Running the Other Way

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Jonah 1

October 28, 2012 • Portage First UMC

I don’t remember his name. I’m sure at some point I knew it, but I’ve lost it somewhere in the back recesses of my mind after twenty years. It was my third year at Asbury, and one of our required classes—actually two—was called Supervised Ministries, or SMin. One semester we were to spend in a local church, working along a pastor and learning the ins and outs of daily life in ministry. And the other semester we were required to spend in an institution of human need. I chose to work that semester as a chaplain at the University of Kentucky Medical Center. UK Med Center is a huge hospital, a regional teaching hospital, and that semester, there was a group of us who went there once a week, on Mondays, and spent the whole day working alongside the staff chaplain, visiting patients, and processing what we were learning. We were each assigned a floor to do visits on, and things were going along pretty well until one week, early in the semester, I came to a door that was closed. I went to talk with the nurse first, and I learned this man had AIDS. Now, this was in the early 1990’s, when we knew very little about AIDS except that it was a death sentence. Today, people live with it for a long time, but then, no one was even sure exactly how it spread. And I’ll admit—I was scared. I stared at his door for a long time. I knew I was supposed to visit him, but I wasn’t sure I could. So finally I gowned up, put on the gloves, and walked into the dark room. He wasn’t asleep, but he was obviously in pain. I told him who I was, and asked if we could visit. He said he’d rather not visit right then, but could I come back another time. I’m not proud of it, but I’ll admit I was glad he didn’t want to visit, so I didn’t push it. Instead, I left the room quickly. I remember leaning against the wall outside his room, thankful it was over. By the next Monday, I had worked up my courage and I went to his room first—only to find it empty. I never found out what happened to him—whether he had died or moved to a hospice center or went home. But I’ve never forgotten him. God called me to that place at that time to minister to that man, and for my part I was just glad to get out of it with very little time or effort spent.

Have you ever run away from something you knew you should do? And I mean knew you needed to do—way down in the deep parts of your soul. Have you ever run the other way? All of us have, most likely, at some point or another. We have an opportunity to something nice for that neighbor who is rude to us, and we don’t. We have a choice to share what we have with someone in need whom we don’t know and we spend that money on ourselves instead. We know that person in the nursing home or the hospital needs a visit, we know that relative needs to hear from us, we know what we should do, what we need to do—and we run the other way. Have you ever run away from something you know you needed to do?

Jonah did. For the next four weeks, we’re going to be looking at his story and how, in so many ways, his story is really our story. Many of us may have heard the story of Jonah in Sunday School or in a children’s Bible. We know the story of Jonah and the whale, and how he got gobbled up, spit out on the beach, and went to preach in Nineveh. But Jonah is a lot more than just a kids’ tale. Jonah is not a nice, bedtime story if you really read the book. For starters, Jonah is all about a call. God called Jonah to do a specific task. He was already a prophet. He was already preaching on God’s behalf, and then one day, while he was sitting in his home in Galilee, about three miles north of a little town called Nazareth (Ogilvie, Communicator’s Commentary: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, pg. 403), Jonah hears a call. Whether it was an audible voice or a deep nagging sense in his soul doesn’t matter. The fact is: Jonah knew God was calling him to do something specific. “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me” (1:2). What a call! Nineveh, you see, had a bad reputation. This was the capital city of Assyria; it was the center of Israel’s worst enemy. And while the city itself may have had around 120,000 inhabitants, the area we might call “Greater Nineveh” had a population of around 600,000. Lots of people, and Jonah knew they were wicked. On that point, he wouldn’t disagree with God. They were evil. Their actions caused pain and misery everywhere they went. They were a threat to Israel’s safety and survival. Nineveh was a symbol for godless tyranny (Ogilvie 402-403; Alexander, “Jonah,” Obadiah, Jonah, Micah [Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries], pg. 59). Sort of makes you wonder where Nineveh is today. What is our Nineveh? If were we called to Afghanistan or Iraq to preach the Gospel…if we were called to boldly proclaim the name of Jesus in the main streets in China…or if we were called to go to Gary and proclaim peace and restoration and hope and Gospel—how would we respond? You see, Nineveh is the place we don’t want to go. Yet God calls Jonah to go there and “preach against it” (1:2).

