Sermon - 3 after Epiphany "can you run from God?"

Sermon – 3rd after Epiphany
Jonah 3:1-5,10
January 22, 2012
“can you run from God?"

Jonah is one of the better known books in the bible. It’s well known for the part where Jonah is swallowed up by a big fish. So, why was Jonah swallowed up by the fish? Let’s look at the background. Open your pew bibles to page 844 to Jonah chapter 1.

The book of Jonah begins with God calling Jonah. It says in Jonah 1:1-2 that the word of the Lord came to Jonah saying: “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.” So that is what God calls Jonah to do, Go to Nineveh. Last week we talked about what it means to be called by God, and how to be open and listening for God’s call. Often times when God calls it may not be comfortable, it may mean going outside our comfort zone. Well this was the case with Jonah. Jonah 1:3 - “But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.” Jonah does not do what God calls him to do…but instead he high tails it, he runs away from God.

I think this brings an interesting question: Have you ever run away from God? Have you ever felt God calling you to do something, but for whatever reason—you were uncomfortable, afraid, confused, angry—and you ran the other way?
There’s something pretty authentic about Jonah, we can relate to it. Because it’s not easy to follow where God is calling us, so we are often reluctant, we may even run the other direction. Which in retrospect is pretty silly, I mean, do we really think we can run from God? Do we really think we can run from the creator of the universe?

Why did Jonah run the other way? Because God wanted him to go to the city of Nineveh. Just to utter “Nineveh” would have sent chills down the spine of anyone in the region. Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria, which was the feared enemy of the people of Israel. In 722 BCE Assyria defeated Israel’s northern kingdom, and they forced people out of their homes. Their tyranny was felt throughout the region.
So basically God wants Jonah go into the heart of enemy territory, to those scoundrels, those people that he hated the most, to go right into the hornet’s nest and deliver a message from God.

So instead of going to Nineveh, Jonah runs in the opposite direction…So he gets on a ship going to Tarshish. Jonah thinks he can run from the Lord and the task he is called to do. But then what happens? (Jonah 1:4) God hurls a storm on the sea. They sailors are throwing the cargo off. Meanwhile Jonah is sleeping through it all. Get up! Call on your God! (Jonah 1:6) Once the sailors figured out it was Jonah’s fault…Wait a minute man, who are you? What’s going on? “It’s my fault,” Jonah said. “Throw me off the boat.”
Then they prayed “don’t let us perish on his account!” Then they threw him out into the sea, and of course then the sea stopped raging. So then Jonah’s there in the middle of the sea, and what happens? That’s when the large fish swallows him up. I wonder what it would have been like to be stuck in the belly of a big fish. Did you really think you could run from God?

So Jonah is stuck inside the belly of this big fish for three days and three nights.
He literally hit the bottom. I bet he was thinking: I should’ve just listened to the Lord. When we try to do things our way it ends up being a whole lot tougher if we would have just listened to God in the first place. But often it isn’t until we hit rock bottom do we call out to the Lord…
So that’s what Jonah does. He prayed to the Lord (chapter 2): He concludes his prayer (Jonah 2:9), “9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you;what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the LORD!’” After that, the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.

So there Jonah is (Jonah 3:1), smelling like he’d just been inside of a fish for three days, finally back on shore. So the Lord said to Jonah: remember what I asked you to do? For the second time, the Lord tells Jonah: 2‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’
So Jonah sets out to Nineveh, when he arrives there he gives them the sermon as the Lord told him, it’s straight and to the point (Jonah 1:4): ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’
Not a very popular sermon. And how did the people of Nineveh respond?
(Jonah 3:5) “they believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.” (which was a sign of repentance)
Other prophets work much harder to get the people to repent, and it takes much longer. But here this foreign enemy city of Nineveh, 120,000 people strong, they repent! The king repented, and calls all the people and even the animals to repent! Even the animals! They shall cry mightily to God (verse 8) “All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands.” After God saw that they turned from the evil ways, God spared them from calamity, from punishment. God had mercy on them. This huge city repented, they turned from their evil ways; and God had mercy on them.
And there was much rejoicing.

Although someone was not rejoicing…Jonah. He was angry. Lord? How could you have mercy on those people?! Don’t you know that they are evil rot gut sinners?! Don’t you know the wicked things they’ve done to our people? This isn’t fair! This is why I ran from you Lord. The Lord said to Jonah: Is it right, or do you do well, to be angry? Then he made a bush come up for Jonah to give him shade, but then made it die the next day. Then Jonah’s angry about the plant. So the Lord says: Jonah you are concerned about this little plant, put things into perspective Jonah… a whole city was just forgiven.

In our Gospel from Mark, we see the other end of the spectrum. Jesus called his disciples, immediately they left their nets and followed him. Now we know that the disciples also struggled to follow Jesus call. But our lessons for today leave us with this challenge, how do we respond when the Lord’s call? How do we respond as people? How do we respond as a church?

In Jonah’s case, following the Lord’s call meant going into foreign enemy territory.
When the Lord calls, we may just have to go to the place we least expect, the last place on our list, those people, even our enemies, those whom we despise. We may just have to cross uncomfortable boundaries. Why? Why are we called to go there? Because that is the place where they need to experience the grace and mercy of God. And we don’t get to judge who is worthy of God’s grace. We don’t get to choose.

Like Jonah, we may be surprised, we may even be offended by what God wants us to do, or by who God wants us to reach out to…God, please, anybody but those people! But God is active in the world, to bring a word of grace to all peoples; this is the kingdom come in our midst; this is God’s mission in the world, this is what God is calling us to. “Follow me and I will make you fish for people” Jesus says (Mark 1:17).
And we may try to run from God’s call, we may like Jonah try to do things our way. But do we really think we can run from God? Amen.