Refocused

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Jonah 2; Luke 22:39-46

November 4, 2012 • Portage First UMC

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed what has been happening in the last year or so, but it’s something so dastardly and so horrifying I hesitate even to talk about it in public. I’m referring, of course, to the way more and more things are being printed in smaller and smaller letters these days. It’s terrible! Things I used to be able read easily—like expiration dates on coupons and the small print on flyers—now seem to be blurry and difficult to read. The way I have to hold the coupons out or get more light to be able to read the writing is, I think, the manufacturer’s attempt to get me to give up on couponing altogether. In fact, this summer when I visited my eye doctor, I mentioned this conspiracy to him, and he said, “You know, Dennis, you are getting older. You’re not quite to the bifocal stage yet, but it’s coming.” I think it may be time to find a new eye doctor! It can’t be my eyes. It must be someone else’s fault! Right?

Or maybe it’s my problem after all. The doctor said all my eyes need is something to refocus them, something to help them see the way they once did. Some contacts that are a bit stronger. Maybe some reading glasses until the time comes when I need bifocals. And what is true in the world of optometry is also often true in other areas of life. Sometimes there are things we just aren’t able to see clearly. Maybe it’s because we’re too close. Maybe it’s because we’re too involved. Maybe it’s because we just don’t want to see it any other way than our own. Whatever the situation, there comes into each of our lives times when we, like Jonah, we need a bit of refocusing.

Last week, we began looking at the story of Jonah, the reluctant prophet. Actually, he wasn’t that reluctant to be a prophet. He had already preached the word of God for some time before the story that’s in the book bearing his name. What he was reluctant to do, you might remember, is to preach in a particular place, in Nineveh, the capital city of Israel’s worst enemy. And so, you remember from chapter 1, he got on a boat and ran away from the presence or the face of God. God sent a storm, and the sailors had to throw Jonah into the sea to calm the storm. And that’s where we left Jonah last week, floating in the sea, certain to drown. 

Chapter one ends with these words: “Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (1:17). There is probably no other verse in the book of Jonah that has generated more ink than this one, because you basically end up with two camps on the “big fish” issue. One group says this is too incredible an event to have actually happened. And so they end up either thinking this story is a parable, not a true story but a work of fiction to make a point, or they find some other way of explaining it. One of my favorites is the scholar who says what the author really meant here is that Jonah went to an inn called “The Fish” and recuperated for three days and three nights (Alexander, “Jonah,” Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, pg. 111). That’s really stretching the text! Basically, some look for an explanation other than what John Wesley would have called the “plain sense of the text.” The author of Jonah clearly falls in the other camp, which accepts the story as it is. Jonah is swallowed by a big fish. Studies have been done to see if a human could even survive inside a fish, with questionable results, but the author of Jonah doesn’t present it as a natural occurrence. The point of the story is not the big fish. The point of the story is God’s provision. It is, the author says, the Lord who provides the fish. It is the Lord who makes sure Jonah has an all-expense paid “lower-than-steerage class” ride back to the shore. This part of the story of Jonah confronts us with what kind of God we believe in. Do we believe in a God who is powerful enough to suspend the laws of nature and provide a miracle? Do we believe in a God mighty enough to use whatever it will take to get a reluctant prophet’s attention? Whatever you might end up believing about the big fish, here’s the point: God provided for Jonah to be rescued and gave him time to be refocused.

And so, inside the fish, with nothing else to do it seems, Jonah prays. Last week, I mentioned that all throughout the first chapter, Jonah doesn’t once speak to God. God speaks to him, tells him to go and preach to Nineveh, but Jonah never says anything back to God. His actions are what convey his thoughts. He runs away from God’s instructions, and even when the ship is in danger of drowning, Jonah still doesn’t talk to God. He talks about God, but not to God. You sort of wonder what it’s going to take for him to wake up and realize the center of his problem is his broken relationship with God. But then, don’t we do the same thing? It’s awfully easy for us to talk about God more than we talk to God, even if that “talking about God” is how angry we are with God because this has gone wrong or that has fallen apart. What does it take for us to actually talk to God? When things are going fine, we think and believe we can do it on our own, we don’t really need God. And then, when we get sick, or we’re served with legal papers, or our spouse walks out on us, or someone we love dies—then we blame God, talk about how God has mistreated us, and sometimes we walk away from our faith. But what does it take for us to talk to God? Jonah’s lost everything, and he has no guarantee at this point in the story that he isn’t going to be digested by the big fish. And yet, something happens in Jonah’s heart in the belly of the big fish that causes him to pray, to cry out to God.