So what does Jonah do? You know the story. Jonah runs. The NIV says he ran away from the Lord. Literally, the text says, he runs from “the presence” of the Lord or “the face” of the Lord. He wants to go someplace God can’t see him. Nineveh was actually only five hundred miles northeast of where Jonah lived (Ogilvie 403); Tarshish, where he decides to head, was a lot further away. In fact, a journey to Tarshish, located in what is today southern Spain, would take almost a year by boat when you factor in stops at the various ports. Tarshish was the “westernmost place in the Mediterranean world.” If Jonah wanted to get away from God, he couldn’t have chosen a better place (cf. Ogilvie 404; Bruckner, NIV Application Commentary: Jonah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, pgs. 42-43). Jonah’s not kidding around. He is REALLY running away!

And this is where Jonah’s story becomes our story, because we, too, often run from the presence of the Lord. We think we can hide, or we can go someplace where God won’t notice that we’ve forgotten our vows, our promises to him and to his church. Maybe we don’t literally get on a boat and try to get as far away as we can, but we do fill our lives with things that take us away from God’s presence, from loving God, loving others and offering Jesus. We fill our lives with stuff—we love our stuff today. We surround ourselves with stuff, and when we have too much stuff, we rent a storage locker to store all the stuff we can’t bear to part with but have no room for. Or we get a house that’s bigger than we can afford so we can store all our stuff. The “American Dream” has become about getting more and more, about bigger and better, and we’re so busy maintaining our affluent lifestyle we don’t have time to listen for God’s call in our lives. Or we get busy. We love being busy. Oh, sure, we complain about it, but really we wouldn’t do it if we didn’t love it. We love being busy, being active. It’s not that the things we’re doing are bad. It’s just that busy-ness becomes our way of “runing” from God’s call. We get involved in every activity, get our kids on every team, and keep ourselves distracted with endless appointments and meetings so when God’s call comes, we can say, “I’m too busy for anything else, God.” And I’m not just talking about “secular” activity. We do it with religious activity, too. C. S. Lewis, in his wonderful book The Screwtape Letters, tells the story of a “senior devil” named Screwtape instructing his nephew, Wormwood, in ways to tempt people away from Christian faith, or if they become Christians, how to keep them distracted from growing in their faith. In one passage, Screwtape tells Wormwood, “An especially useful tactic is to keep them busy. Really busy. It's not hard to do, because they like to think the more work they do, the more spiritual they are…The busier they are, the more likely they will get tired and cranky with each other. We can have lots of fun when that happens. Keep them busy, and they don't take time to talk to each other. Even better, keep them too busy to listen to each other…Keep them too busy to plan ahead. The less planning and prioritizing they do, the better. We're especially in good shape when they don't have time to evaluate what they're doing…If you work it right, you can even get them to neglect their family and their own time reading the Enemy’s book because they’re ‘too busy serving God’ (The Screwtape Letters). Now, Lewis’ book is fiction, but it’s rather close to the truth, isn’t it? We flee from the presence of God,and we even manage to make it look like a good thing.

And yet, we cannot really ever flee from God’s presence like we think we can. The psalmist reminds us: “Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit? to be out of your sight? If I climb to the sky, you’re there! If I go underground, you’re there! If I flew on morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute—you’re already there waiting! Then I said to myself, ‘Oh, he even sees me in the dark! At night I’m immersed in the light!’ It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you” (139:7-12, Message). Jonah learns that in pretty quick order. Actually, the sailors he’s with learn it first, because Jonah gets on the ship, goes downstairs and falls sound asleep—so deeply asleep that he doesn’t hear the storm raging on the sea. It’s a storm God “hurls” at the ship, we’re told (Olgilvie 407). He is, as Jonah will say later, “the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (1:9). He is Lord over it all, so why does Jonah think he can possibly hide here, in the bowels of the ship? It reminds me of the disciples in Matthew 8, where Jesus calms a storm and shows his power over nature, and they ask, “Who is this man?” (Matthew 8:23-27). Well, he’s the one who can calm the storm, and Jonah learns he can also send a storm when a prophet is ignoring his call.

