a better way of serving and following.

God is calling you.  God is sending you.  God is calling and sending us to proclaim truth, and hope, and love, and mercy, and grace, and justice.

You are not disqualified from that call.  And you cannot hide from it.  So let us arise.  And go.  And speak and live truly this day. Thanks be to God!

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