There are really two movements to Jonah’s prayer, and it might help us to think of them as “down” and “up.” Verse 2 through the first half of verse 6 is the “down” portion, where Jonah prays about how far “down” he has gone. He feels like he’s been in the “realm of the dead” and in the very depths of the sea. Even his stay in the belly of the big fish hints at that as “three days and three nights” was well-known in that time and place as the length of time it took to journey to “the underworld” (Alexander 112). Jonah believes he’s facing death. He’s been banished from God’s sight, surrounded by the waters that threaten to drown him, and “barred in” by the earth forever. In other words, when Jonah was thrown into the sea, he did not expect to survive. He’s gone about as far as one can go from God’s presence—which was his goal in the beginning. So, in some sense, he’s saying he accomplished what he set out to do, and as a prophet, he knows that running from God results only in death. It means going down to the “pit,” to the place of the dead (2:6). Running from God’s presence, Jonah learns, results in spiritual death, bad things.

Jonah comes to see that God will not let us continue forever in our rebellion against him. At some point, we will come to a moment of truth (cf. Olgilvie, Communicator’s Commentary: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, pg. 414). Jonah’s moment of truth came when he was thrown over the side of the ship. He had to face who he was…and who God is. Our moments of truth often come in less dramatic, but no less profound, ways. There came a point in my life, about ten years ago, where I wanted to run away from God, just like Jonah. Some things had happened which had caused me to doubt my calling, even to want to reject that calling. I’d had enough, and I was a bit like Jeremiah, who has the audacity to tell God, “You tricked me.” Actually, Jeremiah says, “You deceived me” or “You allured me” (20:7). I felt that way, and I remember telling God that on several occasions. My “belly of the big fish” moment came one evening when I was just about to quit. I was so low that I actually got the newspaper out and read through the want ads to see if there was anything else I could do. I wanted to run the other way. I wanted to be something other than a pastor. I would guess there are times when you want to run, too. Saints throughout the ages have felt that way. Today, we have remembered some wonderful saints who have impacted our lives in different ways, and today we remember their great faith that challenges or inspires us, and yet I’m fairly certain, if any of them were here to talk to us today, they would tell us about their Jonah moments, the times when they were about as low as they could go. We all have those moments.

There was even a moment in Jesus’ life when he was in the proverbial belly of the big fish. Actually, he was in a garden, struggling in his humanness to do the will of his heavenly father. Knowing what was to come the next day, Jesus prayed like he never prayed before: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me” (Luke 22:42). I don’t want to do this, Father! Now, how that is possible, that the Son of God can, in essence, consider rebelling against the Father? I don’t know. I just know what the text says and what Jesus prayed. There in the garden, Jesus prayed to be allowed to run the other way. And yet, there in the garden, he also found the strength to allow the Father to refocus him. It’s in those times of darkness, the times when we have nothing else to rely on, that we find, amazingly enough, a God who is with us through it all, even through our rebellion or our dark times. One of the most surprising things to come out after Mother Teresa died was a collection of her writings that was later published under the title Come Be My Light. We all know Mother Teresa as a woman of great faith and great action, and yet in those writings, she talked about how often she suffered spiritual dry spells, times when she didn’t “feel” God’s presence, times when it seemed as if God was silent. And yet, she maintained a determination to serve even when she felt as if she was in the belly of the big fish. Mother Teresa put it this way: “Even though I don’t feel his presence, I will seek to love him as he has never been loved” (qtd. in Hybels, The Power of a Whisper, pg. 157).

Jonah comes to that same place in the second half of his prayer, the “up” part. “You, Lord my God, brought my life up from the pit. When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple.” (2:6-7). “The pit” is the place of the dead in Hebrew understanding (Alexander 116), and Jonah recognizes God as the one who is pulling him “up,” away from death, back to life. There are resurrection overtones here, as Jonah comes back to the God he was trying to run away from. “With shouts of grateful praise, I will sacrifice to you” (2:9), and more than that, he says, “What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the Lord’” (2:9). In that moment, Jonah returns to his vocation as a prophet. He’s going to do what God asks him to do. Now, as we will see in a couple of weeks, he’s still not happy about it. But he’s willing to do it. He’s willing to answer the call. Sometimes that is the first step we need to take. Like Mother Teresa said, we continue to love God even when we can’t feel his presence. As John Wesley told a preacher who was concerned that he didn’t have the feelings, “Preach faith until you have it; then preach faith.”

That night I spent with the want ads I learned two things. First, I learned that I have no marketable skills. None of the jobs included things I am capable of doing! And second, I remembered my calling. I remembered that I have been called by God to do what I am doing, that it’s his mission and not just my job. Now, I’d like to say that since that day, everything has been smooth sailing, but I can’t say that. It wouldn’t be true. There are still days, even some very recent days, where I’ve been ready to walk away from it all. And in those moments, in the belly of the big fish, I need God to refocus me, to help me see the bigger picture and to call me back to his mission. Sometimes, I go willingly and sometimes I’m like Jonah where I just do it because I have to. And yet, God uses that. God can work with a heart that is at least willing to go where he leads.