The captain remembers Jonah and goes to wake him up, to bring him up on deck. And here is another place, I believe, where our story and Jonah’s intersect. Just like us, Jonah dodges responsibility for his flight from God’s presence. He seems incapable of admitting his mistake (cf. Bruckner 47), his wrong, his disobedience toward God. He’s even determined to make the sailors fix it. When they ask what can be done, he tells them they have to throw him into the sea. He’s not going to repent or make things right with God. Rather, he tells the sailors to basically kill him, and his death will be on their heads. They don’t want that, so they try to row themselves out of the storm. It’s only when it’s obvious that won’t work that they do what Jonah says. They throw him into the sea, and when they do, the storm stops. And “at this the [sailors] greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows to him” (1:16). God even uses the disobedience of Jonah to reach this group of sailors.

And so, we leave Jonah floating in the middle of the ocean this week, with this observation: he’s still not committed to what God wants him to do. We’ll see that more in the next couple of weeks, but he’s only responded to the circumstances. He’s not yet embraced what’s most important and most critical in God’s mind at this point. All he’s done is allow himself to be thrown into the sea and swallowed up by a big fish. Aside from deciding to run away, Jonah’s been completely passive in his response to God. He hasn’t even talked to God at all in this chapter, even though he knows what he’s supposed to do. He still knows what his calling is, what his priority is supposed to be. And that leads us to one further way our story intersects this part of Jonah’s story.

How important is the mission God has given us, his people, through this church? God still calls men and women to join him on his mission. We et that confused sometimes, and substitute what we want to do for God’s mission. But God has called us to become a community where all people encounter Jesus Christ, and we seek to do that here in a variety of ways. One way, obviously, is through worship and providing three different styles of worship each week so people can connect to God—some for the first time, and some for the millionth time. And so we invite people to come with us, to encounter Jesus in worship. But there are a lot of folks who won’t respond to that sort of invitation, at least not at first, which is why the other aspect of our mission is community-oriented—making a difference in this place where we live. Last Sunday evening, in Disciple class, we were discussing Jeremiah the prophet and what he told those who were taken into exile in Babylon. It was a simple message: settle down and make a difference right where you are. God’s call to us is still to make a difference, not just to be nice people but to let this community know there are people who love Jesus and who want to make life in this community better for them. So we collect food for the food pantry, we participate in Feed My Lambs so hungry children can eat on the weekends, we seek to break the chains of poverty in our community. We also reach out beyond our own city to making dresses and shorts for kids in Haiti, to providing clean drinking water in Guatemala, to building houses in Appalachia. We do that not just because we’re nice people, but because we have a mission to demonstrate and tell the love of Jesus in every aspect of life. So here’s the question: what is the most important thing in your life right now? Is that something worth giving your life for? Is it a mission that will make an eternal difference in your life and in the life of others? The only things that will last are the things God calls us to do to build his kingdom. Will it take being swallowed by a big fish for God’s mission to become our own? Will it take a storm for us to pay attention to God?

As we continue with Jonah’s story in the next few weeks, those are the questions we’re going to be wrestling with, but this morning, we’re going to give you a chance to put your faith into action in a small way, to begin to listen to God’s call. Now, you came here this morning planning to spend at least an hour, and we’ve shortened the worship service and are asking you to give the time you would have normally spent here anyway to participating in one of the projects Pastor Deb has set up. I’m going to have her come up and give us a brief explanation, then we’re going to pray and sing and send you out to put your faith into action. Who knows where God might call you! It might even be to your Nineveh. Listen, and follow where he leads.