So that brings us to this church—to you and me, for we can be Jonah, too, people who know we are called by God and yet become content to sit by or even run away from that calling, that mission. I hope if you’ve been here any amount of time, you know our mission statement: to become a community where all people encounter Jesus Christ. That is what we’re called to do and who we are called to be, and we believe we do that in three ways: we love God, love others and offer Jesus. Every word in that mission statement is important. We believe that’s the call we’ve received from God, that we become a community (not a group of separate individuals, but people bound together as one) where all people (not just a few, but all) encounter (not just learn more about, but truly come in contact with) Jesus Christ (the one that all this is about). We could be just another social club. We could be just a place where people hang out and feel better about themselves because they’ve been here. We could be just another local business. But we’re not, any more than Jonah was just another guy who lived in Galilee. Jonah was called, and so are we. Peter says we are a “chosen people.” The King James Version of that verse says we are a “peculiar people” (1 Peter 2:9). We’re not just another building on the corner. We are called to be God’s people. We’re called to participate in God’s mission to redeem this weary old world, to be leaders in loving God, loving others and offering Jesus.

Imagine with me, for a moment, what the world would look like if God’s people got serious about being part of God’s mission. What would it look like in our homes and our extended families if we seriously aimed at loving each other rather than tearing each other down? What would it look like in our communities if we really focused on practical things we could do to love each other, even the stranger, especially the least, the last and the lost? What might our election this week look like if we were fully committed to loving others completely? What if we were dedicated to introducing everyone we know to Jesus, the one who gave his life for us? If Jesus gave his very life for us, why do we have such a hard time giving our lives for him? It’s not just about “doing nice things.” It’s about doing the things—yes, even the hard things—God asks us to do: to love him by loving others and offering Jesus. Imagine what the world might look like if God’s people got serious about being on mission with him—whether we feel like it today or not? 

There is a story told of a young man who went to a wise teacher to find God. The teacher took him down by a river, and the young man thought maybe there was going to be some sort of ritual cleansing. Instead, the teacher grabbed the young man, pushed his head under water and held him there for a very long time. Just when the young man thought he couldn’t go on any longer, the teacher pulled him up and asked him what he was thinking about while his head was under water. “Air!” the young man gasped. “All I could think about was air.” The teacher nodded and said, “When you want God as much as you wanted air, you will find him” (Ogilvie 416). What will it take for us to want God and God’s mission more than anything else in life? What will it take for us to be refocused like that?

The chapter ends with Jonah being unceremoniously deposited back on land. Verse 10 says, “The Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.” It is quite an image, isn’t it? Don’t you wonder what Jonah looked like when he began the long walk toward Nineveh? How he smelled? I wonder if there was some place for him to stop and take a shower. But, seriously, the scene reminds me of another image that shows up in the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation. It’s in the letter to the church at Laodicea, a church that is decidedly lukewarm in its approach to and love of God. To that church, God says, “I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:16). It’s the same image—God will “vomit” Laodicea out of his mouth because they refuse to be who they are called to be. And yet, they still have hope, because that’s the same place in the Bible where that beautiful passage comes about Jesus knocking on the door of our hearts: “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me” (Revelation 3:20). There’s always hope. God always calls us back to his mission. Jonah, spit up on the beach, has a choice at this point: will he continue to be lukewarm in his approach or will be follow where God leads? It’s the same choice you and I face in this time and place as well.

And so this week, we leave Jonah on the beach, but as we stand there with him, I want to challenge you to set aside some time for prayer this week, to prayerfully and seriously consider where you are in Jonah’s story so far. What is God calling you to do? How is God calling you to be involved in the mission he has given this church? Maybe Jonah’s prayer would be a helpful place to start, or pray a prayer of your own and ask God to reignite your passion and your devotion to his mission. If we all took an hour this week to pray and reflect, what might God speak to us? Where might God lead us?

We begin that focus and reflection with the sacrament of holy communion. I don’t think there is anything we do in the church that grounds us more than this act of taking bread and drinking juice—this meal reminds us who we are. We are the redeemed. We are the forgiven, but we have been forgiven at great cost. It cost the life of the Son of God. The bread—his body, broken. The cup—his blood, spilled out. We were forgiven at such a great cost. Out of gratitude for all that Jesus has done for us, is what he asks of us so much? Let’s approach the table with that question in our hearts.